Psychologist Says This One Skill Is the Key to a Healthy Relationship

If your relationship is based solely on your attraction to your partner, you might want to rethink the depth of your connection. Sure, attraction and chemistry are important, but there are far more crucial elements of a successful long-term relationship. According to Mark Travers, Ph.D., in his Psychology Today article, the one thing every healthy relationship needs is temperance. 

“The quality that does predict longevity has been hiding in plain sight for over two thousand years, under a name most people associate with philosophy rather than psychology: temperance,” he wrote. “Classical thinkers used it to describe the capacity to feel a powerful impulse and choose not to act on it.”

He notes that temperance is often classified as self-regulation, or the ability to control one’s impulses. Naturally, this is important in both our individual lives and relationships. Self-restraint is a valuable skill to develop, and your ability to practice it in certain situations (e.g., during arguments, when being hit on by another person, while experiencing jealousy or insecurity, etc.) can make or break your romantic connections.

Why Is Temperance Important in a Relationship?

Temperance helps protect intimate relationships from poor decision-making, rash choices, or knee-jerk reactions. For example, let’s say you’re in a fight with your partner and feeling particularly triggered. Rather than losing your cool and yelling at them, you practice temperance and regulate your emotions before responding.

“Temperance does its work in a specific, recurring moment: immediately after a partner has done something careless, dismissive or unfair, and before the other partner has responded,” Travers wrote in his article. “In that narrow window, an impulse toward retaliation is nearly automatic. It’s easy to snap back with a sharp reply, a withdrawal, or even a punishing silence. What happens next depends almost entirely on whether that impulse gets acted on or interrupted.”

How to Develop Temperance in a Relationship

Thankfully, temperance can be built over time—even if you struggle with self-regulation in your relationship. One such method, according to Travers, is called self-distancing.

“Unlike attraction, which either exists between two people or doesn’t, [temperance] has a documented mechanism for strengthening it, and it isn’t willpower,” he explained. “Researchers studying emotion regulation have found that people can widen that crucial interval between provocation and response by changing their vantage point on the moment itself, by stepping back to observe the exchange as an outside witness would, rather than experiencing it entirely from the inside.”

Pausing and stepping back from the situation—before responding from a subjective place of hurt or frustration—can help you better manage your emotions and compromise with your partner. Taking on a third-person POV will allow you to see the argument or conversation from every side possible, so you’re not internalizing your partner’s behavior or projecting your own insecurities/past experiences onto them.

Additionally, temperance does not mean dismissing or repressing intense emotions. Rather, it means taking time to process them rather than acting on them in the moment. Sometimes, it helps to step away from a fight or heavy discussion to decompress, returning when you’re feeling more grounded.

The more you strengthen the temperance muscle, the easier it will get.