Fostering shared understanding between romantic partners may be a powerful way for people to navigate uncertainty and build a more meaningful life, a study by McGill researchers suggests. The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that co-creating a shared worldview can buffer against distress, even in highly charged social and political contexts. For example, front-line health-care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Americans during the Black Lives Matter movement reported less uncertainty and more meaning when they understood the world around them in the same way as their partners. Sharing a perception of reality with a partner makes one’s view of reality seem true. While previous research has shown that people overwhelmingly cite personal relationships as their primary source of meaning in life, it has been less clear which aspects of relationships contribute to this feeling. “Our approach was different from earlier work on how relationships promote meaning, which tended to focus on aspects like belonging or support,” said M. Catalina Enestrom, lead author of the article, written while she was a doctoral student in psychology at McGill. She is now a post-doctoral fellow at IESE Business School in Barcelona. “We set out to explore whether sharing thoughts, ideas and concerns about the world with a romantic partner could enhance meaning by reducing uncertainty about one’s environment.” A new understanding of the benefits of relationships “As couples accumulate shared experiences, shared feelings, goals, and memories, they develop a generalized shared reality,” said senior author John Lydon, a psychology professor at McGill University. “This is different from simply feeling close or supported. It’s not just ‘my partner gets me,’ it’s ‘we get it.’” Enestrom explained that shared reality can emerge from both shared experiences and shared interpretations. “Shared reality can form, for instance, when a couple watches a horror movie together and one or both partners perceive that they both find it scary. But shared reality doesn’t necessarily require shared experiences. One partner can describe a stressful event they experienced, and if the other partner sees it the same way, this too can foster shared reality. As couples accumulate these shared reality experiences, they come to develop a sense of shared understanding about the world in general.” A sense of coherence and purpose Although there is no single definition of “meaning,” researchers often describe it as a sense of coherence and purpose. Prior studies have shown that experiencing meaning in life is associated with better coping, greater happiness and improved health outcomes. To arrive at their findings, the researchers conducted five studies involving nearly 1,300 adults in Canada and the U.S, using a variety of methods, from lab-based tasks to online surveys and experiments, to test their hypothesis. They consistently found that a shared sense of reality reduced uncertainty, which in turn increased participants’ sense of meaning. The study “Meaning-making with romantic partners: Shared reality promotes meaning in life by reducing uncertainty” by M Catalina Enestrom, Maya Rossignac-Milon, Amanda L Forest,, John E Lydon Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes DOI: 10.1037/pspi0000472 Funding The research was funded in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Pittsburgh.