Protecting relationships from stress

• Interventions to protect relationships from stress can target couples or stress.
• Couple-targeted interventions protect relationships by building couples’ skills.
• Stress-targeted interventions protect relationships by eliminating stress itself.
• Both strategies hold promise for promoting relationship well-being.

Although partners in close social relationships often enable one another to manage stress, stress can also undermine the many benefits that these relationships provide. We review interventions designed to reduce the effects of stress on relationships, distinguishing (a) couple-targeted interventions that aim to build couples’ skills in managing stress from (b) stress-targeted interventions intended to eliminate stress itself. Recent examples of these approaches are presented and evaluated. Couple-targeted and stress-targeted interventions both hold promise for empowering couples to sustain their relationship and the well-being of their children, and additional empirical work will help clarify the conditions under which different strategies prove most effective.