I grew up knowing exactly what intelligence was worth. I was a selective school girl, so I understood early that being smart was a currency, and that it was accepted nearly everywhere. Emotional intelligence wasn’t a term I had come across. Nobody was handing out certificates for it.
This was inconvenient, because I had an enormous emotional world as a teenager: sweeping, intense, and entirely unsupervised. I had plenty of feelings and almost no skill in making sense of them, and even less confidence in saying them out loud to another person. So when close friends hurt me, I did what I knew how to do. I seethed. Quietly, thoroughly, and sometimes for weeks on end, while my friends carried on in blissful ignorance of the crime.
It took me years to understand that emotional intelligence isn’t only about knowing what you feel. It’s relational: reading the other person, registering what your silence is doing to them, and finding a way to bring your inner weather into a shared room. I had the first part, on a good day. I had none of the second.
These days, if you scroll through Hinge you’ll find a small army of profiles listing emotional intelligence as a non-negotiable in a prospective partner. So, if we’re all demanding it, what exactly are we expecting it to do? Can emotional intelligence make or break a relationship?
It sounds obvious, doesn’t it? Surely a couple who can name their feelings and say ‘I’m hurt’ instead of slamming doors and stabbing voodoo dolls has an edge in the most intimate arrangement of their lives. Since Daniel Goleman popularised the idea, researchers have been asking what EQ does for us at home, at work and everywhere else we’re required to have feelings in front of other people.
In 2005, Brackett and colleagues studied heterosexual college couples, looking at EQ and how partners rated their own relationships. The finding that surprised no one: when both partners were low in EQ, couples reported the least depth and support and the most conflict. Groundbreaking. Nobody needed a grant for that.
The odd part is what happened at the other end. Couples where both partners were high in EQ didn’t reliably beat couples where only one partner was. Basically, nobody needs superhuman emotional fluency, but somebody in the room needs enough to keep the whole thing from going sideways. Or perhaps (less generously) one person doing all the emotional labour is a perfectly stable arrangement, right up until …it isn’t.
Then came the follow-up. Tracking couples over a year, the team found that EQ was linked to how satisfied people were, but not to whether their satisfaction changed (so, increased or decreased). What predicted decline was avoidance: couples who stopped raising the hard things and withheld from each other grew less happy over time. EQ looked like a starting position. What people did when things got difficult was a different story.
So can EQ make or break a relationship? Not on this evidence. These studies are small, and EQ here mostly means people rating how emotionally skilled they believe they are, which tells you something about confidence and self-image, and perhaps less about skill. What the research does suggest is that emotional skill matters most where it’s put to work: staying in the conversation, tolerating your own anger and your partner’s, and saying thank you without it being a tactic. You can have the vocabulary and still never use it. You can also be clumsy with the words and stay anyway.
Which leaves the question the research can’t answer for you. When you picture the person who is good at this in your relationship, is it you?