News & Articles

Gambling disorder doesn't just harm the person placing bets. It ripples outward, affecting partners, families, and especially romantic relationships. A recent Spanish study examined how communication patterns and emotional regulation influence relationship satisfaction when one partner struggles with gambling addiction, revealing insights that could improve treatment approaches.

The Hidden Toll on Relationships

When people seek treatment for gambling disorder in Spain, financial problems top the list of consequences. But family conflicts come in a close second, affecting more than a quarter of those in treatment. Despite this, research has barely scratched the surface of how gambling addiction impacts family dynamics and romantic partnerships.

Gambling disorder is classified as a behavioral addiction in modern diagnostic systems. It involves persistent, problematic gambling that causes significant distress or impairment in daily life. The consequences extend far beyond empty bank accounts to include mental and physical health problems, work difficulties, and the breakdown of family relationships through divorce, separation, or loss of custody.

Partners of people with gambling problems face their own set of challenges. Research shows they experience higher rates of mental and physical health issues compared to the general population, along with increased tobacco and alcohol use. Interpersonal conflict, divorce, and separation are common. Alarmingly, female partners of men with gambling disorder experience domestic violence at higher rates than women in the general population.

Communication as a Foundation

Theories about romantic relationships emphasize communication as fundamental to how relationships evolve over time. The quality of communication affects how partners subjectively evaluate their relationship, their sense of satisfaction, and the degree to which they experience intimacy, affection, and mutual support.

Positive communication involves reasoning, problem solving, and showing supportive, affectionate behavior. Negative communication includes belittling, blaming, and displaying hostility or contempt. Research consistently shows that positive patterns increase satisfaction while negative patterns erode it.

Partners of gamblers often report feeling lonely in their relationships. This loneliness connects to taking on financial and family responsibilities that create inequality, and feeling unable to burden their partner during treatment. Many describe living parallel lives despite sharing a home, lacking emotional and physical intimacy, and slipping into a parental role that changes relationship dynamics and eliminates their partner's support.

Trust issues stemming from lies and deception create additional barriers. Dishonesty becomes a recurring theme that undermines the foundation of the relationship.

Measuring Relationship Satisfaction

Studies comparing couples affected by gambling disorder to control couples reveal stark differences. Compared to unaffected couples, gamblers perceive more conflict and less trust, along with reduced willingness from partners to help. Their partners report less emotional connection and lower overall relationship quality.

Interestingly, research shows that both partners often report lower relationship adjustment than the general population, regardless of which gender has the gambling problem. Greater severity of gambling disorder correlates with worse relationship adjustment. However, some studies find that partners, particularly women, report significantly lower satisfaction than the gamblers themselves.

This gap in how each partner perceives the relationship raises important questions. While both may experience relationship deterioration as gambling continues, the partner without the gambling problem often feels the impact more acutely, perhaps due to greater awareness of the dysfunction or shouldering more of the practical and emotional burden.

The Role of Emotional Regulation

People with gambling disorder consistently show greater difficulty regulating emotions compared to the general population. Emotional dysregulation involves struggles with emotional awareness and understanding, accepting emotions, maintaining goal directed behavior when experiencing unpleasant feelings, and flexibly employing strategies to manage emotional responses.

For gamblers, difficulties appear particularly in identifying emotions and in selecting and implementing effective regulation strategies. This makes emotional regulation a central target for treatment and recovery.

Partners of gamblers also experience significant emotional difficulties. They report anger, resentment, depression, suicidal thoughts, confusion, hopelessness, stress, anxiety, guilt, and feelings of responsibility for the addiction. Research links emotional dysregulation to lower relationship satisfaction and to perceiving that partners communicate negatively.

Some evidence suggests that gamblers turn to gambling specifically to regulate difficult emotions that arise after relationship conflicts. When facing disagreements, maladaptive coping strategies from partners can generate unpleasant emotions that gamblers then try to manage through gambling. Conversely, adaptive communication strategies from partners might support recovery.

What the Spanish Study Found

The recent study involved 30 people: 15 men diagnosed with gambling disorder and their 15 female partners. All were connected to rehabilitation associations in Spain, either currently in treatment or having completed it. The researchers measured relationship satisfaction, positive communication, and emotional dysregulation in both partners.

The results revealed that partners scored significantly lower on relationship satisfaction than the gamblers themselves. This finding echoes previous research and suggests partners may experience relationship difficulties more intensely or with greater awareness.

The researchers hypothesize that gamblers' satisfaction may increase as they feel supported through treatment, while partners' satisfaction decreases due to imbalanced roles and heightened awareness of relationship problems. Partners often assume responsibilities like financial control and emotional caregiving that create inequality in the relationship.

Surprisingly, the study found no significant differences in emotional dysregulation between gamblers and their partners. While gamblers were expected to show higher levels, emotional dysregulation isn't unique to addiction. It appears across many psychological difficulties including anxiety and depression. In this study, more than a quarter of the partners had been diagnosed with depression, which could explain why their emotional regulation challenges matched those of the gamblers.

The Communication Connection

For both gamblers and their partners, positive communication correlated strongly with relationship satisfaction. This aligns with broader relationship research showing communication patterns as essential to satisfaction. Better communication in couples predicts relationship longevity, while poor communication more than doubles divorce rates.

However, emotional dysregulation showed a more complex pattern. Partners' emotional difficulties correlated negatively with both their own and the gamblers' relationship satisfaction, but gamblers' emotional dysregulation didn't show these same associations.

This gender difference might reflect how people are socialized into different emotional roles in relationships. Women are typically educated to take emotional responsibility and manage relationship dynamics, while men are often taught to avoid emotional expression and prioritize rationality. Women may therefore feel more emotionally overburdened when struggling with regulation, especially if their partners lack emotional skills to provide support.

When examining what predicted relationship satisfaction, only positive communication emerged as significant for both partners. Emotional dysregulation didn't predict satisfaction once communication was accounted for. This suggests communication may be especially important in relationships affected by gambling disorder.

Implications for Treatment

Several studies have tested couple therapy for gambling disorder with encouraging results. After therapy, couples report more frequent expression of thoughts, feelings, and desires, along with decreased negative communication patterns. They perceive greater connection, security, and intimacy in their relationships.

Couple therapy appears to help both partners understand gambling and its effects. It improves communication, with the non gambling partner contributing to motivation for change, treatment adherence, and relapse prevention. Some gamblers report that fear of losing their relationship provides the most powerful motivation for maintaining abstinence.

Training in emotional regulation and positive communication to manage couple conflicts could help maintain gambling abstinence and prevent relapse. When partners communicate adaptively rather than critically or dismissively, they may reduce the negative emotions that trigger gambling as an escape or regulation strategy.

Important Limitations

The study had several significant limitations worth noting. The small sample size of just 15 couples limits confidence in the findings. A larger study might reveal different patterns, particularly if analyzing different dimensions of emotional regulation separately rather than as a single construct.

The study also couldn't analyze positive versus negative communication separately due to sample size constraints. Research suggests negative communication may have an even stronger effect on satisfaction than positive communication, something this study couldn't examine.

Additionally, participants were at different stages of treatment. Some had completed rehabilitation while others were still actively engaged. This heterogeneity makes it difficult to draw clear conclusions about how these relationship dynamics change through the recovery process. Future research would benefit from tracking couples before, during, and after treatment.

The gender composition presents another major limitation. All gamblers were men and all partners were women. Results might differ considerably in relationships where women have the gambling problem, given factors like lack of social support, family caregiving demands, and violence that particularly affect women with addictions. The study also didn't include same sex couples, despite evidence that sexual and gender minorities face unique vulnerabilities.

The cross sectional design means causality cannot be determined. Does poor communication contribute to gambling, does gambling erode communication, or do both processes occur simultaneously? Only longitudinal research tracking couples over time can answer these questions.

A Systemic Perspective

Despite limitations, the study makes important contributions. It examined both partners rather than just one person's perspective, providing a more complete picture of relationship dynamics. It offers quantitative data to complement existing qualitative research on this topic.

Most importantly, it provides evidence that positive communication acts as a protective factor for relationship satisfaction when gambling disorder affects the couple. Partners' emotional regulation difficulties also appear important, correlating negatively with communication quality and gamblers' satisfaction.

The findings support viewing gambling disorder through a systemic lens that considers not just the individual but also their partner, family, and broader context. Since romantic relationships represent the most affected subsystem, they may be the most urgent area for intervention.

Partners of gamblers experience serious psychological and relational consequences. This burden may intensify for female partners in heterosexual relationships due to traditional gender roles around emotional caregiving. Meanwhile, couple dynamics, specifically communication and emotional regulation around conflicts, may influence whether addiction develops, persists, or improves with treatment.

The research suggests that comprehensive, networked care should be offered, with couple based work playing a relevant role. Both partners can reciprocally influence each other's mental health. Supporting the relationship may benefit both individuals while also creating conditions that support recovery from gambling disorder.

Future research should include more diverse samples: couples where women have gambling problems, same sex couples, and people from various socioeconomic backgrounds. Studies should track couples longitudinally through treatment, examine both positive and negative communication patterns, consider additional factors like stress and dyadic coping, and perhaps include qualitative interviews to capture the complexity of these relationships.

Understanding how gambling disorder affects romantic relationships and how those relationships in turn affect recovery opens new avenues for intervention. Rather than treating gambling as solely an individual problem, acknowledging its interpersonal nature may lead to more effective, holistic approaches that support both people in the relationship.