A Danish maternity ward, starting in the mid-2000s, recruited 290 couples expecting their first child and split them into three groups. One group received a structured relationship-skills course built around the kind of communication and emotion-regulation training often associated with emotional intelligence. A second group received written information only. A third received whatever care came naturally, with no programme at all. Researchers then tracked all three groups for two years.
What the trial actually found
The result, published by Tea Trillingsgaard and colleagues at Aarhus University in the journal Family Relations, was not what a programme built to strengthen couples would hope for. Across the 24-month follow-up, satisfaction declined in all three groups, and the decline in the structured-training group was not meaningfully different from the decline in either of the other two. Teaching couples the specific skills the course targeted, including how to listen, how to manage conflict, and how to regulate reactive emotion during an argument, did not measurably change how their relationship satisfaction moved over the following two years.
This is one randomised trial, recruited through one public maternity ward, and it should not be read as proof that emotional-intelligence-style couples training never helps anyone. But it is a useful complication for a very common premise: the idea that emotionally intelligent couples simply do things differently, and that doing those specific things is what produces the difference in outcome.
What the correlational research actually shows
Separately from that trial, there is a real, if moderate, association between trait emotional intelligence and relationship satisfaction. A 2022 meta-analysis by Brittany Jardine, Sarah Vannier, and Daniel Voyer, published in Personality and Individual Differences, pooled the existing correlational research and found an overall correlation of around 0.37 between a partner’s measured emotional intelligence and how satisfied they, or their partner, reported being in the relationship. That is a real pattern, not a null result, and it held up across a range of studies rather than resting on one dataset.
A correlation of that size means emotional intelligence is one factor among several that tracks with relationship satisfaction, not a variable that determines it on its own. The same meta-analysis found the strength of the association varied depending on where a study was conducted, which relationship-satisfaction scale was used, and whether couples were married, cohabiting, or dating, which suggests the underlying mechanism is more specific than a single trait working the same way in every context.
Where the mechanism seems to actually sit
A 2023 study in Frontiers in Psychology, by María Berenguer-Soler, Álvaro García del Castillo-López, and David Pineda at Miguel Hernández University, looked at 692 women and asked a more specific question than whether emotional intelligence and satisfaction move together. Using structural equation modelling, the researchers found that women’s perceived emotional intelligence was linked to lower rates of emotional flooding, the state of becoming physiologically overwhelmed mid-argument to the point that clear thinking becomes difficult, and that this connection ran largely through a specific behaviour: using positive conflict-resolution strategies during disagreement rather than escalating or withdrawing. Emotional intelligence, in this sample, mattered less as a general trait and more through what it allowed a person to do in the middle of a specific argument.
Other work has pointed to a related, narrower mechanism: taking a partner’s perspective during a disagreement, rather than only tracking one’s own point of view, has been identified as one of the more consistent links between measured emotional intelligence and how satisfied couples report being. None of this describes a fixed personality type that some couples have and others lack. It describes a set of specific behaviours, available to most people in the room during an actual disagreement, that appear to matter more than a general trait score on its own.
Why a country tried to teach this anyway
Denmark’s PREP trial was not an isolated experiment. Norway has run its own publicly funded relationship course for new parents since 2005, called Godt Samliv, offered free through municipal health centres and built around similar communication and conflict skills. Research on the Norwegian programme, including work examining how the course frames gender equality and shared responsibility within a couple, treats these skills as something that can be taught rather than something couples either happen to have or do not.
The Danish result does not settle whether Godt Samliv or similar programmes work, since it tested one specific curriculum, in one country, with one particular population of first-time parents recruited through a single maternity ward. It does suggest that turning a correlational finding, that certain conflict behaviours track with satisfaction, into a taught curriculum that reliably changes outcomes over two years is a harder problem than the underlying correlation implies.
What this does not mean for any individual couple
None of this research supports diagnosing a specific couple as emotionally intelligent or not, or treating relationship satisfaction as something one partner’s trait score can predict on its own. Relationship satisfaction over time is shaped by finances, health, the arrival of children, housing, work stress, and plenty else that has nothing to do with how either partner scores on an emotional intelligence measure. The Danish trial’s flat result across all three groups is a reminder that this is a genuinely difficult thing to move with a structured intervention, even one built on skills that show a real correlation with satisfaction in other research.
What the research does support, modestly, is narrower than the popular version of this idea. Couples who handle a specific disagreement by staying regulated enough to think clearly, and by making some effort to see the argument from the other person’s side, report somewhat higher satisfaction than couples who do not, in the correlational studies that have measured this directly. Whether that behaviour can be reliably taught, and whether teaching it changes a relationship’s trajectory over years rather than a single measured moment, is a different and considerably less settled question.
The distinction worth keeping
The gap between these two bodies of research, a real correlation on one side and a null result from an actual attempt to intervene on the other, is not a contradiction. It is a reminder that a pattern found across many couples in observational research does not automatically translate into a technique that changes any one couple’s outcome when it is packaged into a course and tested directly. Emotional intelligence appears to matter in how couples handle a specific moment of conflict. Whether that adds up to a general difference in how a relationship holds up over years is still, on the evidence so far, an open question.