Why Meaningful Stories Help Couples Tolerate Reality

Monday, December 29, 2025.

In couples therapy, people often arrive with a reasonable complaint delivered in an unreasonable tone:
“We have everything we’re supposed to have. Why does this still feel hard?”

They are not asking for joy.
They are asking for coherence.

This is where the research on eudaimonic media becomes unexpectedly clinical.

A 2021 study by Ott, Tan, and Slater examined what happens when people look back—not immediately, not in a lab, but years later—on films they chose to watch.

Not clips. Not assignments. Real movies, watched voluntarily, remembered imperfectly, and metabolized over time.

What they found aligns uncomfortably well with what therapists already know.

Pleasure doesn’t teach salience.

The study distinguished between films that are primarily hedonic (fun, exciting, distracting) and films that are more eudaimonic—stories that dwell on virtue, moral struggle, loss, endurance, and meaning.

Here’s the clinically relevant result:

Eudaimonic films were not less enjoyable than pleasurable ones.

But they were more likely to leave viewers with:

• a stronger ability to make sense of difficulties.

• greater acceptance of the human condition.

• increased motivation toward moral behavior.

• and a broader emotional range.

In other words, pleasure wasn’t the problem.
Narrow emotional bandwidth was.

This matters clinically because many couples aren’t suffering from too much pain—they’re suffering from too little tolerance for mixed feelings.

Emotional range is the missing skill

One of the study’s most useful contributions is its focus on emotional range—the number of distinct emotions a person experiences strongly during a narrative.

Not just happy and sad.
But uplift, grief, fear, tenderness, hope, admiration, loss, resolve.

From a clinical perspective, emotional range functions like a psychological joint: the more it moves, the less likely it is to snap under pressure.

Couples who struggle often aren’t deficient in love. They are deficient in ambivalence tolerance.

They want clarity where life offers complexity. They want reassurance where reality offers trade-offs.

Eudaimonic narratives appear to quietly rehearse this skill.

They let people feel multiple truths at once without demanding resolution.

Meaning-making is not insight

Another outcome the study measured was making sense of difficulties—the feeling that a film helped viewers understand hardship as survivable, even formative.

This is not insight in the therapeutic sense.
Insight explains patterns.
Meaning-making helps people stay present when patterns repeat.

Clinically, this distinction matters.

Many clients understand exactly why they react the way they do—and still cannot tolerate the emotional experience of reacting differently.

This is why cinema therapy is such a vital area of research. Eudaimonic media seems to operate below explanation.

It models endurance. It normalizes cost. It suggests—without announcing—that suffering does not automatically indicate failure.

That is not cognitive restructuring.
That is emotional conditioning.

Value resonance matters more than genre

Perhaps the most quietly destabilizing finding is this: value match mattered regardless of whether a film was classified as eudaimonic or not.

When viewers perceived that a film expressed values they personally held—justice, loyalty, courage, love—they reported greater acceptance of life’s complexity and stronger moral motivation.

Clinically, this explains why one partner calls a movie “life-changing” while the other shrugs.

In other words, meaning is not universal.
It is relational.

This also explains why couples often fight about media preferences as if they are fighting about taste—when they are actually negotiating values.

The therapeutic implication

Seen clinically, eudaimonic media functions less like distraction, and more like low-cost exposure therapy for ambivalence from a public mental health perspective.

It expands emotional tolerance.
It rehearses loss without catastrophe.
It contextualizes suffering as part of attachment rather than evidence against it.

For couples stuck in cycles of avoidance, resentment, or emotional minimalism, this matters.

Not because movies “heal relationships,” but because the ability to hold mixed emotions is a prerequisite for durable dyadic intimacy.

And that ability is learned—not through positivity, but through repeated, tolerable encounters with complexity.

Final thoughts

In a culture optimized for pleasure, stories that teach people how to stay present with sorrow, joy, loyalty, loss, and moral cost may be doing more psychological work than we currently know how to measure.

Therapy sees the consequences when emotional range collapses.

This research helps explain at least one of the ways in which it is culturally inculcated; meaningful movies.

Be well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Ott, J. M., Tan, N. Q. P., & Slater, M. D. (2021). Eudaimonic media in lived experience: Retrospective responses to eudaimonic vs. non-eudaimonic films. Journal of Communication, 71(5), 725–747. https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2021.1912774