Contextualizing Experiences of Hurt Within Close Relationships

This article uses Bradbury and Fincham's contextual model of relationships to clarify how proximal and distal factors affect the relationship damage associated with hurtful messages, how the consequences of a previous hurt shape people's experience of a subsequent hurtful message, and how the cumulative consequences of hurt influence relationship quality over two weeks. Participants responded about either a dating partner or friend. Multi-level modeling and regression analyses revealed that relational quality and perceptions of messages corresponded with relational damage, and the number of hurtful events and relational damage interacted to predict relational quality at the end of the study.