A New Way to Read the Crystal Ball for Your Relationship

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The $64,000 question about relationships and their future is always, and will always be, whether they will survive the test of time. You may be in a relationship now that seems to be going well, but how will you know what to expect as you ponder the coming years?

The considered wisdom in relationship research is that the initial glow is destined to fail, no matter what. This belief was challenged when long-term studies showed that there is no one distinct pathway that characterizes all couples. Follow-ups of married couples first studied as newlyweds indicated that whatever a relationship looked like in its early stages would most likely continue as time went by.

The newest approach to studying relationship dynamics suggests that it may be necessary for yet another revision to this stability viewpoint. Maybe you’re not fated, after all, to be stuck with whatever pattern your relationship had in its early days.

A New Way to Look at Relationship Dynamics

According to a new study by Racquael Joiner at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues (2024), relationships exist in a larger context, one that can prompt fluctuations in the way that members of a couple feel about each other and their union. As the authors note, these fluctuations can occur in response to external stressors. Such “within-person variability” is predicted by the “vulnerability-stress-adaptation model,” which proposes that “satisfaction at any one time is the direct result of partners’ experiences interacting with each other” (p. 226). Because these interactions do not take place in a vacuum, relationships could potentially take an unpredictable turn.

To get inside the predictors of relationship satisfaction, Joiner and her coauthors maintain that it is necessary to look at variability within the individual over time. Previous studies have instead focused only on variability within groups over time, identifying one group with moderately high satisfaction that declines very little, a second (smaller) group that starts out low and gets lower, and a third category (the largest) that starts out high and remains high. However, this approach ignores the fact that people within groups can show varying patterns even within those average ranges because statistics require that within-group variability be kept to a minimum.

All of this makes sense if you think about your own relationship satisfaction. You and your partner may fall into that third blissful group, but aren’t there times when things are less than hunky-dory? Maybe rising interest rates are putting a crunch on your wallet, and you’re worried about your financial stability. These concerns could trickle into your day-to-day ability to manage other stresses, including any problems that arise with your partner. Eventually, you know you’ll recover, as will your relationship, but for the moment things are less than ideal. From a within-person variability standpoint, your satisfaction may swoop up and down within that high range while someone else’s shows a different curve over time.

Testing Within-Person Variability

Using a sample of 1,249 first-married newlyweds from 12 longitudinal studies (average age 26 years old; 73% white), and an approach known as a “growth mixture model (GMM),” the UCLA team asked each member of a couple to complete a simple six-item marital satisfaction scale (e.g., rating from “bad” to “good”). The time frame of 10 of these studies consisted of six-month data collection points across four years, and for the remaining two, data were collected every four months (though only the yearly data were used in the present analysis). Altogether, there was an average of seven waves of data collection. Additionally, participants reported on whether their marriage ended in divorce or separation; across the four years, this amounted to 15% of the couples in the sample.

The GMM analyses traced patterns of individual variability within categories formed within wives and husbands, taking into account whether the relationship remained intact or not. Summing up the findings, the authors noted that they “challenge descriptions of stable and steady marital change” (p. 237). First, they identified only two broad groupings of both wives and husbands, rather than the three reported in previous studies (the moderate, low, and high groups referred to above).

Second, and most importantly, the findings did reveal those patterns of variability within groupings that the authors expected they would observe. Each person, in other words, showed wobbles around their own overall trajectory of change, showing that “at least within the early years of marriage, fluctuations, as opposed to stable and steady change, appear to be the norm” (p. 237).

Regarding dissolution, as you would expect, couples with decreasing levels of satisfaction were most likely to end their relationships. However, in the group with the lowest rates of dissolution, satisfaction levels or changes in satisfaction were unrelated to the odds of breaking up. Some couples, as the authors suggest, end their relationship for reasons having nothing to do with how they feel about each other.

Applying Growth Curves to Your Own Relationship

The main take-home message from this comprehensive and statistically sophisticated study is that people’s relationships do not undergo steady and stable patterns of either great happiness or great unhappiness. In the words of the authors, “relationship satisfaction is a fluctuating and dynamic process that partners idiosyncratically navigate as they strive to develop fulfilling lives together” (p. 238).

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Putting this conclusion in context with the larger stress and adaptation model, you can see that your relationship’s pathway is not predetermined by its starting-out point. Life happens, and it leads you and your partner to try to make your way through its vicissitudes. A good relationship doesn’t have to be one that is always happy. It instead needs to be able to adapt flexibly to changing circumstances. Both you and your partner, in developing these adaptive abilities, will be better able to withstand the bad and enjoy the good.

To sum up, seeing your relationship as not predetermined or fixed can help give you the long-term perspective you need to keep your eye on your goals as individuals and as a couple. Allow some of that variability to play out, and those “fulfilling lives” will become more attainable.