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Factors that contribute to the maintenance or decline of relationship satisfaction

Nature Reviews Psychology volume 1, pages 161–173 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

The quality of romantic relationships influences physical and mental health. However, maintaining happy and healthy relationships is challenging; relationship satisfaction declines over time, and relationship dissolution is frequent. This raises the question of which factors contribute to the maintenance versus decline of relationship satisfaction. In this Review, we examine the key factors that have been linked to relationship satisfaction in both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. Specifically, we describe how self-reported perceptions (subjective perceptions of the self, the partner or the relationship), implicit evaluations (automatic evaluations of one’s partner assessed indirectly) and objective indexes (demographics, life events, communication patterns and biological indexes) relate to relationship satisfaction. This synthesis suggests that self-reported perceptions are not always the most reliable predictors of longitudinal changes in relationship satisfaction. Thus, to uncover why some relationships flourish and others struggle over time, future research should not solely focus on self-reported perceptions, but also on implicit evaluations, demographics, life events, communication patterns and biological factors, and their combination.

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Fig. 1: The evaluative priming task.
Fig. 2: The revised vulnerability-stress-adaptation model.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank I. Guhring, L. Scharmer and S. van Niekerken for their help with the literature review.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Francesca Righetti & Giulia Zoppolat

  2. Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands

    Ruddy Faure

  3. Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA

    Andrea Meltzer & James McNulty

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F.R. researched data for the article. All authors contributed substantially to discussion of the content and writing the article, and reviewed and/or edited the manuscript before submission.

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Righetti, F., Faure, R., Zoppolat, G. et al. Factors that contribute to the maintenance or decline of relationship satisfaction. Nat Rev Psychol 1, 161–173 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-022-00026-2

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