The attitude towards relationships influences the duration of satisfaction
Published: Thursday, Apr 18th 2024, 17:01
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Destiny or hard work: According to a Basel study, people who believe they are destined for each other are less satisfied in a relationship than those who believe that relationships grow over time through work.
For the study, researchers at the University of Basel interviewed over 900 couples several times over two years, as the university announced on Thursday. In general, satisfaction in the relationship decreased for the majority of couples. However, the attitude they had towards the relationship influenced how exactly this decline occurred, as the study shows in the European Journal of Personality.
The researchers differentiated between two different basic attitudes: The belief in destiny, where people are convinced that a relationship is either destined to last or not, and the belief in growth, where people believe that relationships can develop and grow over time if you work at it. Both partners in a couple tended to have a similar attitude.
According to the study, the couples who believed in destiny started off with a higher level of satisfaction, while this decreased less quickly in the couples who believed in growth. "These people therefore appear to be better equipped to deal with the typical, creeping dissatisfaction," said Fabian Gander, first author of the study, according to the press release.
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