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You ever had a friend come to you in tears, distraught over the breakup of a relationship that, frankly, you’ve known was doomed for like, two years at this point? Well, good news: it might not have just been confirmation bias – because, as it turns out, scientists could probably also have told your pal their love life was dead long before they knew it themselves.
“In order to better understand dissolving relationships, we examined them from the point of view of time-to-separation,” explained Janina Bühler, Junior Professor of Personality Psychology and Diagnostics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), in a statement. “To do this, we applied a concept that is in general use in other fields of psychology.”
Using the combination of four sets of data – one from Germany, one from the Netherlands, one from Australia, and one from the UK – totaling more than 11,000 individuals, researchers analyzed people’s relationship satisfaction through time, up to and including the end of their pairing. What they found was a pretty stable pattern: couples start out happy, and then get less and less so over the next eight-ish years until they reach a “transition point” in the relationship.
“From this transition point onwards, there is a rapid deterioration in relationship satisfaction,” Bühler explained. “Couples in question then move towards separation.”
The worst part? You might have reached this transition point already, and not even know it. Just like your friend, upset about a breakup that for them was totally unexpected, one-half of those subjects from unsuccessful relationships were presumably taken by surprise, having not realized that their partner had already reached that pivotal stage.
After that, though, the end is inevitable: “Once this terminal phase is reached, the relationship is doomed to come to an end,” said Bühler. You’ve got at worst seven months, at best 28 or so, but either way, an average of one to two years after you reach the transition point in the relationship until it’s over. And sorry to all the romantics among you who think you can “just work through it” – successful relationships, it seems, don’t experience this switch.
“Only the individuals in the separation group go through this terminal phase,” confirmed Bühler. “Not the control group.”
If you want to save or maintain your relationship, then, the answer isn’t a last-ditch effort to reignite that lost spark – it’s to make sure they never go out in the first place. “Be aware of these relationship patterns,” advised Bühler. “Initiating measures in the preterminal phase of a relationship, i.e., before it begins to go rapidly downhill, may thus be more effective and even contribute to preserving the relationship.”
The study is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
