Mariah Purol, Union College - What Happens to Our Love Lives When the Rest of Life Gets Messy

On Union College Week: What happens to our love lives when the rest of life gets messy?

Mariah Purol, assistant professor of psychology, examines this.

Faculty Bio:

Mariah received her PhD in Social & Personality Psychology from Michigan State University in 2024. She is currently a faculty member in the Psychology department of Union College. Her work examines how both individuals’ and their partners’ characteristics influence their relationship satisfaction, life satisfaction, and well-being. To that end, she’s interested in how we create happy, satisfying lives as individuals (studying traits like gratitude and optimism), and as relationship members (studying constructs like interpersonal perceptions and personality in romantic relationships/friendships).

Transcript:

We have lots of ideas about how life events, especially negative ones, might impact our romantic relationships. For example, what happens to a couple when one of them gets diagnosed with a chronic health condition? Has a parent pass away? Loses a child? Does relationship quality degrade in the face of these stressors, or do couples draw closer?
In a recent project, I examined the relationship trajectories of over 10,000 couples in the U.S., the Netherlands, and Switzerland. I did this by combining data from three longitudinal datasets, each of which had information about couples’ relationship quality—like their satisfaction, their levels of support, or their closeness— and the life events that they experienced together.
With this data, I examined how changes in relationship quality may be associated with the occurrence of these life events. Overall, it was extremely rare for negative life events to predict negative relationship outcomes (like decreased satisfaction). In a handful of cases, experiencing negative life events was associated with positive relationship outcomes. For example, individuals who experienced a potentially stressful life transition, like beginning a new job or experiencing a new negative health event, also reported feeling more support and responsiveness from their partner over time.
However, these effects were rare, and, when significant, the size of the effects were very small. It was much more common for the occurrence of these life events to be unassociated with changes in relationship quality. While this may seem surprising, these results emphasize a point relationships theorists have been making for decades: the presence of a negative event alone is not enough to make or break a romantic relationship.