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When it comes to relationships, we can all agree that the beginning stages are the most fun. It doesn’t take any scientist to confirm that. We are excited about our new love and can’t get enough of it. Falling in love makes you happy. But as we roll further into the relationship, the general grind of daily life comes a little more to the fore. It’s this moment when people realize that it all seemed to happen naturally… until it didn’t anymore.
Unfortunately, falling in love doesn’t last forever. After the first phase, the hormones return to a stable level and then the personal baggage also emerges. The relationship goes into maintenance mode and the question is whether and how and for how long it will continue to work. No one can deny it: becoming happy and staying satisfied in a relationship is difficult.
How satisfied people are with their relationships depends on a countless number of factors. But even though no one knows exactly how many factors there are, researchers have been trying to decipher for many years what makes people happy in their relationships. Based on the research scientists have conducted, they already know very well what habits the happiest couples have and which habits ruin a relationship .
Meanwhile, researchers never forget one thing when they conduct a study: how satisfied you are with a relationship is constantly changing. It’s not constant. And that is why psychologists from the University of Bern have investigated after how many years couples are least satisfied with their relationship.
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People are least satisfied after this number of years in a relationship
It is generally thought that people are most satisfied with their relationship during the initial stages. Then it gradually decreases and people become less and less satisfied with their relationship. To investigate this idea, German psychologists analyzed data from more than 165,000 people who participated in various studies. In these surveys, they indicated how satisfied they were with their relationship and what the relationship duration was at the time of the interview.
The results show that people are least satisfied with their relationship when it lasts 10 years. On average, people are least satisfied with their relationship when the 10-year milestone is reached, while satisfaction is highest at the beginning of the relationship and after 20 years of relationship.
Less investment, less results
Janina Larissa Bühler, lead author of the study, says in PsychologyToday : “Communication patterns are a likely factor. At the beginning of a relationship, couples often invest time and energy in constructive and effective communication. However, over the course of the relationship, couples often invest less time and energy in dealing with their conflicts constructively, which can lead to lower relationship satisfaction.”
The good news is that although a relationship lasts ten years is the low point for the average relationship, things do get better after that. The relationship dip is only temporary. The research shows that relationship satisfaction will increase again once the 10-year low has been overcome.
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Couples with children are less satisfied
The findings also show that couples with children tend to be less satisfied with their relationships than couples who do not have children. But that is the only characteristic that the researchers could find to explain the fact that some people were more satisfied with their relationship, while others were less satisfied. They looked at the differences between women and men, ages and compared couples from different countries, but found that – apart from having children – there are no major differences between the happy and less happy couples.
Less happy, not unhappy
Although we talk about relationship lows all the time, the research shows that in reality it’s not that bad. Because even at the lowest point, average relationship satisfaction never falls below 77% of the maximum possible. So even if you’re less happy ten years into a relationship than you were earlier in the relationship (or later), satisfaction is still fairly high overall.
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