Are people actually happier when they’re in a romantic relationship, or is that just a comforting cultural myth? And if relationships do matter for emotional well-being, does simply having a partner suffice, or does the quality of that relationship make all the difference?

To discover this, my colleague, Prof. Menelaos Apostolou, and I analyzed longitudinal data following more than 12,000 adults in Germany over 13 years, which offer strong answers to these questions. The paper was just published in the Personality and Individual Differences journal. Rather than comparing different people at a single point in time, our study tracked the same individuals as their relationship status changed, moving in and out of relationships, marriages, and relationships of varying quality. This design allows us to ask a crucial question: When people’s relationship situations change, does their emotional well-being change, too?

The short answer is yes, but with important caveats.

Across more than a decade of data, people tended to experience higher emotional well-being during periods of an intimate relationship than when single. When individuals transitioned from singlehood into a relationship, they reported:

The reverse also held true: When people became single again, emotional well-being generally declined.

Because the study focused on within-person change, these results cannot be explained by the simple idea that happier people are more likely to find partners. Instead, they suggest that changes in relationship status themselves contribute to changes in emotional........

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