Even if you’re in a brand-new relationship, chances are you’ll return to the same patterns from your previous relationships.
It’s not necessarily good or bad; it just what researchers found when they studied the issue recently.
Criteria for measurement
The research team, which included scientists from Germany and Canada, looked at the data for 554 people to study the partnerships and family dynamics of Germans who had been in more than one intimate partner over the course of the study. They specifically looked at four key points:
- A year before their first romantic relationship ended
- During the final year of their first intimate relationship
- Within the first year of their new relationship
- In the second year of their new relationship
Within the romantic relationships, the researchers looked at seven features:
- sexual satisfaction
- frequency of sex
- communication
- relationship satisfaction
- conflict frequency
- how frequently the partners expressed appreciation for each other
- how much confidence each person had that the relationship would endure
The findings
Overall, the patterns related to the bulk of these seven features stayed the same across past and present relationships. But there were two exceptions: expressions of admiration toward their partner and frequency of sex. Both of those features tended to increase in the new romantic relationship. It’s not that the sex was necessarily better in the new relationship compared to past relationships. In fact, sexual satisfaction stayed the same.
“Things get worse as a relationship ends, and when we start a new one, everything is wonderful at first because we’re not involving our partners in everyday life like housework and childcare,” explains lead author Matthew Johnson. “The relationship exists outside of those things. There’s a lot of change in between [relationships], but more broadly, we do have stability in how we are in relationships.”
