While society often assumes that finding a romantic partner is the ultimate key to happiness, tracking relationship changes over time reveals a distinctly different reality.
A massive longitudinal study carried out jointly by Prof. Elyakim Kislev at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) and Dr. Menelaos Apostolou of the University of Nicosia in Cyprus has proven that people actually experience higher emotional well-being when they are single compared to when they are enduring a poor- or moderate-quality relationship.
Ultimately, they stress, while a high-quality partnership does boost overall happiness, the data confirms that settling for an unfulfilling romance takes a far heavier psychological toll than preferring to be single.
Published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences under the title “Do relationship changes cause changes in emotional well-being? A longitudinal investigation,” it provides scientific backing to a well-known piece of life advice – that it is emotionally better to be single than to remain in a bad relationship.
Kislev teaches and researches at HUJI’s School of Public Policy and holds a doctorate in sociology from Columbia University and three master’s degrees – in counseling, public policy, sociology. He is the author of Happy Singlehood: The Rising Acceptance and Celebration of Solo Living, which has been translated into numerous languages, including Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, and Hebrew.
The researchers set out to test the hypothesis that relationship status constitutes a significant predictor of emotional well-being. To uncover these insights, the research team analyzed data from 13 waves of the Pairfam study (Panel Analysis of Intimate Relationships and Family Dynamics, a German study for researching partnership and family dynamics) tracking a representative sample of 12,000 German participants.
While baseline findings indicated that participants’ emotional well-being was significantly higher during waves in which they were in an intimate relationship compared to waves in which they were single, Apostolou and Kislev discovered that the quality of the relationship is the ultimate deciding factor.
“What makes this study unique is that we followed participants over several years to see how their happiness shifted as their relationship status changed,” Kislev explained in an interview with The Jerusalem Post. “The results clearly indicate that it isn’t simply about being coupled up. The quality of the relationship is the deciding factor for our emotional health. If a relationship is poor or even just moderate in quality, an individual’s life satisfaction and positive emotions are significantly lower than if they had just stayed single.”
Higher emotional well-being
They found that participants reported higher emotional well-being when single compared to poor- or moderate-quality relationships, although high-quality relationships yielded the best outcomes.
“We analyzed data from 13 waves of the Pairfam study, a longitudinal project with a representative sample of 12,000 German participants, using mixed-model analysis. Our results indicate that participants’ emotional well-being was significantly higher during waves in which they were in an intimate relationship compared to waves in which they were single. We also found that singlehood was associated with more negative emotions for men than for women, though the observed difference was small,” Kislev noted.
Asked how, as an expert in public policy, he decided to research being single/married and happy/unhappy, Kislev responded that, “right now, the rise of singlehood is one of the most dramatic demographic shifts in modern human history. Yet, policymakers and society are completely blind to it. I realized that if we don’t understand the well-being of single people, we are failing a huge, growing percentage of the global population.”
In general, older adults, especially women, often adapt over time to singlehood, having built resilient social networks, whereas younger adults, especially around their 30s, might feel the immediate social pressures more acutely, he said.
Since many people assume that “being in a relationship” is automatically better than being single, Kislev suggested that “what fit humanity in the past doesn’t necessarily fit it now. This caused heavy socialization, media conditioning, and what researchers call “matrimania”: the over-celebration of marriage. The never-married tend to have the highest baseline of single well-being because they have optimized their lives for it. Divorced and widowed individuals experience a drop during the transition, but over time, their well-being frequently rebounds, although not entirely.”
Social pressure to be in a relationship causes some people to remain in partnerships that reduce their well-being. “People turn to and stay in relationships due to social and family pressure. In reality, we know that the fear of the stigma of being single is often worse than the reality of a bad marriage, keeping people trapped.” A considerable proportion of adults are not in an intimate relationship – 47% of American adults under the age of 30.
The evolutionary framework regarding emotion can be applied to understand the connection between emotional well-being and relationship status, the researchers suggested.
“Maintaining a long-term intimate partnership offers several fitness-increasing advantages – to reproduce, Raising children to sexual maturity requires considerable, prolonged, and reliable investment, a burden often too great for a single parent, so being part of a couple is best served by long-term, effective cooperation between parents; Additionally, a committed long-term relationship reduces the risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections, which are more prevalent in the context of casual sex, they wrote.
Fit and single
But being single also provides specific fitness benefits.
“They can focus their energy and resources on developing personal qualities such as higher education and better jobs that may later be used to attract higher-quality mates. By remaining single, they can concentrate efforts on addressing immediate fitness-compromising issues, such as health problems. But they can suffer from negative emotions such as loneliness and sadness. Although temporary singlehood offers advantages contingent on life stage and context, it is reasonably argued that the fitness benefits of a long-term intimate relationship generally outweigh those of singlehood, so being in an intimate relationship is typically more fitness-increasing than not being in one,” Kislev explained.
The new study began in 2008 with a nationally representative sample of over 12,000 young adults from three birth cohorts: 1971-1973, 1981-1983, and 1991-1993, who were interviewed annually to see if anything changed over time.
Intimate relationships were classified as good or poor quality, based on subjective relationship satisfaction. Participants who reported scores that ranged from “0” to “3” were classified as being in a poor-quality relationship, from “4” to “6” as being in a moderate-quality relationship, and from “7” to “10” as being in a good-quality relationship.
Only about 16% of participants said they were in a poor- or moderate-quality intimate relationship over the years, reflecting the tendency for people to end relationships they view as low quality.
They plan future studies to provide further evidence by replicating this finding in different cultural settings and by using more refined measures of relationship status.