Attachment researchers treat one belief as the core of a close relationship: that your partner cares about you, appreciates you and gets you. More than two thousand married American adults rated that belief, then rated their own well-being again a decade on, with personality and the responsiveness of friends and family held constant. Which kind of well-being, if any, moved?
Only one of the two moved. Feeling understood predicted a rise in ten years later, the sense that a life has purpose and is growing into itself. , the plain balance of pleasant feeling over unpleasant, did not budge once age, gender, extraversion, neuroticism and the earlier scores were taken into account. Day to day explained part of the gain.
Attachment theory puts one belief at the center of a close relationship: , the conviction that your partner cares for you, appreciates you and understands you. It is a belief about the partner, held by the person doing the rating.
More than 2,000 married adults across the United States rated it, and rated their own well-being, ten years apart. A subset also kept an eight-day diary of daily mood, which let the authors see how sharply each person reacted to a bad day.
The split in the results is the whole point. Eudaimonic well-being, purpose and growth and the sense of becoming who you mean to be, rose over the decade for people who felt understood. Hedonic well-being, the plain tally of pleasant feeling over unpleasant, did not, once age, gender, extraversion, neuroticism and the baseline scores were held constant.
Emotional reactivity carried part of the link. People who felt understood were knocked about less by daily stress, and that steadiness partly explained the later gain in purpose. Two cautions remain. The responsiveness measure records what one partner believes, not what the other did. And a ten-year correlation, however carefully controlled, still does not settle which way the arrow points.
wat. Believing a partner understands you predicted purpose and growth ten years on, and left everyday pleasantness exactly where it was.
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It splits two things usually bundled together as happiness, and only the deeper one answers to a partner over a decade. That changes what couples might reasonably expect of each other.
How do we know?
Selcuk and colleagues followed more than 2,000 married adults across the United States for ten years, with an eight-day diary in a subset to track daily emotional reactivity.
What is still unknown
Perceived partner responsiveness is one person’s belief, not an audit of what the other actually did, and a ten-year correlation is still not an experiment.
Learn something?
Where to next
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Does a vacation with meditation in it leave anything behind once you are home?well-being
Does the way you praise a toddler matter five years later?longitudinal