By studying 500 people who had multiple relationships over an eight-year period, an Edmonton researcher has found we tend to repeat behaviours with different partners once the honeymoon phase of a relationship is over.
Matt Johnson, an associate professor of family science at the University of Alberta, conducted his research using data from 554 people who were surveyed for 10 years as part of the German Family Panel. The survey recruited 12,000 Germans—plus their partners and family members for a total of more than 20,000 participants—to study their dynamics throughout a decade.
All of the people Johnson studied had, between 2008 and 2016, been in one relationship that had lasted a year or longer and entered a second relationship.
He said his findings were surprising.
"We intuitively believe that as we go into a new relationship things are different, partly because the person we're in a relationship with is different, and partially because of how we remember… past relationships that ended," Johnson explained.
"We tend to emphasize the negative in those relationships and so obviously we think the next time things are going to be different, it's going to be better, et cetera, et cetera."
But his research shows things often aren't different—aside from the honeymoon phase and the break up.
"Those are unusual periods in the life of a relationship because people kind of settle in to patterns."
Instead, he looked at data from one year before a person's first partnership ended, and data from one year after a new relationship had started.
The German participants were asked, among other things, about their satisfaction levels, whether they thought the relationship would last, how open they were with a partner, and the frequency with which they had sex and expressed appreciation for the other person.
All of the above aspects were found to be stable between each point in time.
"A key takeaway of the study is that if you start a new relationship, it is not inevitable that change is going to happen compared to your prior relationships," Johnson said.
"The honeymoon phase is not enduring. But I think the flip side of that is equally true… It takes some effort to intentionally do things different with a new partner."
Whether the pattern is good or not is up to interpretation, Johnson added.
In some cases, it could signal a person who has stayed true to themselves.
"But stability where people are just blindly repeating the same patterns without really thinking about it—that's probably not optimal either," the researcher said.
"It is an open question as to what is that optimal amount of change?"
It is also one of the questions Johnson wants to continue studying.
