Symposia
Couples / Close Relationships
Donald H. Baucom, Ph.D.
Distinguished Professor
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Ann-Katrin Job, Dr. rer. nat.
Doctor
University of Braunschweig
Braunschweig, Sachsen, Germany
Kurt Hahlweg, PhD
Professor
University of Braunschweig
Braunschweig, Sachsen, Germany
Melanie S. Fischer, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
University of Marburg, Germany
Marburg, Hessen, Germany
Most couples enter into relationships anticipating joy and happiness for life. Yet, a more detailed exploration employing group-based trajectory modeling demonstrates that happiness and distress unfold in different ways for various couples. For example, Anderson et al. (2010) identified two groups who either were consistently happy or recovered from distress, along with groups who were consistently unhappy or declined across time, and some couples divorced. The focus of the current investigation is to build upon this nuanced approach to understanding different patterns of satisfaction over many years, along with exploring parental and child correlates of these trajectories.
282 mothers in Germany and their now grown children who earlier had participated in the Triple P parenting program were followed up 18 years later, completing various questionnaires. Somewhat unique to this investigation, mothers drew a retrospective diagram of their subjective relationship satisfaction with the biological father over their entire relationship (average relationship length, 32 years). Using categories adapted from the trajectory modeling literature, 3 coders sorted trajectories of relationship satisfaction into categories with 95% concordance: stable positive (27% of mothers), stable negative (5%), curvilinear [declined but recovered (23%)], and separated or divorced (45%). Whereas 50% of mothers reported that over decades, they either were consistently satisfied in their relationships or overcome various crises in a resilient manner, very few mothers report staying in unsatisfying relationships over decades, even for the children.
The different trajectory groups also demonstrated notable differences across relationship variables with stable positive and recovered mothers being quite similar to each other. The groups demonstrated somewhat similar patterns across measures of individual functioning, with stable negative and/or divorced mothers scoring more negatively. Overall, the pattern of results suggests that there are not notable long-term negative effects from having relationship crises over the years as long as one is resilient and returns to a high level of relationship satisfaction. Instead, mothers who “bounce back” to high levels of relationship satisfaction over time appear to function well across relationship and individual domains of functioning at follow-up. Findings regarding their children, both assessed during childhood and as adults, also will be presented.
