Wwhen I meet a friend’s new partner for the first time, I want so badly to like them. I hope they are generally pleasant to be around – not just for my sake, but for my friend’s. When people date someone who is miserable, it can rub off on them. Maybe you had that happy, upbeat friend who started dating a grump, and gradually they become an Eeyore too.
Research shows that people often become similar to those they spend a lot of time with. Even strangers tend to imitate each other’s movements and expressions, and studies have shown that friends, strangers, and lovers’ heartbeat or brain waves often synchronize. In romantic couples, a number of studies Showed what they have similar well-beingboth when they first start dating and also over time.
“Convergence has been shown for different characteristics such as personality, lifestyle, daily activities, sports, nutrition, leisure and also well-being,” says Olga Stavrova, a professor of psychology at the University of Lübeck. So if two people date and look more alike, who becomes more like who? In a recent paper co-authored by Stavrova, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, she went after this very question. She said she wants to understand if the happier person in a couple is “pulled down” or if the unhappier person is “lifted up”.
She looked at data from more than 20,000 German and Dutch couples followed for 37 and 14 years, respectively, and focused only on couples who differed in well-being at the start of their relationships. Within each partnership, if one person began to say they had higher well-being and life satisfaction than the other, they experienced declines in their well-being over time. The person with lower well-being may experience a small increase in happiness, but often has no improvement at all. And the decline experienced by the satisfied person was always greater than any improvement in the dissatisfied person.
Stavrova said the findings likely stem from the types of interactions couples have over time. You share what happens in your day, and how you feel, with your partner. If one person is always negative, it can bring the other down. In another study, when researchers followed couples over several weeks, they did found that negative emotions are more commonly passed back and forth, compared to positive ones.
“The idea that we have input from the people we spend time with is important to understanding how relationships shape health and well-being across the lifespan,” said Darby Saxbe, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, said. who were not involved in the new study.
But the findings don’t necessarily mean you should avoid people who seem a little on the unlucky side. You don’t need to find a partner who is very cheerful all the time, or worried about dragging others down. “I would be hesitant to say, ‘Don’t date someone who’s a downer,'” Saxbe said.
The interplay of long-term relationships and well-being is more complicated than just this one factor. A large body of work consistently finds that close relationships make people healthier over our lifespan. If we were consistently affected by less happy partners, there wouldn’t be as much evidence that relationships are generally beneficial.
Saxbe, who trained as a couples therapist, said the way couples affect each other’s moods can differ. If one partner comes home from work upset every day, Saxbe has seen how toxic stress contagion occurs: the other person is drawn into a negative emotional state. But if a couple has a healthy emotional dynamic, one partner can help calm the other, and they can regulate together. “Couples can either help each other return to the baseline, or they can push each other past the baseline,” she said.
Happiness is not the only thing that matters in relationships. For example, parents often report low moods and poor well-being when they are with their children, but when you ask them if they are happy they had children, they still say yes. “Your momentary mood is just one warning to your well-being,” Saxbe said.
Stavrova said that while her team’s findings sound bleak, she can’t comment on whether this convergence is always a bad thing, even when one partner’s well-being declines. Having similar characteristics or behaviors to your partner can lead to more relationship stability; when people have high satisfaction gaps in their first year of marriage, it increase the chances some of them are later divorced.
You don’t have to choose to date someone who is sunny everyone the time, but you should be aware that they are likely to influence you over time. You make sense of the world together, with its ups and downs, Stavrova said. Having a partner with a resilient temperament is probably going to matter more for quality of life.
“It’s not that much, you never experience drops in well-being, or you don’t experience frustrations,” said Saxbe. “What’s more important is: how do you recover?”
