Happily Ever After Is a Bad Starting Point

I love to grumble about the predictable nature of romantic comedies, but I’m secretly thrilled each time the couple gets together at the end. "Happily ever after" seems to really appeal to us on a deep level. Who among us hasn’t fallen head-over-heels in love and thought, “Ah, finally, this is the one”? And who wouldn’t want to drive off into an everlasting sunset of marital bliss (in the convertible you rented for the occasion, of course), knowing that your relationship status is hereafter settled?

Unpopular (but science-backed!) opinion coming your way: Believing that you and your partner were “destined” for each other might set you up to struggle in your relationship. As recent research tells us, the ways we perceive our relationships are some of the most powerful predictors of relationship quality—and not all beliefs are created equal.

Several years ago, an ambitious team of relationship researchers pulled together data from dozens of different studies of romantic relationships. Their goal? Figure out what aspects of relationships were the best predictors of relationship satisfaction. Surprisingly, it was people’s beliefs about their relationship—not their individual traits, nor their partner’s behaviors or traits—that were the stronger predictor of relationship quality (Joel et al., 2021). In fact, relationship beliefs explained nearly half of the variation across participants in relationship satisfaction, much higher than any other category of relationship factors.

Obviously, whether you and your partner were “meant to be” together falls in this category of relationship beliefs. In fact, psychologists call this kind of belief a “destiny belief”—the idea that relationships just either work or they don’t (Knee, 1998). In other words, if it’s written in the stars, things should just naturally work out. At the same time, there’s an opposite belief about relationships, the “growth belief,” which takes the perspective that relationships must be maintained and, in fact, grow over time through the hard work we put into them (Knee, 1998).

In a study published this year, Gander and colleagues (2024) zeroed in on how destiny and growth beliefs are associated with romantic relationship satisfaction over two years of being together. They found that people with stronger destiny beliefs started off their relationships with higher levels of satisfaction; however, their relationship satisfaction decreased more quickly than it did for people with stronger growth beliefs. Just as interestingly, people in high-quality relationships appeared to experience increasing growth beliefs over time.

The happily ever after mindset seems to not be as helpful for long-term relationship quality—but why, exactly? When you believe that relationships are either meant to be or not, you may be ill-prepared to handle the inevitable conflicts and challenges that come with relationships. Rather than work through a conflict, a person high in destiny beliefs might try to ignore it, because facing it means acknowledging that maybe you two aren’t compatible after all (Knee, 1998). Or, that same person might start to look around for a new partner, because perhaps that next person won’t come with this same conflict or seeming incompatibility.

Growth beliefs make it easier to handle these moments of ambivalence. Seeing your relationship quality as a function of how hard you work at the relationship puts you back in the driver’s seat. While relationships may seem serendipitous at times, leading us to wonder whether they just might be fated, we tend to do better when we believe that we can make our romantic destiny.

Nobody just rides off into that endless sunset of relationship bliss, I’m afraid. Believing in growth and effort allows us to see ourselves and our partners expansively (Mattingly et al., 2019), meaning we can respond to relationship challenges with flexibility, rather than getting lost in the question of whether this moment of conflict means we are compatible or not.