Romantic relationships are one of the most important aspects of life for many (but not all) people, but many relationships are not forever. People want to dissolve a romantic relationship for many different reasons. Some may have found another person they fell in love with, others have grown to resent some aspects of the relationship, and some may just be plain bored. Typically, the end of a relationship does not come abruptly, but is a gradual process. People start thinking about a break-up long before they tell their partner that it is over. Therefore, it is an interesting research question for psychological science whether people could accurately predict whether their partner thinks about ending the relationship or not.

Can people can predict when their partner wants out of the relationship?

This intriguing question was the focus of a new study that was recently published in the scientific journal European Journal of Social Psychology (Tan et al., 2023).

In the study, which was first-authored by Kenneth Tan from the School of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University, the scientists conducted several experiments to assess perceived partner dissolution considerations.

In the first experiment, volunteers had to answer several different questions about perceived partner dissolution considerations, such as:

• I believe my partner has been thinking about ending our romantic relationship.
• More and more I believe it comes to my partner’s mind that he/she should break up with me.
• My partner has been close to telling me that he/she wants to end our romantic relationship.

The volunteers also had to answer questions about their partner’s commitment to the relationship, as well as questions about their own dissolution considerations and their own commitment to the relationship.

In a second experiment, the scientist then gathered similar data from 108 couples to have objective data from both people in a relationship. In this experiment, an interesting result came out: In relationships in which one partner often thought about breaking up, the other partner also indicated that her/she predicted higher perceived partner dissolution considerations. Thus, to some extent, people can predict that their partner wants to end the romantic relationship.

Interestingly, however, volunteers generally underestimated how often their partner thought about ending the relationship. Thus, partners naturally thought more often about ending the relationship than volunteers thought.

Instead, they projected their own dissolution consideration onto their partners, even if they were not an accurate reflection of what the partner thought. This finding was also replicated in a third experiment with an independent cohort of volunteers, showing it is likely statistically robust. This association was influenced by attachment anxiety, with more anxious people being able to predict partner dissolution considerations more accurately.

Thus, taken together, people tend to have a bias in seeing the long-term prospects of romantic relationships as more positive than they actually are.