Changes in Relationship Commitment Across the Transition to Parenthood: Pre-pregnancy Happiness as a Protective Resource.

The transition to parenthood is both a joyous and a challenging event in a relationship. Studies to date have found mostly negative effects of the birth of the first child on the parental relationship. We propose that partners' pre-pregnancy individual happiness may serve as a buffer against these negative effects. We predicted that parents who are happy prior to pregnancy fare better in terms of relationship commitment after childbirth than unhappy parents. To test our prediction, we used data of a 5-wave longitudinal study among 109 Dutch newlywed couples who had their first child during the study and a comparison group of 55 couples who remained childless. We found that the relationship commitment of fathers with higher pre-pregnancy happiness and fathers with a partner with higher pre-pregnancy happiness increased slightly in the years after childbirth, whereas the relationship commitment of fathers with lower pre-pregnancy happiness and fathers with a partner with lower pre-pregnancy happiness decreased. In addition, the relationship commitment of mothers with a happier partner prior to pregnancy decreased only slightly across the transition to parenthood but showed a steeper decline for mothers with a partner with average or lower pre-pregnancy happiness. In line with the idea that happiness acts as a resource when partners have to deal with relationship challenges, individual happiness predicted changes in relationship commitment for parents, but not for partners who remained childless.

A Dyadic Test of the Association Between Trait Self-Control and Romantic Relationship Satisfaction.

Previous research has demonstrated that trait self-control is related to a range of positive romantic relationship processes, suggesting that trait self-control should be positively and robustly linked to relationship satisfaction in both partners in a romantic relationship. However, the existing empirical evidence is limited and mixed, especially regarding partner effects (i.e., the effect of one's self-control on the partner's relationship satisfaction). With three datasets of heterosexual couples (S1: N = 195 newlyweds, longitudinal; S2: N = 249 couples who transition into first parenthood, longitudinal; S3: N = 929 couples, cross-sectional), the present pre-registered studies examined: (1) the dyadic associations between trait self-control and relationship satisfaction both cross-sectionally and longitudinally, and (2) whether these effects hold when controlling for both partners' relationship commitment. The results indicated a cross-sectional positive actor effect, some support for a positive cross-sectional partner effect, and only little support for a longitudinal actor (but not partner) effect. After controlling for relationship commitment, all effects of trait self-control on satisfaction diminished except for a longitudinal actor effect among women in Study 2. Potential explanations for the current results, and implications for theory and practice, are discussed.