Romantic Relationships

Romantic relationships are where most relationship research lives: how attraction starts, how commitment deepens, how couples divide a household, handle money, raise families and stay close across decades. This topic gathers the studies that follow couples through the long middle of a shared life, not only the dramatic beginning and end.

It also covers the couples research too often leaves out. Mixed race couples, cohabiting couples and couples negotiating two families appear throughout the Interpersona archive, and their findings regularly complicate the simpler stories told from narrower samples.

Questions this topic explores

• What predicts whether a couple stays together?
• How do couples divide household labour fairly?
• What is distinctive about mixed race couples' experience?
• How does commitment change the way partners treat each other?

Explainers in this topic

Romantic Relationships

What mixed race couples know that research is still catching up to

Mixed race couples negotiate identity, family and the public gaze as part of ordinary life. The archive's research on multiracial identity, and the scholars who keep citing it, show what that teaches everyone else.

Read the explainerSexuality and Intimacy

Why we want sex: motives, gender and context

Hatfield, Luckhurst and Rapson asked people why they have sex, and took the answers seriously. The reasons turn out to be layered, social, and more similar across genders than the stereotypes suggest.

Read the explainer