Why Relationships Should Get Better With Time

Over time, relationships can go in many directions, depending on how couples navigate the variety of challenges that come their way. If you’ve been with your partner for a while, you know that there will be highs and lows, but the fact that you’re together means that the balance is in the favorable direction. If you’re not in a close relationship, you may reflect back, every now and then, on what could have kept your last one going longer.

The magic ingredients that keep couples together still elude relationship researchers, but there are some strong contenders. Negotiating conflict is one of them, but so is feeling that partners can trust each other. This trust may be difficult to attain, however, if one or both partners worry that they’ll be left behind when the other one decides it’s time to leave.

The Canalization Hypothesis of Attachment Style

As suggested by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Keely Dugan and colleagues (2024), the quality of a relationship should theoretically improve over time as partners deepen their feelings of security with each other. According to attachment theory, your adult “attachment style” reflects the “working model” you have of intimacy based on your earliest experiences with your caregiver (usually a mother). If you have a secure attachment style, you’ll feel that others can be trusted, but if you worry that you’ll be left behind, your attachment style will either be anxious (fearful) or avoidant (distant).

John Bowlby, in his early writings about attachment theory, proposed what he called the “canalization hypothesis” of relationship development. As summarized by Dugan et al., “the developmental trajectories of their working models should become increasingly stable and resistant to external pressures.” You might, when first in a relationship, vacillate from secure to insecure as you and your partner figure each other out. As time goes by, both of you, if the canalization hypothesis is true, should find your way toward greater stability.

Testing the Canalization Hypothesis

Using longitudinal data from 1,741 adults (average age 35 years) studied online for 3 months to 3 years, and across 24 assessments, the UIUC team tracked variations in attachment styles and relationship status. They operationalized the idea of canalization by statistically measuring the degree to which people deviated from their own averages across time. Rather than just draw a straight line from one time point to the next, the author team estimated what’s called the “residual” or the variation around their own individual trajectories. Think of this as a set of points that go above and below a dashed line representing the mean.

If the canalization hypothesis were to be supported, the value of that residual should get smaller and smaller across the study period, especially for people in newly formed relationships. The other interesting feature that this analysis can produce is a link to relationship-specific events that might be associated with the ups and downs in attachment security. The two selected by Dugan et al. included physical separation due to travel requirements (work or school, for example) and getting into an argument with the partner. The authors also followed the course of the relationship in terms of formation and break up/divorce. On the positive side, the measures also tapped whether people felt that their partners had done something special for them. Participants also reported on other life events such as getting sick, moving, dealing with illness or death of other family members, and job-related events.

The measure of attachment avoidance included items such as “I don’t feel comfortable opening up to this person,” and sample anxiety items included “I worry that this person may abandon me.”

Turning to the findings, as expected, partners in the formation stage of their relationship showed greater variation in attachment anxiety than did those in more established relationships. The decline was particularly marked in the first few years of the relationship’s length. However, contrary to the canalization hypothesis, the same did not hold true for attachment avoidance.

In linking these patterns to events within the relationship, it appeared that people in the early relationship stages tended to rebound more quickly from an argument or fight. The impact of positive relationship events also tended to settle down more quickly in longer-term relationships. Again, attachment avoidance was less affected by such potential threats to the relationship.

Attachment anxiety may be more labile, the authors suggest, because it reflects the individual’s sensitivity to threats from the environment to one’s own sense of security. When it comes to anxiety, furthermore, your feelings of vulnerability are likely to dissipate over time the longer you are with your partner and the more outside (and inside) pressures you are able to withstand. As the authors concluded, “This finding not only supports the canalization hypothesis … but also directly aligns with the predictions of every other theoretical perspective on close relationships that we have reviewed thus far.” Among all the other factors that can strengthen the bonds partners have with each other, “a sense of conviction” regarding their future only accentuates their closeness.

Relationships Essential Reads

The Top 3 Things Couples Fight About

The Hamster of Love

Why is attachment avoidance less likely to show the settling-down pattern? The authors suggest that this could reflect the desire that avoidant partners have to remain distant from their partners. They will be more impervious to the factors that could make them worry about their partners in the early relationship days because they’re just not that interested in intimacy.

Charting Your Relationship’s Future

Given that these were individual participants and not both partners in a couple, it’s not possible to know whether partners showed less deviation as a pair in their attachment anxiety over time. From the individual standpoint, though, the findings are still impressive. The early days of a relationship, although often romanticized as taking place in the rosy-colored glow of infatuation, seem to present people with a trial of their sense of security. If the relationship is to continue, it needs to be able to weather some of those initial disruptive effects that could threaten its survival.

The findings also suggest that there’s nothing wrong with partners moving from what’s called “passionate” to “companionate” love. All of that relationship research the authors refer to includes findings that describe the mellowing and deepening over time of a couple’s feelings toward each other. The conclusion of the authors that “most people find themselves on a trajectory of diminishing partner-specific attachment anxiety” should give you hope that by hanging in there, things will improve.

To sum up, taking the long view of your relationship can help you understand and appreciate the bonds that can develop over time. If it’s a relationship you are now seeking, or if it is still in its early stages, the odds are that it, too, will become more stable and fulfilling as the years go by.

Facebook image: Impact Photography/Shutterstock