Changes in happiness, sadness, anxiety, and anger around romantic relationship events.

Most people agree that romantic relationships greatly affect how we feel. For example, we typically feel happier when getting married but sadder when breaking up. However, previous research primarily focused on changes in cognitive but less so affective well-being around positive and negative relationship events. Set-point theory suggests that subjective well-being might change shortly around such experiences but bounce back in the long run. Using data from the Socio-Economic Panel study (SOEP), we examined changes in life satisfaction, happiness, sadness, anxiety, and anger in the 5 years before and 5 years after moving in with a partner (N = 4,399), marriage (N = 3,731), separation (N = 3,538), and divorce (N = 1,103). Life satisfaction and happiness increased slightly in the years before moving in and marriage. For marriage, these effects were short-lived and diminished after 1 year. Separation and divorce were associated with much larger well-being impairments (especially a strong increase of sadness) that were most pronounced shortly before and after the event and attenuated in the following years. Changes in anxiety and anger were much smaller. Our findings suggest that romantic relationship events not only relate to substantial changes in life satisfaction but also affective well-being. These changes vary for different well-being facets, are most pronounced for happiness and sadness at the time of the event, and bounce back in the long run. As one of the first studies, we demonstrate that set-point theory not only applies to cognitive but also affective well-being around romantic relationship events. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).