This chapter describes how romantic partners navigate the disagreements that necessarily result from their interdependence and how partners recover when they intentionally or unintentionally hurt each other. Specifically, it reviews the ways in which goals and desires conflict to produce disagreements and how disagreements provide a diagnostic situation in which people make inferences about their partner’s thoughts, feelings, and commitment. Next, it describes typical conflict topics, how conflicts tend to be experienced, and typical conflict prevalence over the course of a romantic relationship. Next, the chapter covers how people manage interpersonal conflicts and highlights specific conflict behaviors that are typically destructive (e.g., hostility, withdrawal) and specific conflict behaviors that are typically constructive (e.g., intimacy, problem solving), as well as how the adaptiveness of conflict behaviors can change depending on the situation. Finally, this chapter reviews how partners can recover from destructive conflicts and other relationship transgressions by accommodating rather than retaliating, sacrificing, and forgiving.

This chapter focuses on how motivated cognition – the tendency for people to think in ways that are consistent with their goals – supports relationship maintenance. It starts with an overview of the assortment of strategies that people use to maintain their close relationships, which lay the foundation for this chapter and subsequent chapters. Then, it explicates the specific biases and illusions that people tend to have about their partners (e.g., seeing partners as particularly physically attractive, projecting ideal traits onto one’s partner) and their relationships (e.g., perceiving one’s own relationship as superior to others). This chapter also reviews empirical evidence describing the implications of this motivated inaccuracy for perceivers and their partners’ relationship experiences. This chapter also describes how biased perceptions extend to potential alternatives, leading people to ignore and devalue attractive alternative partners. It concludes with a discussion of contextual factors that shape the extent to which people engage in motivated cognition and the specific consequences of bias and illusion in relationships.

This chapter describes positive interpersonal processes: interactions between people that actively enhance their close relationships. It begins by describing the field’s shift toward studying positive processes and highlighting the utility of considering positive phenomena as unique from negative phenomena. Then, it reviews three interpersonal behaviors that have been shown to enhance relationships and describes the evidence supporting their benefits. First, spending time together (particularly spending time on novel and exciting activities) enhances relationships by enabling partners to meet their self-expansion needs in ongoing relationships. A second positive process is co-experiencing positive emotions, such as joy, amusement, and excitement, which augment and sustain positive experiences and facilitate interpersonal synchrony. Finally, this chapter reviews the benefits of communicating affection and the individual differences in how and how often people express affection.

This chapter introduces the interdisciplinary field of relationship science. It describes the human drive for belonging, including the biological underpinning of sociality and the harmful consequences of social isolation and social exclusion. It also defines romantic relationships and the characteristics that differentiate romantic relationships from other close relationships (high interdependence, high intimate knowledge, high commitment). In addition to emphasizing the core commonalities across romantic relationships, this chapter explores the many ways in which romantic relationships are diverse (e.g., structure, exclusivity, composition, duration, motives). Finally, this chapter highlights the critical importance of close relationships for individual health and well-being as well, as for society more broadly.

This chapter examines how early relationships become established relationships. It reviews varying relationship trajectories (e.g., ascent, peak, and descent) and then describes the three key components of the relationship that develop over time: love, intimacy, and commitment. First, the chapter defines and differentiates the various forms of love (e.g., passionate love, companionate love, compassionate love) and reviews how love develops and changes over time. Second, this chapter explores how interpersonal intimacy develops through repeated instances of self-disclosure and perceived partner responsiveness and how developing intimate relationships change the self. Third, this chapter reviews how people make and communicate their commitment decisions, as well as how social network members shape commitment. Finally, it provides an overview of common major transitions (cohabitation, marriage, parenthood) and some key challenges therein.

This chapter describes how relationship scientists conduct research to answer questions about relationships. It explains all aspects of the research process, including how hypotheses are derived from theory, which study designs (e.g., experiments, cross-sectional studies, experience sampling) best suit specific research questions, how scientists can manipulate variables or measure variables with self-report, implicit, observational, or physiological measures, and what scientists consider when recruiting a sample to participate in their studies. This chapter also discusses how researchers approach questions about boundary conditions (when general trends do not apply) and mechanisms (the processes underlying their findings) and describes best practices for conducting ethical and reproducible research. Finally, this chapter includes a guide for how to read and evaluate empirical research articles.

This chapter provides an overview of sexuality and its role in romantic relationships. It starts with a discussion of the commonalities and diversity in people’s sexual desires, sexual attitudes, motives for sex, and sexual behaviors. It then covers how often people have sex and the relational implications of more or less frequent sex. Next, this chapter reviews predictors of sexual satisfaction and the relation between sexual satisfaction and relational satisfaction, more broadly. Finally, the chapter ends with a review of how people initiate sex in both casual contexts and in ongoing romantic relationships.

This chapter explores central questions of relationship dissolution: Why and how do people voluntarily breakup? What are the consequences of a close relationship ending? How do people recover and move on from difficult relationship endings? It begins with a discussion of the typical precursors of relationship dissolution, including problems with “me” or “you” (e.g., personality traits, attachment orientation, difficult habits), problems with “us” (e.g., romantic disengagement, disillusionment, incompatibility, infidelity), and problems in the context (e.g., financial stress, incarceration, parenting challenges). Then, it reviews the process of breaking up, including strategies people use to end their relationships. Finally, this chapter ends with a summary of the common immediate negative consequences of relationship dissolution and the common long-term recovery process (as well as diverse post-dissolution outcomes).