A love story

Skip to main content

0%

A love story<br>by alvin chang

scroll down

Once upon a time in the 1960s, an Asian boy and girl met at college. We’ll call them Henry and Mary.

A few years later, during an unusually rainy season in January, they started dating.

Then a few years after that, they got married.

Eventually they had two kids, bought a single-family home, and built successful careers.

Decades later, in 2017, Henry was asked how his relationship was.<br>He said it was excellent.

This is the template of a love story that many of us dream of living. It involves two people who will build a life together—and work through whatever comes their way.<br>And something big is about to come their way.

Henry is one of the thousands of adults Stanford University researchers have been tracking since 2017.<br>Every person on this page answered questions about their relationship status, how they met their partner, and how their relationship is going.<br>This piece only visualizes people who participated in all three waves of this survey—2017, 2020, and 2022. More on methodology at the bottom.

Most partnered people said their relationships were excellent or good.<br>Click a person for details.

Men were more likely to say their relationship was excellent .

People with more money tended to report better relationships.<br>This is partially because they had more time and resources to devote to their partners, but also because older people earn more money and they’ve had time to find and build good relationships.

And to no one’s surprise, couples who had been together longer were more likely to have high-quality relationships.

But a global pandemic is coming in a few years. Could these relationships endure that upheaval?<br>There were already some signs that modern relationships were heading in the wrong direction. Over the past several generations, a shrinking percentage of people have said their marriage is “very happy.”<br>People who say their marriage is “very happy”<br>Source: General Social Survey

From 1987 to 2013, both married couples and cohabitating partners reported more unfairness and disagreement. They also said they interacted less with their partners, possibly because many Americans are working longer hours to make ends meet.<br>Relationship dynamics from 1987 to 2013<br>Source: Wright, Brown, and Manning (2023) and Wright, Zugarek, Brown, and Manning (2025) | The measures for the marriage and cohabiting studies are slightly different, so the vertical axes show the minimum and maximum for each measure.

Furthermore, a record number of people are not getting married. And young single people are less interested in pursuing relationships compared to prior generations.<br>So what would a global pandemic do to American relationships?<br>The obvious theory was that the stress caused by the virus and lockdowns would use up the very energy we need to support our partners through it. And because there was no clear end date, the chronic stress could break some relationships.

It’s 2020. People are locked down in their homes. A deadly virus is rapidly spreading around the world.

Henry and Mary, the couple from the beginning of this story, are now in their 70s. They have agreed that they should socially distance and wear masks in public.<br>They haven’t fought much during lockdown. They’ve hunkered down, avoided getting sick, and eventually got the vaccine.

In fact, Henry says his relationship is still excellent—just like before.<br>Not a huge surprise, given that they’ve been together for more than 50 years!

But what happened to everyone else since 2017?

There were more divorces and breakups than normal.<br>Breakups and divorces, 2010-13 vs. 2017-20<br>Source: How Couples Meet and Stay Together 2017

Even among people who stayed together, many said they fought with their partner multiple times in the past week.

In fact, many people rated their relationship worse in 2020 than three years prior.

Across human history, societal disruptions have exposed the fault lines of our relationships.<br>For thousands of years , marriage served mostly a societal function. Aristocrats used it as a tool to consolidate wealth and property across generations. Meanwhile, serfs worked the land for feudal lords, who often controlled their marriages so that couples could be economically viable units.<br>“It was too vital an economic and political institution to be entered into solely on the basis of something as irrational as love,” writes historian Stephanie Coontz in her book, Marriage, a History.<br>But after the Black Death killed up to half of Europe’s population in the mid-1300s, there was a massive labor shortage. Serfs were able to take up trades or jobs that were independent of feudal lords, so they had more freedom and incentive to find partners they got along with. “A harmonious, well-functioning marriage was a business necessity as well as a personal pleasure,” Coontz writes.<br>Eventually in the late 1700s , people started to marry for love. But this gave rise to...