You’ve woken up today in the best of moods possible, excited about spending a weekend day doing nothing but spending time with your partner. Your partner is not only your best friend but also the one person in the world whom you want to be with the most. It’s going to be a great day!
Much to your dismay, you don’t sense this enthusiasm reflected in your partner’s demeanor. Not only that, but you catch your partner in the middle of sending a text to a friend, complaining that the two of them won’t be able to hang out at their favorite watering hole. What’s going on?
The Role of Synchrony in Relationship Satisfaction
It’s been shown in research, and also fits with common sense, that couples who are in sync are generally happier. Either their in-sync-ness causes them to be happier, or because they’re happier, they tend to share the same sunny optimism about life, each other, and their relationship. The question is why.
According to a new study by Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz psychologist Louisa Scheling and colleagues (2025), a quality known as “state relationship satisfaction” can be used to describe the way that people feel toward their relationship (and each other) at any given moment. Overall or “trait” satisfaction is most often what researchers study, but it’s this more variable quality that they should be looking at as well.
Think about how these differ, especially if you imagine yourself rating your own relationship. Someone asks you to rate your general satisfaction with your partner. It’s an abstract idea, but you’ll ballpark it as perhaps an 8 or 9 out of 10. What if they ask you to rate your satisfaction at this moment or within the past day? Now you conjure up that image of your partner skulking off to text a friend, and your rating shoots down to a 2 or 3. Sure, you love your partner and are generally happy. But not today.
The German research team believes that relationship researchers miss the mark when they fail to trace these more volatile types of relationship satisfaction. They advocate using a “within-day perspective” to “improve the understanding of the dynamics of relationship satisfaction in couples’ daily lives.” This could ultimately generate “insights into whether variability even exists and matters for the relationship.”
Tracking Couple Synchrony
To fix the flaws of previous studies, the authors used a two-pronged approach. First, they tackled variability across a 14-day period in nearly 600 long-term couples (studied for 2 years). Next, they went on to examine variability within days in a sample of 150 younger couples (followed for 6 months). Couple synchrony was defined as occurring when both partners showed the same exact pattern of variability across the time period.
In their analyses, the authors took into account predictors of synchrony such as gender, age, relationship duration, attachment security (feeling lack of anxiety/avoidance), and self-esteem. The outcome measures were overall relationship (trait) satisfaction and breakup intentions.
Combining these approaches, the findings showed that couples indeed varied in their relationship satisfaction across and within days. Overall, there was a moderate to high overall level of couple synchrony in patterns of variability, meaning that couples swung from high to low in similar patterns. What intrigued the researchers was the fact that basically none of the demographic variables predicted variability in state relationship satisfaction, including age. It seems, then, that “variability is a common experience for most couples, even for those who have been in a relationship for decades.” In other words, relationships continue to have good and bad days, even those relationships that have stood the test of time.
The one factor to rise to the top in terms of predicting variability in state satisfaction was perceived responsiveness of one’s partner. Here, the authors likened their findings to those on attachment theory in early life: “Just as a reliably available and responsive caregiver fosters stability and security in childhood, a consistently perceived responsive partner is essential for maintaining a stable and satisfying relationship in adulthood.”
Turning Variability Into Synchrony
You may still be wondering whether it’s good or bad for relationships to have good and bad days, even when couples agree on what’s good and what’s bad. As it turned out, couples experiencing high variability did seem to get fed up with their relationship, expressing more breakup intentions and lower overall satisfaction, but only for the short term. In the long run, these vicissitudes seemed to have no particularly positive or negative implications. A few bad days, even ones your partner feels are bad, probably won’t spell doom for a relationship.
Relationships Essential Reads
More important is the feeling that your partner can be trusted to be there for you and respond to your needs. Turning back to that great weekend day you were hoping to spend in romantic bliss, this one asynchronous day most likely won’t spell relationship doom. Continuously feeling that your partner doesn’t want to spend time with you (or listen to you express that desire) would be much more problematic.
It’s also good to know that you don’t have to be on the same page with your partner at all times, even with something as basic as your feelings of satisfaction. As long as you can discuss this mismatch, the chances are good it won’t be all that significant in the grand scheme of things.
To sum up, feeling that you and your partner share basic views of your relationship is important to your future as a couple. Your fulfillment will still be on solid ground as long as you can talk about the times when those views are temporarily out of kilter.
