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.
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.
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.
Every person on this page answered questions about their relationship status, how they met their partner, and how their relationship is going.
Most partnered people said their relationships were excellent or good.
Click a person for details.
Men were more likely to say their relationship was excellent .
People with more money tended to report better relationships.
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?
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.”
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.
Relationship dynamics from 1987 to 2013
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.
So what would a global pandemic do to American relationships?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Eventually in the late 1700s, people started to marry for love. But this gave rise to dogmatic beliefs that men and women have innately different natures—that men are better-suited to occupy public life, while women should gracefully uphold the domestic and moral standards of the home. By the early 1900s, these beliefs coalesced into the ideal that the man should be the sole breadwinner.
In the 1930s, the Great Depression threw a wrench into these expectations when men lost their jobs and women sought out work.
“This threatened the ‘modern’ ideas of masculinity and marriage that most men had come to embrace over the previous two decades,” Coontz writes. “Unemployed men often lost their sense of identity and became demoralized. Many turned to drink. Tempers flared at home.”
Ever since the 1960s, more people have wanted their relationships to be about self-fulfillment. We want our partners to help us be our best selves, rather than playing a societal role. It has freed us from many traditional and often sexist expectations—but we’re also relying more on our relationships than ever before.
“Never before in history had societies thought that such a set of high expectations about marriage was either realistic or desirable,” Coontz writes.
So did the high-pressure relationships of modern day really crumble when couples were locked down together?
The people on this screen are colored by how they rated their relationship in 2020. But once they rated it excellent, they couldn’t go any higher.
So the Stanford researchers asked another question: How did the pandemic change your relationship?
It looks like many of these relationships have improved!
In fact, people in excellent relationships were much more likely to say their relationship got even better.
Meanwhile, the pandemic was far more likely to erode the quality of less-than-excellent relationships.
And two years later, these effects were even stronger: More excellent relationships got better, while fair or worse relationships suffered.
One hint as to what’s going on: Couples in excellent relationships were far more likely to have complete agreement on what safety measures they should follow during the pandemic.
A 63-year-old man told researchers, “We have given up the outside world to keep each other safe. You see, I love [wife’s name] so much.”
Why did a disruption like the pandemic improve strong relationships, while eroding others?
Stanford researchers studied these relationships and one thing they found was that functional couples engaged in “mutual meaning making.” They were resilient because they aligned their perspectives on the virus’s risk, and agreed on how they would behave in response to it.
When they didn’t?
“I want to wear a mask, gloves, limit exposure as much as humanly possible, I wipe down surfaces and use hand sanitizer,” a 22-year-old woman told researchers. “He thinks I’m being, in his words, ‘ridiculous and paranoid.’ “
This wasn’t surprising for relationship experts. Psychologist John Gottman observed thousands of couples during his long career, and he created a framework called the “Sound Relationship House”—basically the infrastructure of successful couples. And at the very top of this house is creating shared meaning.
“I believe that everyone is a philosopher trying to make some sense out of this brief journey we have through life,” Gottman writes in his book, The Science of Trust. “People do that in many ways, including creating formal and informal rituals of connection, creating shared goals and life missions, supporting each other’s basic roles in life, and agreeing on the meaning of central values and symbols (like ‘what is a home?’).”
Prior societal disruptions revealed cracks in the prevailing relationship models. What did the pandemic expose? Relationship experts have long been anxious that modern relationships require too much of our partners.
“Today, we turn to one person to provide what an entire village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning, and continuity,” Esther Perel writes in her book, Mating in Captivity. “Is it any wonder that so many relationships crumble under the weight of it all?”
On one hand, we became free of the institutions and communities that once had power over our relationships—but in turn, they stopped playing a role in our lives.
We can see our love lives becoming more independent and isolated by looking at how people meet.
First, let’s group everyone by how long their relationship has been.
In newer relationships, couples rarely met at church.
They rarely met through coworkers.
They rarely met through family members.
And they less frequently met through friends.
As you already know, the most common way people meet these days is online, mostly through dating apps.
Source: How Couples Meet and Stay Together 2017 | Five-year rolling averages
This means people are less likely to know the same people prior to meeting.
They’re on a social island, for better or worse.
Pandemic lockdowns accentuated this isolation. Some couples were able to endure the towering expectations of their partnership, but many were not.
“Modern relationships are cauldrons of contradictory longings: safety and excitement, grounding and transcendence, the comfort of love and the heat of passion. We want it all, and we want it with one person,” Perel writes.
It’s uncomfortable for me to read about how we’re too reliant on our partners. It feels like a critique of the relationship I’ve built with the most important person in my life—a relationship that has helped us survive an increasingly precarious and anti-social world.
But our history reveals that love stories are shaped by the world in which we live, and they’ve always come with tradeoffs. We once married people for survival, which provided stability but not emotional satisfaction. We then married for companionship, which traded stability for love—and rigid gender roles. And now we want our partners to fulfill a wide array of emotional, physical, and existential needs. That can be an overwhelming task.
When I told people I’m working on a story about love, so many people shared their struggles with how to love someone in a world where we have to ask so much of them. They shared intimate stories that reflect this tension we feel in our relationships. And they told me how they’re making it work the best they can, in their own specific way.
Having these vulnerable conversations have made me feel less alone—almost like the village is still here.
Explore the data
Methodology
The data for this story is from How Couples Meet and Stay Together, which surveyed Americans in 2017, 2020, and 2022. To get a representative analysis, the researchers weighted each respondent based on demographic characteristics. But the main icon visualization represents each person as one icon, and only shows participants who were surveyed in all three waves. All of the icon visualizations in this piece reflect the general results of a weighted analysis, but the exact numbers may differ. The individual charts are produced using the representative weights.
Data citation
Rosenfeld, Michael J., Reuben J. Thomas, and Sonia Hausen. 2023. How Couples Meet and Stay Together 2017-2020-2022 combined dataset. [Computer files]. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Libraries. https://data.stanford.edu/hcmst2017
Notes
Special thanks to Amanda Sakuma for making the clothes for the claymation icons.
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