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Moving in or Breaking Up? The Role of Distance in the Development of Romantic Relationships

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Abstract

Most romantic relationships start with a living apart together (LAT) phase during which the partners live in two separate households. Over time, a couple might decide to move in together, to separate, or to remain together while maintaining their nonresidential status. This study investigates the competing risks that partners in a LAT relationship will experience the transition to coresidence or to separation. We consider the amount of time LAT partners have to travel to see each other to be a key determinant of relationship development. For our statistical analyses, we use seven waves of the German Family Panel Pairfam (2008/2009–2014/2015) and analyze couples in the age group 20–40 years. We distinguish between short-distance relationships (the partners have to travel less than one hour) and long-distance relationships (the partners have to travel one hour or more). Estimating a competing risks model, we find that couples in long-distance relationships are more likely to separate than those living in close proximity. By contrast, the probability of experiencing a transition to coresidence is lower for LAT couples in long-distance than for those in short-distance relationships. Interaction analyses reveal that distance seems to be irrelevant for the relationship development of couples with two nonemployed (unemployed, in education or other inactive) partners.

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Fig. 1

Source German Socioeconomic panel, own calculations. Adapted from Asendorpf (2008)

Fig. 2

Source Pairfam, relationship years, male and female anchors and their partner, age group 20–40 years. Waves 1–7

Fig. 3

Control variables: relationship duration, woman’s age, woman’s age squared, man’s age, man’s age squared, children, region, partnership satisfaction

Fig. 4

Source Pairfam, male and female anchors and their partner, age group 20–40 years. Waves 1–7. Control variables: relationship duration, woman’s age, woman’s age squared, man’s age, man’s age squared, children, region, partnership satisfaction

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Notes

  1. Although travelling time can be used in productive ways, less than 25% of respondents under age 45 report that “travel time is very worthwhile” (Urry 2006).

  2. This paper uses data from the German Family Panel pairfam, coordinated by Josef Brüderl, Karsten Hank, Johannes Huinink, Bernhard Nauck, Franz Neyer, and Sabine Walper. Pairfam is funded as a long-term project by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft—DFG).

  3. Multi-actor designs might produce bias because secondary respondents’ participation can be selective. For partners, it has been hypothesized that their participation might be positively related to partnership quality. A study on pairfam indicated, however, that partner participation is independent from partnership quality (Schröder et al. 2013).

  4. The full question text is: "On average, how long does it take you to get from your place of residence to your partner in hours and minutes? (On a normal day, means of transportation usually used.)."

  5. In the relationship-year dataset, the travel-time variable has 4.1% missings. The referring observations were excluded from the analysis.

  6. Figure 5 in “Appendix” illustrates in more detail how the travel time in hours is distributed in the group of long-distance relationships. The findings indicate that only a small share of couples was traveling more than 10 hours to see each other.

  7. The information on partners’ children does not identify whether the children live in the same household. Because most children live with their mother, we use information on female partners’ biological children.

  8. In order to account for the investment into a relationship made in the past, it would have been interesting to account for the duration of a long-distance relationship. However, in the pairfam data, for all partnerships that were not observed from the beginning on, we have information only on the overall duration of a relationship, irrespective of the time spent in long or short distance. An interaction effect between partnership duration and distance was largely insignificant (results not shown here).

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Acknowledgements

The research for this paper is part of the project “Partner relationships, residential relocations and housing in the life course” (PartnerLife). Principal investigators: Clara H. Mulder (University of Groningen), Michael Wagner (University of Cologne) and Hill Kulu (University of St. Andrews). PartnerLife is supported by a grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO, Grant No. 464-13-148), the Deutsche ForschungsGemeinschaft (DFG, Grant No. WA1502/6-1) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, Grant No. ES/L01663X/1) in the Open Research Area Plus scheme. I thank Michael Wagner, Clara Mulder, Lisa Schmid and Julia Mikolai for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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  1. Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology, University of Cologne, Greinstr. 2, 50939, Cologne, Germany

    Sandra Krapf

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Appendix

Appendix

Tables 3, 4 and Fig. 5

Fig. 5
figure 5

Source pairfam, relationship years, male and female anchors and their partner, age group 20–40 years. Waves 1–7

Distribution of travel time in hours for long-distance LAT couples (i.e., those who travel 1 h or more). Note LAT—living apart together relationships.

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Krapf, S. Moving in or Breaking Up? The Role of Distance in the Development of Romantic Relationships. Eur J Population 34, 313–336 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-017-9428-2

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