Relationships can be difficult, but they can also be rewarding. Unfortunately, most relationships are doomed to failure at some point.

Sometimes it is best to just let it die since it wasn’t that good to begin with. If you are married or you value your relationship greatly, however, it is worth fighting for.

As with anything you fight for, you need to have a strategy that will let you win and that is where a new study that is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology can help.

The study looked at more than 11,000 individuals and analyzed various aspects of their relationship with a special focus on what happened during the time leading up to a breakup or divorce.

In a statement, Junior Professor of Personality Psychology and Diagnostics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Jania Buhler said:

“In order to better understand dissolving relationships, we examined them from the point of view of time-to-separation.”

While there are many factors involved, they found that an individual’s relationship satisfaction levels started out high near the beginning of the relationship and then started to drop slowly over about the next eight years. From there, one of the individuals would often reach what they dubbed a ‘transition point’ where their satisfaction rapidly decreased.

Buhler said of this point:

“From this transition point onwards, there is a rapid deterioration in relationship satisfaction. Couples in question then move towards separation.”

Once this transition point is reached, virtually all relationships will end. This is true whether both parties report having reached that transition point or just one, and also whether they engage in efforts to fix the relationship such as marriage counseling or not.

Buhler explained:

“Once this terminal phase is reached, the relationship is doomed to come to an end.”

Relationships that are successfully for long periods of time (especially beyond the 8 year mark) report never having reached a transition point. In some cases this is likely because the couple was especially compatible in some way. In others, it is because they put in the effort to ‘save’ the relationship before it was doomed.

So, if you value your relationship and want it to last, make sure you work hard to maintain it. This may mean taking marriage classes, committing to open communication, or even getting involved in couples therapy while you are still very happy.

Whatever you do, the goal is to avoid reaching the transition point for either party because once you are there, your relationship is doomed to failure in almost all cases.

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