Predicting romantic relationship satisfaction from life history strategy

Attachment style and communication style have been shown in previous research to predict relationship satisfaction. We hypothesized that the ultimate cause underlying the relationship among attachment style, communication style, and relationship satisfaction is Life History Strategy (LHS). Furthermore, we hypothesized that LHS would not only predict relationship satisfaction indirectly through a couple’s attachment style and communication style, but would also predict relationship satisfaction directly. Two structural equation models were constructed to model and test each of these hypotheses. The first showed that the indirect causal pathways from LHS to attachment style, attachment style to communication style, and communication style to relationship satisfaction predicted 16% of the variance in relationship satisfaction. The second added a causal pathway directly from LHS to relationship satisfaction which reduced the estimate for the influence of communication style on relationship satisfaction and increased the total variance predicted in relationship satisfaction to 60%. These results challenge the notion that it is primarily the communication between two romantic partners which influences their relationship outcome by proposing that their LHS may be influential: (1) indirectly through their attachment style and communication style; and (2) directly upon relationship satisfaction. Published by Elsevier Ltd. The purpose of this paper is to explore the connections among several predictors of romantic relationship satisfaction that have been empirically demonstrated and to examine these connections within an evolutionary context. The relationship of Life History Strategy (LHS) with attachment style, attachment style with communication patterns, and communication patterns with relationship satisfaction are connections that have been explored separately by many researchers. Our goal is to explore the hypothesized causal structure among these connections and present a new hypothesis to help explain these relationships. We hypothesized that LHS would be highly predictive of relationship satisfaction, promoting the maintenance of long-term relationships and fostering high degrees of parental investment in offspring. Whereas previous theorists proposed that attachment style and communication patterns contributed to relationship satisfaction, we hypothesized that these only partially mediate the effects of LHS. Because whether they either partially or fully mediated the predicted relationship between LHS and relationship satisfaction was unclear, both alternative hypotheses were tested in this study and compared for goodness of fit to the data. 2. Life history strategy Life History Theory describes the systematic patterns of behavior through which an organism allocates limited bioenergetic and material resources between individual survival (somatic effort) and the production of new organisms to serve as vehicles for their genes (reproductive effort). Reproductive effort is further allocated into energy directed at obtaining and retaining sexual partners (mating effort) and assisting in the survival of either the organism’s own offspring or the offspring of genetic relatives (parental/nepotistic effort). Life History (r-K) Theory explains species, and members within the species, vary in their allocation of reproductive effort due to varying environmental selective pressures by ranging from extremely r-selected (maximum mating effort, minimum parental effort) to extreme K-selected (minimum mating effort, maximum parental/nepotistic effort; Mealey, 2000). Because r-selected species live in a constantly changing and unpredictable environment, they produce a vast number of offspring that are genetically diverse to fit the varying environmental conditions. They provide very limited parental care and have a very high mortality rate; examples are rabbits and oysters. Because K-selected species live in a more stable and predictable environment, they have fewer offspring that are more adapted to their particular environment. They provide extensive parental care and have a high survival rate; examples are elephants and humans (Figueredo et al., 2006). 0191-8869/$ see front matter Published by Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2008.12.019 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 928 542 9166; fax: +1 520 621 9306. E-mail address: [email protected] (S. Olderbak). Personality and Individual Differences 46 (2009) 604–610