Lover and learner: Exploring relational schema change following relationship dissolution

ABSTRACT

Romantic relationships are known to be very influential, but less is known about how these relationships, and particularly the breakup of these relationships, may affect individuals’ relational schemas, or their expectations for relationships. Undergraduate students reported on how their views of themselves, romantic partners, and relationships changed after breaking up with a past partner. Results suggest that relational schemas change following relationship dissolution and that there are both positive and negative aspects to this change. There was also some evidence that aspects of the past relationship predicted change and the valence of change, and that change and the valence of change were related to aspects of current relationship quality. These results are an important first step in understanding how past romantic relationships influence people’s expectations about relationships and, by extension, their health and wellbeing.

KEYWORDS:

• Change in relationship knowledge
• relationship
• relationship dissolution
• relational schemas
• self-schema
• cognition

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Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/t86zx/

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/t86zx/

Notes

1. All data and materials necessary to reproduce the study are available at https://osf.io/t86zx/.

2. We also did analyses in which we substituted in gender, age and sexual orientation as covariates, as well as restricted the analyses to women only. These analyses revealed few and minor changes in the results. Gender served as a positive predictor for partner schema change occurrence, and a weak and positive predictor of relationship schema change, such that women reported a greater likelihood of schema change. However, gender was not a predictor in analyses concerning schema change valence, such that there was no difference in the valence of schema change for men and women. Gender also did not predict current relationship quality, both when remaining predictors were schema change occurrence or schema change valence.