A recent study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships provides evidence that having a happy romantic relationship and feeling financially secure both independently contribute to a person’s overall health and well-being. The authors found that a satisfying relationship protects mental and physical health regardless of a person’s objective income or education level. These findings suggest that public health efforts might benefit from treating social connection and economic stability as two separate but equally important pillars of a healthy life.
Human health depends heavily on the environment and social conditions in which a person lives. Two major factors known to influence how long and how well people live are their romantic relationships and their socioeconomic status. Socioeconomic status refers to a combination of a person’s income, education level, and general social standing in their community. High-quality romantic relationships generally predict better physical functioning, lower depression rates, and higher overall life satisfaction.
Similarly, higher socioeconomic status, or SES, tends to be linked with a lower risk of physical illness and better mental health. People with more financial and educational resources typically experience less chronic stress and have better access to quality healthcare. Despite both of these domains playing large roles in human well-being, academic studies tend to focus on them separately. Researchers often study marriage quality without looking deeply into a couple’s specific financial situation.
In other cases, public health experts examine poverty and physical health without considering a person’s home life. Because of this separated approach, it has remained somewhat unknown whether the health benefits of a good relationship persist after taking income and education into account. It is possible that relationship benefits are partly a side effect of financial stability, or vice versa. The researchers designed this study to directly compare the relative strengths of relationship quality and socioeconomic status in predicting overall well-being.
“The relationship science literature has built a strong case that relationship quality matters for health, but that work often does not account for socioeconomic status, even though SES is one of the most well-documented predictors of health,” said study author Hannah Williamson, an associate professor of human development and family sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. “If we want to know how much relationships really matter, we need to test that question rigorously, alongside SES rather than instead of it.”
The research team also wanted to see if these effects apply across different types of societies. To test this, the authors compared data from the United States and Spain. “We also wanted to test it in more than one context, since most of this research is conducted in the U.S. alone,” Williamson said. “Working with colleagues in Spain let us see whether the pattern holds somewhere with a different social safety net and healthcare system.”
These two high-income countries share similar levels of income inequality but have completely different healthcare systems. In the United States, healthcare access is often tied directly to full-time employment and educational attainment. In Spain, citizens have access to a universal healthcare system that provides low and standardized medical costs across the entire population. This structural difference allowed the researchers to test whether the health benefits of income and education change depending on a country’s social safety net.
To explore these dynamics, the researchers recruited large, nationally representative survey samples from both countries using online research panels. The United States sample included 1,004 adult participants sourced through a platform called Dynata. They had an average age of 45 and a median household income of $6,000 per month. The Spanish sample included 969 adult participants sourced through a platform called NetQuest, with an average age of 53 and a median household income of 2,200 euros per month.
The authors measured relationship quality using two specific concepts. First, they asked participants to rate their overall relationship satisfaction using a simple seven-point scale. Second, they measured a concept called perceived partner responsiveness. This psychological term refers to the extent to which a person feels understood, validated, and genuinely cared for by their romantic partner.
The study also assessed socioeconomic status in three different ways. Participants reported their monthly household income and their highest level of formal education. They also completed a measure of subjective social status. For this subjective measure, participants looked at a picture of a ten-rung ladder representing their country’s social hierarchy and selected the rung they felt best represented their own standing.
To measure outcomes, the researchers asked participants to report on three areas of their lives. These included overall life satisfaction, symptoms of mental health issues like anxiety and depression, and a self-rating of their general physical health. For example, mental health symptoms were assessed using a four-item questionnaire measuring how often participants felt down or worried. The authors then used statistical models to see how the relationship variables and the socioeconomic variables predicted these three health outcomes.
The data showed that high relationship satisfaction and perceived partner responsiveness consistently predicted higher life satisfaction in both countries. People with happy relationships also reported better physical health and fewer mental health symptoms. Importantly, these positive health effects remained robust even after the researchers factored in participants’ income, education, and subjective social status. This provides evidence that feeling loved and understood by a partner acts as an independent source of well-being.
Williamson noted that a good relationship and money provide distinct benefits. “The main takeaway is that relationship quality and socioeconomic status are not substitutes for one another,” she told PsyPost. “Each affects health independently. Having a responsive, caring partner was linked to better mental health regardless of income or education.”
Subjective social status also emerged as a consistent predictor of health across both nations. Participants who felt they were higher up on the social ladder tended to report better physical and mental health, regardless of their actual income. This effect appeared strongly in both the United States and Spain. The subjective feeling of social standing seems to carry its own psychological weight above and beyond the actual numbers in a bank account.
“On the socioeconomic side, it was people’s own sense of their social standing, not their actual income or education, that consistently predicted both mental and physical health,” Williamson said. “So a strong relationship does not fully offset the health effects of financial hardship, and financial security alone does not guarantee good relational or physical health. Both deserve attention.”
When looking at objective socioeconomic measures, the authors found differing patterns between the two countries. In the United States, a person’s education level was a strong predictor of their life satisfaction, mental health, and physical health. Higher education generally translated to fewer negative health symptoms. Income also predicted some positive health outcomes for the American sample, though its effects were weaker and less consistent than those of education.
In Spain, the patterns looked completely different regarding objective wealth and schooling. Education level did not significantly predict life satisfaction or physical health among the Spanish participants. The authors suggest this divergence likely reflects the structural differences between the two societies. Because Spain offers universal healthcare, a person’s physical health may not depend nearly as much on their education level or their ability to secure a job with medical benefits.
“Subjective SES, how people rate their own social standing, predicted health more consistently than objective income or education did, in both countries,” Williamson said. “We also saw that education’s association with health was weaker in Spain than in the U.S., which fits with the idea that universal healthcare access may reduce education’s role in shaping health outcomes through access to better employer-provided health insurance.”
As with all research, there are a few limitations to consider. The study relied entirely on observational data taken at a single point in time. Because the researchers did not track participants over many years, they cannot say for certain whether a good relationship causes better health or if being healthy simply makes it easier to maintain a good relationship. Health, wealth, and relationship satisfaction likely influence each other in a continuous cycle.
“The data are cross-sectional, so we can’t speak to causal direction,” Williamson pointed out. “And because this was a two-country comparison, we can describe a difference between the U.S. and Spain but can’t isolate exactly which institutional or cultural factor is responsible.”
Additionally, the researchers measured many of the core concepts using single-item questions. While these types of brief questions help keep surveys short and prevent participants from quitting early, they provide less detail than longer, multi-item questionnaires. The data was also entirely self-reported. Self-reported data can sometimes be influenced by a person’s mood on the day they take the survey or by cultural differences in how people express their feelings.
Future research could build on these findings by tracking couples over long periods of time. This approach would help scientists see how changes in income directly affect relationship quality and physical health.
“I’d like to extend this comparison to more countries to see how far the pattern generalizes, and to move toward longitudinal designs that can speak more directly to causality,” Williamson said. “I’m also interested in pinning down the specific mechanisms, such as healthcare access, that might explain why these associations vary across countries.”
Investigating how social policies interact with personal relationships might help public health officials design better ways to support vulnerable communities. Programs that target both economic stability and relationship skills might offer the best path forward for population health.
The study, “Romantic Relationships and Socioeconomic Status as Independent Predictors of Health and Wellbeing: Evidence From the United States and Spain,” was authored by Inmaculada Valor-Segura, María Alonso-Ferres, and Hannah C. Williamson.
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