Positive romantic relationships ease existential dread by boosting meaning in life

A recent study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships suggests that focusing on the positive aspects of a romantic partnership can reduce a person’s underlying anxiety about death. The researchers found that this effect occurs because healthy romantic bonds tend to enhance an individual’s sense of meaning in life. Interestingly, this protective psychological mechanism was observed specifically in female participants, providing new evidence on how men and women might process relationship intimacy and existential fears differently.

To understand the psychological connection between love and death, it helps to look at a concept known as terror management theory. This framework proposes that humans possess a unique awareness of their own mortality, which creates a background hum of existential anxiety. To keep this fear from becoming overwhelming, people rely on psychological buffers to protect themselves from distress. These buffers typically include adopting cultural belief systems, building self-esteem, and forming close personal relationships.

While psychologists know that strong relationships help people manage their fears about mortality, the exact ways these bonds provide comfort remain somewhat of a puzzle. The authors of the current study proposed that love might shield people from existential dread by boosting their overall sense of meaning in life. Meaning in life refers to the feeling that one’s existence has purpose, significance, and a sense of coherence.

Zhechen Wang, an associate research fellow in the Department of Psychology at the School of Social Development and Public Policy at Fudan University in Shanghai, noted multiple inspirations for the project.

“There were several motivations behind this research,” Wang said. “First, on a personal level, our first author, Shiyun Shen, had recently gotten married at the time, and her experience of how a romantic relationship can affect people’s psychological states made us interested in examining this effect more systematically.”

Pop culture also played a role in sparking the research questions.

“Moreover, we were struck by how often in films and literature romantic relationships had been portrayed as a source of comfort in the face of death,” Wang said. “For instance, in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1956), the male protagonist embraced his deceased lover tightly when he himself died. Also, in Titanic (1997), out of love, the male protagonist chose to give the chance of survival to his lover and accepted his own death calmly. These examples encouraged us to think more seriously about whether and how romantic relationships might help people cope with death anxieties.”

In addition to these cultural observations, the researchers noticed missing elements in existing psychological literature. A related concept is death-thought accessibility, which measures how easily ideas about death come to the forefront of a person’s mind. When someone’s psychological buffers are weak, their death-thought accessibility tends to increase, even if they are not actively worrying about dying.

“Second, on an academic level, we also saw a few theoretical gaps in the literature,” Wang explained. “Specifically, previous research based on terror management theory has reported that mortality salience (MS, i.e., reminders of one’s own mortality) can increase people’s desire to establish and maintain romantic relationships. However, the reverse hypothesis, namely, whether romantic relationships can directly reduce death anxiety, has rarely been examined.”

Wang added that the field needed more focus on healthy relationship dynamics.

“Moreover, prior work has predominantly focused on the impact of negative romantic relationships (or the loss of romantic relationships) on death-thought accessibility (DTA, i.e., how easily death-related thoughts come into mind),” Wang said. “However, the opposite side, namely, the impact of positive romantic relationships on DTA, has received far less attention.”

“In a related vein, the positive psychology movement has also criticized psychology’s disproportionate focus on negative aspects and called for greater attention to the positive aspects of human life,” Wang noted. “Therefore, in our research, we aimed to examine the effect of positive romantic relationships on DTA and further explored meaning in life as a potential underlying mechanism.”

To test these ideas, the scientists conducted three separate experiments with adults in China who were currently in a romantic relationship or married. In the first study, the sample included 138 participants. The scientists randomly assigned these individuals to either a positive relationship group or a control group.

Participants in the relationship group were asked to close their eyes and visualize their partner, paying attention to their appearance and voice. They then wrote down three positive characteristics of their relationship and described an ideal, fulfilling future life together. Those in the control group completed a similar exercise, but they focused on their favorite television shows instead of a romantic partner.

After the visualization exercise, the authors measured the participants’ death-thought accessibility. They showed the participants an ambiguous picture that could look like a woman looking in a vanity mirror or a human skull. Participants then listed ten words that came to mind while looking at the image. Independent coders reviewed the lists and counted how many death-related words, such as “skeleton” or “ghost,” each person wrote down.

The findings from the first study showed that the positive relationship exercise successfully reduced death-thought accessibility. Participants who imagined a happy future with their partner produced fewer death-related words than those who thought about television shows.

In the second study, the researchers recruited 130 participants to see if the same relationship exercise would influence their sense of meaning in life. The scientists used a questionnaire that measures two different aspects of meaning, which are the presence of meaning and the search for meaning. The presence of meaning relates to whether someone currently feels their life has purpose. The search for meaning reflects how actively they are looking for that purpose.

The results from the second experiment indicated that participants in the romantic relationship group reported a higher presence of meaning in life compared to the control group. The visualization exercise did not change their scores for the search for meaning. This suggests that reflecting on a positive romantic bond helps people feel that they already have a meaningful life, rather than making them want to seek out new sources of meaning.

For the third study, the scientists wanted to bring these concepts together and test for gender differences. They recruited a larger, gender-balanced sample of 473 participants. The procedure mirrored the previous experiments, but it included measures for both meaning in life and death-thought accessibility. To measure death thoughts more thoroughly, participants viewed two ambiguous pictures and listed a total of twenty words.

The third experiment successfully replicated the earlier results. Thinking about a positive romantic relationship increased the participants’ presence of meaning in life and decreased the number of death-related words they generated. The researchers then used statistical models to see if the increase in meaning in life was the specific factor that caused the drop in death thoughts.

This statistical analysis showed a notable divide between male and female participants. For women, the enhanced sense of meaning in life entirely explained the reduction in death-thought accessibility. For men, reflecting on the relationship did not show the same protective chain reaction through meaning in life.

“The gender difference surprised us most,” Wang told PsyPost. “Specifically, the ‘positive romantic relationships – enhanced meaning in life – reduced DTA’ model was significant among female, but not among male participants.”

To understand this divide, the researchers looked at various frameworks.

“To interpret this finding, we drew on several theoretical perspectives,” Wang explained. “First, according to the social role theory, women may be more likely than men to develop an interdependent self-construal and therefore may place greater emphasis on establishing and maintaining romantic relationships.”

Biological and evolutionary frameworks also offer potential explanations.

“Second, from an evolutionary psychology perspective, women’s historically greater parental investment and caregiving responsibilities may have made them more sensitive to social bonds and relational stability,” Wang said. “Third, within the framework of terror management theory, men and women may rely on somewhat different buffers against death anxiety: men may rely more on worldview defense and self-esteem striving, whereas women may rely more on romantic relationships.”

When looking at the overall statistics across the experiments, the researchers measured the strength of these outcomes using a statistical tool known as Cohen’s d. This tool helps scientists determine if a finding is small, medium, or large in scale.

“In terms of effect size, across three experimental studies, our research revealed that the effects were generally in the small-to-medium range,” Wang said. “Specifically, the effect size of positive romantic relationship manipulation on reducing DTA was d = 0.44 in Study 1 and d = 0.19 in Study 3. Its effect size on increasing the presence of meaning in life was d = 0.41 in Study 2 and d = 0.26 in Study 3.”

While these numbers are not massive, they still hold real-world relevance.

“These effects should not be interpreted as large or dramatic,” Wang cautioned. “Rather, they suggest that even a brief reflection on the positive aspects of one’s romantic relationship can bring about measurable changes in meaning in life and DTA. Practically, this is meaningful because romantic relationships are a common part of everyday life, and small psychological benefits may accumulate over time.”

In terms of broader implications, the scientists hope their findings resonate with modern society, especially in their home country.

“In short, although it may sound somewhat cliché, the main takeaway from our findings is that romantic relationships can be existentially meaningful and beneficial,” Wang said. “We think this message may be particularly relevant in the Chinese context. In recent years, many Chinese people seem to become less willing to date, marry, let alone have children.”

The researchers acknowledge the economic and social barriers driving this shift.

“Of course, social structural factors such as employment pressure, housing costs, and education competition may be major concerns behind this trend,” Wang noted. “However, our findings suggest that romantic relationships may also provide certain psychological benefits, such as enhancing one’s sense of meaning in life. In other words, although dating and marriage may bring new forms of stress, they may also bring important psychological resources.”

While these experiments offer helpful insights, readers should be careful not to jump to extreme conclusions. One potential misinterpretation is the idea that just being in a relationship automatically reduces a person’s fear of death, or that single people are inherently unprotected. Another misinterpretation involves the difference between male and female responses.

“Some people may interpret our findings as suggesting that positive romantic relationships are not important for men,” Wang explained. “This interpretation would be oversimplified and inappropriate. We argue that positive romantic relationships are also of great importance to men, but their effects may take different forms and work through different mechanisms.”

Different outcomes for men might show up in other areas of health and well-being.

“For example, previous research has shown that men may benefit from marriage in terms of physical health and mortality outcomes,” Wang said. “Therefore, our findings do not mean that positive romantic relationships do not matter for men. Rather, they suggest that the specific mechanism examined in our study may be more salient among women than among men.”

Moving forward, the scientists hope to explore other potential mechanisms that might explain how relationships protect against anxiety.

“For this line of research, we see several important next steps,” Wang said. “First, future research should further examine the gender difference observed in our research and investigate the mechanisms that may explain this difference. Second, it would be beneficial to consider other potentially important factors, such as marital status, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and other relational or demographic variables.”

The scientists also plan to look beyond meaning in life to see what else buffers mortality fears.

“Third, future research could examine other potential mechanisms through which positive romantic relationships affect death anxiety, such as attachment-based felt security, relationship-contingent self-esteem, and relational worldview defense,” Wang noted. “By doing so, we hope to develop a more comprehensive understanding of when, how, and for whom positive romantic relationships help people cope with existential concerns.”

The authors even hid a small pop culture reference in the publication itself.

“The title, Love, Death, and Reason for Living, is a small tribute to the science fiction anthology series, Love, Death, and Robots,” Wang shared.

The study, “Love, Death, and Reason for Living: Positive Romantic Relationships Reduce Death Anxiety Through Meaning in Life Among Females,” was authored by Shiyun Shen, Shijin Sun, Wei Wei, and Zhechen Wang.