AI Analysed Over 11,000 Couples' Relationships. This Is What It Found

A first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence (AI) study of romantic relationships based on data from thousands of couples has identified the top predictors that make partners feel positively about their relationship – and the findings show romantic happiness is about a lot more than simply who you're with. Researchers conducted a machine-learning analysis of data collected from over 11,000 couples, and found that relationship-specific characteristics (personal evaluations of the relationship itself) were significantly more powerful predictors of relationship quality overall than variables based on individual characteristics. In other words, the type of relationship you build with a partner may be more important to your happiness than either of your individual characteristics - in the study, they looked at traits like how satisfied a person was with life, how anxious they were, or whether their parents' marriage worked out. "Relationships-specific variables were about two to three times as predictive as individual differences, which I think would fit many people's intuitions," says lead researcher and psychologist Samantha Joel from Western University in Canada. "But the surprising part is that once you have all the relationship-specific data in hand, the individual differences fade into the background."