Does relationship status account for life satisfaction beyond personality? Yes, but personality accounts for more variance. Rel status is more of a predictor when it comes to rel status related variables like sexual satisfaction and relationship status satisfaction.

Singles high in depression are pretty unhappy about being single, but partnered people high in depression are okay with their relationship status. Similar to fear of being single research where they'd rather be in a bad relationship than no relationship.

Single people are happier about being single if they are higher in respectfulness. If we could have we would have used 🤷‍♂️ in the paper to provide our explanation for this finding we would have.

But there were some differences for satisfaction with relationship status. Partnered people are particularly happier about being partnered if they are higher in compassion, maybe because compassionate people like having a partner to take care of.

Personality generally predicted well-being similarly for singles and partnered people. Single or not, if you want to be happier working on extraversion and neuroticism is a good idea from a personality perspective.

There were smaller effects where singles were lower on the productiveness facet (conscientiousness) and higher on the depression facet (neuroticism).

This is helpful in understanding well being across rel status and maybe why many people are single (both wanting solitude and having less social opportunity). Also a reminder that romantic rel researchers aren't studying everyone but a type of person, ↑ extraverted ppl.

The MacLab has a new paper first authored by Elaine Hoan on personality and relationship status. Data were 2 studies, direct replication. The top line finding is singles are less extraverted (sociability, assertiveness, and energy level) than partnered people. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Again, qualitative work that really listens well to participants is something I appreciate. Wilkinson et al. do that in this paper. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirec...

Hostetler's paper was transformative for me in thinking about the role of secondary coping as part of singlehood. www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1...