The chapter focuses on partnership dissolution in the course of international migration. Rather than studying mobility outcomes following the dissolution of a partnership, we ask under which conditions international migration increases the risk of separation among couples. Our analysis includes individuals in marital and non-marital relationships who leave Germany and move to another country or re-migrate back to Germany. Based on the first two waves of the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study (GERPS), our logistic regression estimations show that non-egalitarian, non-synchronised migration patterns are important predictors of union dissolution for male and female emigrants and remigrants. Until now, the role of family migration on the subsequent stability of a union has been largely underexplored, and this chapter contributes to closing this research gap.

Migration implies both benefits and costs. The latter include a possible breakdown of social networks, and thus a loss of social capital. Although there is some literature on the evolution of family networks after migration, not as much is known about friendship. This article assesses the quality of friendships between German emigrants and their friends who stayed in Germany. In particular, it asks three research questions: (a) How does the quality of relationships with friends in Germany differ from the quality of other relationships after migration? (b) How is friendship quality after migration related to socio-demographic or socio-economic factors? And (c) is there a link between friendship quality and the subjective well-being of emigrants? Results indicate that friendship quality measured as frequency of contact with friends falls in the middle range of contact frequency, as emigrants typically have more contact with partners and children, but less contact with some other relatives, compared to close friends. Furthermore, several determinants of contact frequency (e.g. gender, age, length of stay and household constellation) can be identified and correlations with various aspects of subjective well-being were found.

Up to now, we know only a little about the causal effect of international migration on partnership stability, with the few existing analyses being restricted to internal migration or international migration from less developed countries to the Global North. Using longitudinal data on German citizens [the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study plus the German Family Panel (pairfam)], this study contributes to existing literature primarily in two ways: first, by comparing international migrants to nonmigrants at origin and applying the appropriate methods (Entropy Balancing and Discrete Time Proportional Hazards Models), the causal effect of international migration was studied. Second, assessing (non-)mobile German citizens allows looking at these effects in the context of a highly industrialized welfare state. Additional to the general effect of international migration, differences between emigrants and remigrants are studiedwhich has not been done before, except for the Latin American context. To advance our understanding of the underlying mechanisms, the role of further migration characteristics is investigated. Findings show that international migration increases the risk of union dissolution compared to no migration and that the risk of union dissolution is higher for remigrants compared to emigrants. The underlying migration reasons play an additional role in explaining the risk of union dissolution.

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