Personality Disorders and Romantic Relationships: Introduction to the Special Section

Abstract

For decades, researchers have understood the importance of each partner's personality for the success of a romantic relationship. A relationship is a dyadic process, certainly, but couples are comprised of two people who bring to the table decades' worth of thinking, feeling, and behaving that are informed by temperament and life experiences that happened days, weeks, and years before they met the current partner. Indeed, in Kelly and Conley's (1987) seminal work on personality and relationship satisfaction, individuals who were higher in neuroticism shortly after marriage were less satisfied and happy in their relationship over the course of the next 50 years. There is, in comparison, a relative dearth of work examining more maladaptive aspects of personality and how they can impact relationship success. This is relatively surprising, given that the core dysfunction at the heart of all personality disorders (PDs) is disrupted interpersonal relationships. In this special section, our goal was to bring the study of PDs and romantic relationships into the modern era by moving beyond limitations of previous research. The articles in this issue use multiple assessment methods, intensive longitudinal study designs, traitbased conceptualizations of personality pathology, nontraditional samples, and outcomes related to both partners. As such, this package of articles stands as both a state of the science and preview of the future in regards to the impact of PDs on romantic relationships.