Confiding About Problems in Marriage and Long‐Term Committed Relationships: A National Study

This study examined confiding patterns in a national sample of 1000 U.S. adults aged 25–70 to inform the development of an educational program for confidants, called Marital First Responders. Results showed that 73% of U.S. adults have been a confidant to someone with a problem in a marriage or long‐term committed relationship. The most common confiding relationship was between friends, followed by siblings. Confidants reported a wide range of problems brought to them, ranging from everyday complaints to serious issues such as infidelity and divorce. Confiders identified the most and least helpful responses. Findings suggest that naturally occurring confiding relationships have considerable potential to be the first level of help for troubled couple relationships.     

Impacts of Marriage Legalization on the Experiences of Sexual Minority Women in Work and Community Contexts

The extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples in the United States provides an opportunity to examine how legalization of same-sex marriage has impacted the experiences of sexual minority women (SMW) in interactions within their extended social networks and local communities. Interviews were conducted with 20 SMW ranging in age from 23 to 75, with varying relationship statuses, and in different regions of the United States. Inductive thematic analysis of responses revealed both positive and negative/neutral impacts in 3 broad thematic areas: workplace dynamics and interpersonal interactions in the workplace, social interactions in extended social networks and local communities, and community climate and queer communities. Findings of the study underscore the importance of evaluating the impact of same-sex marriage legalization in the context of local social and political climates.     

Repronormativity and the Reproduction of the Nation-State: The State and Sexuality Collide

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to explain the consistent margins between popular support for same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption/parenting. I posit that the paradigm of repronormativity explains these differences, in permitting only “legitimate,” state-sanctioned, heteronormative reproduction. Through three case studies—Poland's strict abortion policies, France's law against lesbians utilizing artificial reproduction technologies, and Sweden's history of sterilizing trans individuals—I will demonstrate how not only does repronormativity select and enforce an inside/outside, in-group(s)/out-group(s) binary and legitimize only certain reproduction, it also tethers female sexuality to reproduction and creates an inevitability of reproduction.     

Sexuality in Marriage,Dating, and Other Relationships: A Decade Review

In this article, we review the major research advances made during the 1990s in the study of sexuality in marriage and other close relationships. More specifically, we provide a critical review of the empirical findings from the last decade on such sexual phenomena as sexual behavior, sexual satisfaction, and sexual attitudes within the context of marriage, dating, and other committed relationships. After highlighting the major theoretical and methodological advances of the 1990s, we focus on the research literatures of: (1) frequency and correlates of sexual activity in marriage; (2) sexual satisfaction, including its association with general relationship satisfaction; (3) sexuality in gay and lesbian committed relationships; (4) trends in sexual behavior and attitudes in dating relationships; and (5) the role of sexuality in dating relationships. We also incorporate brief reviews of the past decade's research on sexual assault and coercion in marriage and dating and on extramarital sex. We end our decade review with recommendations for the study of sexuality into the next decade.     

Occupational Sex Composition and Marriage: The Romantic Cost of Gender-Atypical Jobs

The author considers the mechanisms by which occupational sex composition (the proportion of women and men in an occupation) might be associated with romantic transitions in the United States. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 to 2014, the author estimates the odds of marriage during a period of 35 years as a function of occupational and personal characteristics. Men's odds of marriage are decreased by working in predominately female occupations (75%–100% female) when compared with working in predominately male occupations (0%–25% female) or integrated (26%–74% female) occupations. Also, working in a predominately female occupation increases the odds that men have never married by ages 30 and 40. Women's odds of marriage are unrelated to occupational sex composition. Although the author focuses on marriage, the results are robust to including cohabitation as a competing risk. The author uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health 1994 to 2008 to replicate these findings in a more recent cohort with additional control variables. The romantic penalty for men's occupational gender atypicality demonstrates the continued devaluation of female activities and attributes and the resulting rigidity of expectations for men's gendered behavior, which may reinforce occupational segregation.     

Telling Our Stories: Narrative and Framing in the Movement for Same-Sex Marriage

Although framing and narrative are both well-documented discursive features of social movements, the difference between them is often overstated; where frames are treated as logical, authoritative, and abstract, the usefulness of narratives is frequently documented in relation to pre-mobilization phases of movement development such as identity and community building. Drawing on an analysis of Connecticut's Judiciary Committee hearings on same-sex marriage, I challenge this distinction and elucidate the relationship between storytelling and framing, showing how narrative is used to make packages of frames cohesive and compelling. In demonstrating how proponents of the legislation deployed narratives and frames simultaneously, this research contributes to scholarship on the function and configuration of discursive strategies for social movements.     

Alcohol Problems,Marriage, and Treatment: Developing a Theoretical Timeline

SUMMARY

While research findings over the past twenty years have consistently supported the efficacy of couples work with people experiencing alcohol related problems, in the field of practice in Ireland there is little evidence of the development of interventions based on a couples/marital perspective. This paper examines the place of marital work in the alcohol field through a review of the literature from 1950s to the present in order to discover the limitations in theory and research that might explain the reluctance of practitioners to adopt this method of intervention.     

Intergenerational Support and Marital Satisfaction: Implications of Beliefs About Helping Aging Parents

Everyday support given to aging parents is a salient aspect of married life that may have implications for marital quality. Among 132 middle‐aged couples drawn from Wave 1 of the Family Exchanges Study, the authors examined the moderating effects of each spouse's normative and motivational beliefs about helping parents on associations between the frequency of everyday support that wives and husbands gave to their own parents and marital satisfaction. Husbands' more frequent provision of support was linked to wives' greater marital satisfaction when reports of personal rewards linked to helping parents were high for wives or low for husbands. Conversely, wives' more frequent provision of support was linked to husbands' lower marital satisfaction when reports of filial obligation were low for husbands or high for wives. Findings highlight the interdependence within couples and indicate that both spouses' perceptions are important in understanding linkages between intergenerational support and marital satisfaction.     

The Power and Limits of Marriage: Married Gay Men's Family Relationships

Same‐sex marriage has received much scholarly attention in the United States in the past decade. Yet we know little about how same‐sex couples experience marriage. In this article, I present findings from in‐depth interviews with 32 legally married gay men in Iowa. I focus on their experiences with families of origin and investigate the legitimating potential of same‐sex marriage. The men had high expectations about the power of marriage to help them gain recognition and support, but their experiences with family members were more varied and complex than they expected. Although marriage often led to positive family outcomes, it also commonly had negative consequences, including new and renewed experiences of family rejection. This study complicates ideas about the legitimating potential of marriage for same‐sex couples by illuminating both its power and limits in helping gay men gain status and support from their families of origin.     

Body Dissatisfaction: Commitment,Support, and Trust in Romantic Relationships

Research investigating dimensions of relationship quality has suggested that aspects of relationship quality (e.g., commitment, support, trust) are related to lower levels of body dissatisfaction in women. However no studies have examined the effect of all three measures of relationship quality on body dissatisfaction simultaneously. Trust and support correlated with body dissatisfaction in men and women. Additionally, the results showed that lack of support is a predictor of body dissatisfaction in men and lack of trust is a predictor in women; relationship commitment did not appear to relate to body dissatisfaction.     

It Won't Change a Thing: The Meanings of Marriage in the Netherlands

The vast body of literature that highlights the increasing fragility of marriage fails to explore the effect of this fragility on the meanings people attach to marriage. During the last twenty-five to thirty years the instrumental and normative reasons for marriage—legal protection, societal support and enforcement, the social rejection of alternatives to marriage—have largely disappeared in the Netherlands. This study focuses on how young adults, raised after the most dramatic changes in marital practices took place, talk about the meanings of marriage in the context of building intimate relationships. In-depth interviews with fifteen heterosexual young adults (aged twenty-one to thirty) who were in a committed relationship showed that they talked about marriage in four different ways. They (1) minimized the meaning of marriage, (2) talked about the idea of marriage to ascertain commitment, (3) defined marriage as the ideal relationship, and/or (4) saw marriage as a jinx. Contradictions between these modes of talk revealed feelings of ambivalence and anxiety associated with a desire for commitment. The emotionally charged meanings associated with marriage anchored marriage in interviewees' imaginations, enabling the institution to retain its hold even though social pressures to marry are limited and legal substitutes to marriage exist.     

Marriage in the New Millennium: A Decade in Review

This review focuses on broad themes characterizing marital research in the past decade. In addition to continuing themes, such as a focus on conflict, violence, and impact on physical and mental health outcomes, we also address the impact of the Healthy Marriage Initiative on marital research and recent advances in methodology. We highlight an overarching theme that characterizes much of the literature: the importance of context in understanding marital outcomes and the impact of positive marital transactions and marital strengths. Given the increasing diversity of married couples, the attention given to context over the past decade has been timely and appropriate, providing an increasingly solid foundation for future research.     

Adolescent Marriage in Nepal: A Subregional Level Analysis

This study aims to identify the distribution of marriages among adolescents, aged 10 to 19 years, throughout Nepal. Data were obtained from the 2011 Nepal Demographic and Health Survey. Chi-square tests and logistic regression analyses were used to identify the main determinants of adolescent marriages (AMs). Of a total 11,967 weighted samples, 9.3% of adolescents (95% CI, 8–10%) were found to have been married; a significantly higher percentage of these were female. The variability of AMs varied among the regions of Nepal, with a higher percentage occurring in the Western Mountain, Mid-Western Hill, and Central Terai areas. AMs were also more likely to have occurred among poorer households. The findings show a substantial differences of AMs in different geographic areas and demographic levels in Nepal.     

Cohabitation and Marriage: Complexity and Diversity in Union-Formation Patterns

Nonmarital cohabitation and marriage are now fundamentally linked, a fact that is routinely reflected in current research on union formation. Unprecedented changes in the timing, duration, and sequencing of intimate co-residential relationships have made the study of traditional marriage far more complex today than in the past. It is now clear that a white, middle-class, American-centric research template has become increasingly anachronistic. In this review article, we begin by providing an overview of contemporary theory, empirical approaches, and demographic trends in cohabitation and marriage, focusing primarily on the United States, but also distinguishing the U.S. from patterns found in other high-income societies, including European countries, Canada, Australia, and in East Asia. We place the spotlight on the causes and consequences of union transitions. We identify the commonalities between cohabitation and marriage, but also key differences that are expressed unevenly across different populations and cultural groups. The rise in nonmarital cohabitation has upended conventional theoretical models and measurement approaches to the study of traditional marriage, complicating matters but also reinvigorating family scholarship on union formation and its implications for partners, children, and society.     

Research on Marital Satisfaction and Stability in the 2010s: Challenging Conventional Wisdom

Although getting married is no longer a requirement for social acceptance, most people do marry in their lifetimes, and couples across the socioeconomic spectrum wish their marriages to be satisfying and long lasting. This review evaluates the past decade of research on the determinants of satisfaction and stability in marriage, concluding that the scholarship of the past 10 years has undermined three assumptions that were formerly accepted as conventional wisdom. First, research exploiting methods such as latent class growth analyses reveal that, for most couples, marital satisfaction does not decline over time but in fact remains relatively stable for long periods. Second, contrary to predictions of behavioral models of marriage, negative communication between spouses can be difficult to change, does not necessarily lead to more satisfying relationships when it is changed, and does not always predict distress in the first place. Third, dyadic processes that are reliably adaptive for middle-class and more affluent couples may operate differently in lower income couples, suggesting that influential models of marriage may not generalize to couples living in diverse environments. Thus, the accumulated research of the past 10 years indicates that the tasks of understanding and promoting marital satisfaction and stability are more complex than we appreciated at the start of the decade, raising important questions that beg to be answered in the years ahead.     

Community Differences in the Association Between Parenting Practices and Child Conduct Problems

Various hypotheses were identified regarding the manner in which community context might influence the association between two dimensions of parenting—control and corporal punishment—on child conduct problems. The authors used hierarchical linear modeling with a sample of 841 African American families to test these hypotheses. Consistent with the evaporation hypothesis, the results indicated that the deterrent effect of caretaker control on conduct problems becomes smaller as deviant behavior becomes more widespread within a community. The findings for corporal punishment supported the normative parenting argument. Although there was a positive relationship between caretaker corporal punishment and child conduct problems in communities where physical discipline was rare, there was no association between the two variables in communities where physical discipline was widely prevalent. These results suggest that a particular parenting strategy may be more effective in some neighborhood environments than others. The theoretical implications of this view are discussed.     

Arab American Marriage: Culture,Tradition, Religion,and the Social Worker

The growing and varied Arab American population and the continuing stereotyping and mistrust between people of Arab descent and other Americans make the need for culturally competent social work more pronounced. This study considers the importance the institutions of marriage and family retain within what can be a generally high-context community. Marriage, family, and religious relationships can be complicated by a sense of honor and stigma alongside frequently distressing experiences or news from the country of origin. Various generations of Arab Americans are returning with their Middle Eastern counterparts to their religions to reestablish their identities. We shall consider the problems between fundamental and enlightened readings and understandings of the traditional marriage contract, especially under Sharia law, and traditional gender roles in relation to the varied expectations of the bride and groom, the extended families, and the cultural community. We suggest ways that social workers can develop skillful communications within effective cultural community networks to offset both inappropriate and insensitive misdiagnosis and treatment.     

Stress Crossover in Newlywed Marriage: A Longitudinal and Dyadic Perspective

Studies of stress and marital quality often assess stress as an intrapersonal phenomenon, examining how spouses’ stress may influence their own relationship well‐being. Yet spouses’ stress also may influence partners’ relationship evaluations, a phenomenon referred to as stress crossover. This study examined stress crossover, and conditions that may facilitate crossover, in a sample of 169 newlywed couples over 3.5 years. A significant crossover effect emerged for husbands, which was moderated by couples’ observed conflict resolution skills. For wives, a significant stress interaction emerged, such that the influence of husbands’ stress on wives’ marital satisfaction depended on wives’ own stress levels. These findings highlight the importance of a dyadic approach when examining the role of stress in marriage.