Marriage at the Summit: Response to the Commentaries

The Psychology of Close Relationships: Fourteen Core Principles

Relationship science is a theory-rich discipline, but there have been no attempts to articulate the broader themes or principles that cut across the theories themselves. We have sought to fill that void by reviewing the psychological literature on close relationships, particularly romantic relationships, to extract its core principles. This review reveals 14 principles, which collectively address four central questions: (a) What is a relationship? (b) How do relationships operate? (c) What tendencies do people bring to their relationships? (d) How does the context affect relationships? The 14 principles paint a cohesive and unified picture of romantic relationships that reflects a strong and maturing discipline. However, the principles afford few of the sorts of conflicting predictions that can be especially helpful in fostering novel theory development. We conclude that relationship science is likely to benefit from simultaneous pushes toward both greater integration across theories (to reduce redundancy) and greater emphasis on the circumstances under which existing (or not-yet-developed) principles conflict with one another.

Should Spouses Be Demanding Less From Marriage? A Contextual Perspective on the Implications of Interpersonal Standards

How much should people ask of their relationships? Whereas several perspectives suggest high standards should make actual outcomes feel worse by comparison and thus harm relationships, other perspectives suggest high standards should motivate people to exert the effort necessary to cultivate quality partnerships. The current 4-year longitudinal study of newlywed couples reconciled these competing perspectives by testing a prediction implicit in Finkel, Hui, Carswell, and Larson’s suffocation model of marriage—that spouses’ standards interact with factors reflective of their abilities to meet those standards to predict subsequent satisfaction. Among spouses who either reported less severe problems or were in marriages observed to be characterized by lower levels of destructive behavior, standards were positively associated with satisfaction over time; among spouses who reported more severe problems or were in marriages characterized by higher levels of destructive behavior, in contrast, standards were negatively associated with satisfaction over time.

The Suffocation Model

Throughout American history, the fundamental purpose of marriage has shifted from (a) helping spouses meet their basic economic and political needs to (b) helping them meet their intimacy and passion needs to (c) helping them meet their autonomy and personal-growth needs. According to the suffocation model of marriage in America, these changes have had two major consequences for marital quality, one negative and one positive. The negative consequence is that, as Americans have increasingly looked to their marriage to help them meet idiosyncratic, self-expressive needs, the proportion of marriages that fall short of their expectations has grown, which has increased rates of marital dissatisfaction. The positive consequence is that those marriages that succeed in meeting these needs are particularly fulfilling, more so than the best marriages in earlier eras. In tandem, these two consequences have pushed marriage toward an all-or-nothing state.