The fulfillment of marital ideals: A study of marital satisfaction and personal well-being.

Abstract

A review of the literature and clinical experience suggested that as marital ideals were increasingly fulfilled, spouses would tend to report increases in personal and marital well-being. This idea was tested using a sample of 282 European-American and African-American couples. Subjects were given a questionnaire asking them to rate their spouses as they perceived them to be and as they would like them ideally to be on measures of agreeability, abrasiveness, and ambitiousness in the first and third years of their marriages. They were also given measures of personal well-being (depression, anxiety) and marital well-being (control, competence, happiness, positive sex, and constructive and destructive conflict). Simple multiple regression analyses were performed to determine whether changes in spouses' fulfillment of ideals predicted changes in subjects' well-being over time. The impact of race, income change, presence or absence of children, and premarital cohabitation were included as moderating variables in these analyses. For wives, the results indicate that changes in fulfillment of spousal ideals predicted changes in positive sex and marital happiness. For husbands, changes in fulfillment of ideals predicted changes in anxiety level, positive sex, and marital happiness. Observations are made about limitations of self report methodology, operationalization of dependent and independent variables, and generalizability to individuals with previous marriages, those of different ages, ethnicities, and cultural heritage. The implications of findings for marital assessment and treatment are also addressed.