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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.
Key Words: decade review, marital interaction, marital satisfaction, marriage.
Despite what you may have heard, the institution of marriage is alive and well. It is true that marriage is no longer a requirement for social acceptance and advancement (Cherlin, 2004). It is also true that more of the population of the United States is currently unmarried than ever before (U.S. Census Bureau, 2017) because people have been cohabiting more frequently (Rosenfeld & Roesler, 2019), entering marriage later (Kreider & Ellis, 2011), and yet divorcing at similar rates (Cohen, 2016). Notwithstanding these trends, however, the vast majority of people across levels of socioeconomic status still aspire to marry (Kuo & Raley, 2016; McDonald, Pini, Bailey, & Price, 2011), and more than 90% of people do marry at some point in their lives (Kiersz, 2017; Yau, 2015).
The persistence of marriage makes sense considering that the intimate relationship enshrined by marriage continues to be vital...