An Excerpt
Not long after her call I decided to design a qualitative study of fifty couples who had built lasting, happy marriages, couples who had confronted the same obstacles, crises, and temptations as everyone else and had overcome them.
As I began setting up the study, I drew up a list of questions that would guide my inquiry.
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Are the people in good marriages different from the men and women whose marriages fall apart?
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Are there common ideas, ways of dealing with the inevitable crises?
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What can we learn about selecting a partner, about sex, the stresses of the workplace, infidelity, the arrival of a baby or of adolescence, coping with midlife, aging, and retirement?
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What is happy in a marriage when people are in their twenties, thirties, forties, or fifties, or when they reach retirement?
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What are the central themes at each life stage?
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What makes men happy?
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What makes women happy?
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What does each spouse value in one another?
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What do they regard as the glue of the marriage?
From the beginning I was aware of the limitations of this kind of research, including the risk that it would attract vulnerable couples seeking a stamp of approval on their marriage, as well as the risks of selection bias, reliance on volunteers, and the small size of the sample.
But I felt that these limitations were far outweighed by the potential understanding to be gained from exploring subjectively defined happiness in marriage. I planned to interview all of the individuals separately and each couple together over a two-year period.
Although fifty couples may seem too small a number from which to make sweeping conclusions about marriage, my conclusions are not meant to explain all there is to know about this subject. My intentions are much more modest. I have looked for commonalities as well as individual differences, hoping to find patterns on which to build general hypotheses.
To me this is a fertile method of inquiry, but I should emphasize that I regard this as a pilot study. Further investigation would include more subjects and greater ethnic, geographic, and economic diversity, as well as homosexual couples.
The couples I studied, all of whom lived in northern California, were predominantly white, middle-class, and well educated. They do not represent the entire country and were not selected as typical. In a Country as heterogeneous as ours, finding "typical" couples has limited value; the payoff comes from understanding different subgroups within the whole.
The fifty couples represent a "first cut" within a particular socioeconomic group—but a group that is influential in setting social and cultural trends for the nation. Californians, who make up a sixth of the country's population, are more likely than other Americans to be distant from their families of origin and regions of birth—circumstances that are increasingly the norm in our highly mobile society.
The sample divided almost evenly among people who had married in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. This provided a panoramic look at the changes that have overtaken marriage in the last four decades: the sexual revolution, the women's movement, the rise of dual-career couples.
I recruited the fifty couples by casting a wide net into the community, starting with the group of women who had heard my earliest thoughts on the study. For a while, whenever I spoke to professional groups, schools, social clubs, or other organizations, I requested as my fee the names of couples willing to participate in the marriage project.
I found others with the help of my graduate students in the Department of Social Welfare at the University of California at Berkeley. These couples were younger and less affluent than the others in the study, and they had young children.
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