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Article
Longtime Couples Tell Their Story: An Integrated Constructivist View of Marital Relationships
Author(s)
Li Shaozhuan
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5542/2021.07.002
Affiliation(s)
University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA
ABSTRACT
The current study was designed to explore how longtime couples understand and manage their marital relationships into later time of their lives. An integrated approach of social exchanged and symbolic interactionism was adopted to understand how longtime couples develop, organize, and adjust their experience of marriage via active exchange and interactions. Participants were five Caucasian heterosexual couples who have been married for more than 18 years. A narrative interview was conducted on each couple separately. Participants were asked to tell a story of how their marriages started and developed in time jointly. Four major processes emerged from the current study displayed how longtime couples proactively engage in managing their life together as a union. The current study revealed a series of exploratory results concerning how individuals in marital relationships communicate and cooperate with each other in the process of their marital relationship development. It also identified an interesting point of view concerning how couples actively manage their negative experiences regarding critical transitioning life events related to their marriage. This adds evidence to understand and predict marital outcomes from a micro-social constructivist approach. Implications about couples and family counseling from a social-constructive approach, as well as the probability of synthesizing a social-constructivist family framework with a systemic family framework, are thus provided.
KEYWORDS
longtime couples, marital relationship development, social exchange theory, symbolic interactionism
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