Patterning of midlife marital trajectories in enduring marriages in a dyadic context: Physical and mental health outcomes in later years

Abstract

The current study, using prospective data over 25 years (1991–2015; N = 245 couples), investigates life course dyadic patterns of positive and negative marital trajectories (i.e., marital strength and strain, respectively) in middle-aged husbands and wives and an array of physical and mental health outcomes associated with these patterns. Spousal warmth, spouse’s constructive conflict resolution, and couple’s joint participation were used as indicators of marital strength, whereas spousal hostility, spouse’s destructive conflict resolution, and marital instability were used as indicators of marital strain. Four dyadic latent classes with heterogeneous trajectory patterns were identified using husbands’ and wives’ concurrent strength and strain marital trajectories (1991–2001), including a couple stable and moderately favorable group, a couple stable and highly favorable group, a couple stable and husband more favorable than wife group, and a husband improving with wife slightly worsening group. The best health outcomes in 2015 were generally reported by members of the couple stable and highly favorable group, whereas the worst health outcomes were found, on average, for members of the husband improving with wife slightly worsening group. Based on these findings, interventions should promote and develop resiliency factors, thereby aiding in the redirection or improvement of middle-aged spouses’ marital trajectories, which can reduce detrimental positive–negative imbalances in marital strength and strain.

Aging Together in Enduring Couple Relationships: A Life Course Systems Perspective

“…For instance, following previous research noting that early couple‐level financial strain can have long‐term effects on couple‐level financial strain in later adulthood through PF (Lee et al, ), Figure demonstrates a model specifying family‐level EH as a concurrent event (i.e., predictor) and consequence (i.e., outcome) of couple‐level classes of FP. Another example is a recent study that identified groups of couples with similar dyadic patterns of marital trajectories over 25 years, including socioeconomic background characteristics as predictors of these trajectories and later mental and physical health as consequences of those trajectories (Wickrama, Klopack, & O'Neal, ). In an SEM framework, there are multiple stepwise approaches for specifying predictors and outcomes (e.g., one‐ and three‐step approaches) in a mixture model.…”

The longitudinal association between marital and psychological functioning in socioeconomically disadvantaged relationships

“…Recent studies illustrate how qualitatively different marital pathways (i.e., those that decline in satisfaction versus those that do not) are associated with systematic variation in psychological functioning. Deterioration in marital quality, for example, is associated with poorer psychological functioning, whereas relatively stable, high levels of marital quality are associated with declining psychological distress (Foran et al, 2013;Proulx et al, 2017;Wickrama et al, 2020).…”

“…Marriages in which spouses exhibit asynchronous marital change patterns (i.e., spouses exhibit diverging marital satisfaction patterns) tend to have poorer functioning compared to marriages characterized by synchronous patterns (Wickrama et al, 2020). Asynchronous patterns are also likely associated with health outcomes of both spouses.…”

“…Given that wives tend to be more aware of relationship well-being and report that the valence of their marriage is intertwined with their sense of self (e.g., Acitelli, 1992), negative asynchronous patterns may be more strongly associated with wives' psychological distress compared to husbands'. Recent work has either modeled each spouse's marital and individual functioning separately (Foran et al, 2013) or explored between-couple differences in health outcomes (Wickrama et al, 2020), but not differences within the same marriage. These approaches cannot sufficiently highlight differences both between and within marriages.…”

Midlife Marital and Financial Stress and the Progression of Later-Life Health Problems for Husbands and Wives

“…Some research suggests that these partner effects may vary in magnitude depending on the spouse's gender, type of stress, and the health outcome, with stronger effects noted for partner effects between wives' stress and husbands' psychological distress. For example, wives' stress has been shown to have stronger consequences for their husbands' psychological distress than vice versa (Wickrama et al, 2020b). However, other studies that focused on marital stress trajectories and loneliness revealed spouses' marital stress trajectories influenced both partners' loneliness (Wickrama et al, 2020a).…”