By Deborah Gilbert

News and Information Services

Newlyweds who tell the story of their romance as a duet, giving each other equal time to perform variations on themes, are still likely to be much in love three years later.

These shared marriage narratives are at the “heart of marriage building,” explain U-M research psychologists, “because they are the vehicles by which husbands and wives negotiate behavioral norms for their marriage, express their interdependence and evaluate their marriage.”

In 1986, under the direction of Profs. Joseph Veroff and Elizabeth Douvan, and of Shirley Hatchett, now assistant professor at the University of Illinois, the Early Years of Marriage study at the Institute for Social Research began interviews with 176 Black and 167 white newlywed couples in their homes, asking them, among other things, to narrate the story of their relationship.

The couples, most of whom were in their mid-20s, were asked to tell their story with a beginning, a middle and an epilogue that speculated about their future. The narratives, which lasted an average of 30 minutes, ranged from 20 minutes to an hour. The couples, who were all in first marriages, told their stories in 1986, again in 1988 and are in the process of retelling them once more this summer.

“We asked them to reminisce at their leisure,” Veroff explains. “We wanted to know how they met and began dating, how they started talking about marriage and what the wedding was like. We also wanted to know what their married life was like now, and their expectations for the future.”

The stories were coded for feelings expressed, husband-wife interactions, and consistent narrative styles or themes.

The researchers found that:

In telling their stories, the spouses often did not acknowledge each other’s interruptions or conflicting views—they just went on with their own version of events, winding around each other, embellishing and shifting focus.

“But, more importantly, we were surprised to find that in good marriages, both spouses interrupted or talked over the interruption about the same number of times in the interview. Apparently, equal time is more important than agreement. The more spouses are allowed to express their own individual voices and to be equally assertive in working out the meaning of their lives in these stories, the stronger the marriage,” Veroff explains.

Couples who told stories in which the wife was cast as the pursuer or controlling force in the courtship often were in marital trouble two years later. If they lasted into the third year, these couples frequently had rewritten their marital history, now casting the wife in a less dominant role.

“These narrative shifts suggest that couples revise their memories so they can make their marriages fit social norms,” Veroff says.

The more frequently the spouses mentioned feeling something as a couple (“We were very angry with her parents” or “We were very much in love”), the better their relationship was three years later.

By and large, the Black and white newlyweds responded similarly. Most of their affective statements—those that express intense feeling—were positive and were focused on their courtship and wedding. True honeymooners, they gave relatively little thought to the future.

White couples mentioned the husband’s feelings (“My husband didn’t want a big wedding”) somewhat less often than Black couples. “This suggests that white husbands may have less influence forming the ‘meaning of the marriage’ than Black husbands do,” Veroff says.

White couples, he added, disagreed somewhat less about what happened and were somewhat more confirming of each other’s anecdotes than Black couples.

Weddings drive everyone crazy, but white couples reported fretting more about the upcoming public performance while Black couples were more focused on the wedding as a commitment between two people “and felt all the anxiety that commitment engenders,” Veroff says.

The marriage story findings appear in the August issue of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. This study is one in a series examining the dynamics of early marriage, including the effects of culture. Veroff’s colleagues on this report included Lynne Sutherland, now assistant professor at Eckherd College; Letha Chadiha, now assistant professor at Washington University; and Robert M. Ortega, U-M assistant professor of social work.

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