Citation

McNulty JK. Person. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 2016; 42(4): 444-457.

Affiliation

Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA mcnulty@psy.fsu.edu.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/0146167216634050

PMID

26984011

Abstract

How much should people ask of their relationships? Whereas several perspectives suggest high standards should make actual outcomes feel worse by comparison and thus harm relationships, other perspectives suggest high standards should motivate people to exert the effort necessary to cultivate quality partnerships. The current 4-year longitudinal study of newlywed couples reconciled these competing perspectives by testing a prediction implicit in Finkel, Hui, Carswell, and Larson's suffocation model of marriage-that spouses' standards interact with factors reflective of their abilities to meet those standards to predict subsequent satisfaction. Among spouses who either reported less severe problems or were in marriages observed to be characterized by lower levels of destructive behavior, standards were positively associated with satisfaction over time; among spouses who reported more severe problems or were in marriages characterized by higher levels of destructive behavior, in contrast, standards were negatively associated with satisfaction over time.

© 2016 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

Language: en