Strategies for Maintaining and Repairing Marital Relationships

Although relationship research has concentrated on relational formation and termination processes, most of the time spent in long-term relationships is devoted to relational maintenance and/or repair. The present study examines the maintenance/repair strategies reported by fifty couples (n= 100 spouses). It attempts to discover the strategies and the ways in which their number and choice are related to marital satisfaction, participation in a marital enrichment programme, length of marriage and respondent gender. Forty-nine strategies were identified and clustered into twelve superordinate strategy types. Respondents most frequently reported use of prosocial, ceremonial, communication and togetherness strategy types. More strategies were reported in accomplishing maintenance than repair of the relationship. However, the same types of strategies were reported for both maintenance and repair with the exceptions of metacommunication and anti-ritual/spontaneity strategies. The number of strategies correlated negatively with length of marriage. Implications for future research include the need for comparative work among premarital, marital and divorced couples. In addition, the need to develop understanding of such strategies for use in marital enrichment programmes is discussed.