Affinity-Maintenance in Marriage and Its Relationship to Women's Marital Satisfaction

This article describes the strategies married couples use to maintain the quality of their bonds. After developing a typology of affinity-maintenance strategies, we assessed the relationship of women's perceptions of maintenance activities within their marriages to their marital satisfaction. Each participant completed the Marital Relationship Inventory and then rated how frequently she and her husband used each strategy, how personally important it was that her husband use the strategy, and how important she thought it was to her husband that she regularly use the strategy. There was little relationship between marital satisfaction and strategy valuation. Satisfaction was moderately related to perceived frequency of use for several strategies. In a multiple regression analysis, wives' marital satisfaction was most strongly related to perceptions of the frequency of husbands' use of the strategies Sensitivity, Spirituality, Physical Affection, Self-inclusion, and Honesty (R2 = .52).