ABSTRACT
In the next four chapters, we turn to a consideration of how the narratives might vary depending on the interpersonal or personal characteristics of the storytellers involved: their marital well-being, their current marital attitudes, their gender, or their ethnicity. In this first of the four chapters, we examine how participants’ current marital well-being, their overall feelings toward their relationship, relates to the stories they tell. Do the narratives of happy couples differ in systematic ways from those told by unhappy couples, either at a single point in time or in how they have changed over the years? Or, as another way of looking at the same question, do those who tell particular types of relationship narratives tend to be unhappy, versus happy, in their relationship, again either at a single point in time or over the years? In this chapter, our examination of the links between marital well-being and narratives is primarily exploratory. We examine a variety of aspects of the narratives, both their style and content, to see, empirically, which ones tend to differentiate between happy and unhappy couples. In chapter 7, we turn to more focused questions and explore how changes in current marital feelings over time predict reconstructions in the narratives. First, however, let us examine how couples’ current relationship feelings are related to the relationship stories they choose to tell.
