ABSTRACT
Every time we open our mouths to say something, we reveal many qualities about ourselves: certainly our nationality, often our station in life, and perhaps even our gender. In this chapter, we investigate the role that gender had in affecting the narratives the couples in our study told. What did men or women reveal of their gender, either in the way they told their stories (narrative style), or in the particular issues they chose to focus on (narrative content)? Although we briefly examined similar questions in chapter 4, we were only considering newlyweds’ stories in Year 1. Here, we extend our analyses to include thrice-told tales in Years 1, 3, and 7. We are again interested in differences husbands and wives displayed when they told the story of their relationship, but we also include whether these differences have implications for their well-being in their marriages.
