ABSTRACT
Most studies of marriage investigate the universal principles that operate at different stages of a relationship for most couples. As much as we would like to emerge from our study with universal principles about the meanings couples impose about their marriages and the way narratives are told and retold, we know we must leave the door open for finding results that are specific to an African-American context as opposed to a White context, and vice versa. White couples generally face structural circumstances that are strikingly different from African-American couples. Whites generally face fewer obstacles and encounter fewer injustices in their worlds. Thus, as we indicated in the earlier chapters, individuals can have different meanings of what marriages are or should be, based on whether they are embedded in one or the other of these two subcultural contexts. We have already discussed in chapter 8 how the experiences of being male or female in a marriage can have unique meanings that are revealed in the narratives. In this chapter, we examine the extent to which unique meanings emerge, depending on whether the couple is African-American or White.
