ABSTRACT
As we saw in chapter 6, spouses’ evaluations of their own marital happiness had much to do with how couples constructed their relationship story. In some instances, it seemed as though the couples were changing their memories, or at least their descriptions, of past events in their relationship history to coincide with or to offset their present feelings about their marriage. In this chapter, we take a closer look at these types of findings, with the guidance of recent theories and research about the way people reconstruct their memories. We test a few critical hypotheses relevant to the processes of memory reconstruction as they apply to telling stories about the past.
