ABSTRACT
In chapter 4, we examined couples’ stories of their relationship in their first year of marriage. In this chapter, we investigate how their stories may have changed when we returned in the couples’ third and seventh years of marriage to ask them to tell us their stories again. We treated couples’ Year 1 stories in chapter 4 as insights into how average American couples meet, fall in love, and get married-and to a certain extent, they are. To be sure, most people’s autobiographical narratives have some basic touch points with the reality of their lived experiences as would be described by an outside observer. But as narrative researchers, we are also well aware that narrative truth is not historical truth (Spence, 1982), and we should not be surprised when stories of even exactly the same events differ from telling to retelling. As we discussed in chapter 2, narratives may well be dynamically affected by the changing contexts of the storytellers’ lives, whether those contexts are understood at a cultural, interpersonal, or personal level. Narratives shape and are shaped by changes in the very relationships they both reflect and guide. Thus, we would fully expect that couples’ relationship narratives will not remain exactly the same over time, but will change and evolve from Year 1 to Year 3 to Year 7.
