ABSTRACT
Research has demonstrated that although both married men and women tend to have better mental health than do never-married, widowed, and divorced men and women, the positive association between marriage and mental health is more salient for men than for women. In older cohorts in particular, women were expected, by virtue of their family caregiving role, to be attentive to their husbands' well-being and satisfaction and to respond physically and emotionally to their needs throughout marriage. The variance in spousal predictor variables attributable to marital defensiveness was controlled by including defensiveness in the regression analysis and interpreting it as a covariate. The husbands' perception of the marriage is the most influential spousal variable for wives’ well-being. Not only is the wives' own positive assessment of the marriage beneficial to their psychological well-being, as indicated in the correlation matrix of wives' variables and as reported in the literature, but so is their husbands' positive assessment of the marriage.
