ABSTRACT
Equity theory presents a model of couplehood in which husbands and wives negotiate over time and through the domestic upheavals brought about by childbirth, offsprings’ adolescence, the empty nest crisis, and so on, to achieve the subjectively fair balance between each spouse’s contributions and benefits known as marital equity. The latter is the pattern that has typically emerged in the numerous studies that have assessed husbands’ and wives’ marital satisfaction in relation to the family life cycle. Numbers of women in the childbearing and launching subdivisions of the present sample were too small to justify separate analyses by family size. Perhaps the most striking similarity is the parallel between the U-shaped pattern of the present sample of husbands’ perceptions of their marital equity over family life stages and a similarly U-shaped course of marital happiness from the newly wed period to empty nest.
