ABSTRACT
Centuries ago, Africans relied on their oral tradition to tell stories, and those folktales were often stories about survival of the collective tribal community. The stories of African American love, relationship bonding, and marriage have received scant attention in professional literature. The literature for African Americans in psychotherapy is sparse, and yet in increasing numbers African Americans are participating in psychotherapy and in marriage counseling. Gallup projected that 50% percent of African Americans say it is important to marry when they have a child, and 66% indicated that marriage is important when they plan to spend their lives together. There has been some suggestion that major change in American society has significant impact on the institution of marriage in the United States-and for African American couples, in particular. Importantly, the authors suggest that none of the theories that have commonly been suggested for these differences fully account for racial and ethnic differences in marriages.
