ABSTRACT
“Marriage is one of the most nearly universal of human institutions. No other touches so intimately the life of practically every member of the earth population…. The beginning of marriage is lost in the preliterate past, but in recorded history, everywhere, its problems have enlisted the attention of religionists, moralists, poets, lawmakers, and social reformers. The scientist alone has hesitated, until recently, to make it an object of his professional concern” (Terman, 1938, p. 1). These are the introductory lines in Terman’s book in which he describes the results of his questionnaire study with 1133 married couples, the first published psychological study of the determinants of marital happiness. Since then there has been a tremendous increase—a literature explosion, as Gurman and Kniskern (1978) pointed out—in research on marriage, divorce, and especially on marital therapy.
