This resource presents seven reasons that answer the question “”What’s The Point of Marriage?”” Marriage is: good for your children, better than just living with someone, good for your sex life, good for your pocketbook, and good for your health. It also makes you happier and keeps you safer.

A substantial body of empirical research has documented both the promise and the shortcomings of psychological interventions for preventing or ameliorating marital distress. Couple therapy reduces relationship distress and may affect individual psychopathology, such as depression. However, some couples are unresponsive and others improve but relapse later. Interventions to prevent marital distress usually produce short-term […]

This article explores the lives of women who have chosen to remain single. Findings are shared from a study of 25 women ages 36 to 83 that indicated they were happy and had satisfying life work and strong attachments to their families, friends, and communities. Factors that influence unmarried women’s decision to stay single are […]

The purpose of this study is to examine the association between interparental conflict and parenting using meta-analytic review techniques. One-hundred and thirty-eight effect sizes from 39 studies are analyzed. The overall average weighted effect size is -.62, indicating a moderate association and support for the spillover hypothesis. The parenting behaviors most impacted by interparental conflict […]

This article explores difficulties between men and women, the search for identity and gender role, how gender roles are developed, the special power of gender beliefs, and the use of a gendergram to help couples identify gender beliefs that influence interaction. Steps for developing a gendergram are explained, as well as ways gendergrams can help […]

This paper evaluates a burgeoning literature on the effects of the 1996 welfare reform bill. Our goal is to shift the debate from the current preoccupation with declining caseloads to one focused on the social and economic well-being of fragile families, single mothers, and children. The welfare reform literature reveals many positive changes: reduced poverty […]

This article explains the debate over gender differences that pit male psychologists who believe evolution and biology account for gender differences against female psychologists who argue society and culture create those differences. Efforts by evolutionary psychologists (EPs) to explore differences through the Darwinian principle of sexual selection are explained, as well as perspectives on the […]

Three to four percent of teenagers lived in cohabiting families in 1997 and these percentages did not vary dramatically by race/ethnicity. This brief explores how 3 measures of teen well-being vary by family structure and race/ethnicity. Based on these three measures of well-being, living with a single mother and her boyfriend, who was not the […]

Application of the Coase Theorem to marital bargaining suggests that shifting from a consent divorce regime to no-fault unilateral divorce laws should not affect divorce rates. Each iteration of the empirical literature examining the evolution of divorce rates across US states has yielded different conclusions about the effects of divorce law liberalization. I show that […]