The subject of divorce has been the topic of multiple research studies over the course of many years. Take a look at this model for relationship breakdowns. Do you think this Vulnerability-Stress- Adaptation model has merit? Why or why not? SCIENCE BRIEFS Keeping Marriages Healthy, and Why It’s So Difficult 4 By Benjamin R. Karney 0210karneyBenjamin Karney is an Associate Professor of Social Psychology and co-director of the Relationship Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on how marriages change or remain stable over time, and in particular how relationship maintenance is constrained or enhanced by the contexts in which it takes place. Currently this includes research on marriages in the military, funded by the Department of Defense, and marriages in low-income populations, funded by the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development. He received the Gerald R. Miller Award for Early Career Achievement from the International Association for Relationship Research in 2004 and has twice been the recipient of the National Council on Family Relation’s Reuben Hill Research and Theory Award for outstanding contributions to family science. His textbook, Intimate Relationships (coauthored with Thomas Bradbury), will be published by W. W. Norton in January, 2010. People rarely change their minds about subjects that are important to them. Those who favor gun control today are likely to favor gun control ten years from now, and those who vote for Democratic candidates today are likely to do so throughout their lives. Yet intimate relationships, and marriages in particular, are the exception to this rule. After two people stand before everyone important to them in the world and publicly declare that they love each other and intend to remain together for the rest of their lives, everything social psychology has learned about the stability of publicly declared opinions suggests that these will be the most stable opinions of all (Festinger, 1957). Yet of course they aren’t. Despite the almost uniform happiness and optimism of newlyweds, most first marriages will end in divorce or permanent separation (Bramlett & Mosher, 2002), and the rate of dissolution http://bestofassignment.com for remarriages is even higher (Cherlin, 1992). In most cases, this represents a drastic and unwanted change in a highly valued belief, a change that is emotionally and financially costly to both members of the couple. Even in marriages that remain intact, newlyweds’ initially high levels of marital satisfaction tend to decline over time (VanLaningham, Johnson, & Amato, 2001). How can we account for this change? How is it that marital satisfaction declines so frequently, despite our best efforts to hold on to the positive feelings that motivate marriage in the first place? And what is it those couples that maintain their initial happiness are doing right? What couples that stay happy are doing right Understandi.

1. The subject of divorce has been the topic of multiple research
studies over the course of many years. Take a look at this model
for relationship breakdowns.
Do you think this Vulnerability-Stress-
Adaptation
model has merit? Why or why not?
SCIENCE BRIEFS
Keeping Marriages Healthy, and Why It’s So Difficult
4
By Benjamin R. Karney
0210karneyBenjamin Karney is an Associate Professor of
Social Psychology and co-director of the Relationship Institute
at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research
focuses on how marriages change or remain stable over time,
and in particular how relationship maintenance is constrained or
enhanced by the contexts in which it takes place. Currently this
includes research on marriages in the military, funded by the
Department of Defense, and marriages in low-income
populations, funded by the National Institute on Child Health
and Human Development.
He received the Gerald R. Miller Award for Early Career
Achievement from the International Association for
Relationship Research in 2004 and has twice been the recipient
of the National Council on Family Relation’s Reuben Hill
Research and Theory Award for outstanding contributions to
family science. His textbook, Intimate Relationships

2. (coauthored with Thomas Bradbury), will be published by W.
W. Norton in January, 2010.
People rarely change their minds about subjects that are
important to them. Those who favor gun control today are likely
to favor gun control ten years from now, and those who vote for
Democratic candidates today are likely to do so throughout their
lives.
Yet intimate relationships, and marriages in particular, are the
exception to this rule. After two people stand before everyone
important to them in the world and publicly declare that they
love each other and intend to remain together for the rest of
their lives, everything social psychology has learned about the
stability of publicly declared opinions suggests that these will
be the most stable opinions of all (Festinger, 1957). Yet of
course they aren’t. Despite the almost uniform happiness and
optimism of newlyweds, most first marriages will end in divorce
or permanent separation (Bramlett & Mosher, 2002), and the
rate of dissolution http://bestofassignment.com for remarriages
is even higher (Cherlin, 1992).
In most cases, this represents a drastic and unwanted change in
a highly valued belief, a change that is emotionally and
financially costly to both members of the couple. Even in
marriages that remain intact, newlyweds’ initially high levels of
marital satisfaction tend to decline over time (VanLaningham,
Johnson, & Amato, 2001). How can we account for this change?
How is it that marital satisfaction declines so frequently,
despite our best efforts to hold on to the positive feelings that
motivate marriage in the first place? And what is it those
couples that maintain their initial happiness are doing right?
What couples that stay happy are doing right
Understanding how marital satisfaction changes requires first

3. understanding how thoughts and opinions about a marriage and
a spouse are structured. Our representations of our partners are
complex and multifaceted, consisting of perceptions that range
from specific and concrete (e.g., “My spouse makes great
pancakes.”) to global and evaluative (e.g., “My spouse is
wonderful!”) (John, Hampson, & Goldberg, 1991).
Although we are generally motivated to believe the best about
our partners, we are not equally motivated or able to protect all
our beliefs at all levels of abstraction (e.g., Dunning, 1995). For
example, if my partner actually makes terrible pancakes, it is
neither possible nor terribly important to believe otherwise.
However, if I am to stay happily married, it is desirable to find
a way to believe that my spouse is wonderful, and it is possible
to do so by identifying and focusing on specific perceptions that
might support this global belief.
That is what happy couples do. When couples in the early years
of marriage are asked to rate which specific aspects of their
relationships are most important to the success of their
marriage, they generally point to whatever aspects of their
relationship are most positive, and the spouses who demonstrate
this tendency most strongly are the ones who are the happiest
with their relationships overall (Neff & Karney, 2003). This
selection process does not happen only at the beginning of the
relationship. https://homeworkhelpersblog.com/blog/
Over time, as specific aspects of the relationship change, with
some parts becoming more positive and some becoming more
negative, the couples who stay happiest overall are the ones
who change their beliefs about what is important in their
relationships accordingly, deciding that whatever aspects of the
marriage have declined must not be so important after all (Neff
& Karney, 2003). As a consequence of this continued process of
selective attention, global evaluations of a marriage tend to be
pretty stable from day to day, as these are the evaluations we

4. are motivated to protect, but perceptions of specific aspects of
the marriage tend to vary, more positive on good days and less
positive on bad days (McNulty & Karney, 2001).
So what happens to those less positive specific perceptions?
They don’t disappear. Even happy newlyweds readily
acknowledge that their partners are not perfect in every way
(Neff & Karney, 2005). Staying positive about the relationship
requires that spouses find ways to integrate their perceptions of
specific problems and disappointments within an overall
positive view of the marriage. One way spouses can do this is
by generating explanations for a spouse’s failings that limit any
broader implications those failings may have.
For example, if my spouse is distant and withdrawn one
evening, deciding that my spouse’s behavior is a symptom of a
difficult day at work (rather than a sign of a lack of interest in
me) means that the behavior has no global implications for my
marriage. For spouses who tend to make these sorts of
charitable explanations for their partner’s disappointing or
irritating behaviors, global evaluations of the marriage remain
relatively stable from day to day even when perceptions of
specific aspects of the relationship are fluctuating. For spouses
who make less charitable explanations, blaming each other for
faults and missteps, specific perceptions and global evaluations
are more closely linked, such that the entire marriage seems less
rewarding on days when specific elements are bad and the entire
marriage seems more rewarding on days when specific elements
are good (McNulty & Karney, 2001).
In other words, making charitable explanations severs the link
between specific negative perceptions and global evaluation of
the marriage, leaving the global evaluations more resilient.
Couples who are able to acknowledge their partner’s faults
while maintaining positive views of their marriage overall have
more stable satisfaction over time (Karney & Bradbury, 2000)

5. and they are less likely to divorce in the early years of marriage
(Neff & Karney, 2005).
Why is maintaining a relationship so difficult?
If this sort of integration is so beneficial, and if happy
newlyweds are already doing it, why do newlyweds’ initially
high levels of marital satisfaction nevertheless decline so
frequently? The short answer is that making allowances for a
spouse’s inevitable shortcomings is difficult, and especially so
because marriages and other intimate relationships do not take
place in a vacuum. The way that spouses think about and
respond to each other is a product of broader forces that affect
marriages and intimate relationships. As research identifies
more of the processes that contribute to stability and change in
marital satisfaction, models of these processes have expanded to
account for those broader forces.
One framework that attempts this is the Vulnerability-Stress-
Adaptation Model of Marriage (i.e., the VSA model; Karney &
Bradbury, 1995). Consistent with the research described above,
the VSA model (see Figure 1) describes adaptive processes
(e.g., solving problems, explaining each other’s behavior) as
directly affecting how marital satisfaction changes over time.
The model further suggests that these processes themselves are
facilitated or constrained by spouse’s enduring vulnerabilities
(e.g., cognitive styles, personality traits, childhood experiences)
and the stressful circumstances they encounter outside the
relationship (e.g., work load, financial strains, health
problems).
karney-fig1
Figure 1: The Vulnerability-Stress-Adaptation Model of
Marriage (Karney & Bradbury, 1995)

6. Research infohttps://www.apa.org/images/Karney-fig1_tcm7-
90210_w1024_n.gifrmed by the VSA model suggests two
general reasons why spouses’ attempts to maintain their initially
high marital satisfaction may fall short over time. First, some
people are naturally better at it than others. For example, when
asked to write open-ended paragraphs about issues in their
marriages, some spouses recognize that there can be two sides
to every conflict and that compromises are possible. Others
write only about their own perspective, failing to recognize that
other perspectives are possible, let alone valid.
When couples who have written these paragraphs are then
invited to discuss real marital issues, the ability to recognize
multiple perspectives emerges as a significant predictor of the
quality of their discussions, as rated by outside observers
(Karney & Gauer, in press). Where does this ability come from?
A likely source is exposure to more or less successful problem-
solving in early childhood. Indeed, wives whose parents
divorced when they were children and husbands whose
childhood family environments were highly negative also have
more difficulty resolving problems together, and are at risk for
declines in marital satisfaction as a result (Story, Karney,
Lawrence, & Bradbury, 2004).
Second, maintaining a relationship takes energy, and in some
contexts that energy is in short supply. It is not enough that
couples have the ability to address problems effectively if they
lack the capacity to exercise those abilities in the moment.
Unfortunately, in the context of stress, even couples who are
normally effective at maintaining their relationships may find it
difficult to do so. To evaluate this possibility, recently married
couples were asked about the kinds of explanations they made
for each other’s negative behaviors every six months for the
first four years of their marriages (Neff & Karney, 2004). At
each assessment, they were also asked to describe and rate the
stressful events they had been exposed to outside of the

7. marriage (e.g., stress at work, financial strains, problems with
friends or extended family, health issues, etc.) during each six
month interval.
Controlling for changes in their marital satisfaction over that
time, the way spouses understood each other’s negative
behaviors at each assessment was significantly associated with
the stress they had been under during that period. When stress
was low, spouses on average were able to generate more
charitable explanations for each other’s negative behaviors,
preventing those behaviors from affecting their global feelings
about the marriage. But after periods of relatively high stress,
the same spouses who had demonstrated this ability were
significantly less likely to exercise it, and so were more likely
to blame their partners for negative behaviors that they had
previously excused.
In addition to highlighting the main effects of enduring
vulnerabilities and stressful circumstances on marriage, the
VSA model suggests that these relatively independent sources
of influence on marital processes interact. That is, among
individuals with comparable levels of enduring vulnerabilities,
those who encounter stressful circumstances will have an
especially hard time maintaining their relationships, and among
individuals encountering similar levels of stress, the ones most
at risk for relationship problems are the ones who also have
numerous enduring vulnerabilities. Survey research that
oversampled from low-income and underrepresented
communities (Rauer, Karney, Garvan, & Hou, 2008) confirms
these sorts of interactions, showing that the associations
between relationship satisfaction and any particular constraint
on adaptive processes (e.g., mental health problems, financial
strain, substance abuse) becomes stronger in the presence of
other risk factors.
So, why is it so difficult to maintain the initial positive feelings

8. that characterize most newlywed couples? It is difficult because
some disappointments are inevitable in any long-term
committed relationship, because some spouses lack the ability
to respond to those disappointments effectively, and because
even spouses who have the ability may encounter stressful
circumstances that prevent them from exercising their abilities
when they are most needed.
Implications for helping couples succeed
Dominant approaches to strengthening marriages and other
intimate relationships focus almost exclusively on adaptive
processes, i.e., teaching couples a set of skills for resolving
problems and dealing with disappointments when they arise
(e.g., Markman, Stanley, & Blumberg, 1994). The VSA model
and the research informed by it suggest that there may be a limit
to what these approaches can accomplish. Individuals coping
with significant personal vulnerabilities may not be able to
change their behaviors. Even couples that know perfectly well
how to respond to each other effectively may lose their capacity
for effective adaptive processes when under stress.
In light of these broader forces affecting relationships, policies
that address individual well-being and current sources of stress
on family life may be as effective at promoting healthy
relationships as any interventions that target relationships
directly. Research on the effects of public policies on marital
outcomes supports this idea. In Norway, for example, after the
government began offering cash incentives to parents that
elected to forgo state-subsidized childcare and stay home with
their children, divorce rates fell significantly even though the
new policy did not target marriages directly (Hardoy & Schøne,
2008). Policies like these that simply make life easier for
families and individuals may contribute to an environment that
supports marriages and other intimate relationships. In such an
environment, more spouses and partners may prove capable of

9. maintaining their relationships on their own.
References
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