Stress resilience in early marriage: can practice make perfect?

As all couples experience stressful life events, addressing how couples adapt to stress is imperative for understanding marital development. Drawing from theories of stress inoculation, which suggest that the successful adaptation to moderately stressful events may help individuals develop a resilience to future stress, the current studies examined whether experiences with manageable stressors early in the marriage may serve to make the relationship more resilient to future stress. In Study 1, 61 newlywed couples provided data regarding their stressful life events, relationship resources (i.e., observed problem-solving behaviors), and marital satisfaction at multiple points over 2½ years. Results revealed that among spouses displaying more effective problem-solving behaviors, those who experienced moderate stress during the early months of marriage exhibited fewer future stress spillover effects and reported greater increases in felt efficacy than did spouses who had less experience with early stress. Study 2 examined stress resilience following the transition to parenthood in a new sample of 50 newlywed couples. Again, spouses who experienced moderate stress during the early months of marriage and had good initial relationship resources (i.e., observed support behaviors) reported greater marital adjustment following the transition to parenthood than did spouses who had good initial resources but less prior experience coping with stress. Together, results indicate that entering marriage with better relationship resources may not be sufficient to shield marital satisfaction from the detrimental effects of stress; rather, couples may also need practice in using those resources to navigate manageable stressful events.