The Marriage Checkup: a randomized controlled trial of annual relationship health checkups.

OBJECTIVE: This study assessed the efficacy of the Marriage Checkup (MC) for improving relationship health and intimacy. METHOD: Cohabiting married couples (N = 215, Mage women = 44.5 years, men = 47 years, 93.1% Caucasian) recruited from a northeastern U.S. metropolitan area through print and electronic media were randomly assigned to MC treatment or wait-list control. Treatment but not control couples participated in assessment and feedback visits, at the beginning of the study and again 1 year later. All couples completed 9 sets of questionnaires over 2 years. Outcome measures included the Quality of Marriage Index, the Global Distress subscale of the Marital Satisfaction Inventory-Revised, the Intimate Safety Questionnaire, and the Relational Acceptance Questionnaire. RESULTS: A latent growth curve model indicated significant between-group differences in intimacy at every measurement point after baseline (d ranged from .20 to .55, Md = .37), significant between-group differences in women's felt acceptance for every measurement point after baseline (d ranged from .17 to .47, Md = .34), significant between-group differences in men's felt acceptance through the 1-year 2-week follow-up (d across follow-up ranged from .11 to .40, Md = .25), and significant between-group differences in relationship distress through 1-year 6-month follow-up (d across follow-up ranged from .11 to .39, Md = .23). CONCLUSIONS: Longitudinal analysis of the MC supports the hypothesis that the MC significantly improves intimacy, acceptance, and satisfaction. Implications for dissemination are discussed.

Mindful relating: exploring mindfulness and emotion repertoires in intimate relationships.

This study tested the theory that mindfulness contributes to greater intimate relationship satisfaction by fostering more relationally skillful emotion repertoires. A sample of married couples was administered measures of mindful awareness, emotion skills, and marital quality. We hypothesized that mindfulness would be associated with both marital quality and partners' emotion skills and that the association between mindfulness and marital quality would be mediated by emotion repertoire skill. Findings suggested that emotion skills and mindfulness are both related to marital adjustment, and that skilled emotion repertoires, specifically those associated with identifying and communicating emotions, as well as the regulation of anger expression, fully mediate the association between mindfulness and marital quality. Theoretical implications are discussed.