Marriage: Direct and continuous measurement

Abstract

Marriage partners who were college students were asked to count and chart the frequency of marital behaviors (sexual intercourse, arguments, and socials) per day for a period of at least 3 months. Functional relationships were found between arguments and sex. Couples who engaged in sexual intercourse at a higher rate than they argued described their marriage as “happy.” Marriages with rates of argument higher than rates of intercourse described their relationship as “definitely unhappy.” Daily records of these behaviors functionally pinpointed and quantified changes in the status of a couple’s marriage across time. In marriages described as “tolerable,” the sex rate was only slightly higher than the rate of arguments, but both rates were extremely low.