Advances in Behaviour Research and Therapy

Questionnaires assessing marital satisfaction, personality, background, social attitudes, sexual attitudes, and sexual behaviour were independently administered to 566 males and 566 females who had been married to each other for from 0 to 40 years. The marital satisfaction (MS) variable was factored and transformed into an almost normally distributed variable that yielded a correlation of 0.73 between husbands' and wives' scores. The influence of all other variables on the MS of the couples was assessed with regression analyses. With all variables accounting for over two-thirds of the variance of MS, the sexual behaviour and sexual attitude variables contributed most heavily; background and personality moderately; and social attitudes only minimally. Similarity of husbands' and wives' responses had only small effects when the linear effects of the variables were controlled. Effects of complementarity of responses were completely non-existent. An analysis of assortative mating on the psychological variables included in the study indicated that couples select each other for similar sexual and social attitudes and MS itself prior to marriage. The personality variables showed little assortative mating. No tendency for the spouses to become more alike on any variable during the course of marriage was present in the data.