Marital quality over the life course

Much prior research in social psychology indicates that in many domains of social life, individuals' well-being improves in the latter half of the life course. The reason for this pattern is not well understood, however. We argue that objective changes in family composition and in social and economic conditions in middle and later life may explain the later-life increase in well-being. To test this argument we focus on one domain, martial well-being, and examine the curvilinear relationship between martial duration and martial quality, with emphasis on the latter half of the martial life course. Our results show that reduced work and parental responsibilities in later life explain much of the later-life increase in martial satisfaction but do not account for the decrease in thoughts of divorce. Longitudinal research is needed to confirm our results, which are necessarily confined to cross-sectional data.