Understanding marriage and stress: essential questions and challenges

This paper explores the complex interplay between stressors and marital functioning, beginning with a discussion of how key concepts from the stress and coping literature can be extended to the study of dyads. Five essential questions are outlined as a means of advancing research in this domain, addressing protective dyadic processes, the competing demands of individual and dyadic coping agendas, the role of individual well-being in couples' stress and coping, stress in the broader context of couples' lives, and prospects for intervention. Following an overview of methodological and procedural challenges, the paper concludes by noting that research devoted to understanding marriages in the context of stress is at a crossroads, poised between a set of provocative questions, preliminary findings, and intervention possibilities on one hand, and important theoretical and empirical challenges on the other.