Correlates of couple satisfaction in Malay Muslims in Malaysia: the implications for marital counselling

Abstract

Evidence-based couple therapies like cognitive-behavioural and emotion-focused couple therapies are intended to enhance couple relationship satisfaction in Western countries. Such approaches are secular and focus on enhancing the emotional bond between partners. It is unclear, however, whether the secular and couple bond focused counselling approaches are culturally appropriate or effective with non-Western couples. The current thesis consists of three studies that investigated the correlates of marital satisfaction in Malay Muslim couples, as way of testing whether the key assumptions underpinning Western couple therapies seem to hold for Malay couples. As religion is central in the life of Malay Muslims, I also explored whether spouses’ individual religiosity was associated with couple satisfaction and whether any association was mediated by emotional forgiveness. In Study 1 with 110 married heterosexual Muslim couples were recruited through social media for an online study. Results revealed that husband’s personal religiosity predicted their own marital satisfaction but not their wives’ satisfaction, and wives’ personal religiosity was not associated with either spouses’ satisfaction. Husbands’ forgiveness of their wives did not mediate the association of husbands’ religiosity with husband’s satisfaction. The high mean, and limited variability, of personal religiosity within the sample might have prevented finding the expected mediation. Study 2 extended the investigation of the association of religion with marital satisfaction and tested whether the relationship standard that religion is important in marriage was associated with relationship satisfaction in 113 Malay couples, and whether that association was mediated by joint religious activities. In addition, the study examined the standards Malay couples held about the importance of the couple’s emotional bond, responsibility to extended family, and putting effort into the relationship, and how those standards were associated with marital satisfaction. Malay husbands and wives endorsed the importance of religion in marriage most strongly of all four relationship standards, and there were minimal sex differences in standards. An actor-partner interdependence model (APIM) analysis showed a consistent pattern of actor effects of own Couple Bond, Relationship Effort and Religion predicting husbands’ and wives’ own satisfaction. There were some partner effects of husband’s standards predicting high wives’ satisfaction but no partner effects were found of wives’ standards predicting husbands’ satisfaction. A composite model entering all standards simultaneously showed the Religion and Couple Bond standard were the strongest predictors of marital satisfaction when all standards were entered into a single APIM. Joint Religious Activities partially mediated the relationship between the religion standard and satisfaction. The findings underscore the centrality of religion in Malay Muslim marriages, and suggest attention to the adaptive functions of religion in marriage might need to be part of couple therapy for Malays. As some research suggests clinically distressed couples might be qualitatively different from satisfied couples, Study 3 compared the relationship standards of 73 clinically dissatisfied couples and 113 community satisfied couples (from Study 2). Relative to community couples, clinical couples less strongly endorsed the Couple Bond, Relationship Effort, Religion and Relationship Effort standards. The clinical couples also were significantly less frequently engaged in joint religious activities than community couples. In summary, the current program of research suggests that there is a cross-cultural difference in relationship standards of Muslim couples relative to Western couples, with the most striking difference being the increased importance of religion for Muslim couples in Malaysia. In addition, results indicate that Muslim couples in Malaysia place greater importance on responsibilities to extended family, relative to Western couples. When practicing couple therapy with Malay couples, it seems unlikely that a secular approach focused just of primarily on the spouses’ emotional bond would be acceptable or effective. Future research should test whether a culturally adapted form of evidence-based couple therapies is effective for Malay couples.