Dysfunctional Marital Conflict

Abstract

Previous investigations have noted that: (1) women have been noted to typically start most of the marital conflict discussions in laboratories that use observational methods, (2) the way conflict discussions start is also critical in predicting both their outcome and the longitudinal course of marriages, and (3) in distressed marriages there is a wife-demand/husband-withdraw pattern. Coupled with the fact that women begin most marital conflict discussions, this gender pattern could be taken as blaming women for marital distress, unless it itself has an etiology. The present investigation was designed so that a non-conflict interaction, an events of the day reunion discussion after the partners had been apart for at least 8 hours, preceded the conflict discussion. The data of this investigation showed that the dysfunctional patterns of conflict interaction were predicted by husband as well as wife interaction variables during the preceding non-conflict interaction. These results qualify the interpretation of well-established gender differences during conflict discussions, so that these dysfunctional patterns must be seen as being systemic.