Parents, personality or partner? Correlates of marital relationships

Intimate relationships play an important role in the psychological and physical wellbeing of women during and after pregnancy. Our previous analyses demonstrated the significant role of marital relations on the woman's emotional status among a cohort of 61 married Japanese couples with a history of two consecutive spontaneous abortions.

The present analyses examined factors which may be related to the wife's perceived marital quality, including her parental rearing experiences, personality of the woman herself, or the personality of the husband.

The wife's perception of care received from her mother correlated positively with her husband's care whereas overprotection received from the mother also correlated positively with the husband's control. A woman scoring high on the Conscientiousness scale of the five-factor model of personality tended to report more care, and a woman high on the Agreeableness scale less control from her husband, whereas a husband high on the Openness scale tended to show more care in his marital relation.

The continuity hypothesis between the quality of parental relations in childhood and the quality of intimate bonds in adulthood received partial support in a non-Western sample. This hypothesis merits further exploration, preferably within a more integrated model of marital quality.