Relationship health impacts many facets of both physical and mental well-being, including depression, heart health, and even children's health. For a variety of reasons, distressed couples often delay entering therapy despite its value in supporting wellness and preventing distress. One early intervention program, the marriage checkup (MC), aims to keep healthy couples healthy with a brief supportive checkup. The MC is based on motivational interviewing principles, and research on MC shows the program has a positive impact on relationship satisfaction, prevents decline, and improves health on other variables such as intimacy. However, past research on MCs has only focused on heterosexual couples. As such, this study explores the research question, "What is the impact of a relationship wellness checkup on lesbian couples' relationship satisfaction?" Using a single-subject design, specifically concurrent multiple-baseline, multiple-probe design, this study extends MC research to an underrepresented population. After conducting checkups over 10 weeks with three lesbian couples, findings show the intervention had a medium effect on satisfaction (nonoverlap of all pairs ¼ .66). These results indicate a relationship checkup can increase satisfaction for lesbian couples. The findings also suggest checkups with lesbian couples can have a comparable impact to their use with heterosexual couples. This study concludes by advocating that the checkup may help lesbian couples stay healthy, providing support for this marginalized group of couples in a time of prejudice.

This study aims to fill the gaps in relationship wellness intervention research by providing a relationship wellness program, the Marriage Check (MC), to transgender couples. Transgender couples (defined, for this study, as couples where one or both partners self-identify as transgender) may benefit from an MC as a brief prevention program to support relationship health. The research question for this study was: What is the impact of a Marriage Checkup on transgender couples' relationship satisfaction? Researchers created a small pilot study using single-subject design methods-specifically a non-concurrent, multiple-baseline, and a multiple-probe design. Three couples participated in this investigation in which one or both partners identified themselves as transgender. The MC and relationship satisfaction were the independent and dependent variables, respectively. Findings from the visual analysis and non-overlapping of pairs (NAP .87) showed that the MC positively influenced relationship satisfaction for all three couples. The outcomes of the study suggest that the MC may increase relationship satisfaction for some transgender couples. Further research is worth pursuing in this field.

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Relationship health impacts many other health outcomes, including physical and mental wellbeing and the health of children in the family system (Goeke-Morey, Cummings, & Papp, 2007; Jaremka, Glaser, Malarkey, & Kiecolt-Glaser, 2013; Jaremka, Lindgren, & Kiecolt-Glaser, 2013; Pihet, Bodenmann, Cina, Widmer, & Shantinath, 2007; Rappaport, 2013; Robles, Slatcher, Trombello, & McGinn, 2014). Despite the importance of relationship health, couples do not regularly seek support for maintaining their connection (Eubanks-Fleming & Cordova, 2012). Early intervention programs that provide support are a growing public health initiative (Cowan & Cowan, 2014). One brief early intervention program, the Marriage Checkup (MC), positively impacts relationship satisfaction, prevents decline, and improves health on other relationship variables such as intimacy (Cordova, 2014). To date, the MC research has included only heterosexual couples. This study explored the question, “What is the impact of a relationship wellness checkup on gay male couples’ relationship satisfaction?” Using single-subject multiple-baseline, multiple-probe design, this study extends MC research to include gay may couples. Findings showed that the MC positively influenced satisfaction (NAP .73) for the group overall. In an analysis of each couple, two of the three couples improved and one couple showed a slight decline in satisfaction. The likely confounding event for this third couple was their marriage and honeymoon during the baseline phase. In light of research with newlywed and engaged couples from other studies, overall the results tentatively suggest the MC may increase satisfaction for gay male couples with additional research needed for newlywed couples.

Eighteen lesbian, gay, and transgender partners (gender, romantic, and sexual minority, acronym GRSM, for this article) responded to two questions about their experience with the Marriage Checkup (MC): (1) the helpfulness of the checkup and (2) what they would like added to the checkup. Participants included six lesbians, six gay males, and six individuals in relationships where at least one partner identified as gender diverse. On the helpfulness of the checkup, the Likert scale offered three choices: helpful, a mix of helpful and not helpful, and not helpful. Of 18 participants, 17 chose “helpful.” One participant chose “a mix of helpful and not helpful.” Regarding what to add to the MC topics, top responses were “defining and managing roles,” “coping with discrimination and prejudice,” and “handling relationship disclosures.” In responses to open-ended questions, participants explored both topics in more depth. Two topics emerged to add to the MC: aging and adding additional time.