Marriage and the spiritual realm: The role of proximal and distal religious constructs in marital functioning.

Abstract

Ninety-seven couples completed questionnaires about their involvement in joint religious activities and their perceptions regarding the sanctification of marriage, including perceived sacred qualities of marriage and beliefs about the manifestation of God in marriage. In contrast to individual religiousness and religious homogamy (distal religious constructs), these proximal religious variables directly reflect an integration of religion and marriage, and they were associated with greater global marital adjustment, more perceived benefits from marriage, less marital conflict, more verbal collaboration, and less use of verbal aggression and stalemate to discuss disagreements for both wives and husbands. The proximal measures also added substantial unique variance (adjusted R 2 change ranged from .06 to .48) to specific aspects of marital functioning after controlling demographic factors and distal religious variables in hierarchical regression analyses.

Religion, self-regulation, and self-control: Associations, explanations, and implications.

“…Coefficients are standardized regression coefficients. ‫ء‬ p Ͻ .05. endowed with a spiritual or religious importance) generate more goal striving (e.g., Mahoney, Carels, et al, 2005;Mahoney et al, 1999) and less goal conflict (Emmons, Cheung, & Tehrani, 1998). Third, the evidence for the proposition that religiousness promotes self-monitoring is mixed.…”

Religion and Relationships in Muslim Families: A Qualitative Examination of Devout Married Muslim Couples

“…strong marriages [34,35]. Quantitative studies have also reported that couples who perceived their marriage as "sacred" experienced lower levels of marital conflict and higher overall levels of marital satisfaction [22]. Indeed, Burr and colleagues posited in their recent volume, Sacred Matters, that viewing any aspect of life as "sacred" endows it with unique power and force, but that this may be especially true with marriage and family relationships, as Mahoney has documented [1].…”

“…Mahoney et al found that couples who pray for each other and attend religious services together seem to experience better marital quality [22]. Shared religious practice also appears to help couples with preventing and resolving marital conflict [23].…”

Personal goals, life meaning, and virtue: Wellsprings of a positive life.

“…Spiritual strivings were also rated as more important, requiring more effort, and engaged in for more intrinsic reasons than were nonspiritual strivings. Investing goals with a sense of sacredness confers on them a power to organize experience and to promote well-being that is absent in nonsacred strivings (Mahoney et al, 1999).…”