In this study, the predictive power of relationships with parents, peers, and romantic partners in adolescence on the marital quality in adulthood is examined. It is hypothesized that relationships in adolescence both inside and outside of the family of origin influence the development of romantic relations later in life. In addition, marital quality in early and middle adulthood is predicted from aspects of the adult life situation.

The study draws on German longitudinal data that covers more than 30 years of development. It was conducted first in the 1980ies with adolescents aged 12 to 16. In 2002 and 2012 the study was resumed, when participants were 35 and 45 years of age, respectively. The sample consists of nearly 700 participants. They reported on their relationships in adolescence as well as on their life situation and marital quality in adulthood. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted.

Results demonstrate that the quality of relationships with parents, peers, and romantic partners in adolescence contributes uniquely to the development of romantic relations later in life. For example, a conflict-ridden parent-child relation in adolescence proves to be associated with an elevated risk for conflict and dissatisfaction in the adult love relationship. However, the predictive power of adolescent variables is quite modest, being somewhat stronger for women than for men. Generally, aspects of the adult life situation (e.g. parenthood) have a greater impact on marital quality than early social experiences. Additional analyses will test if the influence of adolescent relationships decreases with increasing age of the participants.

Religious faith is often found to have a positive impact on relationships, in terms of commitment, coping and marital generosity, and to be particularly salient to older women. This study investigates whether, in a religiously homogenous yet secularising microstate, faith still matters to relationship satisfaction; what factors predict this; and whether faith influences couple agreement on various relationship aspects.

This study is based on the 2015 relationships survey by the National Centre for Family Research in Malta, based on a 33-item questionnaire administered to a random stratified sample of the population through telephone interviews. The subset of 1369 cases in this study includes all respondents in couple relationships.

Those for whom faith matters to their relationship reported significantly higher relationship satisfaction, though the effect was small (p = 0.03, r = -.05). Only three among numerous variables made a unique significant contribution to whether faith mattered - being married had the highest odds ratio (8.04, p =.03) followed by being older than 60 (2.78, p =.03) and being female (1.73, p =.03). Those for whom faith mattered had significantly higher mean levels of agreement on the demonstration of affection (z = -2.471, p = .13), children’s upbringing (z = -2.883, p =.004) and managing family finance (z = -2.990, p =.003) but did not differ in other examined areas.

This study sheds further light on age and gender differences in the salience of faith to relationships, and proposes further research on how faith affects couple agreement in key relational areas.

In Western societies, the borders of gender role related expectations have become vague, meaning that couples must negotiate, plan and personally carry out more and more aspects in their lives. These changes have made couples’ relationships and family life more diverse but also fragile. The changes have been especially precipitous in former socialist countries, like Estonia, which have witnessed dramatic and overwhelming changes in the political, economic and social environment while striving to adopt Western values. All this has also affected the family institution, e.g. since 1998 in Estonia more than half of children are born outside of marriage. In the current paper, we study how this complex situation has changed couples’ relationships and family related attitudes and how well people have adopted egalitarian values. Using qualitative methods, semi-structured interviews with married and cohabiting couples (N=13) were conducted. Our results show that the loss of traditional gender role related expectations has led to ambivalence in couples’ relationships. Although couples seemingly have embraced egalitarian values, traditional gender role related expectations are still deeply embedded. This also supports the idea of norms and counter-norms. For instance, it is considered appropriate for women to start a conversation about marriage, yet it is still believed that the marriage proposal itself should only be made by men. We conclude that family formation pathways are related to the gender role expectations, which in turn are highly ambivalent.

Despite longer life expectancy and thus an increasing extent of common time of living together, previous research has paid more attention on emotional closeness between couples in young adulthood than in old age. However, regarding the phenomenon of ageing societies, the paper focuses on elderly European partnerships and addresses the following questions: (1) How close are European couples in old age?, (2) Are there gender- and/or country-specific differences regarding emotional bonds within partnerships? and (3) Which circumstances concerning the individual, the partnership, the family and the context can explain a situation of closeness or distance? The analysis are based on the social network module as part of the 4th wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (2010/11) including 37,000 respondents from 16 countries. The results indicate that in general, almost 80 percent named the respective partner as an important member to discuss things that happen to them, bad or good. Besides, there are partially huge gender and country differences. While in all observed European countries, men report more often of such an emotional relationship to his partner/wife than women, the country-specific pattern is less clear or simple. Hereby, men and women especially in Austria and Hungary show the closest and particular French couples the lowest emotional closeness. Furthermore, multilevel logistic regressions provide relevant insights to understand such a situation, in general and especially for men and women.

Elderly couples have endured together the struggles, conflicts and decisions of a linked life (Elder 1987, Wiley 1988, Gottman 2000). With age they increasingly face health burdens, decrease in well-being and loss of abilities such as self-regulation (Vogel 2013, Gerstorf 2010). Couples cope with these age-related decrements by „compensation through collaboration“ (Dixon 2011, Landis 2013). This potentially creates dependence. Health strain might require couples to re-establish their dyadic “homeostasis”, roles and division of labor (Korpoolar 2013). As couples have been socialized more 'traditionally', this is highly relevant (Ferree 1990, Wilkie).

We used a parallel, convergent mixed-methods design with quantitative cross-sectional data (N=170, 76.91 years, marriage duration 46.48 years) and open-ended, qualitative interviews (N=11 couples, 1.5-2.5h) to examine couples' conflicts and roles in late life. Why do conflicts arise, how do they look and how are they resolved? How egalitarian are these couples, which role dynamics do they have and how gendered are they?

Conflicts are partly resolved functionally. However, the positivity of conflicts is mixed. It is still difficult to address conflicts. Gender makes surprisingly quantitatively no difference. Role patterns are egalitarian and beneficial for conflict dynamics, although past inequality still plays a role. Furthermore, qualitative interviews revealed retrospectively gendered dyadic life courses, but with a comparatively dyadic approach.

The question remains, what happens with conflicts and roles during Fourth Age, when couples have to adjust to further functional limitations and potential loss of autonomy?