Reconstructing Marital Closeness While Caring for a Spouse With Alzheimer’s

Abstract

This study examines how people caring for a spouse with Alzheimer’s disease reconstruct the meaning of closeness within their marriage. In-depth interviews were conducted with 13 men and 15 women. The authors discovered that significant changes in the social identity of the impaired spouse may have important implications for how caregivers view their marriage and their ability to reestablish a sense of marital closeness. The majority of caregivers experienced significant disruptions in their marriage as a result of their respective spouse’s dementia. The authors further discovered that the caregiver wives in the study sample were more likely than caregiver husbands to report that perceived changes in the spouses’ identity altered how they identified themselves within their marriage, leading to longer term disruption of marital closeness. The findings suggest that retaining a sense of marital closeness is often quite difficult for caregiving spouses, pointing to the need for specific types of caregiver education and support.