Healthy Relationships: Where’s the Research?

Abstract

The author reviewed research on healthy couple relationships from the past decade. Few research articles exist targeting healthy relationships within the context of couple relationships. The existing research on healthy relationships targets a variety of populations other than couples, for example, relationships involving adolescent sexual assault and teacher-child relationships. To obtain a description of a healthy couple relationship, the review was expanded to include concepts such as marital happiness, marital stability, and marital quality. The existing literature on couple relationships has focused more on the use of stability or quality as a means of defining couple relationships than on examining healthy couples specifically. Research on marital quality is reviewed, and the results are compared in an attempt to describe a healthy couple relationship.