Thrice Told Tales: Married Couples Tell Their Stories

Abstract

Thrice Told Tales: Married Couples Tell Their Stories. Diane Holmberg, Terri L. Orbuch, and Joseph Veroff. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 2004. 231 pp. ISBN 0-520-21826-4. $69.95 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). Scholars have increasingly acknowledged that quantitative and qualitative methodologies provide uniquely valuable information about the widely varied social phenomena we study. Still, many researchers confine themselves, often building a body of work that falls in one or the other of these two methodological approaches. In their book, Thrice Told Tales: Married Couples Tell Their Stories, Diane Holmberg, Terri Orbuch, and Joseph Veroff break these boundaries and present a study based on a blend of both qualitative and quantitative data that provides a glimpse of how married couples make their marital relationships meaningful and how those constructed meanings are related to overall marital well-being. Before delving into the central question of the relationship between marital happiness and the stories couples construct about their marriages, Holmberg et al. situate their study in the diverse tradition of qualitative, interpretive social science and narrative analysis in particular. This broad field of inquiry has witnessed significant developments in recent years in ways that this project does not address. However, this current effort to explore these marriage narratives underscores the fact that narrative analyses are reaching an ever-widening audience. Holmberg et al. have been at work on the Early Years of Marriage project at the University of Michigan for nearly 20 years. This larger project involved interviews with married couples in Years 1 through 4, Year 7, and Year 16 of their marriages. Thrice Told Tales utilizes data from in-depth but loosely structured, face-to-face interviews with the couples in Years 1, 3, and 7. At each interview, the couple was asked to tell the researcher the step-by-step story of their relationship, specifically addressing their courtship, wedding, honeymoon, current married life, and future life. First, the authors present the features and qualities of the couples' stories in Year 1. In the following three chapters, they consider changes in these stories by comparing newlywed narratives with stories provided in Years 3 and 7. Next, the researchers explore the relationship between marital happiness and certain narrative features and also address gender and ethnic variations in the marriage narratives. They conclude by considering what was learned from this study about both marriage and the narrative approach. Various qualities of the narratives were assessed including the dramatic flair and degree of integration in the stories themselves. To the researchers' surprise, couples' stories were neither very dramatic in style or content nor were they very coherent (with a clear plot structure from beginning to end). …