320 Chapter 9of the division of labor in the family. This
topic will be discussed in more depth in Chap-
ter 11. Second, wives sacrifice personal leisure
time (Canary & Wahba, 2006). For example,
at the end of the day when both husband and
wife are sitting down watching television, the
wife is likely to be folding laundry or creating
a grocery list at the same time.
Emotion skills are another way of main-
taining relationships.Emotion skillsrefer to the
management of one’s own and one’s partner’s
emotions during interactions. Softening the
delivery of a negative message, being open and
receptive to others’ communication, anger di-
rected at the behavior rather than the person
are examples of emotion skills. In a study of
married couples discussing an area of dis-
agreement, the display of emotion skills was
associated with marital satisfaction for both
women and men (Mirgain & Cordova, 2007).
Women scored higher than men on some—
but not all—domains of emotion skills.
In married couples, sexual activity can
be construed as a maintenance behavior.
Sexual activity is both a source of marriage
vitality and a source of marriage conflict. In-
terviews with couples who had been married
for over seven years revealed that sexual ac-
tivity was a barometer of a healthy marriage
(Elliott & Umberson, 2008). Couples agreed
that the main conflict over sex was in terms
of frequency and that husbands desired sex
more than wives. In response to this prob-
lem, both wives and husbands made attempts
to address this problem. Wives said that they
purposely tried to become more interested in
sex, whereas husbands said that they some-
times tried to inhibit their sexual desires.
Sexual desire also was tied to the division of
labor. Men participated in household labor
in an attempt to reduce their wives’ workload
and enhance their wives’ sexual desire; and
wives said that this was effective!the preservation or maintenance of relation-
ships. Second, toward whom are these books
directed? Survey the sex of the people brows-
ing through this section of your local book-
store. As you will see in this section of the
chapter, women are typically regarded as the
caretakers of relationships.Maintenance Strategies
What do people do to keep a relationship
going? One way that couples maintain rela-
tionships is via a series of cognitive mecha-
nisms that reflect both accuracy and bias
(Luo & Snider, 2009). In terms of accuracy,
couples who have an accurate perception
of each other are happier. In terms of bias,
couples who view each other more positively
than they really are (positivity bias) and cou-
ples who perceive each other as more similar
than they really are (similarity bias) are hap-
pier. Although women show more biases than
men, the biases are equally associated with
marital satisfaction for both women and men.
Another way relationships are main-
tained is through accommodation.Gender-role
attitudesis one such domain. In both married
and cohabiting couples, when one partner is
traditional, the other partner is more likely to
become traditional and when one partner is
egalitarian, the other partner is more likely to
become egalitarian (Kalmijn, 2005). The ef-
fect of men on women is similar to the effect of
women on men, but the effects partly depend
on the nature of the view. Wives’ egalitarian
views have a stronger effect on husbands than
wives’ traditional views. And, husbands’ tra-
ditional views have a stronger effect on wives
than husbands’ egalitarian views.
There are some maintenance behaviors
that wives are especially more likely to engage
in than husbands. First, wives maintain rela-
tionships by taking on more than their shareM09_HELG0185_04_SE_C09.indd 320 6/21/11 12:40 PM