Spiritual Intimacy, Spiritual One-upmanship, and Marital Conflict Across the Transition to Parenthood

Dyadic discussions that directly tap into spouses' views on spirituality and religiousness (S/R) represent an understudied but important facet of marital functioning that may be tied, for better or worse, to marital conflict and resolution processes. This study used longitudinal data gathered from 164 married couples across the transition to parenthood (TtP) to address this possibility. Specifically, during late pregnancy and when their infant was 3, 6, and 12 months old, husbands and wives completed measures about both spouses' spiritual intimacy (i.e., self-disclosure and support of partner's disclosures about spirituality) and spiritual one-upmanship (i.e., relying on spiritual and religious [dis]beliefs and opinions to assert superiority in conflicts). Criterion variables were the frequency of marital conflict and both partners' use of collaborative, hostile, and stalemating communication strategies during marital conflicts. Using fixed-effects regression models with both predictors entered, we found that greater spiritual intimacy by wives and husbands predicted less frequent conflict (p < .01), more collaborative communication by husbands (p < .01) and less stalemating (p < .01) by both spouses. Wives' spiritual intimacy also predicted more collaboration and less verbal hostility by wives (p < .01). By contrast, greater spiritual one-upmanship by both spouses predicted greater stalemating by both spouses (p < .05) and verbal hostility by husbands (p < .05). The findings indicate that 2 contrasting types of S/R dialogues are differentially linked to disagreements and conflict-resolution skills after accounting for stable aspects of the couples across the TtP (e.g., personality traits). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).