Religious Heterogamy and Partnership Quality in Later Life

Abstract

Objectives: Prior research points to the importance of couple-level religious similarity for multiple dimensions of partnership quality and stability but few studies have investigated whether this association holds for older couples.

Method: The current article uses dyadic data from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP), a representative sample of 953 individuals age 62-91 plus their marital or cohabiting partners. We use modified actor-partner interdependence models.

Results: Religious service heterogamy predicted lower relationship happiness and satisfaction. Both associations were partially explained by the fact that religiously dissimilar partners report relatively little free time in joint activity. Further, religiously heterogamous couples had less frequent sex and engaged in less nonsexual touch than their more similar counterparts.

Conclusions: Taken together, results attest to the ongoing importance of religious similarity-service attendance, in particular-for partnership quality in late life. Future research is needed to more fully examine which mechanisms account for these patterns.

Keywords: Actor–partner interdependence models; Church attendance; Heterogamy; Marital quality; Partnership quality; Religion; Sex.

Figure 1.

Actor–partner interdependence model for the effect of religious heterogamy on partnership quality in older adult couples. Note: ^aReligious attendance heterogamy is considered the independent variable most likely to be confounded by health heterogamy or to be mediated by partnered coactivity and/or spousal network overlap. For the sake of simplicity, additional individual- and couple-level covariates are not presented here.