Interactive Stress and Coping Around Parenting: Explaining Trajectories of Change in Intimate Relationships Over the Life Course

Parental status is one of the most important contextual features that shape the quality and dynamics of long-term intimate relationships over time. In this chapter, we build on a stress and life course perspective to analyze in-depth interviews with long-term lesbian and married heterosexual couples. Our goal is to explore (1) the interactive processes through which partners come to appraise parenting experiences as stressful (or not), (2) predominant strategies that couples develop to cope with potentially stressful parenting experiences, and (3) how particular interactive stress appraisal and coping strategies are associated with upturns and downturns in the quality of intimate relationships over the life course. We emphasize that the perception of stress and strategies of coping with stress are interactive, as well as individual, processes within the context of intimate relationships.