Modeling the Relationship between Marital Intimacy, Early Maladaptive Schemas, and Distress Tolerance in Married Individuals

Marital conflicts are a pattern of emotional, sexual, intellectual, economic, and socially disturbed interactions among spouses. Increasing marital conflicts and the risk of separation of couples have led family researchers to conduct studies on the role of conflicting emotions in family interactions and marriage to find strategies to improve distress tolerance in couples. Distress tolerance (respecting marriage) is among the skills that can assist couples to increase adaptation to problems. Accordingly, distress tolerance is common in studies related to constructing marital conflicts. The current study aimed to model the relationship between marital intimacy, Early Maladaptive Schemas (EMSs), and distress tolerance in married individuals.

The present descriptive–analytical and correlational research implemented structural equation modeling. The statistical population of this study included all married men and women with marital conflict (based on the couples' self–declared marital conflict & the confirmation of counselors of family counseling centers), referring to family counseling centers in Kerman City, Iran, in 2019. To increase accuracy, sampling was performed based on gender and share of each urban area from the 4 regions of north, south, east, and west of Kerman. Furthermore, 15–20 subjects are required per apparent variable in the modeling research; accordingly, 340 individuals were needed; however, for further confidence and considering the fallout and uncompleted questionnaires, 428 subjects were selected by purposive and convenience sampling methods. In addition, considering the odds of losing samples during sampling, 220 women and 220 men were considered, who were divided into 55 women and 55 males per urban area. In practice, 217 and 211 questionnaires were collected among women and men, respectively. After removing incomplete questionnaires, the number of acceptable samples for analysis equaled 384 (192 females & 192 males). The inclusion criteria of the study included experiencing permanent marriage for at least one year, not having biopsychological illnesses, such as depression, bipolar disorder, and anxiety (based on medical records review), and the age range of 20–60 years. The exclusion criteria were failure to answer >10% of the questions. Data collection tools included the Distress Tolerance Scale (Simmons and Gahler, 2005), the Marital Intimacy Questionnaire (Walker and Thompson, 1983), and Young Early Maladaptive Schemas Scale (Young, 1990). The obtained data were analyzed using structural equation modeling and Pearson correlation coefficient in SPSS and AMOS. The significance level of the tests was considered 0.05.

The present study results indicated that disconnection/rejection domain (β=–0.32, p<0.001) and impaired inhibition domain (β=–0.31, p<0.001) had a negative and inverse effect, and the other–directedness domain (β=0.31, p<0.001) had a positive and direct effect on marital intimacy. Furthermore, impaired function domain (β=–0.14, p<0.001), impaired inhibition domain (β=–0.15, p<0.001), and disconnection/rejection domain (β=–0.21, p<0.001) had a negative and inverse effect. Moreover, marital intimacy (β=0.47, p<0.001) had a positive and direct effect on distress tolerance. The goodness of fit indices supported the optimal fit of the research model with the collected data (x2/df=4.00, CFI=0.96, GFI=0.95, AGFI=0.93, RMSEA=0.07).

The collected data indicated the moderating role of marital intimacy concerning EMSs incompatible with distress tolerance among married individuals.