Introduction Themes Embedded in This Volume Conceptual Frameworks for Dyadic Coping Must Be Dyadic Know Thy Stressor Dyadic Coping with Stress Is a Process Dyadic Coping within an Interpersonal Framework

Over the past 30 years, the lion’s share of research on stress and coping has focused almost exclusively on the coping efforts used by individuals, describing types or modes of coping strategies and their effects on physical and mental health outcomes. Major life stressors do not limit their influence to individuals but instead spread out like crabgrass to affect the lives of others in the individual’s social network: family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, and even whole communities. Quite simply, people cope in the context of relationships with others. And those “others” are affected by the same stressors in a pattern of radiating effects (Kelly, 1971). Yet relatively few coping researchers have investigated how intimate partners cope with stress as a couple or how the coping efforts of partners mutually influence each other. It seems that an essential step toward further clarification of the relationship between stress and health involves examining coping as it naturally occurs within the context of significant relationships, in particular, the marital or marital-type relationship. The past decade has witnessed the development of several theoretical frameworks for studying how couples cope together with life stress. Whereas there were only a few contributions published on stress and coping in couples before the 1990s, an increasing amount of theoretical and empirical work on this topic has emerged in the last decade (see Fig. 1). A number of researchers, primarily in the United States and Western Europe, became interested in how coping research could move past the individual level to