Designing and testing a model of some antecedents and outcomes of marital satisfaction and love

The purpose of this study was designing and testing a model of some antecedents and outcomes of marital satisfaction and love. The statistical population included all married employees of four districts of Education Organization in Ahvaz City. From this population 420 employees selected by multistage random sampling method. Instrument included Marital Satisfaction (Blum & Mehrabian, 1991), Love (Hatfield & Rapson, 1993), Gender Role Attitudes (Kaufman, 2000), Perceived Beauty (researcher-made), Value Congruency (researcher-made), Personality (Taylor & Johnson, 1966), Marital Intimacy Needs (Bagarozzi, 2001), Satisfaction with Life (Diener et al., 1985) and Job Satisfaction (Judge and Bono, 2000). The proposed model analyzed through structural equation modeling (SEM) and using SPSS-22 and AMOS-22 software packages. Results indicated that the proposed model fitted the data relatively proper. Better fit and more meaningful results were obtained by omitting 4 non-significant paths (perceived beauty and traditional gender role attitudes to love, egalitarian gender role attitudes to marital satisfaction and love) and correlating the errors of 3 paths (job satisfaction and satisfaction with life, recreational intimacy and general intimacy, recreational intimacy and love). Findings also confirmed the meditating role of intimacy in the relationships of perceived beauty, congruence of value system, gender role attitudes, contrary of fundamental personality traits, similarity of central personality traits with marital satisfaction and love. According to the findings, considering both marital satisfaction and love variables in couple therapy recommended to counselors and psychologist.