Relational Ethics as a Predictor of Success and Failure in Marriage

Finding effective variables in marriage success has always been the considered by counselors and psychotherapists. Relational ethics refers to trust, justice, loyalty, responsibility and merit in relationships and affects the fairness of relationships. Relational ethics has two vertical (Ethics in the family of origin) and horizontal (Ethics between partners) dimensions. The aim of the present study was to determine relational ethics as a predictor of success and failure of women's marriage. The studied population of the current research was women following divorce procedure and normal women in Ahvaz city. The research sample consisted of 150 women following divorce and 150 normal women whom were selected by available sampling method. The participants completed the relational ethics scale and demographic information questionnaire created by the researcher. In this research, Discriminant analysis was used to analyze the data. The results showed that the linear combination of the components of relational ethics in the family of origin and the components of relational ethics in marital relationships were  strong predictor of the success and failure of women's marriages, and the discriminant analysis method showed that the components of trust and justice, loyalty and entitlement in family of  origin and the components of trust and justice and loyalty in marital relationships discriminahted success and failure of marriage individually. However, the component of entitlement in marital relationships could not discriminate success and failure of marriage individually. Horizontal relational ethics has a stronger predictive power than vertical relational ethics; therefore, it can be concluded that relational ethics has a decisive role in predicting family functions and the durability of marital relations. Therefore, considering the effect of relational ethics, it is suggested that the mentioned variable be taken into consideration in the stability of marriage.