The time has come to talk of many things: a commentary on Kurdek (1998) and the emerging field of marital processes in depression

The improvement made by L.A. Kurdek on the data analysis produced by Frank D. Fincham and colleagues cannot be seen as accounting for the discrepant longitudinal or concurrent links between depression and marital quality. When all disturbance terms were permitted to correlate freely across spouses, there were signs of a gender difference in Fincham's data but no indication of any cross-lagged effects in the Kurdek data. It has been possible to identify a number of factors that may affect the ability to detect any potential causal link between marital distress and depression.