The Impact of Relationship Wellness Checkups With Lesbian Couples

Relationship health impacts many facets of both physical and mental well-being, including depression, heart health, and even children’s health. For a variety of reasons, distressed couples often delay entering therapy despite its value in supporting wellness and preventing distress. One early intervention program, the marriage checkup (MC), aims to keep healthy couples healthy with a brief supportive checkup. The MC is based on motivational interviewing principles, and research on MC shows the program has a positive impact on relationship satisfaction, prevents decline, and improves health on other variables such as intimacy. However, past research on MCs has only focused on heterosexual couples. As such, this study explores the research question, “What is the impact of a relationship wellness checkup on lesbian couples’ relationship satisfaction?” Using a single-subject design, specifically concurrent multiple-baseline, multiple-probe design, this study extends MC research to an underrepresented population. After conducting checkups over 10 weeks with three lesbian couples, findings show the intervention had a medium effect on satisfaction (nonoverlap of all pairs = .66). These results indicate a relationship checkup can increase satisfaction for lesbian couples. The findings also suggest checkups with lesbian couples can have a comparable impact to their use with heterosexual couples. This study concludes by advocating that the checkup may help lesbian couples stay healthy, providing support for this marginalized group of couples in a time of prejudice