Close Romantic Relationships: Maintenance and Enhancement
Purchase: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Routledge
Romantic relationships require active, sustained effort to remain healthy and fulfilling over time. Most relationship research has focused on how bonds begin or how they dissolve. Far less attention has been given to the science of what keeps relationships strong across the full arc of a partnership. This edited scholarly volume addresses that gap directly.
Close Romantic Relationships: Maintenance and Enhancement, edited by John H. Harvey and Amy Wenzel, is a 408-page academic volume published by Psychology Press in 2001. It draws together contributions from leading researchers across the field of close relationships to examine the mechanisms, behaviors, and clinical applications that support lasting romantic bonds.
Book Details
Editors: John H. Harvey and Amy Wenzel
Publisher: Psychology Press (Taylor & Francis / Routledge)
Edition: First
Copyright: 2001
Pages: 408
eBook ISBN: 9781135659417
Print ISBN: 9780805835533
Series: The Educational Psychology Series
About the Book
Close Romantic Relationships: Maintenance and Enhancement is a comprehensive edited volume covering the mechanisms by which close romantic bonds are sustained, deepened, and protected over time. Unlike texts that focus on relationship formation or breakdown, this volume concentrates entirely on the middle period of a relationship's life, examining how partners actively maintain and enhance their connection.
The editors brought together top scholars to produce what Routledge describes as a comprehensive account of the reasons why close relationships are or are not maintained, and how those principles can be applied to current social issues and clinical interventions.
Research in this area has expanded substantially since the volume's publication. A 2023 study published in the journal Personal Relationships by researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found that relationship satisfaction functions as a critical moderating variable between maintenance behaviors and long-term commitment. Couples who accurately perceived each other's maintenance efforts showed stronger commitment outcomes, reinforcing the theoretical frameworks this volume helped establish.
The volume is organized around two major sections. Part I addresses theoretical and empirical models of relationship maintenance. Part II applies those models to real-world social issues and clinical settings. Together, the two parts offer a full account of what relationship science knows about maintaining and enhancing close romantic bonds.
Topics Covered in the Volume
The editors organized the book to cover a broad range of constructs central to relationship science. Contributors explore self-expansion theory as a driver of relationship vitality, equity in close relationships, and the mechanisms through which commitment is built and sustained.
Other major topics include social support between partners, self-verification processes in intimate relationships, relational dialectics, and minding the relationship, which refers to the ongoing attentiveness partners bring to knowing and respecting one another.
The applied portion of the volume addresses communal relationships, empathic accuracy, strategic self-verification, relationship satisfaction, evolutionary psychology approaches to relationships, multicultural relationship dynamics, and the unique challenges faced by remarried families.
Clinical applications receive dedicated treatment as well. Chapters address depression in marriage, health outcomes associated with relationship quality, appetitive and aversive patterns in social interaction, and Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy as a structured evidence-based approach to relationship intervention.
Part I: Theoretical Approaches
The first section of Close Romantic Relationships presents the theoretical and empirical foundations of relationship maintenance research. Chapters in this section examine shared self-expanding activities as a mechanism for strengthening bonds, the role of commitment in sustaining motivation, and how equity perceptions influence relational behavior across time.
Self-expansion theory holds that individuals are drawn to relationships that expand their sense of self. When partners engage in novel, shared activities, those experiences generate the positive arousal and growth associated with early attraction. This section examines how couples can deliberately cultivate that expansion to maintain relational vitality.
Self-verification theory is also addressed, exploring how partners seek confirmation of their self-concepts within the relationship and how those needs interact with support, satisfaction, and long-term stability. The section on relational dialectics examines the inherent tensions in close relationships, such as autonomy versus connection, and how partners navigate these competing needs over time.
Part II: Applied Issues
The second section moves into social and clinical applications of relationship maintenance theory. Chapters address practical domains where the science of relationship maintenance intersects with real-world challenges.
Multicultural relationship dynamics receive targeted attention, reflecting the editors' commitment to situating relationship research within diverse social contexts. The chapter on remarried families addresses the structural and emotional complexity of stepfamilies and how relationship maintenance operates under those conditions.
The health chapter examines the well-documented links between relationship quality and physical health outcomes, an area of growing clinical interest. Depression in marriage is addressed as both a relational stressor and a clinical target, drawing connections between individual mental health and dyadic functioning.
The chapter on Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy presents one of the most rigorously evaluated couple therapy approaches in the literature. IBCT integrates behavioral interventions with acceptance-based strategies, offering clinicians a structured model for working with couples experiencing significant distress.
Who Should Read This Book
Close Romantic Relationships was designed for a broad academic and professional readership. Routledge identifies the book's audience as students, researchers, and professionals with an interest in the science of relationship maintenance and enhancement.
Graduate students in clinical psychology, social psychology, family studies, and counseling will find the theoretical chapters foundational to advanced study of close relationships. Researchers who study romantic bonds, relationship satisfaction, or dyadic processes will find the volume valuable both as a synthesis of key models and as a point of departure for further inquiry.
Clinicians working with couples, including marriage and family therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and clinical social workers, will benefit from the applied chapters, particularly the material on depression in marriage, health outcomes, and IBCT. Instructors teaching upper-level courses in relationships, couples therapy, or social psychology will find the volume well-suited as a primary or supplementary text.
Dr. Valerian Derlaga of Old Dominion University noted that the book fills a clear gap in the academic market for an upper-level relationships text focused specifically on close, romantic bonds. He praised the editors and contributors for their ability to disseminate complex research ideas to a broader audience.
Robert Sternberg of Yale University offered a concise assessment: "Harvey is excellent. The chapter authors include many of the top people in the field."
Contemporary Psychology described it as "a classic book to be added to the library of anyone interested in close romantic relationships."
Why This Volume Remains Relevant
The questions this volume addresses have only grown more urgent. Rising rates of relationship dissolution across many countries point to an ongoing need for rigorous, accessible research on what sustains long-term bonds.
A recent meta-analysis published in 2025 by Spengler, Johnson, and Wiebe in Psychotherapy found that structured couple interventions, including IBCT, produce long-term improvements in intimacy and relationship satisfaction, validating the clinical models the book introduced to a broader academic audience.
The foundational frameworks presented in Close Romantic Relationships, including equity theory, self-expansion, self-verification, minding, and relational dialectics, continue to appear in current research and clinical training. The volume served as an early, organized synthesis of those models at a time when the field lacked a dedicated text on maintenance and enhancement.
A 2023 systematic review published in Personal Relationships noted that relationship maintenance processes include a wide range of activities and cognitions that romantic partners engage in to sustain or enhance their relationships, with equity, openness, positivity, social network use, and task sharing among the most consistently studied dimensions. These are precisely the constructs the Harvey and Wenzel volume organized and clarified for a generation of relationship researchers.
The fact that Contemporary Psychology called the book a classic reflects its position as a standard reference point for anyone studying or teaching this area of relationship science.
Continue Exploring: Related Work by Amy Wenzel
Close Romantic Relationships: Maintenance and Enhancement is one of several books in which Amy Wenzel has contributed to the scholarly literature on relationships, psychotherapy, and clinical intervention.
Readers interested in the clinical application of relationship maintenance science will find the companion volume A Clinician's Guide to Maintaining and Enhancing Close Relationships, a natural extension of this work. Published in 2002, also edited by Harvey and Wenzel, that volume focuses specifically on how therapists address maintenance challenges in clinical settings, including depression, anxiety, alcohol use, and forgiveness in couples.
For a broader view of Dr. Wenzel's scholarly contributions across cognitive behavioral therapy, perinatal mental health, suicide prevention, and close relationships research, the complete books list presents her full publication record.
To learn more about Dr. Wenzel's clinical background, academic appointments, and editorial roles, her biography page provides a full overview of her training, research contributions, and the development of Therapeutic Relationship-Focused CBT.
Purchase Close Romantic Relationships
This volume is available in print and eBook through the following retailers:
Buy on Amazon | Buy on Barnes and Noble | Buy on Routledge
Working with a Clinician Who Understands Relationship Science
Research on romantic relationship maintenance consistently finds that accurate partner perception, shared positivity, and sustained commitment are central to long-term relationship health. Understanding what that science says is one thing. Applying it in the context of real-world distress, depression, or life transitions is another.
If you are a clinician seeking a grounded, research-informed framework for working with couples or with individuals whose relationship functioning is affected by anxiety, depression, or perinatal challenges, Dr. Wenzel's clinical work brings that scholarship directly into practice. If you are exploring whether individualized, evidence-based therapy is a good fit for your current situation, you are welcome to reach out through the contact page to learn more about the next steps.
