His research focuses on how marriages change or remain stable over time, and in particular how relationship maintenance is constrained or enhanced by the contexts in which it takes place. Currently this includes research on marriages in the military, funded by the Department of Defense, and marriages in low-income populations, funded by the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development. He received the Gerald R. Miller Award for Early Career Achievement from the International Association for Relationship Research in 2004 and has twice been the recipient of the National Council on Family Relation’s Reuben Hill Research and Theory Award for outstanding contributions to family science. His textbook, Intimate Relationships (coauthored with Thomas Bradbury), will be published by W. W. Norton in January, 2010.