Conclusion

What might the new Secretary of Health and Human Services learn from reading this chapter? What steps are needed to improve relationships, build strong families, have healthy children, and maintain a prosperous nation? Our discussion provides only an introduction to this topic, but some lessons stand out clearly. First, interventions for relationships can have diverse goals (e.g., prevention, improvement, treatment), target populations (e.g., adolescents, younger couples, established couples), and settings (e.g., the therapist’s office, religious organizations, the workplace). Adopting a strategy that encompasses all the possible opportunities for relationship growth and improvement seems most promising.

Second, notable progress has been made in developing therapeutic models that capture key phenomena in relationships. In this chapter and elsewhere we have learned about the rich body of research that has accumulated about relationships, and we have seen how that knowledge contributes to effective couples therapy. This basic knowledge is valuable in its own right, and it provides a foundation for developing and refining the next generation of therapeutic approaches.

Third, the prevailing view about strengthening relationships assumes that a professional will be interacting in some way with couples. This approach probably has real benefits, but it might also limit the possible ways of helping. Many other indirect ways of supporting couples and families should be explored, such as reforming the workplace, improving wages and neighborhoods, and providing low-cost health care. In addition, Internet resources can be developed to enable couples to get useful, reliable information whenever they need it.

Intimate relationships are a force of nature, and the purpose of therapeutic and educational interventions is to harness their power and remove the obstacles that stand in their way. Progress in promoting intimacy emerges from a combination of basic research on how relationships work naturally and applied research on how to make them work better. As we learn more and more about how (and how not) to improve relationships, we go back to the drawing board, ask new questions, and devise new intervention strategies that will help more couples gain the benefits that can only come from deep human connections.