This explains why they feel almost physically connected to their spouses. In romantic marriages, the groundwork is the couple's sex life. Although for many of these couples the intensity and frequency of sex diminish over time, sex remains central to the marriage. This physical connection keeps them together.
The second type of marriage is identified as the rescue marriage. "Although every good marriage provides comfort and healing for past unhappiness, in a successful rescue marriage the partners" early experiences have been traumatic" (Wallerstein, 1995, p.22). Couples involved in rescue marriages begin their matrimony with wounds that during the course of the marriage, healing takes the leading role. One fifth of the couples in the study fell into the category that the authors call a rescue marriage. Many young men and women today have grown up fearing that because they were abused as a child, they are destined to repeat those sufferings throughout their adulthood too. Here, with the rescue marriage is a direct confirmation that people who have suffered great pain can put it behind and have a stable, rewarding marriage. All close relationships have the power to bring about psychological change. When two people with happy early experiences marry, the relationship can bring about change toward even greater harmony. In the rescue marriages these psychological changes stand out dramatically because of their magnitude. .
Wallerstein calls the third type of marriage a companionate marriage. This may be the most common form of marriage among younger couples, as it reflects the social changes of the last two decades. "The ground rules of this type of marriage are friendship, equality, and the value system of the women's movement, with its corollary that the male role, too, needs to change" (Wallerstein, 1995, p.22). None of the couples in the study who married in the 1950s had companionate marriages.