Wilson's lecture focuses on healthy marriages

Focusing her research on what helps couples maintain healthy marital relationships on family owned or operated farms, Wilson said she spent an extensive amount of time with the couples, who were married between 13 and 28 years, and interviewed them through the technique of narrative inquiry. The subjects’ real names were not used for privacy. She looked for specific words repeated during the interviews and coded the words in the transcriptions as an analytic tool to identify themes.

From her research, she enumerated four themes: A deep sense of connection, family unity and togetherness, importance of shared values, relationship unity through interdependence and balance.

Wilson said she discovered all four couples felt a spiritual, existential connection to the land including a keen sense of weather changes. One wife reminisced that she felt more connected to her husband before cell phones when she regularly used intuition about what he needed.

Extended family members and in-laws were also invested in helping. One wife’s father, before his death, came back to the farm each summer to paint the outbuildings even though he was not involved in agriculture.

Integrating family time and work was especially important during harvesting and planting seasons, the two most stressful times of the year, Wilson said.  She added that children could receive time with their father by checking irrigation settings early in the morning, having lunch with him or a just taking a trip around the field together.

“Our kids were there. They grew up in a barn. They grew up in the front seat of a pickup, checking cows, and that’s just an everyday occurrence. A lot of bonding can go on when you spend so many hours a day together. And not only that, but their grandparents were there as well, which was pretty special,” said one woman Wilson interviewed.

Wilson said the word respect recurred most frequently in the theme of shared values. The subjects said even if they were upset with each other, they still respected one another.

Regarding interdependence and balance, Wilson said the couples in her study recognized the need for their own spaces and to have some time away from the farm even if it was just a trip to town for ice cream.

One wife realized when she was mistaken when she resented the amount of time her husband spent in the field during the early years of their marriage. She shifted from feeling that he was away because he didn’t want to be with her and the children to understanding that his desire to provide a living for them was the way he was showing his love for them.

“She said, ‘All of a sudden it hit me. What I needed to do was look out my husband’s window,’” Wilson said.