When I graduated from high school in Reno Nevada in the mid-1950s, Betty Friedan had yet to publish The Feminine Mystique (1963), which is often credited as sparking a second women’s revolution equal to that of suffrage. At this time the revolution was already in progress, for I, along with many other young women, had already adopted many of the views Friedan was to express. We had rejected the assumption that all women would find their life’s fulfillment in domestic household chores and caring for a husband and children. I agreed with Friedan before she wrote it that women who married immediately after graduating from high school were volunteering to stint their lives at an early age.

If at any time during my professional career I had been asked, “What do you consider your most important scientific contribution?” I would have said, “The next one!” Like the Biblical Lot, I believe that looking back can be an unrewarding distraction from current endeavors. As I now glance in my rear view mirror, I see only a long stream of “nexts” in the general areas of interpersonal attraction and close relationships. No one piece of work stands out as “most” important, or even as particularly important in itself. I must hope that if the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts, it at least is not significantly less.

Identifying your most important contribution would be difficult in any case because scientific contributions are rarely made by one person alone. Any contribution attributed to me has been the result of collaboration (formal or informal) with others, and might have never been made without their knowledge and effort. A useful piece of advice to a young aspiring researcher might be: “Always try to work with those who have more relevant knowledge than you do and, preferably, people smarter than you are.”

My answer to another question, “How did you get the idea?” for each piece of work also remains the same as always: curiosity! Not the idle kind of curiosity, but an involuntary personal compulsion to seek the answer to a question. It is the kind of curiosity that dominates conscious thought and usually is the spawning ground for an active and organized quest to find the answer. Being captured by curiosity is not always welcome. For one thing, the search for the answer may crowd out personal relationships and previous activities, some essential to health and home. For another, failure is always a real possibility.

Success of a new pursuit is always in doubt because the answers to large questions – and most things that matter and that we are curious about are very large questions – are usually yielded by Mother Nature in a series of droplets, each one granted only in response to a small question associated with the larger question.

For those of us who believe that a science of interpersonal relationships is critical to the further development of the social and behavioral sciences as well as to the practice of relationship therapy, the longitudinal expeditions into marital relationships chronicled in this volume make an important contribution. Together with the precious few longitudinal studies of relationships conducted previously, they represent a small island of terra firma in that vast sea of studies that observe behavior at only a single point in time. Such single-shot studies, which have characterized the marital satisfaction and stability literature for many years, have “produced only a modest increment in understanding of the causes and consequences of marital success” (Glenn, 1990, p. 818).

More immediately and personally, these authors' accounts inspire feelings of admiration for those who have undertaken the arduous longitudinal march and returned to tell the tale. Who cannot wince in sympathy with Kurdek's (this volume) aside that he came to dread the publication of yet another set of marriage licenses, signaling the opportunity to recruit additional research participants but also the investment of yet more time and tedium in their pursuit? And who cannot be impressed with the grit required to track down and enlist the further cooperation of couples last seen more than a decade ago (e.g., Hill & Peplau, this volume; Huston & Houts, this volume)? And so who can put this volume down without appreciating why, as Lindahl, Clements, and Markman (this volume) observe, so few young investigators, confronted with the publish-immediately-or-perish pressures of academe as well as ever-diminishing research funds, are electing to take the longitudinal route to furthering our understanding of relationships?

I take it as a given, then, that the contributors to this volume deserve battle ribbons, not kibitzing from spectators however well meaning.