My previous post on substance use agreements—the limits or rules couples develop related to the use of drugs or alcohol—summarized recent findings suggesting that couples who discuss substance use concerns and successfully agree on shared limits are more successful at regulating use. These findings came from our recent paper (Starks & Cain, 2025) published in Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice. In this post, we take a closer look at what Starks and Cain (2025) learned about the content or types of agreements couples formed.

As a reminder, this study used data produced by 100 cisgender male participants who were members of 50 couples. (See my previous post for more details.) When a participant indicated that they had discussed substance use-related concerns with their partner or agreed on substance use limits, they were asked to describe these discussions and limits. Participants typed their responses into an open-ended field using their own words.

In order to identify important themes or characteristics in these open-ended responses, we divided the available data based on whether couples had discussed concerns and set a limit. This post focuses specifically on what we learned about the........

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