Building on previous examinations of marital outcomes in the empty nest phase that have been based on surveys of individuals (primarily wives), the current study examined the direct effect of no longer living with children in the home (vs. continuing to live with children) on husbands’ and wives’ ratings of marital closeness as well as their perceived health. The study also tested whether couples’ empty nest status moderated the associations between spouses’ marital closeness and health. Analyses were based on 3,765 mixed-sex couples drawn from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. Dyadic multilevel modeling and actor–partner interdependence models were used to test hypotheses. Results indicated that, accounting for known covariates, being in the empty nest was directly linked with both husbands and wives reporting higher levels of marital closeness and with wives (only) reporting better health. Moderating findings were less consistent, with the single reliable moderation result indicating that wives’ perceived health was improved at higher levels of their husbands’ marital closeness only among couples who were still living with children in the home. Clinical implications and future research directions are discussed.

基于之前基于对个人（主要是妻子）的调查对空巢阶段的婚姻结果进行的检查，当前的研究考察了不再与孩子同住（与继续与孩子同住）的直接影响关于丈夫和妻子对婚姻亲密程度的评价以及他们认为的健康状况。该研究还测试了夫妻的空巢状态是否调节了配偶的婚姻亲密程度与健康之间的关联。分析基于从威斯康星纵向研究中抽取的 3,765 对异性伴侣。二元多层次建模和参与者-合作伙伴相互依赖模型用于检验假设。结果表明，考虑到已知的协变量，处于空巢状态与丈夫和妻子报告更高水平的婚姻亲密关系以及（仅）妻子报告更好的健康状况直接相关。调节结果不太一致，唯一可靠的调节结果表明，只有在家中仍与孩子同住的夫妻中，妻子的健康感知在丈夫的婚姻亲密程度较高时得到改善。讨论了临床意义和未来的研究方向。