With their honeymoon and wedding behind them, newlyweds begin every-day life together. A period of adjustment ensues, spanning weeks or months, in which couple members learn how to live with one another, accept each other's idiosyncrasies, and work to forge a viable dyadic relationship. The high incidence of marital divorce or separation, reports of marital stress and discord, and the use of professional counseling services suggest that monogamous couples in contemporary society often fail to cope successfully with both long-run and early problems in their relationships. Even in marriages that eventually succeed, initial adjustments can be challenging, complex, and stressful.

Hard as it may be for monogamous relationships to gain a firm footing, the earliest stage of marriage in a polygynous marriage is fraught with even greater challenges. Not only must newlyweds learn to relate to one another, but other wives are also in the picture. New and complex relationships emerge from the new configuration of wives, or between the husband and his established wives and new wife. One husband used the atom to describe the early days and months of a new marriage. Before a new wife joins a plural family, the family is like a stable atom, with the husband at the nucleus, and the wives revolving around him like electrons. But when a new wife joins a family, the stability of the family is disrupted and thrown into turmoil.