A role-sharing marriage is one in which the husband and wife share equally the rights and responsibilities traditionally assigned to one or the other sex as part of their ideal family role, in the areas of breadwinning, decisionmaking, and domestic chores. A marriage style based on sexual equality is rarely found in practice and subsequently has been mostly unstudied by sociologists. Benefits and problems in such marriages were examined among 31 couples involved in successful role-sharing relationships. Data collection techniques included several face-to-face interviews with husbands and wives, time-budgets, personality inventories, and attitudinal questionnaires. Results indicate that role-sharing enhances self-actualization and better family relations, at least for certain couples. At the same time, there exist considerable social barriers to the widespread abandonment of traditional family roles. For instance, vestiges of sex-role socialization make it difficult for couples to equitably share responsibility for all domestic chores, inflexible work hours make sharing childcare difficult, and traditional attitudes about children's needs stand in the way of fathers participating more in childrearing. These barriers can be expected to disintegrate with time. (Author/JLL)