The effect of multiexponential transverse relaxation of degenerate transitions on coherence transfer phenomena in high-resoln. NMR is discussed. Dipolar relaxation of X3 and AX3 systems is considered, and the implications for multiple-quantum-filtered 2-dimensional correlation spectra of large mols. are analyzed. An expansion of the d. operator in terms of products of irreducible tensor operators is used for tracing the pathways of coherence transfer. [on SciFinder (R)]