western expectation of friendship
Order ID 53563633773 Type Essay Writer Level Masters Style APA Sources/References 4 Perfect Number of Pages to Order 5-10 Pages Description/Paper Instructions
After studying this chapter, you should be able to…
- Recognize five Western expectations of friendship.
- Connect the stages of friendship development to your own.
- Recognize challenges to sustaining friendships.
- Identify advantages and disadvantages of both face-to-face and online friendships.
- Apply chapter guidelines to communicate more clearly with friends.
Introduction
How would you like to win a $1,000 scholarship? To apply, you need to write an essay on what it means to be a friend and you need to have two of your friends confirm that you are a good friend. Believe it or not, this scholarship is for real, but you also have to be from Ames, Iowa, to apply for it. The scholarship honors Sheila Walsh, one of eleven women from the class of 1981 at Ames High School in Iowa. These 11 women were friends in high school, and 10 of them remain close friends. The 11th, Sheila Walsh, died at 22. The remaining 10 friends created the scholarship to honor the friend they lost and to honor the value of long-term friendships (Zaslow, 2009; “A Scholarship,” 2009).
Like the women from Ames, most of us value friendships. We know what a comfort friends can be when we’re sad and how much they multiply our happiness when life is good. In this chapter, we explore what friendships are, how they work, and how they differ among people. To launch our discussion, we identify common features of friendship and then point out variations across cultures and social communities. Second, we explore the typical developmental path of friendships and some of the common rules for friendships. Next, we consider pressures on friendship and how we can deal with them. We then consider relationships between social media and friendship. Guidelines for effective communication between friends conclude the chapter.
The Nature of Friendship
Friendship is a unique relationship. Unlike most relationships, friendship is voluntary. Biology or legal procedures establish relationships between family members, and proximity defines neighbors and coworkers. But friends come together voluntarily. Unlike marital and family relationships, friendships lack institutionalized structure or guidelines. Legal and religious ceremonies govern marriage, and social norms and laws regulate family relationships. We have no ceremonies to recognize friendships and no formal standards to guide interaction between friends.
Will
It’s funny. Kids have ways to symbolize friendship, but adults don’t. I remember when Jimmy, down the block, and I became blood brothers. It was a big, big deal for me at 8. My sister and her best friend bought matching friendship rings and wore them until their fingers turned green. But what do we have to symbolize friendships when we grow up?
Even though there are no formal standards for friendship, people within a culture hold some fairly consistent ideas about what a friend is and what happens between friends. Regardless of race, sexual orientation, gender, age, and class, most Westerners share five basic expectations of friends and friendship (Nardi & Sherrod, 1994; Parks & Floyd, 1996b).
Willingness to Invest
Friendships grow out of personal investments, which we discussed in Chapter 8 (Branje, Frijns, Finkenauer, Engles, & Meeus, 2007; Ledbetter, Griffin & Sparks, 2007). We expect to invest time, effort, thought, and feeling in our friendships, and we may also invest materially by lending or giving money, gifts, and other items of value. The investments that we make tend to stoke our commitment to friendships.
Dennis
I really count on my buddies to be there for me. Sometimes, we talk or do stuff, but a lot of times we just hang out together. That might not sound important, but it is. Hanging out with friends is a big part of my life.
Emotional Closeness
Emotional intimacy grows out of investments, such as time, talk, and shared experiences. As people spend time together, they tend to become more comfortable being together and to have an increased sense of bonding. Although most people agree that closeness is central to friendships, sex and gender influence how we experience and express intimacy with friends.
Closeness through Dialogue
For some people, communication is the centerpiece of friendship. This is especially true for people socialized in feminine speech communities, which emphasize talk as a primary path to intimacy. In general, women see talking and listening—face-to-face or via social media—as the main activities that create and sustain closeness (Bodey & Wood, 2009; Wood, 2015; Wright, 2006). Talk between women friends tends to be disclosive and emotionally expressive (Braithwaite & Kellas, 2006; Metts, 2006b). Women discuss not only major issues but also day-to-day activities. This “small” talk isn’t unimportant because it allows friends to weave their worlds together and to understand the rhythms of each other’s life (Braithwaite & Kellas, 2006; Metts, 2006b). Out of intimate conversation, friends build a deep sense of connection.
A majority of women expect to know and be known intimately by close friends. They want friends to know and understand their inner selves, and they want to know their friends at the same emotional depth. This is also true of men who have build closeness through dialogue.
Lori Ann
My girlfriends and I know everything about each other. We tell all our feelings and don’t hold anything back. I mean, it’s total knowledge. We give updates on each new episode in our relationships, and we talk about what it means. There’s just nothing I wouldn’t tell my friends.
Reflecting feminine socialization, communication between women friends typically is responsive and supportive (Guerrero et al., 2006b; Mulac, 2006; Wood, 2010, 2014). Animated facial expressions and head movements convey involvement and emotional response in face-to-face encounters, and quick replies, often with emoticons, to text messages and online postings convey responsiveness in social media. In addition, women friends ask questions and give feedback to signal that they are following and want to know more. Women friends also tend to give emotional support to one another. They do this by accepting one another’s feelings and by staying involved in the other’s dreams, problems, and lives.
Closeness through Doing
A second way to create and express closeness is by sharing activities. Friends enjoy doing things together and doing things for one another. Closeness through doing often is the primary, but not the only, emphasis in men’s friendships (Inman, 1996; Metts, 2006b; Monsour, 2006; Swain, 1989; Wood & Inman, 1993). Given the focus on doing things together, it’s not surprising that male friends tend to engage in fewer verbal emotional disclosures (Burleson, Holmstrom, & Gilstrap, 2005) and spend more time engaging in activities (“You’ve really improved your swing.”) than female friends or male and female friends (Samter & Cupach, 1998). Sharing activities and working toward common goals(winning the game, getting the contract) build a sense of camaraderie (Inman, 1996; Walker, 2004).
Josh
The thing I like about my buddies is that we can just do stuff together without a lot of talk. Our wives expect us to talk about every feeling we have, as if that’s required to be real. I’m tight with my buddies, but we don’t have to talk about feelings all the time. You learn a lot about someone when you hunt together or coach Little League.
Josh has a good insight. We reveal ourselves and learn about others by doing things together. In the course of playing football or soccer, teammates learn a lot about one another’s courage, reliability, willingness to take risks, and self-confidence. Soldiers who fight together also discover one another’s strengths and weaknesses. Strong emotional bonds and personal knowledge can develop without verbal interaction. Intimacy through doing also involves expressing care by doing things for friends. Scott Swain (1989) says men’s friendships typically involve a give-and-take of favors. Jake helps Matt move into his new apartment, and Matt later helps Jake install a new program on his computer. Perhaps because masculine socialization emphasizes instrumental activities, men are more likely than women to see doing things for others as a primary way to say they care.
It would be a mistake to conclude that women and men are radically different in how they create intimacy. They are actually more alike than we often think (Parks & Floyd, 1996b; Wright, 2006). Although women generally place a special priority on communication, men obviously talk with their friends. Like women, men disclose personal feelings, hopes, and concerns. They simply do it less, as a rule, than women. Similarly, although men’s friendships may be more activity focused than women’s, women also do things with and for their friends and count these activities as important in friendship.
Sometimes, different emphases on instrumental and expressive behaviors lead to misunderstandings. If Myra sees intimate talk as the crux of closeness, she may not interpret Ed’s practical help in fixing her computer as indicating that he cares about her.
Yet different emphases on dialogue and doing can also enrich friendships. Many men and women enjoy friendships with members of the other sex because they find their differences stimulating. In a recent study by Aaronette White (2006), African American men said they valued close friendships with women because they could practice interpersonal communication skills with women friends, but not men friends. Men also report getting more support and attention from female than male friends (Burleson et al., 2005; Koesten, 2004).
Kaya
My husband’s life centers on doing things for me and our kids. He looks for things to do for us. Like when our son came home over break, he tuned up his car and replaced a tire. I hadn’t even noticed the tire was bad. When I wanted to return to school, he took a second job to make more money. One day, he came home with a microwave to make cooking easier for me. All the things he does for us are his way of expressing love.
Acceptance
We expect friends to accept us, including our flaws. Each of us has shortcomings, and we count on friends to accept us in spite of them. With people we don’t know well, we often feel we need to put on our best face to impress them. With friends, however, we don’t want to put up false fronts. If we feel low, we can act that way instead of faking cheerfulness. If we are upset, we don’t have to hide it. If someone dumped us, we don’t have to pretend we feel fine
For the late Captain Phil Harris of TV’s The Deadliest Catch, his work friends, and sons Josh (left) and Jake (right), the often split-second tasks to be handled on a crabbing boat required an emphasis on instrumental behaviors.
As we saw with Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs in Chapter 1, being accepted by others is important to our sense of self-worth. Most of us are fortunate enough to gain acceptance from family and friends. However, this is not always true. Some parents of gays, lesbians, and transpeople refuse to validate their children’s basic worth.
Martin
It isn’t just the homosexual who is outed. Everyone in that person’s life is affected when he comes out. My ex-wife was devastated when I told her I was gay. She felt it said something about her as a woman. My father and stepmother are homophobic. They are more fearful of how friends and family will judge them than they are concerned with my issues. My coming out was all about their embarrassment and fear.
Because social and familial acceptance sometimes is lacking for them, gender-nonconforming people may count on friends for acceptance even more than heterosexuals do (Nardi & Sherrod, 1994; Roberts & Orbe, 1996). Friendships may have heightened importance because they often substitute for families as reflected in the title of Kath Weston’s 1991 book, Families We Choose. Although lesbians, trans, bi, and gay people may depend more heavily than heterosexuals on friends for acceptance, research has not identified major differences in how their friendships operate. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual adolescents report that they are equally close to GLB and straight friends, contact them with equal frequency, and have equal hassles with them. The one difference is that GLB youth find their GLB friends are more supportive of their sexual orientation than their straight friends (Ueno, Gayman, Wright & Quantz, 2009).
Like heterosexuals, gay men and lesbians value friendship and rely on both talking and doing as paths to intimacy (Nardi & Sherrod, 1994; Parks & Floyd, 1996b).
Trust
A key component of close friendships is trust, which has two dimensions. First, trust involves confidence that others will be dependable. We count on them to do what they say they’ll do and not to do what they promise they won’t. Second, trust is rooted in the belief that a friend cares about us and our welfare. We count on friends to look out for us and to want the best for us. When we believe that both dimensions of trust are present, we feel safe sharing private information with friends, and secure in the knowledge that they will not hurt us.
Sarini
Trust is the bottom line for friends. It’s the single most important thing. It takes me a long time to really trust someone, but when I do, it’s complete. I was so hurt when a friend told another person something I told her in confidence. We still get together, but the trust is gone. I don’t tell her private things, so there’s no depth.
Like most qualities of friendship, trust develops gradually and in degrees. We learn to trust people over time as we interact with them and discover that they do what they say they will, the care about our happiness, and they don’t betray us. As trust develops, friends increasingly reveal themselves to one another. In turn, self-disclosures fuel feelings of intimacy and commitment to the friendship.
The level of trust that develops between friends depends on a number of factors. First, our individual histories influence our capacity to trust others. Recalling the discussion of attachment styles in Chapter 2, you’ll remember that early interactions with caregivers shape our beliefs about others. For those of us who received consistently loving and nurturing care, trusting others is not especially difficult. On the other hand, some children do not get that kind of care. If caring is absent or inconsistent, the capacity to trust others is jeopardized.
James
It’s tough for me to really trust anybody, even my closest friends or my girlfriend. It’s not that they aren’t trustworthy. The problem’s in me. I just have trouble putting full faith in anyone. When my parents had me, Dad was drinking, and Mom was thinking about divorce. He got in Alcoholics Anonymous, and they stayed together, but I wonder if what was happening between them meant they weren’t there for me. Maybe I learned from the start that I couldn’t count on others.
Family scripts also influence how much and how quickly we trust others. Did your parents have many friends? Did you see them enjoying being with their friends? Were their friends often in your home? Basic scripts from families, although not irrevocable, often affect the ease and extent of our ability to trust and our interest in investing in friendships.
Willingness to take risks also influences trust in relationships. In this sense, trust is a leap into the unknown. To emphasize the risk in trusting, it has been said that “trust begins where knowledge ends” (Lewis & Weigert, 1985, p. 462). The risk involved may explain why we trust only selected people.
Support
We expect friends to support us. There are many ways to show support. Common to the various types of support is the relationship message, “I care about you.” Often, we support friends by listening to their problems. The more mindfully we listen, the more support we provide. How we respond also shows support. For example, it’s supportive to offer to help a friend with a problem or to talk through options. Another way we support friends is by letting them know they’re not alone. When we say, “I’ve felt that way, too” or “I’ve had the same problem,” we signal that we understand their feelings. Having the grace to accept friends when they err or hurt us is also a way to show support and validate their worth.
Another important form of support is availability. Sometimes we can’t do or say much to ease a friend’s unhappiness. However, we can be with friends so that at least they have company in their sadness. In one study, young adults said the essence of real friendship was “being there for each other” (Secklin, 1991). Increasingly, people rely on friends for support online—being there for them emotionally when they can’t be there physically (Carl, 2006).
Women and men tend to differ somewhat in how they support friends. Because feminine socialization emphasizes personal communication, women generally provide more verbal emotional support than men do (Becker, 1987; Johnson, 2000; Monsour, 2006). They are likely to talk in detail about feelings, dimensions of emotional issues, and fears that accompany distress. By talking in depth about emotional troubles, women help one another identify and vent feelings and work out problems.
Rich
If I don’t want to think about some problem, I want to be with a guy friend. He’ll take my mind off the hassle. If I’m with a girl, she’ll want to talk about the problem and wallow in it, and that just makes it worse sometimes. But when I really need to talk or get something off my chest, I need a girl friend. Guys don’t talk about personal stuff.
Men often provide support to friends through “covert intimacy,” a term Swain (1989) coined to describe the indirect ways men support one another. Instead of an intimate hug, men are more likely to clasp a shoulder or playfully punch an arm. Instead of engaging in direct and sustained emotional talk, men tend to communicate support more instrumentally. This could mean giving advice on how to solve a problem, or offering assistance, such as a loan or transportation. Finally, men are more likely than women to support friends by coming up with diversions (Cancian, 1987; Walker, 2004). If you can’t make a problem any better, at least you can take a friend’s mind off it. “Let’s go shoot some baskets” provides a diversion.
Bellino
A year ago, a friend of mine from back home called me up to ask for a loan. I said, “Sure,” and asked what was up. He told me his hours had been cut back and he couldn’t buy groceries for his family. I knew the problem was more than paying for groceries. I figured he also couldn’t pay for lights and rent and everything else. So I talked with several of his friends in our church, and we took up a collection to help him. Then, I took it over and left it at his house without any note and without saying anything. He didn’t have to ask for help, and I didn’t have to say anything.
Culture also influences orientations toward friendship. In a study of Japanese and American friendships, Dean Barnlund (1989) found that both groups preferred friends who were similar to them in age and ethnic heritage. Yet Japanese respondents said togetherness, trust, and warmth were the most important qualities in friendship, whereas Americans listed understanding, respect, and sincerity as the top qualities. The differences in rankings reflect distinctions between Japanese and American culture. Interpersonal harmony and collective orientation are central values in Japan, whereas American culture emphasizes individuality, candor, and respect.
Communication in Everyday Life: Workplace Workplace Friendships
Friends can make work a lot more bearable. That’s the conclusion of a study by Thomas Feeley, Jennie Hwang, and George Barnett (2008). They found that friends on the job help workers cope with pressures. Employees reported that on-the-job friends provided support and companionship. People who have friends in their workplace are more likely to stick with a job. Interestingly, the number of on-the-job friends was more important than the degree of closeness in predicting turnover—having more workplace friends increases the likelihood that at least one will be available if you need support. Other researchers (Feeley, Moon, Kozey, & Slowe, 2010) confirmed this finding, reporting that employees who experience less social support in workplace networks are more likely to leave.
Another study (Collier, 1996) identified different priorities for friendship in four ethnic groups. European Americans give priority to sincerity and freedom to express ideas. Consistent with traditional Asian cultural values, many Asian Americans especially value courtesy, restraint, and respect for families. Among African Americans, problem solving and respect for ethnic heritage were primary criteria in selecting friends. Collier also found that Latinas and Latinos see relationship support and emotional expressiveness as priorities.
In sum, friendship grows out of investments, emotional closeness, acceptance, trust, and support. Our membership in different cultures and social communities may lead to variations in how we experience and express friendship. However, it seems that these five common expectations transcend many of the differences between us.
The Development of Friendship
Although intense bonds sometimes are formed quickly, the majority of friendships evolve through a series of stages that involve progressive investments (Mongeau & Henningsen, 2008; Rawlins, 1981, 2009). Although not every friendship follows exactly the same evolution, the general trajectory describes most Western friendships.
Growth Stages
Friendships don’t start off as friendships. They begin when people meet each other. We might meet a person at work, through membership on an athletic team, in a club, or by chance in an airport, store, or class. We also might encounter new people in chat rooms or newsgroups or as friends of friends on our social networking sites (Parks & Floyd, 1996a). The initial meeting is the first stage of interaction and possibly of friendship. During this stage, we tend to rely on standard social rules and roles. We tend to be polite and to limit personal disclosures.
Because new acquaintances don’t have enough personal knowledge of each other to engage in dual perspective, they tend to rely on general scripts and stereotypes. Also, early interactions are often awkward and laced with uncertainty because people haven’t worked out patterns for relating to each other.
In early communication, new acquaintances usually check to see whether common ground, values, and interests exist (Weinstock & Bond, 2000). After class, Jean makes a comment to Rebekah about a new film that she saw. If Rebekah responds with her impressions of the film or by asking Jean for more details, she conveys the relationship-level message that she’s interested in interacting. A businessperson may joke or mention a weekly poker game to see whether an associate wants to move beyond the acquaintance level of relating. One person in an Internet newsgroup invites another member of the group to engage in individual exchange of ideas.
If invitations to move beyond social roles are reciprocated, a fledgling friendship is launched. We might make a small self-disclosure to signal that we’d like to personalize the relationship or meet outside of contexts that naturally occur. Emily might ask her associate Sam whether he wants to get a cup of coffee after work. Ben might ask his classmate Drew to get together to study. Sometimes, we involve others to lessen the potential awkwardness of being with someone we don’t yet know well. For instance, Amy might invite Stuart to a party where others will be present.
Many friendships never move beyond this phase (Knapp & Vangelisti, 2005). They stabilize as pleasant but casual friendships. The friends enjoy interacting but generally don’t invest a lot of effort to arrange times together. Disclosures tend to be limited as are investments and expectations of support.
But some friendships do become closer and more important. This happens as we interact more personally with others, disclose more about ourselves, have shared experiences, and share thoughts, feelings, values, concerns, interests, and so forth.
At this point, friends begin to work out their private rules for interacting. Some friends settle into patterns of getting together for specific things (watching games, shopping, racquetball, going to movies) and never expand those boundaries. Other friends share a wider range of times and activities. Although during the nascent stage friends are working out rules for their relationship, often they aren’t aware of the rules until later. The milestones of this stage are that people begin to think of themselves as friends and to work out their own patterns for interaction.
Interracial friendships often require more effort than intraracial friendships, yet the basic foundations of the friendships don’t differ. Acceptance and responsiveness and revealing information about yourself and accepting information about the other are keys in same and different-race friendships (Shelton, Trail, West, & Bergsieker, 2010).
At some point, people decide they are friends, whether they vocalize that explicitly or not. The touchstone of this stage is the assumption of continuity. Whereas in earlier stages people don’t count on getting together unless they make a specific plan, stabilized friends assume they’ll continue to see each other even if they don’t have specific dates reserved. We take future interaction for granted because we consider the relationship ongoing.
A close friendship is unlikely to stabilize until there is a mutually high level of trust. Once friends have earned each other’s trust, they communicate more openly and fully. As friendships become stabilized, they are often integrated into the larger contexts of each friend’s social networks (Spencer & Pahl, 2006). Thus, when we interact in our social circles, we are often nurturing multiple established friendships at the same time. Stabilized friendships may continue indefinitely, in some cases lasting a lifetime.
Online communication is an increasingly popular way to maintain established friendships (Carl, 2006). Nearly two-thirds of the people that Malcolm Parks and Kory Floyd (1996a) surveyed reported that they had a good friendship with someone they first had met on the Internet. Parks and Floyd also found that friendships maintained largely through email and Internet communication were as personal and committed as those maintained through face-to-face contact.
Marlene
Martha and I go way, way back—all the way to childhood, when we lived in the same housing complex. As kids, we made mud pies and ran a lemonade stand together. In high school, we double-dated and planned our lives together. Then we both got married and stayed in touch, even when Martha moved away. We still sent each other pictures of our children, and we called a lot. When my last child entered college, I decided it was time for me to do that, too, so I enrolled in college. Before I did that, though, I had to talk to Martha and get her perspective on whether I was nuts to go to college in my thirties. She thought it was a great idea, and she’s thinking about that for herself now. For nearly 40 years, we’ve shared everything in our lives.
Friendships generally follow rules that specify what is expected and what is not allowed (Argyle & Henderson, 1985). Most of the time, we’re not consciously aware of relationship rules, even though we may be following them. Typically, relationship rules are unspoken understandings that regulate how people interact. For instance, most friends have a tacit understanding that they can be a little late for get-togethers but won’t keep each other waiting long. A delay of 5 minutes is within the rules, but a 40-minute delay is a violation. Most friends have an unspoken understanding that private information they share is to be kept confidential. The case study at the end of Chapter 9 illustrates what can happen when friends violate the unspoken rule to keep disclosures confidential. Although friends may never explicitly discuss their rules, the rules matter, as we discover when one is violated.
Rules regulate both trivial and important aspects of interaction. Not interrupting may be a rule, but breaking it probably won’t destroy a good friendship. However, stealing money, jewelry, or romantic partners may be the death knell of a friendship. Although friends often develop some very unique rules, many of our friendship rules reflect cultural perspectives, as the “Communication in Everyday Life” box above demonstrates.
Communication in Everyday Life: Diversity Friendships around the World
Like most things, friendship is shaped by culture (Atsumi, 1980; Feig, 1989; Goodwin & Plaza, 2000; Lustig & Koester, 1999; Mochizuki, 1981). People raised in the United States may befriend people who differ from them in personal values or political allegiances. Not so in Thailand, where friendship tends to be all or nothing. Thais generally don’t develop friendships with anyone of whom they disapprove in any way. Among Thais, a friend is totally accepted and approved.
The Japanese distinguish between two types of friendships. Tsukiai are friendships based on social obligation. These usually involve neighbors or work associates and tend to have limited life spans. However, friendships based on affection and common interests usually last a lifetime; personal friendship is serious business. The number of personal friends is very small and stable, in contrast to friendship patterns in the United States. Friendships between women and men are rare in Japan. Before marriage, only 20% of Japanese say they have close friends of the opposite sex.
In Spain, friends are important both for personal support and to anchor people in the collectivist Spanish culture. In a recent study, Spanish respondents reported that they counted on friends more than on family members to provide emotional support.
Deterioration Stages
When one or both friends stop investing in a friendship, it is likely to wane. Occasionally friendships end abruptly and sometimes dramatically—a tense argument, a curt text. Such abrupt endings are generally occasioned by serious breaches in trust—a confidence aired to others, stealing, lying, and so forth.
It is more common for friendships to wane gradually. Friends may drift apart because one moves or because the two are pulled in different directions by career or family demands. In other cases, friendships deteriorate because they’ve run their natural course and have become boring. Many, perhaps most, friendships fade slowly rather than abruptly (Schappell, 2005).
Cary
Janet and I had been friends since our first year at school. We told each other everything and trusted each other totally. When I told her that Brad had cheated on me, I knew she would not tell anyone else. She knew I felt bad about it, plus Brad and I got back together, so I didn’t want anyone to know about that incident. One day, I was talking with another girl, and she asked me how I’d been able to trust Brad again after he cheated on me. I hadn’t told her about that! I knew she was friends with Janet, so I figured that’s how she knew. To me, that was the ultimate betrayal. I’m still on friendly terms with Janet, but she’s not a close friend, and I don’t tell her anything private.
When friendships deteriorate or dissolve due to serious violations, communication changes in predictable ways. Defensiveness and uncertainty rise, causing people to be more guarded, less spontaneous, and less disclosive than they were. Yet the clearest indicator that a friendship is fading may be decreased quantity and quality of communication. As former friends drift apart or are hurt by each other, they are likely to interact less often and to talk about less personal and consequential topics.
Even when serious violations occur between friends, relationships sometimes can be repaired. Sometimes, friends hurt us when they are under serious stress. If we attribute something we don’t like to factors that are temporary or beyond our friends’ control, we may be willing to forgive them and continue the friendship. We are usually more willing to stay friends with someone who hurt us unintentionally than with someone who deliberately harmed us. To revive a friendship that has waned, however, both friends must be committed to rebuilding trust and intimacy.
Pressures on Friendships
Like all human relationships, friendships are subject to internal tensions and external pressures
Internal Tensions
Friendships are vulnerable to tensions inherent in being close. Internal tensions are relationship stresses that grow out of people and their interactions. We consider three of these.
Relational Dialectics
In Chapter 8, we discussed relational dialectics, which are opposing human needs that create tension and propel change in close relationships. The three dialectics of connection/autonomy, openness/privacy, and novelty/familiarity punctuate our friendships, prompting us to adjust continually to natural yet contradictory needs.
Friendships can be strained when people have different needs. There could be tension if Joe is bored and wants novelty but his friend Andy is overstimulated and needs calming routines. Similarly, if Andy has just broken up with a girlfriend, he may seek greater closeness with Joe at a time when Joe is very involved with family issues. When needs collide, friends should talk. It’s important to be open about what you need and to be sensitive to what your friend needs. Doing this simultaneously honors yourself, your friend, and the relationship. Friends usually can work out ways to meet each person’s needs or at least understand that differing needs don’t reflect unequal commitment to the friendship.
Lana
My girlfriends and I are so often in different places that it’s hard to take care of each other. If one of my friends isn’t seeing anyone special, she wants more time with me and wants to do things together. If I’m in a relationship with a guy, her needs feel demanding. But when I’ve just broken up, I really need my friends to fill time and talk with. So I try to remember how I feel and use that to help me accept it when my friends need my time.
Diverse Communication Styles
Friendships may also be strained by misunderstandings that arise from diverse cultural backgrounds. Because our communication reflects the understandings and rules of our culture, misinterpretations may arise between friends from different cultures. For instance, in many traditional Asian societies, people are socialized to be modest, whereas American culture encourages celebration of ourselves. Thus, someone born and raised in Japan might perceive an American friend as arrogant for saying, “Let’s go out to celebrate my acceptance to law school.”
Misunderstandings also arise from differences between social groups in the United States. Aaron, who is European American, might feel hurt if Markus, an African American friend, turns down Aaron’s invitation to a concert in order to go home and care for an ailing aunt. Aaron might interpret this as a rejection by Markus because he thinks Markus is using the aunt as an excuse to avoid going out with him. Aaron would interpret Markus differently if he realized that many African Americans are more communal than European Americans, so taking care of extended family members is a priority (DeFrancisco & Chatham-Carpenter, 2000; Gaines, 1995; Orbe & Harris, 2001). Ellen may feel that her friend Jed isn’t being supportive when, instead of empathizing with her problems, he suggests that they go out to take her mind off her troubles. Yet he is showing support according to masculine rules of communication. Jed, on the other hand, may feel that Ellen is intruding on his autonomy when she pushes him to talk about his feelings. According to feminine rules of communication, however, Ellen is showing interest and concern.
Differences themselves usually aren’t the direct cause of problems in friendship. Instead, how we interpret and judge others’ communication is the root of tension and hurt. What Jed and Ellen did wasn’t the source of their frustrations. Jed interpreted Ellen according to his communication rules, not hers, and she interpreted Jed according to her communication rules, not his. Notice that the misunderstandings result from our interpretations of others’ behaviors, not the behaviors themselves. This reminds us of the need to distinguish between facts and inferences.
Communication in Everyday Life: Insight Just Friends?
Research suggests that being “just friends” often includes sexual activity. Walid Afifi and Sandra Faulkner (2000) surveyed 315 women and men in college about their cross-sex friendships. They found that 51% of respondents reported having had sex with a friend of the other sex at least once. A more recent study (Wyndol & Shaffer, 2011) found that nearly 60% of college students have had at least one friendship with benefits. Most people in friends-with-benefits relationships say that sexual activity increases the quality of their friendships, but a few say it harms the friendships. Perhaps most interesting is the finding that engaging in sexual activity with friends doesn’t necessarily—or even usually—change a friendship into a romantic relationship.
Sexual Attraction
Friendships between heterosexual men and women or between gay men or between lesbians often include sexual tensions. Even if there is no actual sexual activity, sexual undertones may ripple beneath the surface of friendships. A recent study (Halatsis & Christakis, 2009) found that when sexual interest is expressed in a friendship, the friends need to have an explicit talk to decide if they are going to remain platonic friends, become friends with benefits, or become romantically involved. Sexual attraction or invitations become more challenging between friends who have agreed not to have a sexual relationship.
External Pressures
In addition to internal tensions, friendships may encounter pressures from outside sources. Three such pressures are competing demands, personal changes, and geographic distance.
Competing Demands
Friendships exist within larger social systems that affect how they function. Our work and our romantic relationships tend to be woven into our everyday lives, ensuring that they get daily attention. The early stages of a career require enormous amounts of energy and time. We may not have enough time or energy left to maintain friendships, even those that matter to us.
We sometimes neglect established friends because of other relationships, especially new ones. When a new romance is taking off, we may be totally immersed in it. We may also neglect friends when other important relationships in our lives are in crisis—for example, if one of our parents is ill or another friend is having trouble. To avoid hurting friends, we should let them know when we have to focus elsewhere, and assure our friends that we are still committed to them.
Personal Changes
Our friendships change as our lives do. Although a few friendships are lifelong, most are not. If you think about your experiences, you’ll probably realize that you gained and lost friends as you made major transitions in your life. They’ll change again when you leave college, move for career or family reasons, and perhaps have children. Similarly, unemployment can alter friendships because it takes people out of their usual social networks.
Communication in Everyday Life: Diversity Friendships across the Life Span
Friendships vary during the course of life (Blieszner & Adams, 1992; Monsour, 1997; West et al., 1996; Yager, 1999). Most children begin forming friendships around age 2, when they start learning how to communicate with others. Toddlers play primarily side by side, and each is focused more on his or her activity than on the other person. At the same time, toddlers work to sustain friendships that matter to them, and they sometimes grieve when a friend moves away (Whaley & Rubenstein, 1994).
Children under age 6 tend to think of friendships primarily in terms of their own needs. As children mature, they develop awareness of the norms of friendship, including reciprocity. By the time friends are in third grade, they tend to rely on communal norms that lead them to strive for equity with friends (Pataki, Shapiro, & Clark, 1994).
During adolescence, friendship assumes great importance for most people. Adolescent boys tend to define their friends as groups of people, usually other boys. Girls, on the other hand, tend to name only one or two peers as close friends.
Sharing personal information and activities is a primary criterion for friendships among young adults, who are the group most likely to form and maintain friendships with people of the other sex (Werking, 1997).
In middle adulthood, friendships are more difficult to sustain. People marry, have children, move, and focus on careers. Despite these complications, most adults consider friendships important in their lives.
Later in life, people tend to value longtime friends with whom they can relive events that are part of their shared lives and the eras in which they lived (McKay, 2000). Many friendships between older people were formed between couples or between whole families when each family had young children. In addition, many older people make new friends as they move to smaller homes or retirement communities. Friends become increasingly important sources of emotional and practical support.
Ruth
Sandi and I had been friends for years when I had my first baby. Gradually, we saw less of each other and couldn’t find much to talk about when we did get together. She was still doing the singles scene, and I was totally absorbed in mothering. I got to know other mothers in the neighborhood, and soon I thought of them as my friends. What’s funny is that last year Sandi had a baby, and it was so good to get together and talk. We reconnected with each other.
Geographic Distance
Most friendships face the challenge of distance, and many don’t survive it. A majority of North Americans have at least one long-distance friendship (Sahlstein, 2006). Whether distance ends friendship depends on several factors. Perhaps the most obvious influence is how much people care about continuing to be friends. The greater the commitment, the more likely a friendship is to persist despite separation.
The likelihood of sustaining a long-distance friendship also depends on other factors, such as socioeconomic class. Friendships that survive distance involve frequent emails, phone calls, texts, and visits. It takes money to finance trips, subscribe to a cell phone service, buy computers and tablets, and maintain Internet access. Thus, friends with greater economic resources are better able to maintain their relationships than are friends with less discretionary income. A second way in which socioeconomic class affects the endurance of long-distance friendships is flexibility in managing work and family. White-collar workers usually have considerable flexibility in work schedules, so they can make time to travel. Blue-collar workers tend to have less personal control over their job schedules and how much vacation time they get.
Cass
My parents are so different from each other in their approaches to friendship. When I was growing up, Dad was on a career roll, so we were always moving to better neighborhoods or new towns. Each time we moved, he’d make a whole new set of friends. Even if his old friends lived nearby, he would want to be with the people he called his new peers. Mom is 180 degrees different. She still talks with her best friend in the town where I was born. She has stayed close to all of her good friends, and they don’t change with the season like Dad’s do. Once, I asked him if he missed his old friends, and he said that friends were people you share common interests with, so they change as your job does. That doesn’t make sense to me.
Women and men differ in how likely they are to maintain long-distance friendships because they respectively see talking and activity as the nucleus of closeness. As we’ve seen previously, shared interests and emotional involvement are the crux of closeness for many women. Both of these are achieved primarily through communication, especially personal talk. The focus of men’s friendships tends to be activities, which are difficult to share across distance. Women can sustain ties with important friends by talking on the phone, texting, emailing, and writing. Men, on the other hand, can’t share activities with friends who are not present. Thus, they may be more likely to replace friends who have moved away with others who can share activities they enjoy.
Lillian Rubin (1985) distinguished between friends of the heart, who remain close regardless of distance and circumstances, and friends of the road, who change as we move along the road of life. For many people, our intimate friends tend to be friends of the heart, and our workplace and neighborhood friends tend to be friends of the road.
Social Media and Friendships
Social media offer us a range of ways to make friends and to maintain existing friendships. A friend’s move to a new place once threatened the continuity of the friendship, but that is no longer the case. With social media, we can keep in touch with friends. Not only that; we can also make new friends in cyberspace. From texting and commenting on posts on social networking sites to playing games such as Words With Friends, many of us rely on digital and online communication for easy and ongoing contact with friends.
Yet many online friendships are not as rich and close as face-to-face friendships. William Deresiewicz (2009) questions whether social networking friendships are “real.” He asks, “If we have 768 ‘friends,’ in what sense do we have any?” And he then suggests that “once we decided to become friends with everyone, we would forget how to be friends with anyone” (p. B6). Contrasting online friendships with traditional, face-to-face ones, Deresiewicz notes that the former are less personal and less adapted to individuals. He thinks online friendships are “just broadcasting our stream of consciousness to all 500 of our friends at once” because “we’re too busy to spare our friends more time than it takes to text” (p. B9). Deresiewicz may be exaggerating, but it might be worth your time to reflect on the intimacy you have with online and face-to-face friends. Think about all the friends on your social networking sites. How many of them would stay with you in the hospital if you were injured, hold you if you lost a family member, or let you live with them for 3 months if you needed lodging (Walter, 2009)?
The developmental path of friendships that we described in this chapter was developed based on research on face-to-face friendships. Research showing that people often disclose more and more quickly online than they do in person suggests that online friendships may have a distinct trajectory in which revelations occur sooner.
Social media can be used to engage in cyberbullying, which is text messages, online comments and rumors, embarrassing pictures posted online, and videos and fake profiles that are meant to hurt another person and are sent by email or smart phones or posted on social networking sites. Groups of friends sometimes target particular individuals for cyberbullying, and social networking sites such as Facebook have ineffectual procedures to monitor and stop cyberbullying (Bazelon, 2013).
According to a recent report (Burney, 2012), 43% of teenagers are subject to some form of cyberbullying. For LGBTQ teenagers the percentage is even higher: 53% (Burney, 2012). Also targeted are girls and boys who do not conform to current gender ideals or, ironically, girls who conform too much to those ideals.
Girls who are victims tend to be more physically developed than others in their age cohort, are perceived as less attractive than peers, or are perceived as more attractive than peers (Anderson, 2011). Girls who are regarded as less attractive are ridiculed for not measuring up to feminine ideals while girls who are very attractive are bullied out of jealousy. One of the more common tactics for bullying girls is to spread rumors that they are sluts.
Boys, especially non-white boys, who are perceived as feminine are most likely to be victims of cyberbullying (Anderson, 2011, Burney, 2012). Collapsing distinctions between gender and sexuality, and reflecting both sexist and homophobic attitudes, bulliers belittle them for not being sufficiently masculine. In fact, posting comments that a boy is gay is a common form of cyberbullying.
Cyberbullying differs from face-to-face bullying in two important ways. First, it is often perpetrated anonymously. Through fake accounts and other online maneuvers, an individual can post hateful messages and photos without ever being accountable for her or his actions. When asked why people were so cruel online, one young boy explained, “You can be as mean as you want on Facebook” (Hoffman, 2010, p. A12). Second, cyberbullying has no necessary stopping point. The school yard bully pretty much stayed on the school yard. Thus, a victim could escape by going home or visiting a friend. Online bullying can follow the victim anywhere, 24-7. It is unremitting.
Communication in Everyday Life: Social Media Cyberbullying
In 2010, 18-year-old Tyler Clementi committed suicide when he learned that his roommate Dharun Ravi had sent out Twitter and text messages inviting others to watch a sexual encounter between Clementi and another man. Ravi was tried on 15 charges, including hate crimes; he was found guilty of a bias crime and using a webcam to spy on Clementi. His sentence was 30 days in jail, 3 years on probation, and 300 hours of community service (Zernike, 2012). Clementi’s is not an isolated case.
- 15-year-old Amanda threw herself in front of a bus when she could face no more of the cruel posts on her Facebook wall.
- 13-year-old Rachel hanged herself after an anonymous text saying she was a slut was circulated through her school.
- 14-year-old Jamey killed himself after an anonymous text saying he was gay became a widely spread rumor.
- 15-year-old Phoebe took the advice of a cyberbullier who told her to hang herself.
- 14-year-old Megan committed suicide when information she confided to a person who posed as a friend was turned against her online
Guidelines for Communication between Friends
Satisfying communication between friends follows the principles of good interpersonal communication that we’ve discussed in preceding chapters. For instance, it is important to create a confirming climate and to engage in effective verbal and nonverbal communication. Finally, managing conflict constructively is important in friendships as in all relationships. In addition to these general principles, we can identify four specific guidelines for satisfying communication between friends.
Engage in Dual Perspective
As in all interpersonal relationships, dual perspective is important in friendship. To be a good friend, we must understand our friends’ perspectives, thoughts, and feelings. As we’ve noted before, accepting another person’s perspective is not the same as agreeing with it. The point is to understand what friends feel and think and to accept that as their reality.
To exercise dual perspective, we distinguish between our judgments and perceptions and what friends say and do. Keep in mind the abstraction ladder discussed in Chapter 3. When we feel hurt or offended by something a friend says, we should remember that our perceptions and inferences do not equal their behavior. The process goes like this:
A friend acts. We perceive the action(s) selectively.
We then interpret what happened.
We assign labels and meanings to our interpretation of what happened.
We make inferences based on the labels and meanings we chose.
Notice how far from the original act we move in the process of making sense of it. There’s lots of room for slippage as we ascend the abstraction ladder. Let’s consider a concrete example. Shereen tells her friend Kyle that she’s upset and needs support; she shouldn’t assume he’s uninterested if he suggests they go out for the evening. As we have learned, men often support friends by trying to divert them from problems.
Two communication principles help us avoid misinterpreting our friends. First, it’s useful to ask questions to find out what others mean. Shereen might ask Kyle, “Why would you want to go out when I said I needed support?” This would allow Kyle to explain that he was trying to support her in his own way: by coming up with an activity to distract her from her problems. Consequently, Shereen could grasp his meaning and appreciate his effort to support her.
Second, we should explain, or translate, our own feelings and needs so the friend understands what would feel supportive to us. Shereen could say, “What would help me most right now is to have a sympathetic ear. Could we just stay in and talk about the problem?” If we make our needs clear, we’re more likely to get the kind of support we value.
Communicate Honestly
A few years ago, I confronted an ethical choice when my close friend Gayle asked me for advice. Several months earlier, she had agreed to give the keynote speech at a professional conference, and now she had an opportunity to travel to Italy with her partner at the time of the conference. She wanted to accompany her partner to Italy but wondered whether it was ethical to renege on her agreement to give the keynote address. Following principles we’ve discussed in this book, I first asked a number of questions to find out how Gayle felt and what her perspective was. It became clear that she really wanted me to tell her it was okay to retract her agreement to give the speech.
Because I love Gayle, I wanted to support her preference and to encourage her to do what she wanted. Yet I didn’t think it would be right for her to go back on her word, and I didn’t think Gayle would respect herself in the long run if she didn’t keep her word. Also, I knew that I wouldn’t respect myself if I wasn’t honest with Gayle. Ethically, I was committed both to being honest and to supporting my friend.
I took a deep breath and told her three things: First, I told her I would love her whatever she decided to do. Second, I told her that I didn’t think it would be right not to give the speech. And, third, I suggested we look for more options. At first, she was quiet, clearly disappointed that I hadn’t endorsed her dream. As we talked, we came up with the idea of her making the keynote speech and then joining her partner, who would already be in Italy. Even with this plan, Gayle was dejected when she left, and I felt I’d let her down by not supporting her dream. Later that night, she called to thank me for being honest with her. After we’d talked, she’d realized it went against her own values to renege on her word, and nobody else had helped her see that.
Honesty is one of the most important gifts friends can give each other. Even when honesty is less than pleasant or is not what we think we want to hear, we count on it from friends. In fact, people believe that honest feedback is what sets real friends apart from others (Burleson & Samter, 1994). Sometimes it’s difficult to be honest with friends, as it was for me with Gayle. Yet if we can’t count on our friends for honest feedback, then where can we turn for truthfulness?
Many people think that support means saying only nice things that others want to hear. This is not the essence of support. The key is to care enough about a person to look out for her or his welfare. Parents discipline children and set limits because they care about their children’s long-term welfare. Friends who want to help each other give honest, often critical feedback so that others can improve. We can be supportive and loving while being honest about important matters. Although it may be easier to tell friends what they want to hear or only nice things, genuine friendship includes honest feedback and candid talk.
Milando
I can count on one hand (with three fingers left over!) the people who will really shoot straight with me. Most of my friends tell me what I want to hear. Yeah, that’s kind of nice in the moment, but it doesn’t wear well over the long haul. If I just want reinforcement for what I’m already feeling or doing, then why would I even talk to anyone else? Real friends tell you straight-up what’s what.
Grow from Differences
A third principle for forming rich friendships is to be open to diversity in people. Western culture encourages us to think in either–or terms: Either he acts like I do, or he’s wrong; either she’s like me, or she’s odd. The problem with either–or thinking is that it sharply limits interpersonal growth.
Most of us choose friends who are like us. We feel more immediately comfortable with friends who share our values, attitudes, backgrounds, and communication rules. But if we limit our friendships to people like us, we miss out on the fascinating variety of people who could be our friends. It does take time and effort to understand and become comfortable with people who differ from us, but the rewards of doing so can be exceptional.
Communication in Everyday Life: Diversity “I’ve held you in my heart”
The !Kung are hunter-gatherers who live in a region of southern Africa where droughts, floods, and famine are all too common. The !Kungs’ survival depends on a complex system of social relationships that are maintained by storytelling, gift giving, and visiting.
One year torrential rains killed plants and prompted animals to flee for drier land. As the !Kung grew more hungry and disconsolate, they began telling stories about loved ones who lived as far as 200 kilometers away. The stories brought the distant friends to mind and motivated the !Kung to craft gifts and then to make the long journey to their friends. When they arrived, they gave the gifts, which tell the receiver “I’ve held you in my heart” while they were separated (Dreifus, 2009).
Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff
The 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson once remarked that most friendships die not because of major violations and problems but because of small slights and irritations that slowly destroy closeness. Johnson’s point is well taken. Certainly, we can be irritated by a number of qualities and habits of others. If you are a punctual person, you might be annoyed by a friend who is chronically late. If you don’t like prolonged telephone conversations, you may be irritated by a friend who likes to talk for hours on the phone. Feeling annoyance is normal; what we do with that feeling can make the difference between sustaining a friendship and suffocating it.
What we learned about perception in Chapter 3 gives us insight into how to let go of small irritations. Knowing that perceptions are subjective, you might remind yourself not to focus on aspects of a friend that you dislike or find bothersome. There’s a big difference between acknowledging irritations and letting them preoccupy us. Is the lateness really more significant than all that you value in your friend? Do your friend’s good qualities compensate for the long phone conversations that you dread? You can exercise some control over your perceptions and the weight you attach to them.
Bernadette
I grew up with a single mother, but our home was always full. She had so many friends, and somebody was visiting all the time. I used to tell her that I didn’t like Mrs. Jones’s language or Mrs. Perry’s political attitudes or the way Mr. Davis slurped his coffee. One day, when I was telling her what was wrong with one of her friends, my mother said, “Keep going like that, girl, and you won’t ever have any friends. If you want to have friends, don’t sweat the small stuff. Just keep your eye on what’s good about them.”
All of us want to be accepted and valued despite our flaws. You want that from your friends. And they want that from you. Acceptance doesn’t mean you have to like everything about your friends. It does mean you accept friends and don’t try to change them to suit your personal preferences.
Chapter Summary
In this chapter, we explored how friendships form and how they function and change over time. We began by considering common expectations for friends, including investment, intimacy, acceptance, and support. Into our discussion of these common themes we wove insights about differences between us. We discovered that there are some differences in how women and men and people in different cultures and social communities create and express intimacy, invest in friendships, and show support.
Most friendships evolve gradually, moving from role-governed interactions to stable friendship and sometimes to waning friendship. Both social rules and private rules lend regularity and predictability to interaction so that friends know what to expect from one another. We also noted that friendships that develop through social media may have a different evolutionary trajectory that includes earlier disclosures of personal information.
Like all other relationships, friendships encounter challenges and tensions that stem from the relationship itself and from causes beyond it. Internal tensions of friendship include managing relational dialectics and misunderstandings and dealing with sexual attraction. External pressures on friendship are competing demands, changing personal needs and interests, and geographic distance. Principles of interpersonal communication covered throughout this book suggest how we can manage these pressures and the day-to-day dynamics of close friendships. In addition, communication between friends is especially enhanced by engaging in dual perspective, being honest, being open to diversity and the growth it can prompt in us, and not sweating the small stuff.
Key Concepts
Practice defining the chapter’s terms by using online flashcards.
- cyberbullying 297
- friends of the heart 297
- friends of the road 297
- internal tensions 293
- relationship rules 291
After studying this chapter, you should be able to…
- List features of committed romantic relationships.
- Evaluate the development of a romantic relationship in your life.
- Identify ways that social media affect romantic relationships.
- Apply chapter guidelines to enhance the quality of your romantic relationships.
Introduction
Ellen is upset about an issue with a colleague at work. After dinner, she tries to open a conversation with her husband Norton by saying, “Pat is still creating tension at the office.” Without looking up from his laptop, Norton mumbles, “Sorry, hon.” This is the third time this week that Ellen has tried to talk with Norton about an issue that is really troubling her. He always seems preoccupied.
Sighing, Ellen goes into her den, opens her laptop, and checks to see if her friend Jake is online. She met him when they were both posting comments on a political blog. Discovering much common ground, they quickly moved to one-on-one email, Skyping, and texting. Tonight, she finds him online, and they connect on Skype. She tells Jake the latest news about the problems with Pat at the office, and Jake offers empathy—he’s had some difficult colleagues too. He also suggests a couple of ways she might control Pat. After 20 minutes, Ellen feels comforted and much less anxious. She says to Jake, “Sometimes you seem to understand me better than I understand myself.” Jake replies, “I want to understand you because I care about you.” She says, “Thanks for being there for me.” Jake replies, “I’ll always be here for you, Ellen.”
Is Ellen being disloyal to Norton to have such a close relationship with Jake? Is there a danger that her online relationship with Jake will develop into an affair?
In this chapter, we explore communication in committed romantic relationships. We begin by defining committed romantic relationships and the different styles of loving that individuals bring to romance. Next, we discuss the developmental pattern that many romantic relationships follow as they grow, stabilize, and sometimes dissolve. The third section of the chapter considers the role of social media in committed romantic relationships. To close the chapter, we identify guidelines for communicating effectively to meet challenges that often arise in romantic relationships.
Committed Romantic Relationships
Committed romantic relationships are relationships between individuals who assume that they will be primary and continuing parts of each other’s lives. These relationships are voluntary in mainstream Western culture although marriages are arranged in some cultures. We don’t pick our relatives, neighbors, or work associates, but in Western countries we do choose our romantic intimates.
Committed romantic relationships are created and sustained by unique people who cannot be replaced. In many of our relationships, others are replaceable. If a colleague at work leaves, you can get another colleague, and work will go on. If your racquetball buddy moves out of town, you can find a new partner, and the games will continue. In fact, most of our social relationships are I–You connections. Committed romantic relationships, in contrast, are I–Thou bonds, in which we invest heavily of ourselves and in which each person knows the other as a completely distinct individual.
Committed romantic relationships involve romantic and sexual feelings, which are not typically part of relationships with coworkers, neighbors, family members, and most friends. Another distinctive quality of romantic relationships is that they are considered primary and enduring. We expect to move away from friends and family, but we assume we’ll be connected to a romantic partner permanently or at least for a very long time.
Dimensions of Romantic Relationships
For years, researchers have struggled to define romantic commitment. As a result of their work, we now believe that romantic love consists of three dimensions: intimacy, commitment, and passion. Although we can discuss these dimensions separately, they overlap and interact (Acker & Davis, 1992; Hendrick & Hendrick, 1989). One scholar (Sternberg, 1986) arranges these three dimensions to form a triangle, representing the different facets of love (see Figure 11.1).
Passion
For most of us, passion is what first springs to mind when we think about romance. Passion describes intensely positive feelings and fervent desire for another person. Passion is not restricted to sexual or sensual feelings. In addition to sexual feelings, passion may involve powerful emotional, spiritual, and intellectual excitement. The sparks and emotional high of being in love stem from passion. It’s why we refer to feeling butterflies in the stomach and falling head over heels.
As exciting as passion is, it isn’t the principal foundation for most enduring romantic relationships. In fact, research consistently shows that passion is less central to our experience of love than are the dimensions of intimacy and commitment. This makes sense when we realize that passion is seldom sustained at the high levels that may be part of a new relationship. Like other intense feelings, it ebbs and flows. Because passion comes and goes and is largely beyond our will, it isn’t an adequate foundation for long-term relationships. In other words, passion may set romance apart from other relationships, but typically it isn’t the glue that holds romantic relationships together. To build a lasting relationship, we need something more durable.
Commitment
The “something else” needed is commitment, the second dimension of romantic relationships. As we noted in Chapter 8, commitment is the intention to remain involved with a relationship. Although often linked to love, commitment is not the same thing as love. Love is a feeling based on the rewards of our involvement with a person. Commitment, in contrast, is a decision to remain in a relationship. There is a strong relationship between commitment and investments in a relationship—the more we invest in a relationship, the greater our commitment is likely to be (Lund, 1985; Rusbult, Drigotas, & Verette, 1994).
Researchers have identified two broad categories of reasons why people commit to relationships (Lund, 1985; Previti & Amato, 2003). First, we may stay with a relationship because we find it comfortable and pleasing—we value companionship, emotional support, financial assistance, practical benefits, and so forth. Second, we may stay with a relationship to avoid negative consequences that would accompany ending it—these barriers to leaving include violating religious values, family disapproval, and financial hardship. While both of these reasons may secure commitment, they tend to have different implications for relational happiness. Couples who stay together because of barriers to leaving tend to be less happy, less satisfied, and less likely to stay together permanently than couples who stay together because they find the relationship pleasing (Kurdek, 2006). This pattern holds true for heterosexual, gay, and lesbian couples (Kurdek, 2006).
Theresa
I’m sick of guys who say they love me but run if I try to talk about the future. They’re allergic to the C-word. If you truly love someone, how can you not be committed?
Ted
I don’t know why everyone thinks that saying “I love you” means you want to plan a life together. I love my girlfriend, but I haven’t even figured out what I want to do next year, much less for the rest of my life. She thinks if I really loved her, I’d want to talk about marriage. I think love and marriage can be different things.
Most Westerners want both passion and commitment in long-term romantic relationships (Bellah et al., 1985). We desire the exhilaration of passion, but we know that love alone won’t allow a couple to weather rough times and won’t ensure compatibility and comfort on a day-in, day-out basis. Commitment provides a sturdier foundation for a life together. Commitment is the determination to stay together despite trouble, disappointments, sporadic restlessness, and lulls in passion. Without commitment, romantic relationships are subject to the whims of transient feelings and circumstances.
Commitment involves accepting responsibility for maintaining a relationship (Swidler, 2001). Thus, it isn’t surprising that commitment is positively related to willingness to sacrifice for and invest in a relationship (Rusbult et al., 1994).
Wade
I’ve been married for 15 years, and we would have split a dozen times if love was all that held us together. Lucy and I have gone through spells where we were bored with each other or where we wanted to walk away from our problems. We didn’t, because we made a promise to stay together “for better or for worse.” Believe me, a marriage has both.
Intimacy
The third dimension of romantic relationships is intimacy: feelings of closeness, connection, and tenderness. Intimacy is abiding affection and warm feelings for another person. It is why partners are comfortable with each other and enjoy being together even when there are no fireworks. When asked to evaluate various features of love, people consistently rate companionate features such as getting along and friendship as most important. Although passionate feelings also matter, they are less central to perceptions of love than caring, honesty, respect, friendship, and trust (Hasserbrauck & Aaron, 2001; Hasserbrauck & Fehr, 2002). Unlike passion and commitment, which are distinct dimensions of romance, intimacy seems to underlie both passion and commitment (Acker & Davis, 1992; Hasserbrauck & Fehr, 2002).
Styles of Loving
- Does real love grow out of friendship?
- Can you decide to love only someone who meets your criteria for a partner?
- Would you rather suffer yourself than have someone you love suffer?
- Is love at first sight possible?
- Is love really a game—playful, not serious?
If you were to survey your class, you’d discover different answers to these questions. For every person who thinks love grows gradually out of friendship, someone else believes in love at first sight.
People differ in how they experience and express love (Lee, 1973, 1988). Just as there are three primary colors, there are three primary styles of loving. In addition, just as secondary colors are combinations of two primary colors, secondary love styles are combinations of two primary ones. Secondary styles are as vibrant as primary ones, just as purple (a secondary color) is as dazzling as red or blue (the primary colors that make up purple). Figure 11.2 illustrates the colors of love.
Primary Styles of Love
The three primary styles of love are eros, storge, and ludus. Eros is a powerful, passionate style of love that blazes to life suddenly and dramatically. It is an intense kind of love that may include sexual, spiritual, intellectual, or emotional attraction or all of these. Eros is the most intuitive and spontaneous of all love styles, and it is also the fastest moving. Erotic lovers are likely to self-disclose early in a relationship, be very sentimental, and fall in love fast. Although folk wisdom claims that women are more romantic than men, research indicates that men are more likely than women to be erotic lovers (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1996).
Mike
When I fall for someone, I fall all the way—like, I mean total and all that. I can’t love halfway, and I can’t go gradually though my mother is always warning me to slow down. That’s just not how I love. It’s fast and furious for me.
Storge (pronounced “STORE-gay”) is a comfortable, even-keeled kind of love based on friendship and compatibility. Storgic love tends to develop gradually and to be peaceful and stable. In most cases, it grows out of common interests, values, and life goals (Lasswell & Lobsenz, 1980). Storgic relationships don’t have the great highs of erotic ones, but neither do they have the fiery conflict and anger that may punctuate erotic relationships.
Stephen
Lisa and I have been together for 15 years now, and it’s been easy and steady between us from the start. I don’t remember even falling in love way back when. Maybe I never did fall in love with Lisa. I just gradually grew into loving her and feeling we belonged to each other.
The final primary style of love is ludus, which is playful love. Ludic lovers see love as a game. It’s an adventure full of scheming, challenges, puzzles, and fun, but love is not to be taken seriously. For ludics, commitment is not the goal. Instead, they like to play the field and to enjoy falling in love … again and again. Many people go through ludic periods but are not true ludics. After ending a long-term relationship, it’s natural and healthy to date casually and steer clear of serious entanglements. Ludic loving may also suit people who enjoy romance but aren’t ready to settle down. Research indicates that more men than women have ludic inclinations when it comes to love (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1996).
Vijay
I’m not ready to settle down, and I may not ever be. I really like dating and seeing if I can get a girl to fall for me, but I’m not out for anything permanent. To me, the fun is in the chase. Once somebody falls for me, I kind of lose interest. It’s just not challenging anymore.
Secondary Styles of Love
The three secondary styles of love are pragma, mania, and agape. Pragma, as the word suggests, is pragmatic or practical love. Pragma blends the calculated planning of ludus with the stable security of storge. Pragmatic lovers have clear criteria for partners, such as religious affiliation, career, and family background. Although many people dismiss pragma as coldly practical, pragmatic lovers aren’t necessarily unfeeling or unloving. For them, though, practical considerations are the foundation of enduring commitment, so these must be satisfied before they allow themselves to fall in love. Pragmas are likely to like online matching services that allow them to specify their criteria for a desirable mate. Pragmatic considerations also guide arranged marriages, in which families match children based on economic and social criteria.
Ranchana
I have to think carefully about who to marry. I must go to graduate school, and I must support my family with what I earn when I finish. I cannot marry someone who is poor, who will not help me get through school, or who won’t support my family. For me, these are very basic matters.
Mania derives its name from the Greek term theia mania, which means “madness from the gods” (Lee, 1973). Manic lovers have the passion of eros, but they play by ludic rules—a combination that can be perilous. Typically unsure that others really love them, manics may devise tests and games (that’s the ludic streak in mania) to evaluate a partner’s commitment. They often experience emotional extremes, ranging from euphoria to despair (that’s the erotic streak). In addition, manics may obsess about a relationship and be unable to think about anyone or anything else.
Pat
I never feel sure of myself when I’m in love. I always wonder when it will end, when my boyfriend will walk away, when he will lose interest. Sometimes I play games to see how interested a guy is, but then I get all upset if the game doesn’t work out right. Then I just wallow in my insecurities, and they get worse the more I think about them.
The final style of love is agape (pronounced “ah-GAH-pay”), which is a blend of storge and eros. The term agape comes from Saint Paul’s admonition that we should love others without expectation of personal gain or return. People who love agapically feel the intense passion of eros and the constancy of storge. Generous and selfless, they put a loved one’s happiness ahead of their own without any expectation of reciprocity. For them, loving and giving to another are their own rewards. Although the original studies of love styles found no people who were purely agapic, many people have agapic tendencies.
Keenan
My mother is agapic. She has moved more times than I can count because my father needed to relocate to advance. She agreed to the house he wanted and went on the vacations he wanted, even when she had other ideas. There’s nothing she wouldn’t do for him. I used to think she was a patsy, but I’ve come to see her way of loving as very strong.
If you are trying to figure out your love style, you should keep in mind five issues related to identifying your love style. First, most of us have a combination of styles (Hendrick, Hendrick, Foote, & Slapion-Foote, 1984). So you might be primarily storgic with strong agapic inclinations, or mainly erotic with an undertone of ludic mischief. Second, styles of love are not necessarily permanent. We learn how to love (Maugh, 1994), so our style of loving may change as we have more experiences in loving. Third, a love style is part of an overall interpersonal system, so it is affected by all other aspects of a relationship (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1996). Your partner’s style of love may influence your own. For instance, even if you don’t tend toward mania, being with a strongly ludic partner could foster manic tendencies in you. Fourth, individual styles of love are not good or bad in an absolute sense; what matters is how partners’ styles fit together
A final issue related to love styles is that their perceived appropriateness, or desirability, varies across cultures. In the United States and other cultures that are highly individualistic, passionate love (eros) is culturally endorsed. In more collectivist cultures such as China, India, and Korea, however, passionate love is not culturally endorsed because it can threaten familial values and kin relations (Kim & Hatfield, 2004). Storgic love is more the ideal in collectivist cultures.
The Development of Romantic Relationships
Like friendships, romantic relationships tend to follow a developmental course. Irwin Altman and Dalmas Taylor (1973, 1987) developed social penetration theory to explain how romantic intimacy progresses in Western cultures. The key idea in social penetration theory is that intimacy grows as interaction between people penetrates from the outer to inner layers of each person’s personality. In other words, we have to move beyond the surface of another person to know him or her well enough to develop an I–Thou relationship. In more collectivist cultures, however, the American tendency to bare one’s soul to intimates is not culturally valued or expected (Kito, 2005).
Some years after Altman and Taylor introduced social penetration theory, James Honeycutt (1993) amended it to note that intimacy progresses based on our perceptions of interaction, not on interaction itself. For example, if Terry discloses personal information to Janet, and if Janet and Terry both interpret self-disclosure as a move toward greater intimacy, the relationship is likely to escalate. If Janet doesn’t perceive disclosure as linked to intimacy, however, then she’s unlikely to feel closer to Terry. It is the meaning they assign to self-disclosing, not the actual act of self-disclosing, that determines how they perceive their level of intimacy.
The meanings we assign to behavior in romantic relationships are not entirely individualistic. They also reflect broad cultural views, which we learn and often internalize. For this reason, there are strong consistencies in how people socialized in the same culture and social groups attribute meaning to communication in romantic relationships. Research shows that college students in the United States agree on the goals and script for initial get togethers (Metts, 2006a; Mongeau, Serewicz, & Therrien, 2004; Pryor & Merluzzi, 1985). Both women and men perceive getting to know the new person and having fun as parts of a first-encounter script. Women are more likely than men to perceive companionship as a goal, and men are more likely than women to perceive sexual activity as a goal (Mongeau et al., 2004).
Members of a culture also tend to have similar ideas about how men and women should act. The majority of college students in the United States think that men should initiate and plan get togethers and make decisions about most activities, but that women control sexual activity (Laner & Ventrone, 2002; Metts, 2006a). However, women tend to be more egalitarian than men in their ratings of who is responsible for paying the first time a couple hangs out. While only 9% of men think either partner could pay, 22% of women think either person could (Laner & Ventrone, 2002). In other cultures, different rules prevail for initial get togethers and the whole process of courting. For example, in parts of India, marriages are often arranged by parents; love is understood to be something that develops after marriage. In Nepal, ritualistic dancing and celebrations are an important part of courtship.
Research on the evolution of romantic relationships has focused on Western society, so we know the most about the developmental course of romance in the West. Investigations show that Westerners typically perceive romantic relationships as evolving through three broad phases: growth, navigation, and deterioration (Mongeau & Henningsen, 2008). Within these three broad categories, we distinguish a number of more specific stages.
Growth
Researchers have identified six growth stages through which romance typically, but not always, progresses. The first is individuality: each of us is an individual with particular needs, goals, love styles, perceptual tendencies, and qualities that affect what we look for in relationships. Our choices of people with whom to begin a romance are influenced by our personal histories and our identities, including our attachment styles (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2005) and whether we give to others conditionally or unconditionally (Clark & Finkel, 2005).
Edna
It’s funny how things change as we age. When I was first dating in my teens, the topics for small talk early in the relationship were your major, career plans, and background. Now I’m 47, divorced, and dating again, and the opening topics tend to be about career achievements, past marriages, and finances.
The second growth stage is invitational communication, in which people signal that they are interested in interacting; during this stage they also respond to invitations from others. “I love this kind of music,” “Where are you from?” and “Hi, my name’s Shelby” are examples of bids for interaction. We may also invite interaction in chat rooms or websites that are designed for meeting new people. The most important meaning of invitational communication is found on the relationship level, not the content level. “I love this kind of music” literally means that a person likes the music. On the relationship level of meaning, however, the message is, “I’m interested in interacting. Are you?”
Communication in Everyday Life: Diversity Development of Interracial Relationships
The number of interracial marriages tripled between 1970 and 2002, and interracial dating grew at an even higher rate (Troy & Laurenceau, 2006). In addition to the stages generally followed in developing intimacy, partners in interracial relationships often deal simultaneously with four distinct developmental stages (Foeman & Nance, 1999).
- Racial awareness—Each partner becomes conscious of his or her race and his or her views of the partner’s race. In addition, partners become more aware of broad social perspectives on their own and each other’s racial group.
- Coping—The couple struggles with external pressures, including disapproval from family and friends, and develops strategies to protect their relationship from external damage.
- Identity emergence—Partners declare their couple identity to themselves and others.
- Relationship maintenance—The couple works at preserving the relationship as it incorporates new challenges, such as having children, moving to new areas, and entering new social circles.
Hooking up, which is engaging in some degree of sexual activity with a person with no expectation of seeing that person again, is an increasingly popular form of initial get-together. Broad surveys of college students report that 72% of both sexes have hooked up (40% intercourse; 35% kissing and touching; 12% hand and genital contact; 12% oral sex) (Blackstrom, Armstrong, & Puentes, 2012). African Americans are less likely to hook up (35% ) than are Caucasian Americans (60% ) (Jayson, 2011). Hooking up has become an alternative to dating for several reasons. One is that women students outnumber men students so heterosexual women have fewer choices and heterosexual men have more choices. A second reason is that individuals want freedom from commitments that might interfere with summer internships and jobs or early career focus (Taylor, 2013; Uecker & Regnerus, 2011). Although both sexes engage in hooks ups, women are more likely than men to regret hooking up, to feel guilty, and to be depressed (Bradshaw, Kahn, & Saville, 2010).
Of all the people we meet, we find only a few sufficiently attractive to warrant further get togethers. Three of the greatest influences on initial attraction are attractiveness, proximity, and similarity. Among members of each sexual orientation, there tend to be somewhat consistent criteria for selecting dating partners. Many gay men place priority on physical characteristics, including slimness, body conditioning, and grooming (Huston & Schwartz, 1995). Heterosexual men also place importance on physical attractiveness; many prefer women who are slim and beautiful (Sprecher & Regan, 2002). Heterosexual women and lesbians tend to emphasize qualities of personality, such as kindness, honesty, and integrity (Huston & Schwartz, 1995).
Yet the bases of attraction we just discussed are not universal but are shaped by culture. In other words, what we look for in partners varies across cultures. A recent study (Riela, Rodriguez, Aron, Xu, & Acevedo, 2010) found that Americans place more emphasis on appearance than Chinese, and Chinese place more emphasis on personality, fulfilling needs, and social influence.
Proximity and similarity are major influences on initial attraction. We can interact only with people we meet in person or in social media, so where we live, work, and socialize and the social media we use constrain the possibilities for relationships. Nearness to others doesn’t necessarily increase liking. The term environmental spoiling denotes situations in which proximity breeds ill will. This happens when we’re forced to be around others whose values, lifestyles, or behaviors conflict with our own.
Similarity is also important in romantic relationships. In the realm of romance, “birds of a feather flock together” seems truer than “opposites attract” (Levin, Taylor, & Caudle, 2007; Samp & Palevitz, 2009). The hypothesis that the United States is classless has been disproved by the fact that most people seek romantic partners of their own social class or above it (Sprecher & Regan, 2002; Whitbeck & Hoyt, 1994).
Most people seek romantic partners whose values, attitudes, and lifestyles are similar to their own (Amodio & Showers, 2005; Buston & Emlen, 2003; Lutz-Zois, Bradley, Mihalik, & Moorman-Eavers, 2006). Similarity of personality is also linked to the fit between people and to long-term satisfaction in relationships (Gonzaga, Carter & Buckwalter, 2010).
People increasingly rely on online sites to meet potential partners. Over 16 million Americans say they have gone online to look for dating partners (Rosen, Cheever, Cummings, & Felt, 2008). Online dating services may be especially helpful to people who are shy about launching romantic relationships (Scharlott & Christ, 1995).
Explorational communication is the third stage in the escalation of romance, and it focuses on learning about each other. In this stage, people fish for common interests and grounds for interaction: “Do you like jazz?” “Where have you traveled?” “Have you been following the political debates?” In this stage, we continue trying to reduce our uncertainty about the other person so that we can evaluate the possibility of a more serious relationship. We may make self-disclosures, which can increase trust and feelings of intimacy (Laurenceau, Barrett, & Rovinne, 2005; Sprecher & Hendrick, 2004). It’s also possible for this phase to be where a relationship settles—that is, stabilizes as a casual hook-up or hang out-relationship (Knapp & Vangelisti, 2005).
What we tell each other during these early stages of relationships isn’t necessarily entirely truthful. Many people “put their best foot forward” in new relationships. Beyond that, some people misrepresent themselves in more significant ways—for example, claiming degrees they haven’t earned or abilities they don’t have. This is equally true in online relationships. In online dating, men are more likely than women to misrepresent their personal assets (e.g., financial worth), relationship goals (e.g., to claim interest in a long-term relationship when they are actually interested in shorter-term connection), personal attributes (e.g., height), and personal interests. Women are more likely than men to misrepresent their weight (Hall, Park, Song, & Cody, 2010).
The fourth growth stage is intensifying communication, which my students nicknamed euphoria to emphasize its intensity and happiness. During this stage, partners spend more time together, and they rely less on external structures such as films or parties. They may immerse themselves in the relationship and may feel that they can’t be together enough. Further disclosures occur, personal biographies are filled in, and partners increasingly learn how the other feels and thinks. As partners increase the depth of their knowledge of each other, they begin to develop dual perspective and begin thinking and talking of themselves as a couple. During this stage, couples usually agree to make their relationship exclusive. In Japan, couples commit to tsukiau relationships; tsukiau roughly translates into “going steady” (Farrer, Tsuchiya, & Bagrowicz, 2008).
Communication in Everyday Life: Insight Valentine’s Day
Valentine’s Day means love, romance, and passion. It’s a time for sweethearts, a time to be mushy. If that’s how you think of Valentine’s Day, think again. In A.D. 498, the Roman Catholic Church declared February 14 to be St. Valentine’s Feast Day, meant to recognize that marriage was a necessary institution but certainly not a romantic one. Prior to the Church’s decision, however, on February 14, girls’ names were put into a container and each boy drew out one name. For the next year, the boy and the girl whose name he had drawn would be sexual partners. The Church thought this practice should be stopped because, at that time, the Church had little use for passion, love, or even marriage (Coontz, 2005b).
Of course, young people disagreed and continued to think that passion and love were central to romance. By the Middle Ages, St. Valentine had become associated with romance in popular culture, but even then, romance was not assumed to lead to or to be part of marriage. Only in the 18th century did the idea that love and marriage go together begin to gain popular acceptance in the West.
And just who was St. Valentine? He was a Christian priest who, in the 3rd century, was jailed (the reason is a matter of controversy). Awaiting execution, he wrote a sentimental goodbye letter to his jailer’s daughter, with whom he had fallen in love. He signed the letter, “from your Valentine.”
Also characteristic of the intensifying stage are idealizing and personalized communication. Idealizing involves seeing the relationship and the partner as more wonderful, exciting, and perfect than they really are (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1988; Murray, Holmes, & Griffin, 1996a, 1996b). During euphoria, partners often exaggerate each other’s virtues, downplay or fail to perceive vices, and overlook problems in the relationship. It is also during euphoria that partners begin to develop private nicknames and language.
Revising communication, although not a stage in the development of all romantic relationships, is important when it does occur. During this stage, partners come out of the clouds to look at their relationship more realistically. Problems are recognized, and partners evaluate whether they want to work through them. Many people fall in love and move through the intensifying stage yet do not choose to stay together. A student of mine had a long-term love relationship with a man she loved, but she never let her parents know of the relationship because he is African American and she is Indian and expected to marry within her ethnicity. It is entirely possible to love a person with whom we don’t choose to share our life.
Susan Piver (2008) advises couples who are considering long-term commitment to answer 100 questions to assess their compatibility and readiness to commit. Here’s a sampling of the questions:
- What proportion of our time do you expect to spend maintaining our home?
- How many couple friends do you expect us to have?
- How often do you expect us to get together with joint friends?
- How do you feel about saving money versus enjoying spending it?
- How do you want our home to look and feel?
- Do you want children? How many? When?
As important as answers to the questions are the conversations that are prompted by asking them. In dealing with questions such as these, many couples discover that they have serious differences that could jeopardize the relationship’s stability.
Thelma
Breaking up with Ted was the hardest thing I ever did. I really loved him, and he loved me, but I just couldn’t see myself living with a Christian. My whole heritage is Jewish—it’s who I am. I celebrate Hanukkah, not Christmas. Seder, Passover, and Yom Kippur are very important to me. Those aren’t part of Ted’s heritage, and he wouldn’t convert. I loved him, but we couldn’t have made a life together.
The final growth stage is commitment, which is the decision to stay with the relationship. Before commitment, partners don’t assume that the relationship will continue forever. With commitment, the relationship becomes a given, around which they arrange other aspects of their lives. Commitment also leads partners to invest more in a relationship, especially in terms of communication to maintain satisfaction. Not surprisingly, partners in on-again, off-again relationships, in which commitment has not been made, engage in fewer maintenance behaviors when a relationship is on than partners in stable relationships. Specifically, partners in on-again, off-again relationships report that when a relationship is on, they are less cooperative, patient, and polite in communicating with their partners and involve their partners less in their social circles than do partners in stable relationships (Dailey, Hampel, & Roberts, 2010).
Emily
A lot of people my age don’t really date that much. We’re more likely to hook up with people. What sounds like the intensifying stage in the model is more like explorational stage for us. Sometimes after physical intimacy with a hookup, something else develops.
Navigation
Navigation is the ongoing process of staying committed and living a life together despite ups and downs, and pleasant and unpleasant surprises. Couples continually adjust, work through new problems, revisit old ones, and accommodate changes in their individual and relational lives. During navigation, partners also continually experience tension from relational dialectics, which are never resolved once and for all. As partners respond to dialectical tensions, they revise and refine the nature of the relationship itself.
To use an automotive analogy, navigating involves both preventive maintenance and periodic repairs (Canary & Stafford, 1994; Dindia, 2000; Parker-Pope, 2010a). The goals are to keep intimacy satisfying and healthy and to deal with any serious problems that arise. To understand the navigation stage, we’ll discuss relational culture, placemaking, and everyday interaction.
The nucleus of intimacy is relational culture, which is a private world of rules, understandings, meanings, and patterns of acting and interpreting that partners create for their relationship (Bruess, 2011; Bruess & Hoefs, 2006; Wood, 1982, 2000a). Relational culture includes the ways in which a couple manages their relational dialectics. Jan and Byron may negotiate a lot of autonomy and little togetherness, whereas Louise and Kim emphasize connectedness and minimize autonomy. Bob and Cassandra are very open, whereas Mike and Zelda preserve more individual privacy in their marriage. Satisfied couples tend to agree on how to deal with dialectical tensions (Fitzpatrick & Best, 1970).
Communication in Everyday Life: Workplace Workplace Romance
It’s hardly surprising that workplace romances are common. When 40% of employees spend more than 50 hours a week on the job (Losee & Olen, 2007), the workplace is the most likely place to find romantic partners. But is it a good idea to get involved with a coworker? As long as the relationship sails along, all may be fine. However, most workplace romances don’t last, just like most non-workplace romances don’t last. 53% of workplace romances end within 1 year, and 84% end within 5 years (Clark, 2006). When they end, the fallout may include hostility, retaliation, poor teamwork, and even sexual harassment suits. All of these are reasons why many employers discourage or even prohibit sexual and romantic relationships between employees. However, Paul Abramson (2007) argues that every adult has a right to free choices about relationships. Abramson believes we have a constitutional right to consensual adult relationships as long as we don’t harm others.
Relational culture also includes rules and rituals. Couples develop rules, usually unspoken, about how to communicate anger, sexual interest, and so forth. Couples also develop rules about everyday thoughtfulness and kindness. A recent study (Algoe, Gable, & Maisel, 2010) found that when one partner does something thoughtful, the other partner is likely to feel grateful and that gratitude acts as a “booster shot” for romantic relationships. Both women and men felt more satisfied with relationships when they also felt grateful to their partners. In addition, couples develop rules for commemorating special times such as birthdays and holidays and create rituals for couple time (Duck, 2006; Wood, 2006a), celebrations and play, and so forth (Bruess & Pearson, 1997). The rules and rituals that partners develop and follow provide a predictable rhythm for intimate interaction.
Placemaking is the process of creating a comfortable personal environment that reflects the values, experiences, and tastes of the couple (Bateson, 1990; Werner, Altman, Brown, & Ginat, 1993). In our home, Robbie and I have symbols of our travels: Tibetan carpets, a batik from Thailand, ancient masks from Nepal, marble dishes from Turkey, wooden bowls from Belize, and a wood carving from Mexico. Photographs of friends and family members who matter to us are scattered throughout our home, and we have built-in bookshelves, all overloaded, in most rooms. The books, photos, and travel souvenirs make the house into a home that reflects who we are and what we’ve done together.
An especially important dimension of relational culture is everyday interaction (Parker-Pope, 2010a; Wood & Duck, 2006a, 2006b). The importance of everyday interaction for couples becomes most obvious when it’s not possible. People in long-distance relationships say that being together for big moments is not what they miss most; instead, they miss sharing small talk and the trivial details of their days with each other.
Deterioration
Some relationships end abruptly. A person moves or dies or simply quits making contact. Most relationships that have reached the level of commitment, however, deteriorate through a series of stages. Steve Duck (2007; Duck & Wood, 2006) describes relational deterioration as happening through a five-stage sequence: intrapsychic processes, dyadic processes, social support, grave-dressing processes, and resurrection processes.
Communication in Everyday Life: Insight Ambiguous Loss
Usually we know if we have lost someone we love. The person dies or leaves in a clear-cut way. But what happens if a loved one’s departure isn’t definite? That’s what interests Dr. Pauline Boss. She studies what she calls ambiguous loss—the experience in which a person seems both present and absent simultaneously (Boss, 2007). Physical absence happens when someone leaves without goodbye. For instance, the person abruptly disappears with no explanation or is a soldier reported as missing in action. The people left behind know the person is gone, but they have no certainty that the person is dead or forever gone. Psychological absence occurs when someone is physically present but emotionally and mentally absent. For example, a person who is in a coma or who has amnesia or dementia is psychologically absent (Sherman & Boss, 2007).
There are other forms of ambiguous loss in which a person seems to be both present and absent. Children with some forms of autism may be physically present but not psychologically accessible (O’Brien, 2007), and military families often experience ambiguous loss when family members are deployed and contact is difficult (Faber, Willerton, Clymer, MacDermid, & Weiss, 2008). Kristen Norwood (2010) found that many families with a transgender member experienced ambiguous loss. Family members grieved for the loss of a son or brother or father or husband but also recognized the new presence of a daughter or sister or mother or wife.
First, there are intrapsychic processes, during which one or both partners begin to feel dissatisfied with the relationship and to focus their thoughts on its problems or shortcomings. As gloomy thoughts snowball, partners may actually bring about the failure of their relationship. During the intrapsychic phase, partners may begin to think about alternatives to the relationship.
If not reversed, the intrapsychic phase generally leads to dyadic processes, which involve the breakdown of established patterns, rules, and rituals that make up the relational culture. Partners may stop talking over dinner, no longer text when they are running late, and in other ways neglect rules that have operated in their relationship. As the fabric of intimacy weakens, dissatisfaction intensifies.
There are general sex differences in the causes of dyadic breakdown (Duck & Wood, 2006). For many women, unhappiness with a relationship tends to arise when communication declines in quality, quantity, or both. Men, in general, are more likely to be dissatisfied when specific behaviors or activities change (Riessman, 1990). Many women regard a relationship as breaking down if “we don’t really communicate with each other anymore,” whereas men tend to be dissatisfied if “we don’t do fun things together anymore.” Women also tend to be more concerned with relationship equity than men. Marital quality diminishes for women as they contribute more whereas men’s marital quality increases when they contribute more to domestic labor (DeMaris, 2010).
Another sex difference lies in who notices the problems in a relationship. As a rule, women are more likely than men to notice tensions and early symptoms of problems (Canary & Wahba, 2006; Cancian, 1989).
There are also sex differences in sources of jealousy. In general, women are more jealous of emotional commitments and men are more jealous of sexual involvements. These gender differences also show up in reactions to online relationships. Women are more jealous of a partner’s emotional investment in another relationship whereas men are more jealous of a partner’s sexual infidelity (cybersex) (Groothof, Dijkstra, & Bareids, 2009).
Dyadic processes may also include discussion of problems and dissatisfaction. This doesn’t always occur (Duck, 2007) because many people avoid talking about problems (Baxter, 1984; Metts, Cupach, & Bejlovec, 1989). Although it is painful to talk about the decline of intimacy, avoiding discussion does nothing to resolve problems and may make them worse. The outcome of dyadic processes depends on how committed the partners are, whether they perceive attractive alternatives to the relationship, and whether they have the communication skills to work through problems. If partners lack commitment or the communication skills needed to resuscitate intimacy, they must decide how to tell outsiders that they are parting.
Social support is a phase in which partners look to friends and family for support. Partners may give self-serving accounts of the breakup to save face and to secure sympathy and support from others. Thus, Beth may portray Janine as at fault and herself as the innocent party in a breakup. During this phase, partners often criticize their exes and expect friends to take their side (Duck, 2007; La Gaipa, 1982). Although self-serving explanations of breakups are common, they aren’t necessarily constructive. It’s a good idea to monitor communication during this period so that we don’t say things we’ll later regret. When relationships end because of the death of one partner, the surviving person may rely on social networks for sympathy and support.
Communication in Everyday Life: Social Media Cybermemorials
Social media offer unique means for people to grieve and to remember people who have died. Sites such as Memory-Of.com and MyDeath.Space.com are dedicated to cybermemorials, and more general social networking sites such as Facebook allow people to post messages about loved ones who have died. Posts and pages to memorialize loved ones link people who are physically dispersed and allow them to share memories and help each other through the grieving process.
Grave-dressing processes involve burying the relationship and accepting its end. During grave dressing, we work to make sense of the relationship: what it meant, why it failed, and how it affected us. Usually, people need to mourn intimacy that has died. Even if we initiate a breakup, we are sad about the failure to realize what once seemed possible. Grave-dressing processes also include explaining to others why the relationship ended.
Although some rumination is inevitable and probably healthy, excessive thoughts about an ended relationship tend to hurt us more than they help us. Specifically, people who brood extensively or engage in “what if” thinking are more likely to experience depression and lack of motivation and to adjust less well to breakups than people who ruminate for a short while and then move on (Honeycutt, 2003; Saffrey & Ehrenberg, 2007).
The final part of relationship deterioration involves resurrection processes, during which the two people move on with their lives without the other as an intimate. We conceive of ourselves as single again, and we reorganize our lives to break the synchrony that we had with our ex-partner.
The stages we have discussed describe how many romantic relationships evolve. However, not all people follow these stages in this order. For example, people with pragmatic love styles might not allow themselves to enter into euphoria until they have engaged in the very practical considerations of the revising stage. Other couples skip one or more stages in the typical sequences of escalation or deterioration, and many of us cycle more than once through certain stages. For example, a couple might soar through euphoria, work out some tough issues in revising, then go through euphoria a second time. It’s also normal for long-term partners to depart from navigation periodically to experience both euphoric seasons and intervals of dyadic breakdown and then move back to navigating. Furthermore, because relationships are embedded in larger systems, romantic intimacy follows different developmental paths in other cultures.
Social Media and Romantic Relationships
In the foregoing pages, we have already noted some of the ways in which social media affect romantic relationships. Before social media existed, our choices of relationship partners were largely limited to the people we encountered face to face. In addition, the primary way to check out potential partners was through dating, which requires some expense and time to learn what we can now learn quickly through online profiles. Once couples in long-distance relationships relied on letters and expensive plane tickets and long-distance calls to maintain contact, whereas today we can Skype and text to stay in touch (Tong & Walther, 2011). Even intimates who live together rely on social media to stay in close contact throughout each day (Walther & Ramirez, 2010). In many ways, social media have made it far easier to form and maintain romantic relationships.
At the same time, social media have introduced new challenges for people seeking romance. As noted in this chapter, deception is perhaps more easily accomplished online than face to face. Both sexes tend to misrepresent themselves when posting online profiles (Hall et al., 2010). People may give false information about their physical attractiveness, and people who are less attractive are more likely to embellish their photographs and self-descriptions (Toma & Hancock, 2010).
Another concern about social media is the potential for cyberstalking. Former boyfriends and girlfriends may monitor your online communication and harass you or interfere with your communication with other people. In addition, someone you meet online can become obsessed with you and, in extreme cases, can engage in stalking you online, following your every move and imposing himself or herself into your life.
Social media also offer opportunities for infidelity as the scenario that opened this chapter suggested. While there is nothing new about cheating on a partner, social media increase the opportunities to be unfaithful and perhaps the likelihood of doing so without discovery. When asked how they would feel if they learned their partner had been involved in an online romantic relationship, college students responded that online infidelity was just as wrong and hurtful as in-person betrayal (Henline, Lamke & Howard, 2007).
Guidelines for Communicating in Romantic Relationships
Romantic relationships often experience unique challenges. We’ll now discuss four guidelines for communicating to meet such challenges and to build and maintain a healthy, satisfying relationship.
Engage in Dual Perspective
In Chapter 10, we offered the same guideline—engage in dual perspective—for maintaining friendships. It’s equally important to engage in dual perspective in romantic relationships (Parker-Pope, 2010a). When we love someone, we want to know and be known by that person. We want to understand and to be understood by that person. And we want to feel that she or he takes our perspective into account when interacting with us. Engaging in dual perspective requires us to get to know the other person really well, and then to use that knowledge to guide our communicative choices.
Austin
Mandy’s the first girlfriend I’ve ever had who understands that I need time to think things through when we have a difference of opinion. All of the girls before her pressured me to talk when they wanted to, with no respect for when I wanted to. If I refused, they accused me of avoiding conflict or something like that. Mandy gets it that I really need to work things out before I can talk about issues, and she respects that.
Austin gives a good example of what it feels like to have someone you care about take your perspective into consideration. It feels like—and it is—a very special gift. In I–Thou relationships, dual perspective is especially important.
Practice Safe Sex
We usually think of sexual activity in terms of pleasure. In addition to its pleasures, sexual activity can pose serious, even deadly, threats. Engaging in safer sex is a communication issue for two reasons. First, cultural views, often mistaken, about who is likely and not likely to have sexually transmitted diseases are communicated to us through everyday conversations as well as media. Second, engaging in safer sex requires communication between partners. They must talk about their sexual histories, medical checkups, and what each of them requires in terms of protections to feel safe.
Committing to communication about safer sex is a matter of health and survival. Each year, about 2 million people die of AIDS (Collins & Fauci, 2010). Each year 56,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with AIDS (Collins & Fauci, 2010), and more than one and a quarter million people in the United States are living with HIV today (Altman, 2008). Many of them contracted the virus through sex with a hook-up, casual date, or serious romantic partner. New HIV and AIDS cases have actually increased since 1999 (Altman, 2008; Carey & O’Connor, 2004; Schott, 2008). Every single day, worldwide, 6,800 people are infected with HIV (Schott, 2008).
Communication in Everyday Life: Insight Facts about Sexually Transmitted Diseases
Many people hold dangerous misunderstandings about sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Let’s check the facts. (American Social Health Association, 2005; Cates, Herndon, Schulz, & Darroch, 2004; Collins & Fauci, 2010; Cowley & Murr, 2004; Dennis & Wood, 2012; “One in Four,” 2008; http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/diseases/hepatitis/b/fact.htm).
Misconception: If I’m tested for HIV, and I make sure my sexual partner is, then I’m safe.
The Facts: HIV is not the only STD, and it’s not the most common. Other STDs include genital warts, genital herpes, hepatitis B, human papillomavirus (HPV), chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, and trichomoniasis. One in 20 people will get hepatitis B in his or her lifetime, and 15% to 25% of those who do will die of liver disease.
Misconception: I’m heterosexual, so I’m not at risk for HIV.
The Facts: Seventy percent of women who are HIV positive contracted the disease through heterosexual sexual contact.
Misconception: I don’t think I’m being too risky because only a few people have STDs.
The Facts: One in two sexually active youths will contract an STD by age 25. Over 65 million Americans are currently living with an STD, and 15 million new cases are diagnosed each year.
Misconception: STDs only affect older people.
The Facts: Half of all new STDs occur in people 15 to 24 years old. Each year, one in four teens contracts an STD. Among blacks, 50% of 14- to 19-year-olds contract an STD.
Misconception: The incidence of STDs is declining.
The Facts: Some STDs, such as genital warts, chlamydia, and gonorrhea, are actually increasing.
Misconception: I can’t catch an STD if I have only oral sex.
The Facts: You can contract STDs from oral, anal, or vaginal sexual activity.
Misconception: I could tell if someone had an STD because there are symptoms.
The Facts: Some STDs have no visible symptoms. For instance, HPV, which 50% of sexually active people will contract at some point, often has no symptoms.
Misconception: STDs can be treated, so there aren’t serious consequences even if I do get one.
The Facts: Some can be treated. Some are resistant to treatment. And for some, such as HIV, we do not have a cure. Also, because some have no symptoms, people may not seek treatment until it’s too late. In all cases, it’s best to be treated as early as possible.
Misconception: I see a doctor regularly, so I am tested for STDs.
The Facts: Most doctors do not routinely test for STDs. You must specifically ask to be tested for STDs and then specify those you want to be tested for.
Misconception: Other than HIV, STDs don’t have major consequences.
The Facts: Because STDs often have no symptoms, they may go untreated for some time, and the long-term effects of untreated STDs can be severe: infertility, blindness, liver cancer, increased vulnerability to HIV, and death. This is why it is particularly important to be tested for STDs, even if you don’t think you’ve been exposed to one.
HIV is not the only sexually transmitted disease (STD). In fact, one in four girls ages 14–19 is infected with a common STD (“One in Four,” 2008). In 2008, 1,210,523 cases of sexually transmitted chlamydia were reported to CDC. This is the largest number of cases ever reported to CDC for any condition and is a 9.2% increased over the prior year. Rates of reported chlamydia among women have increasing annually since the late 1980s. In 2008, the chlamydia rate in black men was 12 times higher than in white men; the chlamydia rate in black women was 8 times higher than in white women (Centers for Disease Control, 2010).
One reason people sometimes fail to practice safe sex is that they are impaired by alcohol or other drugs, so they don’t use their usual good sense and caution. College students often neglect precautions when they drink heavily (Bowen & Michal-Johnson, 1995).
A second reason for not exercising care when engaging in sex is the belief that you are not at risk. Many people rely on talk with friends instead of health professionals for their information about sexual health. This is especially true for young men. Less than 25% of boys aged 15 to 19 have received counseling about STDs whereas nearly 66% of sexually active girls have received some counseling about STDs (Grady, 2010). Based on communication with friends, many people hold dangerous misconceptions such as, “Nice people don’t have STDs,” “AIDS only affects gays,” “You can’t get an STD by having oral sex,” and “As long as you’re monogamous, you’re safe.” Many people believe that it’s sufficient to ask a potential sexual partner if he or she has any sexual diseases, but that assumes people know if they have a disease and will be truthful. One in five people with HIV do not know they have it (Collins & Fauci, 2010). Kara’s commentary illustrates the risks of being misinformed.
Kara
When I had a medical exam, the doctor told me I had herpes. “What? Me? That’s impossible,” I said. I only have oral sex because I don’t want to risk getting diseases. Turns out you can get them from oral sex, too. Now I have oral herpes, and I will have it for the rest of my life.
A final reason people don’t practice safer sex is that they find it difficult and embarrassing to talk about it with an intimate. They find it awkward to ask direct questions of partners (“Have you been tested for HIV?” “Are you having sex with anyone else?”) or to make direct requests of partners (“I want you to wear a condom,” “I would like us to be tested for STDs before we have sex”). Naturally, it’s difficult to communicate explicitly about sex and the dangers of STDs. However, it is far more difficult to live with an STD or the knowledge that you have infected someone else.
The principles of effective interpersonal communication we’ve discussed can help ease the discomfort of negotiating safer sex. I language that owns your feelings is especially important. It is more constructive to say, “I feel unsafe having unprotected sex” than to say, “Without a condom, you could give me an STD.” A positive interpersonal climate is fostered by using relational language, such as “we,” “us,” and “our relationship.”
Your health and perhaps your life depend on your willingness to engage in talk about sex. Think about the fact that choosing to practice safe sex is an act of respect toward yourself and your partner: People who care about themselves and their partners are honest about their sexual histories and careful in their sex practices. Before you decide it’s too hard to talk about safer sex with your partner, carefully consider the dangers of silence.
Manage Conflict Constructively
Chapter 9 was devoted to managing conflict in relationships. Doing so is important for all kinds of relationships. Yet there are two reasons romantic relationships require special attention to effective conflict management. First, romantic bonds, particularly serious ones, are important to us, and they are fragile. Lack of skill in handling conflicts can end a relationship that really matters.
The second reason for giving special attention to managing conflict in romantic relationships is one we’ll discuss in depth. Although we like to think of romantic relationships as loving, many are not. Violence and abuse are unfortunately common between romantic partners, and they cut across lines of class, race, and ethnicity (Jacobson & Gottman, 1998; Johnson, 2006; Spitzberg & Cupach, 1998, 2009; West, 1995; Wood, 2000b, 2001). Researchers (Cahn, 2009) have shown that many people who engage in violence against romantic partners lack the communicative skills to constructively manage emotions and conflicts.
Intimate partner violence, which is sometimes also called domestic violence, occurs not only in marriage but also in dating and cohabiting relationships of both heterosexuals and gays (Johnson, 2006, 2008; Spitzberg & Cupach, 1998, 2009). The Centers for Disease Control’s 2011 report states that 1 in 4 U.S. women have been violently attacked by husbands or boyfriends, and 1 in 7 men have been violently attacked by wives or girlfriends. Intimate partner violence is also on the rise in dating relationships, including those of very young people. Nearly 10% of high school students report being physically hurt by a girlfriend or boyfriend, and 1 in 3 high school students report psychological violence from a girlfriend or boyfriend (Hoffman, 2012).
Women and men alike can be targets of violence from intimates. Women exceed men in social aggression, which is intentionally designed to hurt romantic partners by manipulating social relationships (Goldstein, 2011). Yet the majority of reported physical violence is committed by men against women: 95% of cases involve male abusers and female victims (Johnson, 2006). Furthermore, male abusers are far more likely than female abusers to inflict physical injuries, sometimes severe ones (Johnson, 2006). In fact, intimate partner violence is the most common form of violence committed against women in the United States (Haynes, 2009).
It’s important to remember that the statistics on violence between intimates are based on reported incidents and are therefore significantly underrepresented: Many people do not report incidents to the police at all. Women may not report assaults by intimate partners because they are afraid that the consequences might be even worse violence, because they want to protect their partners from punishment, or because they want to spare their children or themselves from the abuser’s ensuing anger or vengeance. Men abused by women may not report assaults by intimate partners because they feel ashamed or embarrassed that a woman is assaulting them.
Stalking is repeated, intrusive behavior that is uninvited and unwanted, that seems obsessive, and that makes the target afraid or concerned for her or his safety. In studies conducted on college campuses (Spitzberg & Cupach, 2009), 13% to 21% of students report having been stalked (Spitzberg & Cupach, 2009). About half of female victims are stalked by ex-partners and another 25% by men they have dated at least once (Meloy, 2006). Stalking is particularly common on campuses because it is easy to monitor and learn others’ routines. Further, IMing and social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook give stalkers more ways to learn about (potential) victims’ habits and patterns.
Relationships in which men abuse women often reflect traditional power dynamics that structure relationships between women and men. Some men are taught to use power to assert themselves and to dominate others (Coan, Gottman, Babcock, & Jacobson, 1997; Sugarman & Frankel, 1996; Truman, Tokar, & Fischer, 1996; Wood, 2004), and some women are socialized to defer and preserve relationships (Ellington & Marshall, 1997; Wood, 2001). When these internalized patterns combine in heterosexual relationships, a foundation exists for men to abuse women and for women to tolerate it rather than to be assertive.
Marla
Looking back, I can’t believe I stayed with Sean for so long, but at the time, I couldn’t imagine leaving him. We started hanging out together in high school, and then we both came to this university. When we first started seeing each other, he was so nice to me—flowers sometimes, lots of phone calls, and all the stuff. But the summer after we graduated from high school, he hit me for the first time. I was shocked. He was really sorry and said he was just so stressed about the whole college thing. A little while later, it happened again, and he apologized again, and I forgave him again. But it didn’t stop. It got worse. Whenever he was in a bad mood, he took it out on me—really hitting hard, even beating me at times. Finally, my roommate saw bruises and put two and two together and walked me to a counselor at student health. That was the start of getting out of the relationship.
Violence seldom stops without intervention (Clements, Holtzworth-Munroe, Schweinle, & Ickes, 2007). Instead, it usually follows a predictable cycle, just as Marla described: Tension mounts in the abuser; the abuser explodes, becoming violent; the abuser then is remorseful and loving; the victim feels loved and believes the relationship will improve; and then tension mounts, and the cycle begins again (see Figure 11.3).
People who engage in dual perspective (Clements et al., 2007) and who develop skills in identifying and expressing their emotions and in managing conflict are less likely to resort to violence in their romantic relationships.
Adapt Communication to Maintain Long-Distance Relationships
A majority of college students are or have been in long-distance romances (Sahlstein, 2006; Stafford, 2005). Three problems, or tensions, are commonly experienced in long-distance relationships, and each can be addressed with communication. Perhaps the greatest problems are the lack of daily sharing of small events, and unrealistic expectations about time together. As we have seen, sharing ordinary comings and goings helps partners keep their lives interwoven. Routine conversations form and continually reform the basic fabric of our relationships (Wood & Duck, 2006a, 2006b). Technology allows us to engage in more sharing of everyday things, even if not via face-to-face conversation.
The lack of routine contact leads to the second problem faced by long-distance couples: unrealistic expectations for time together. Because partners have limited time together, they often think that every moment must be perfect and that they should be together all of the time. Yet this is an unrealistic expectation. Conflict and needs for autonomy are natural and inevitable in all romantic relationships. They may be even more likely in reunions of long-distance couples because partners are used to living alone and have established independent rhythms that may not mesh well. Laura Stafford, Andy Merolla, and Janessa Castle (2006) studied couples who united in the same place after being in long-distance relationships. One-third of the couples broke up not long after they were in the same place. The key reasons were that being physically together denied the couples what they most valued in the long-distance relationship: novelty and autonomy.
A third common problem in long-distance relationships is unequal effort invested by the two partners. The inequity in investment creates resentment in the person who is assuming the majority of the work to keep the relationship alive and may create guilt in the partner who is investing less.
The good news is that these problems don’t have to sabotage long-distance romance. Many people maintain satisfying commitments despite geographic separation (Stafford, 2005). In fact, there are some noteworthy advantages of long-distance relationships. Because couples aren’t together continually, they tend to be more loving and passionate when they are together (Blake, 1996; Reske & Stafford, 1990).
In sum, four guidelines for communication in romantic relationships are to engage in dual perspective, to practice safe sex, to manage conflict effectively to avoid intimate partner violence, and to maintain communication in long-distance relationships. Commitment, flexibility, and effective interpersonal communication help partners meet the challenges of keeping romance healthy and satisfying over the life of the relationship.
Chapter Summary
In this chapter, we focused on romantic relationships. Although passion may be the most dramatic dimension of romantic relationships, it is not as central as commitment (the intention to stay together) and intimacy (feelings of warmth and connection). Love comes in many forms; we considered six distinct styles of loving and how they might combine in romantic relationships.
Relationship partners are no longer limited to those people in our immediate physical environment. Social media allow us to meet people who live miles or even continents away. We can get to know others online, and we can also use social media to stay in touch with long-distance partners.
The typical developmental course of romance, whether online or face to face, begins with an escalation phase, in which communication is concentrated on gaining personal knowledge and building a private culture for the relationship. If partners decide to stay together permanently, they commit to a future of intimacy. At that point, they enter the extended phase of navigation, in which they continually adjust to small and large changes in their individual and joint lives. If a romantic bond falters, partners may enter into deterioration and eventually lay their relationship to rest.
Romantic relationships are subject to unique challenges. We discussed three guidelines for communicating to meet these challenges. Engaging in dual perspective, negotiating safer sex, and managing conflict constructively are vital to healthy, satisfying romantic relationships.
Key Concepts
Practice defining the chapter’s terms by using online flashcards.
- agape 313
- commitment 310
- committed romantic relationships 309
- environmental spoiling 317
- eros 312
- hooking up 316
- intimacy 217
- ludus 312
- mania 313
- passion 310
- placemaking 320
- pragma 312
- relational culture 320
- storge 312
Chapter 12. Communication in Families
Introduction
After studying this chapter, you should be able to…
- Describe different definitions of family.
- Identify family communication patterns in a particular familial interaction.
- Recognize different stages in your family’s life cycle.
- Assess ways that social media affect families.
- Apply chapter guidelines to improve communication in your family.
Introduction
In their mid-twenties, Pat and Chris decide to share their lives. They buy a home and share the responsibilities of mortgage payments, maintenance, and housekeeping. They also pool their financial resources and provide each other with emotional support and care during sickness. After 7 years, Pat’s unmarried sibling dies, leaving an 8-year-old child, Jamie, who moves in with Pat and Chris. During the 10 years that follow, Pat and Chris share the emotional and financial responsibilities of raising Jamie as well as typical parental responsibilities, such as taking Jamie to the doctor and the dentist and attending PTA meetings, games, and school concerts. Later, Pat and Chris accompany Jamie to visit college campuses, and the three of them decide which college Jamie will attend.
Are Pat, Chris, and Jamie a family?
Does your answer depend on whether Pat and Chris are a male and a female? Does your answer depend on whether Pat and Chris are legally married and Jamie is legally adopted? Does your answer depend on whether Pat, Chris, and Jamie live in the United States or in France, which grants legal status to unions between any two people who live together?
If this example had appeared in a textbook in 1980, most people in the United States would have counted Pat, Chris, and Jamie a family only if either Pat or Chris was male and the other female, if they were married, and if Jamie was legally adopted. In 1980, most people in the United States viewed “family” as a legally married man and woman who had children. Many people considered a married man and woman who did not have children a “couple” but not a “family.”
Today there is less agreement about what a family is. A majority of Americans still conceive of family as involving children, marriage (rather than cohabitation), and blood or legal ties (Baxter, 2011). Also, a majority of Americans today believe that same-sex marriages should be legal. In the past 25 years, views of family have changed a great deal and so have families themselves. For that reason, the first section of this chapter elaborates on the opening theme by noting the diversity of families in our era. The second section of the chapter discusses elements and patterns of family communication. Next, we consider a model of the family life cycle and explore the kinds of families it does and doesn’t describe. After discussing the roles of social media in contemporary families, we close the chapter with guidelines for communicating effectively to meet the challenges of family life in our
Diversity in Family Life
Before we begin discussing families, we should note that not everyone lives with others. Approximately 25% of households in the United States consist of one person—the greatest number of people living alone in this country’s history (Olds & Schwartz, 2010).
The other 75% of Americans have formed diverse types of families. Think for a minute about your friends and acquaintances. How many different family forms do they embody? When I did this exercise myself, I came up with 14 different kinds of families in my social circle:
- A heterosexual African American man and woman who have been married for 12 years, who have two children, and who both work outside the home.
- A heterosexual Caucasian woman and man who have cohabited for 2 years, who are child free, and who both work outside the home.
- Two gay men, both Caucasian, who have cohabited for 20 years, who both work outside the home, and who have an adopted son from another country.
- A heterosexual Caucasian man and Latina woman who are married and have three children; he works outside the home, and she is a stay-at-home mom.
- A single Vietnamese man who has built close relationships with friends whom he considers his family.
- Two lesbians, one Caucasian, one African American, who married last year after cohabiting for 26 years and who have two adopted teenaged sons of a race different from theirs.
- A single Caucasian woman who adopted a daughter from Russia and who works outside the home.
- A widowed African American grandmother who is raising her granddaughter.
- A child-free marriage between a Caucasian man who lives in Pennsylvania and a Chinese-American woman who lives in North Carolina.
- A man and a woman of different races, both in their second marriage, who have five children from their previous marriages and who both work outside the home.
- A stay-at-home Caucasian dad who is married to a Caucasian woman who works outside the home.
- A heterosexual Caucasian man and woman who live as a couple, having raised two children, both of whom have moved across the country.
- A 27-year-old single Hispanic mom whose mother just moved in with her.
If we look beyond mainstream culture in the United States, we discover even more diversity in family forms.
- In some countries, marriages are arranged by families, and spouses may get to know each other only after the wedding ceremony. In some arranged marriages, the preferred match is between first cousins (Strong, DeVault, & Cohen, 2011).
- Polygamy is practiced in some societies (Regan, 2008).
- Some cultures regard marriage as so sacred that divorce is allowed only if a spouse denounces ancestors or kills someone in his or her mate’s family (WuDunn, 1991).
- In the Vanatinai of the South Pacific, dining together without others defines marriage more than sleeping together (Coontz, 2005b).
- In parts of India, Africa, and Asia, children as young as six may marry, although they may not live with a spouse until later. In many other societies, however, marriage joins two families, and couples are intricately connected to both families, including cousins, grandparents, and great-grandparents. It is not unusual for multiple generations of family to live in the same home (Strong, et al., 2011).
- Traditional Native Americans consider the clan, a group of related families, as the family unit (Yellowbird & Snipp, 2002).
- Many Latinas and Latinos consider compadres (godparents) members of the family (Strong et al., 2011).
Mansoora
I find it very odd that Americans marry only each other and not whole families. In South Africa, people marry into families. The parents must approve of the choice, or marriage does not happen. After marriage, the wife moves in with the husband’s family. To me, this is stronger than a marriage of only two people.
Diverse Forms of Families
The most common family form in the United States continues to be marriage although fewer Americans are married today than in the past. Currently, 51% of all Americans are married (“Fraying Knot,” 2013). However, this percentage is significantly less than the 72% of Americans who were married in 1960 (“Fraying Knot,” 2013). Despite the decline in marriage, a majority of 18- to 34-year-old men and women of all races regard having a happy marriage as a top priority (Knox & Hall, 2010), and 81% of high school students expect to get married (Blow, 2013;“Fraying Knot,” 2013). In fact, only 6% of whites and 12% of non-whites say they have never been married and never want to be (Blow, 2013).
Contemporary Americans are marrying at later ages than previous generations, which partially accounts for the decline in the percentage of married people. Whereas the typical bride in 1960 was not even 21, today the average age of first marriage in about 27 for women and 29 for men (Coontz, 2013).
No longer is marriage in the United States defined as one man and one woman. In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples are entitled to the same Federal rights as mixed-sex couples, thereby echoing majority sentiment in America. Many states have passed laws recognizing same-sex marriages. As a result, increasing numbers of gays and lesbians are choosing to marry.
Peggy
My mom and Adrienne have lived together since she and Daddy divorced when I was two. We’ve always been a family. We eat together, work out problems together, vacation together, make decisions together—everything a heterosexual family does. But my mom and Adrienne aren’t accepted as a legitimate couple. We’ve had to move several times because they were “queers,” which is what a neighbor called them. Mom’s insurance company won’t cover Adrienne, so they have to pay for two policies. It goes on and on. I’ll tell you, though, I don’t know many heterosexual couples as close or stable as Adrienne and Mom.
Yet not everyone marries, and not everyone who marries stays married. Of adults in the United States, 28% have never married, and the number of unmarried people in the United States has doubled since 1960 (Coontz, 2013; “Fraying Knot,” 2013). By the age of 35, 10% of American women have lived with three or more husbands or domestic partners, showing that commitments don’t necessarily last (Cherlin, 2010).
Not being married doesn’t necessarily mean not having children. Approximately one-third of American families consist of a single parent and a child or children (“Fraying Knot,” 2013). More than 40% of births in America are to unmarried parents (Coontz, 2007, “Fraying Knot,” 2013). Single women and single men who adopt children increase the number of single-parent families. Also adding to the number of single-parent families are widows, widowers, and divorced parents who have custody of children.
Cohabitation is a popular family form for some couples cannot marry or choose not to marry. There are many reasons why some people choose not to marry: Some don’t marry because state laws prohibit them from marrying. Others don’t marry because they don’t want to, or aren’t ready for a total commitment. And some people don’t marry because they reject the institution of marriage and see it as incompatible with their values and identities. Although cohabitation before marriage was once linked to a higher divorce rate, this is no longer the case. Since the 1990s, people who cohabit before marriage are no more or less likely to divorce than those who don’t (Manning & Cohen, 2012; Smock & Manning, 2010).
Dimitri
I’m crazy about Bridgette, but I’m not ready for marriage now—not even ready to think about that! There’s a lot I want to do on my own before I think about settling down permanently and having a family. But I do love Bridgette, and I want to be with her now and in more than a casual way.
Some cohabitors view living together as a “trial marriage” that allows them to assess whether they truly want to be together for the long term (Regan, 2008). For other people, cohabitation is a preferred permanent alternative, not just a precursor to marriage. They care enough about each other to want to live together and perhaps raise children, but they dislike the institution of marriage or they don’t want to marry for practical, often financial, reasons. For them, cohabitation is a way to make a permanent commitment on their own terms. Audrey, who has cohabited for 15 years, explains why she chooses not to marry.
Audrey
What I feel for Don isn’t a matter of what’s on a piece of paper or what could be said before a preacher. We don’t need those formalities to know we love each other and want to spend our lives with each other. Both of us prefer to know we stay together because we love each other, not because of some legal contract.
Diverse Goals for Families
Families are diverse not only in the people who belong to them but also in their goals—the reasons people want to be involved in long-term relationships. Yet the reasons for families have varied over time, and there continue to be a range of reasons today.
Communication in Everyday Life: Insight Voluntary Kin
Families are no longer defined exclusively by blood and kin. People are increasingly creating social networks that function as families. Communication scholars have identified four types of voluntary kin (Braithwaite, Bach, Baxter, Diverniero, Hammonds, Hosek, Willer, & Wolf, 2010). Substitute family replace biological and legal family. For instance, if families of origin reject someone who is gay or trans, that person may form close familial ties with friends. Supplemental family fulfills needs and desires not met by biological and legal family. For instance, you might have a friend with whom you are closer than you are to siblings. Convenience family grows out of a particular context such as a workplace, a particular time period such as people on a study abroad program, or a stage of life such as hallmates in the first year of college. Finally, extended family are people considered part of biological and legal families, for instance the neighbor who becomes the godfather of your children or an aunt whom you consider a sister.
Historically, marriage has been regarded as a means to other goals. In hunting and gathering societies, unions were strategic arrangements to preserve peace between tribes (Rosenblum, 2006). For ancient Greeks, the purpose of marriage was to produce offspring—passion and pleasure were found with lovers outside the marriage (Rosenblum, 2006). During the Middle Ages, marriages functioned to forge political alliances, link families, and cement property transactions. The idea that passion and love are reasons to marry was not widely accepted until the 18th century. Prior to that time, the wedding day often marked the end of the bride’s and groom’s romances with other people and their entry into the purely practical, unemotional institution of marriage.
Beginning in the late 1700s or early 1800s, most people in the United States started choosing mates based on love and companionship. In times and places where marriage served other purposes, the waning of love—or the absence of it from the start—was not a reason to consider ending the marriage (Coontz, 2005b). If stable families are a goal, then love may not be the ideal basis for forming a family.
Historically, Americans also have viewed raising children as a primary objective of marriage (Coontz, 2005a, 2005b). Raising children is no longer seen as the only goal of marriage. In 1990, 65% of Americans said children were very important to successful marriage, but two decades later only 41% believe that (Parker-Pope, 2010a). Increasing in popularity are individualized relationships, which enhance each partner’s personal accomplishments and satisfaction.
Joanna
I’d be miserable without my job. I love the sense of accomplishment that I get from teaching first graders. When a child finally catches on to reading, it’s magic. Being part of that magic for so many children over the years gives me a sense of purpose in life.
As Joanna points out, many people of both sexes define their work not just as a source of income but as central to who they are. They find work personally fulfilling. As we will see later in the chapter, balancing work and family responsibilities and opportunities is one of the greatest challenges facing families today.
As work increasingly provides personal fulfillment and economic support, women are becoming less dependent on men for financial support. Men are also less dependent on wives to take care of children and homemaking. Day care and live-in babysitters are available today, and labor-saving appliances make home maintenance much less time- and labor-intensive than it was even 20 years ago. What was a full-time job in the 1950s can be done in far less time today. In other words, for both women and men today, marriage is more a choice than a necessity (Coontz, 2005a, 2005b; Galvin, 2006).
There are reasons other than the ones we’ve discussed that motivate people to marry. Some people see marriage as a route to financial security or a co-parent for existing children or a child on the way. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll reported that 7% of Americans marry to gain access to health care coverage (Sack, 2008).
Cultural Diversity of Family Forms
Our choices of whom to marry have also grown. In the 1900s an overwhelming majority of Americans married people of their own race. Today, marriage between members of different races is more popular and accepted. Also increasing is the number of Americans who marry someone who was born in a different country. Today, approximately 5 million Americans are married to someone from another country: That’s double the number of these marriages since 1960 (Palmar, 2013). Interfaith marriages have also increased in America. In her book, ‘Til Faith Do Us Part, Naomi Riley (2013) describes enduring and happy marriages between an evangelical Christian and a Muslim, a Jew and a Catholic, a Jew and a lapsed Jehovah’s Witness, and others.
Communication in Everyday Life: Workplace Breadwinning—Increasingly a Shared Responsibility
Changes in the workforce have resulted in changes in family life. In the mid-1970s, only about 40% of married women worked outside the home (Galvin, 2006). By 2000, the percentages had reversed, and 40% of married women were not employed outside the home (Bond, Thompson, Galinsky, & Prottas, 2002). The recession that began in 2008 further affected proportions of women and men in the paid labor force. Significantly more men than women were laid off because men tended to work in industries that downsized. The number of women who are sole wage earners for families was the highest ever in 2009, and the number of men who were sole wage earners for families dropped to the lowest level in a decade (Yen, 2010). The latest figures show that one in four wives earns more than her husband and 40% of American households with children rely on mothers as the biggest or only wage earner (Alpert, 2013).
Diverse Family Types
Given the diversity in family forms and goals that we have discussed, you won’t be surprised to learn that researchers have identified varied ways that people organize their families. Communication scholar Mary Ann Fitzpatrick (1988) and her colleagues (Fitzpatrick & Best, 1970; Koener & Fitzpartrick, 2002a, b, 2006; Noller & Fitzpatrick, 1992) identified three distinct types of relationships: traditional, independent, and separate. Couples who fit into the traditional category are highly interdependent and emotionally expressive with each other. Traditional couples also share conventional views of marriage and family life, and they engage in conflict regularly.
Independents made up 22% of the couples in Fitzpatrick’s study. Independents hold less conventional views of marriage and family life. Compared to traditionals, independents are less interdependent, more emotionally expressive, and they engage in conflict more often. Autonomy is moderately high for independents, so this couple type is likely to have fewer common interests and activities than traditional couples. If Fitzpatrick were to repeat her study today, she would likely find a far greater number of independents because greater emphasis is now placed on individual fulfillment and personal happiness.
The third marital type is separates, who made up 17% of the couples Fitzpatrick studied. As the term implies, separates are highly autonomous. Partners give each other plenty of room, and they share less emotionally than the other two types. Separates also try to avoid conflict, perhaps because it often involves emotional expressiveness and pushes them to negotiate to reach a common decision rather than to operate separately.
In Fitzpatrick’s research, almost 60% of couples fit into one of these three types of marriage, but 40% did not. In these couples, which Fitzpatrick termed “mixed marriages,” the husband and wife subscribe to different perspectives on marriage. The most common form of mixed marriage is the separate–traditional couple. In the couples Fitzpatrick studied, it was typically the wife who held a traditional view of marriage and wanted high interdependence and emotional closeness. Generally, husbands in mixed marriages fit the separate category. They wanted a high degree of autonomy, and a number of them felt emotionally divorced from the marriage.
At the time of Fitzpatrick’s research, the highest levels of marital satisfaction were reported by traditional and separate–traditional couples. At first, it seems surprising that separate–traditional couples would have high satisfaction. However, it makes sense when we realize that this kind of couple embodies conventional gender roles. The traditional partner, who wants closeness and emotional expressiveness, is generally a woman, and the separate partner, who wants high independence and little emotional expressiveness, is generally a man. Because their preferences are consistent with conventional feminine and masculine roles, they may see the relationship as complementary, with each partner contributing something the other values. The traditional partner may meet her or his needs for connection and intimacy through relationships with friends, children, and other family members. The separate partner is not expected to provide emotional intimacy and can derive his or her satisfaction from independent activities such as career or hobbies.
Since Fitzpatrick conducted her research, Western values have changed markedly. Egalitarian values have become much more central in relationship satisfaction and durability (Coontz, 2013), which suggests that there might be fewer couples who fit the traditional category today, and non-traditional couples might have higher satisfaction than they did in the 1970s.
Communication in Families
All families communicate, but not all families communicate in the same ways. Each family has its own norms and patterns of communicating. The communication that characterizes a family shapes the closeness, openness, and satisfaction of family members.
Elements in Family Communication
Clifford Notarius (1996) identifies three key elements, as shown in Figure 12.1, that influence satisfaction with long-term relationships: words, thoughts, and emotions.
Words refer to how family members talk and behave toward each other. Communication influences self-esteem and feelings about the relationship. In happier relationships, members tend to communicate more support, agreement, understanding, and interest than in less happy couples. In contrast, unhappy families include frequent criticism, negative statements, mind reading, and egocentric communication, in which family members do not engage in dual perspective (Gottman & Carrère, 1994; Gottman & Silver, 2000; Notarius, 1996).
The differences in the communication of happy and unhappy families echo the material on climate and conflict that we discussed in Chapters 8 and 9. The differences also suggest the importance of forgiveness, at least of minor transgressions. Lorig Kachadourian, Frank Fincham, and Joanne Davila (2004) found that willingness to forgive was positively related to satisfaction with the relationship.
The second element in family communication is thoughts, which is how family members think about each other and family. Our thoughts shape our emotions and words. From Chapter 3 you’ll recall that, in satisfying relationships, people tend to attribute nice actions by others to stable, internal qualities that are within individual control (Fincham, Bradbury, & Scott, 1990). For example, a mother might think, “My son came home for the weekend because he is a thoughtful person who makes time to show me he cares.” Likewise, in satisfying relationships, people tend to attribute negative actions and communication to unstable, external factors that are beyond individual control. If a daughter forgets to call on her parents’ anniversary, the father might explain it by telling himself, “She forgot because she is overwhelmed with final exams.”
Communication in Everyday Life: Diversity Love Languages
How do you communicate love to family members? How do people in your family express their love to you? Gary Chapman (2010) has identified five distinct ways that we communicate love, which he calls the five love languages.
AFFIRMING WORDS: Written or oral compliments, support, and expressions of valuing another communicate love.
QUALITY TIME: Being mindfully present with another and giving another your total attention for an extended amount of time are loving behaviors.
GIFTS: Small or large, expensive or not, gifts are tokens of affection and thoughtfulness.
SERVICE: Doing chores or unrequested favors such as tuning up a car tells another that you care about her or him.
TOUCH: Physical contact, sexual or otherwise, is an important way of expressing affection and intimacy.
Most of us have one or two primary languages of love—perhaps words and touch are most meaningful to you—and other love languages mean less to us. However, there is no guarantee that people you love will have the same language preferences that you do. It’s important to engage in dual perspective to learn what another counts as loving.
A third key to family communication is emotions, which we discussed in detail in Chapter 7. As we saw in that chapter, emotions are affected by words and thoughts. How we feel is affected by what we say to others and what we communicate to ourselves through self-talk. For example, the attributions we make for our partners’ behaviors affect how we feel about those behaviors. If a wife sees her husband’s gift of flowers as evidence of his thoughtfulness and caring, she will feel closer to him than if she sees the flowers as something he bought because they were on sale.
Obviously, the words, thoughts, and actions that family members find satisfying depend on many factors, including family type. For example, we would expect separate partners to communicate less than traditional partners. However, we would still expect that separates who are happy together and satisfied with their shared life would communicate supportively, make relationship-enhancing attributions, and feel positive about each other and the relationship.
Words, thoughts, and emotions affect each other in overlapping ways: What we feel affects how we communicate and how we think about ourselves, others, and our family. What we think influences how we feel and communicate. How we communicate shapes how we and our partners think and feel about relationships, ourselves, and each other.
Communication Patterns
Building on Notarius’s views of the three keys to family communication, we can now consider overall communication patterns in families. Communication researchers (Fitzpatrick & Ritchie, 1994; Koerner & Fitzpatrick, 2002a, b, 2006; Keating, Russell, Cornacchione & Smith, 2013) have identified two key dimensions of communication that define a family’s communication style. The first dimension, conversation orientation, refers to how open or closed communication is. In families with high conversation orientation, members feel free to openly express their thoughts and feelings about a range of topics, including ones that are personal or private. Families that are low in conversation orientation tend to talk mainly about superficial topics, and members tend not to disclose personal feelings and thoughts.
The second dimension of family communication style is conformity orientation, which refers to the extent to which family members are expected to adhere to a family hierarchy and conform in beliefs. Families differ in how much they expect members to respect hierarchy, particularly parental authority and in how much they expect family members to avoid conflict by agreeing (or acting as if they agree). In families that have high conformity orientation, there is little overt conflict and lines of authority are respected. Families with low conformity orientation experience more disagreement and conflict, and children are more or less likely to adhere to all of their parents’ beliefs and values.
These two dimensions of family communication, conversation orientation and conformity orientation, combine to create four basic types of family communication patterns. Consensual families have high conversation orientation and high conformity orientation. In consensual families, communication tends to have substantial depth and breadth. Parents encourage children to express their ideas and feelings, yet once everyone has had their say, parents expect and encourage children to adhere to the parents’ values and beliefs.
Pluralistic families are high on the dimension of conversation and low on conformity. Communication is open, all family members are encouraged to express their thoughts and feelings, and agreement among family members is not required or compelled. Parents respect their children’s views and decisions, even if they do not agree with them.
Low conversation and high conformity define protective families’ communication. Conflict is avoided, and children are expected to adhere to parents’ values, beliefs, and decisions, which may undermine open and honest communication between parents and children (Keating et al., 2013).
The final type of family communication pattern is laissez-faire. As the name implies, there is limited connection among members of laissez-faire families. Parents and children have limited interaction, children are inclined to be relatively independent of parents, and family members may not feel close bonds. Both conversation and conformity orientations are low.
As you might imagine, these basic communication patterns shape what happens in families as well as how close family members are. Easy topics might be discussed in families with any of the four communication patterns, but dealing with difficult topics might be more challenging and less likely in families that have protective or consensual patterns where agreement is expected.
Communication in Everyday Life: Insight Difficult Dialogues
Have you ever had to have a really tough conversation with your parents in which you disclosed something that you knew they would not like? A group of communication researchers (Keating, Russell, Cornacchoione, & Smith, 2013) studied undergraduate students who had engaged in difficult conversations with parents such as discussion of obtaining birth control or dropping out of school. The undergraduates reported they had anticipated possible negative responses such as parents’ anger and disappointment. Even though the conversation often did include some of the anticipated negative responses, a majority of the students said having the conversations was beneficial in the long run, and many of them said that discussing a difficult topic increased trust, understanding, and the overall family relationship.
The Family Life Cycle
Many families follow a general pattern of evolution (Olson & McCubbin, 1983). Although these stages are experienced by many families, they may not apply, for instance, to the developmental paths of many cohabiting, gay, single parent, and lesbian couples. Nor do all the stages apply to child-free marriages. Couples who do not have children would not go through Stages 2, 3, 4, or 5 because raising and launching children would not be part of their relationship.
Stage 1: Establishing a Family
During this phase, a couple settles into a committed relationship and works out expectations, interaction patterns, and daily routines for their shared life. Partners get accustomed to living together. For couples who are married, spouses get used to the labels “wife” and “husband” and to the social and legal recognition of their union.
Stage 2: Enlarging a Family
A major change in many families’ lives is the addition of children. The transition to parenthood typically brings a whole array of joys, problems, challenges, and new constraints for the couple. It also introduces new roles. In addition to her identities as wife or partner and probably a worker, a woman also becomes a mother. A man becomes a father in addition to his identities as a husband or partner and probably a worker.
Furthermore, children decrease the amount of couple time and change the focus of a couple’s communication. For most parents, children are a primary focus of conversation: “How are they doing?” “Which of us is taking Susie to the doctor tomorrow?” “When you had the conference with Bobby’s teacher, did she have any suggestions for dealing with his behavior problems?” “How do we save money for their college education?”
Stan
Just about everything in our lives changed when Dina was born. We had to sell our little two-door sports car because we couldn’t use Dina’s car seat in it. We used to enjoy a glass of wine before dinner, but now one of us fixes the dinner while the other feeds and bathes Dina. We used to sometimes decide on the spur of the moment to drive to the beach for a day trip, but now we either have to plan ahead and hire a babysitter or pack everything Dina will need, from diapers to food to toys. We’re both so tired from ragged sleep because Dina wakes up several times each night. When we go to bed, neither of us is interested in sex—sleep is far more appealing.
Stan’s reflection on becoming a parent is not unusual. Mari Clements and Howard Markman (1996) note that a baby can be both a bundle of joy and a home wrecker. A great deal of research shows that marital satisfaction declines after the birth of a child or children (Belsky & Rovine, 1990; Clements & Markman, 1996; Cowan, Cowan, Heming, & Miller, 1991; Segrin & Flora, 2005). For many years, researchers assumed that the decline resulted from the presence of children and the demands they make. Yet that may not be true.
A research team headed by Howard Markman (Markman, Clements, & Wright, 1991) followed 135 couples from engagement through 10 or more years of marriage. The team discovered that marital satisfaction declines after children arrive, which usually occurs after a few years of marriage. However, they also found that marital satisfaction declines after the first few years for couples who do not have children. In other words, after the first few married years, most couples experience a dip in marital satisfaction regardless of whether they have children.
Parents whose ethnicity is not the privileged one in their culture tend to invest more energy in instilling ethnic pride in children than do parents who belong to privileged ethnic groups. African American parents were more likely to act as cultural advisors and to use more stringent discipline than European American parents (Socha, Sanchez-Hucles, Bromley, & Kelly, 1995). African American mothers were more likely than European American mothers to characterize adolescent daughters as “best friends.” They also tend to set more hard-and-fast rules and to engage in more sarcasm than European American mothers (Pennington & Turner, 2004). In African American families headed by single women, daughters frequently exhibit greater self-reliance and self-esteem than their European American counterparts (McAdoo, 2006). African American parents also place significantly more emphasis on teaching children racial identity, history, and pride—as well as awareness of prejudice and sarcasm in the world.
Thus, the second stage of family life may be a time of adjusting expectations and experiencing some disappointments. It may also be that this period in family life is prone to a phenomenon known as pileup (Boss, 1987). Pileup occurs when many negative events occur in a short period of time and strain a family’s ability to cope. A baby arrives, an older child is having problems in school, one partner’s father is diagnosed with a serious heart condition, one partner gets a promotion that requires moving across the country. That’s a lot of change and a lot of stress to handle in a short span of time.
Stage 3: Developing a Family
Parent–child relationships are critical influences on children’s identities (Socha & Stamp, 2009; Socha & Yingling, 2010). Recall from Chapter 2 that attachment styles develop in a child’s first human relationship, which is usually with a parent, and that parent is more often the mother than the father. A consistently loving, attentive parent cultivates a secure attachment style in the child. Other attachment styles are fostered by other patterns of caregiving. Parents also shape children’s self-concepts through labels (“such a sweet little girl,” “such a big, strong boy”) and identity scripts that make it clear who children are and are supposed to be.
Although fathers spend less time than mothers with children, today’s fathers are more active parents than fathers of previous generations. Today, college-educated mothers spend an average of 21.2 hours a week with children and mothers with less education spend an average of 15.9 hours a week with children. By comparison, college-educated fathers average 9.6 hours and less educated fathers average 6.8 hours in an average week (Parker-Pope, 2010b). A recent study was based on taping the daily lives of 32 dual-career families from 2002 until 2005. Among the findings were that housework claims 27% of mothers’ time and 18% of fathers’ time. Mothers give themselves less time for breaks from housework and child care: Leisure breaks account for 11% of mothers’ time and 23% of fathers’ time (Carey, 2010).
Stage 4: Encouraging Independence
As children enter adolescence, they tend to seek greater autonomy. This is a natural part of their effort to establish identities distinct from those of their parents. Often, this stage involves some tension between parents and children. Parents may feel hurt by the children’s reduced interest in being with the family. Also, parents may not approve of some of their children’s interests, activities, and friends. Children may feel that parents are overly protective or intrusive.
For children, this is a very important phase in personal development. They are learning to be less dependent on their families, which is essential to becoming a healthy adult. Ideally, parents realize that their children need to try their wings, and they encourage progressive independence—while keeping a watchful eye.
Maggie
After Annie arrived, Rick and I decided we wanted to attend a parenting class. It was really helpful in preparing us for the stages Annie would go through. But one thing that the teacher emphasized was that our primary job as parents was to “prepare your children not to need you.” Those were her exact words. I still remember them. It just crushed me to think my job was to prepare our baby not to need me, but I knew that was good advice. Hard but good.
Stage 5: Launching Children
Launching is a time of vital change for most families. Children leave home to go to college, marry, or live on their own. When the last child leaves home, parents, who for 18 years or more have centered their lives around children, now find themselves a couple again. For parents, this can be an abrupt change. For instance, if there is only one child (or twins or triplets) in the family, when that child leaves, the parents become a couple. For parents who have more than one child, the children tend to leave home at different times, so the adjustment to a smaller family is more gradual. For the children, who are now young adults, this is a time of increased independence and self-discovery.
Mark
When you have a child with special needs, the launching phase doesn’t happen. We’ll never have an empty nest, because Josh will never be able to live on his own. When he was born, we thought he was the most perfect baby in the world. By the time he was 1, we knew he wasn’t, knew something was wrong. He is brain-damaged and somewhat autistic. He’s 32 and still lives in our home. I retired last year, but our nest isn’t empty.
Mark makes a good point. Some parents never experience the so-called empty nest. Although some special needs children are able to live relatively independent lives, many are not. In addition to having a child with special needs, parents may feel responsible for raising grandchildren or for letting their children live at home if they are unable to support themselves.
The recession that began in 2008 made it very difficult for new college graduates to find jobs. Often called “boomerang children,” they often return to parents’ home for financial reasons: high debt, a need to save money, or inability to find a job. When adult children move in with parents, family roles have to be renegotiated (Vogl-Bauer, 2009). Unlike when they lived at home earlier, the adult children have become accustomed to freedom from parental rules and supervision. Parents, too, may have come to enjoy greater space and freedom that comes with not having children in the home. Individual families have to figure out logistical issues and how financial responsibilities and contributions to the household will be managed. If the boomerang children have their own children, that adds to the complexity of family dynamics. Mark’s reflection also reminds us that the stage model of family life cycles doesn’t describe all families. Tracy makes the same point with her story.
Tracy
It would be a real challenge to try to fit my family into the model of the family life cycle. My parents divorced when I was 6 years old. My sister and I lived with Mom until we went to college, her 4 years ago and me 2 years ago. Then, Mom started seeing this man who transferred to our town. He was a widower with 3-year-old twin boys. Last year, they got married, so my family is in the postlaunching and developing-a-family phases!
Stage 6: Postlaunching of Children
After the departure of children from the home, partners have to redefine their marriage. This period can be a time of lower satisfaction between partners if the couple is out of practice in engaging each other outside of their roles as parents. The partners have more time for each other but that may be a blessing, a curse, or both.
For some couples, this is a time of renewed love—a second honeymoon—as they enjoy being able to focus on their paired relationship and not having to plan around children’s schedules. Many couples find the “empty nest years” the happiest in their marriages because there are fewer stresses and more couple time (Parker-Pope, 2009; Scarf, 2008).
For other couples, the absence of children makes obvious the distance that has arisen between them, and dissatisfaction grows. Children can often be the glue that holds couples together: Some couples divorce after the last child has left home. Gretchen points out that many partners find that they have to relearn how to be together with just each other and how to enjoy activities that don’t involve their children.
Gretchen
When our last child left home for college, Brant and I realized how little we had in common as a couple. We’d centered our lives around the three children and family activities. Without any of them in the home anymore, it was like Brant and I didn’t know what to do with each other. At first, it was really awkward. If we weren’t Christians, maybe we would have divorced, but both of us feel marriage is forever. That meant we had to rediscover each other. We went to a weekend workshop sponsored by our church. It was called “Rediscovering Love in Your Marriage.” That workshop got us started in finding our way back to each other.
Stage 7: Retirement
Retirement brings about further changes in family life. Like other changes, those ushered in by retirement can be positive or negative. For many people, retirement is a time to do what they want instead of focusing on earning a living. Many people who retire are highly active, often volunteering in community groups, traveling, and taking up new hobbies or interests.
For other people, retirement may evoke feelings of boredom and lack of identity. Individuals whose sense of self-worth is strongly tied to their work may feel unanchored when they retire. Naturally, this discontent can foster tension in the marriage.
Stuart
I looked forward to retiring for years, and I finally did it 2 years ago. For about 6 months, it was everything I had dreamed of—sleeping as late as I wanted, no pressures or deadlines, golfing anytime I felt like it. Then, I got kind of bored with nothing I had to do and nobody who was counting on me for ideas or work. Every day seemed like every other day—long and empty. You can only sleep and golf for so long.
Howard
I retired 4 years ago, and the last 4 years have been the best years of my life! I’d always loved woodworking, but I had little time for it when I was punching the time clock. Now, I can spend as much time as I want working in my shop. I’ve even started selling things at the local co-op. When I was working, I always felt guilty that I didn’t give anything back through civic or volunteer work. Now, I have time to contribute to my community—the Lions Club is my main volunteer activity. We raise a lot of money to help people who have vision problems and other kinds of things where they need some help. My life is more satisfying now than it has ever been.
During retirement years, the family may grow again, this time through the addition of grandchildren (Mares, 1995). Grandchildren can be welcome new members of the family who provide interest and an additional focus for grandparents’ lives. The coming of grandchildren may also foster new kinds of connection and communication as grandparents talk with their children about raising grandchildren and as they interact with children for whom they don’t have primary responsibility.
Communication in Everyday Life: Social Media Connecting Generations
How do social media change the ways that families communicate? To find out, AARP and Microsoft conducted a joint research project to examine how computers, mobile devices, and the Internet affect frequency and quality of communication among family members (Connecting Generations, 2013). Here are the results:
83%, including at least 80% in every age group, regards online communication as a helpful way to stay in touch with family members.
More than two-thirds of teenagers think computer contact increases both the quantity and quality of their communication with family members who live a substantial distance from them.
Only slightly fewer people aged 39 and older think computer contact increases the frequency (63%) and quality (57%) of contact with family members.
The later years in parents’ lives can also be difficult medically. It is not unusual for age to be accompanied by health problems. In addition to physical challenges, there may be cognitive impairments ranging from forgetfulness to Alzheimer’s. Such physical and mental changes are difficult both for the people experiencing them and for loved ones who witness the changes.
As we noted when introducing this discussion of family life cycle, the model doesn’t apply to all families. Mark and Tracy wrote of their family experiences, which do not fit well into the sequence of stages in the generic model of the family life cycle. This is another reminder of how diverse families are in our era: No single model represents all of them.
Social Media and Family Communication
Social media have changed family communication many ways. One obvious change is that social media increase the ways that family members can interact. In addition, cell phones and email allow family members to be in touch frequently through the exchange of very brief messages. Smart phones allow contact between young children and parents, between parents, among siblings, and so forth.
As children grow older and need more independence from family, social media have complex influences. On the one hand, social media make it very easy for adolescents to stay in minute-by-minute contact with peers and, thus, to establish relationships outside of the family. Yet those same media make it easy for adolescents to stay in touch with parents. Some teenagers text their mothers 15 times a day, asking their moms’ opinions on shoes they are thinking about buying, course registration, and so forth. That makes it harder for adolescents to achieve a healthy degree of separation from parents (Hafner, 2009; Turkle, 2008).
Social media also enable a degree of monitoring or tracking that parents did not have before the era of information technologies. Parents may use phones and other devices to require children to maintain contact and even to monitor children who are out of the home.
Social media facilitate communication when family members no longer live together or even in close proximity. Parents and children can video chat when children are engaged in study abroad programs or when they move a significant distance from their parents’ home. Siblings stay in touch by texting and posting on social network sites. Grandparents are able to see photos of grandchildren and to talk with them via Skype and other VOIP systems. Games also allow ongoing connection. Each day, I play Words With Friends with my sister and my niece, and we sometimes chat while playing.
Social media also augment family communication by providing opportunities for social support beyond family members and face-to-face friends. Many people belong to online communities that provide social stimulation, advice, and support.
Guidelines for Effective Communication in Families
Throughout this chapter, we’ve noted how varied families are: They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and they adopt a wide range of interaction styles and communication patterns. For that reason, families face different challenges and find different ways to meet them. Despite this diversity, four guidelines apply to effective communication in most, if not all, families.
Maintain Equity in Family Relationships
One of the most important guidelines for sustaining healthy families is to make fairness a high priority. The responsibilities of maintaining a family should not fall just or primarily on one person. Likewise, the benefits of family life should not be substantially greater for one person than for another.
Social exchange theory (Kelley & Thiabaut, 1978; Rusbult & Buunk, 1993; Sayer & Nicholson, 2006; Thiabaut & Kelley, 1959) states that people apply economic principles to evaluate their relationships: They conduct cost–benefit analyses. Costs are the undesirable elements that stem from being in a relationship. Perhaps a relationship costs you time, effort, and money. Rewards are the desirable elements that come from being in a relationship. You may value the companionship, support, and affection that come from a relationship. According to social exchange theory, as long as your rewards outweigh your costs, the net outcome of the relationship is positive, so you are satisfied. If costs exceed rewards, however, we’re dissatisfied and may move on.
Yet most of us are probably not as coldly calculating about relationships as social exchange theory suggests: few people spend their time tallying the rewards and costs of being in a family to make sure that they are getting a “good deal.” At the same time, most of us do want relationships that are equitable, or fair, in a general sense (Wood, 2011c). Equity is fairness, based on the perception that both people invest equally in a relationship and benefit similarly from their investments.
Communication in Everyday Life: Workplace The Second Shift
In the majority of dual-worker families, women leave work and come home to what is considered a second shift, which is work that one partner—usually, but not always, a woman—does after coming home from a shift in the paid labor force outside the home (DeMaris, 2007, 2010; Wood, 2011b). Many women who work outside the home assume primary responsibility for fixing meals each night, fitting in housework in the evenings, and caring for children. Women tend to do the day-in, day-out jobs, such as cooking, shopping, and helping children with homework. Men more often do domestic work that can be scheduled flexibly. Mowing the lawn can be done morning or evening any day of the week, whereas preparing meals must be done on a tight timetable. Men also are likely to participate actively in playing with children and in fun activities, such as visiting the zoo, whereas women are more likely to take care of the routine, daily tasks, such as bathing, dressing, and feeding children.
As a rule, women assume most of the psychological responsibility, which involves remembering, planning, and scheduling family matters. Parents may alternate who takes children to the doctor, but it is usually the mother who remembers when checkups are needed, makes appointments, and reminds the father to take the child. Birthday cards and gifts are signed by both partners, but women often assume psychological responsibility for remembering birthdays of all family members and for buying cards and gifts.
Equity theory does not accept social exchange theory’s assumptions that people demand equality and measure the rewards and costs to decide whether to stay in a relationship. Instead, it says that whether a relationship is satisfying and enduring depends on whether the people in it perceive the relationship as relatively equitable over time. In other words, people are generally satisfied if they are in relationships with people who contribute about as much as they do to the aspects of family life that matter to them. This is a more flexible explanation for why relationships do or do not endure.
There may be times, sometimes prolonged times, when one member of a family invests more than other members of the family. According to equity theory, this would not necessarily mean that the greater investor feels dissatisfied. He or she might not, if, in the past, he or she invested less, or if, in the past, others in the family had given more than their fair share. As long as the relationship is perceived as relatively equitable over time, we’re likely to be satisfied.
We want our family relationships to be equitable over time. Inequity tends to breed unhappiness, which lessens satisfaction and commitment and sometimes precedes affairs or other threats to a family’s survival (Anderson & Guerrero, 1998; DeMaris, 2007, 2010; Sprecher, 2001; Sprecher & Felmlee, 1997; Wood, 2011b).
Equity has multiple dimensions. We may evaluate the fairness of financial, emotional, physical, and other contributions to a relationship. Couple satisfaction seems especially affected by equity in housework and child care. Inequitable division of domestic labor fuels dissatisfaction and resentment, both of which harm intimacy (DeMaris, 2007; Helms, Proulx, Klute, McHale, & Crouter, 2006).
One of the biggest issues related to equity is the division of domestic labor. Egalitarian values are more central to relationships today than ever before. Today 62% of Americans rank sharing chores as very important to marital success; that percentage is higher than the importance attributed to having an adequate income (53%) or having shared religious beliefs (49%) (Coontz, 2013).
An equitable division of labor requires more than agreeing that each partner will do a fair share of chores. Partners must also agree on a standard of housekeeping. Many couples argue because one person wants floors vacuumed and beds changed more often than the other person. The person with the higher standard may feel frustrated that her or his partner doesn’t do more, while the person with the lower standard resents being nagged to do work he or she considers unimportant (Wood, 2011b). There’s no right or wrong standard for domestic labor, but family members, at least adult members, need to agree on the standard they will use.
Even when both partners in heterosexual relationships work outside the home, women do the majority of child care and homemaking (Baxter, Hewitt, & Western, 2005; Tichenor, 2005; Wood, 2011b). In fact, men who don’t have jobs in the paid labor force and whose female partners work outside the home engage in less child care and home maintenance than men who have jobs in the paid labor force (Dokoupil, 2009). As a point of comparison, unemployed women spend twice as much time on child care and housework as employed women (Dokoupil, 2009).
Although most men in dual-worker families don’t do half of the work involved in running a home and raising children, today most men assume more of those responsibilities than they did 20 or even 10 years ago.
How are domestic responsibilities managed in same-sex relationships? A majority of gay and lesbian couples create more egalitarian relationships than do heterosexuals (Huston & Schwartz, 1995; Parker-Pope, 2013). This may be because gay and lesbian relationships are less likely to divide work along traditional sex and gender lines. A recent study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health tracked gay and straight couples over 10 years. The results were not ambiguous. Compared to heterosexual partners, same-sex couples had more egalitarian relationships in which partners contributed relatively equally to homemaking and child care, when children were present. Gay couples also reported greater happiness, intimacy, and sharing of confidences and less conflict than heterosexual couples (Parker-Pope, 2013).
Make Daily Choices That Enhance Intimacy
A second important guideline is to pay attention to daily opportunities to enrich family relationships. Although we are not always aware that we are making choices, we continuously choose who we will be and what kind of relationships we will fashion. Intimate partners choose to sustain closeness or let it wither, to build defensive or supportive climates, to rely on constructive or destructive communication to deal with conflict, to fulfill or betray trust, and to enhance or diminish each other’s self-concepts.
Jackson
One of the things I love most about Meleika is the way she starts each day. Before getting out of bed, she reaches over and kisses my cheek. Then, she gets up and showers while I sneak a little more shut-eye. When I get up, the first thing she always says is “Morning, love.” That is such a great way to start each day. Even after 5 years of marriage, she starts each day by letting me know I matter.
Typically, we focus on large choices, such as whether to commit or how to manage a serious conflict. As important as major choices are, they don’t make up the basic fabric of family life. Instead, it is the undramatic, small choices that create or destroy families (Totten, 2006; Wood & Duck, 2006b). Do you listen mindfully to your child when you are tired? Do you buy flowers or a card for a parent when there is no special reason? Do you find the energy to go to your child’s game even when you’ve had a rough day? Do you engage in dual perspective so that you can understand your parents on their terms? Do you stay in touch with your partner’s concerns and dreams?
Seemingly small choices weave the basic fabric of our families. Reflecting on his own long marriage, former president Jimmy Carter (1996) wrote, “What makes a marriage? Is a personal union built or strengthened by dramatic events? I would say no. It’s the year-by-year, dozen-times-a-day demonstration of the little things that can destroy a marriage or make it successful” (p. 76). Through awareness of the impact of the “small” choices we make a dozen times a day, we can make choices that continuously enhance the quality of our families.
Show Respect and Consideration
For families to remain healthy and satisfying, family members need to demonstrate continuously that they value and respect each other. As obvious as this guideline seems, many families don’t follow it. Sometimes we treat strangers with more respect and kindness than we offer our romantic partners or our children (Emmers-Sommer, 2003). It’s easy to take for granted the people who are continuing parts of our lives and to be less loving, respectful, and considerate than we should be.
It’s especially important to communicate respect when discussing problems and complaints. Satisfied couples assert grievances and express anger and disagreement, but they do so in ways that don’t demean each other (Hendrick & Hendrick, 2006). Respectful, open communication between parents and adolescent children is also associated with satisfying relationships (Dailey, 2006; Guerrero, Jones, & Boburka, 2006). Because communication is irreversible, we need to be mindful of our ethical choices when communicating with family members.
Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff
We first discussed this guideline in Chapter 10 as a way to maintain healthy friendships. The advice not to sweat the small stuff also pertains to family relationships. If we want a healthy, vibrant family life, we must be willing to overlook many minor irritations and frustrations that are inevitable in living with others (Carlson & Carlson, 1999; Christensen & Jacobson, 2002; White, 1998).
We all have quirks, habits, and mannerisms that irritate others: the toothpaste cap left off the tube, the clinking of a coffee spoon, the loud music played late at night, or watching football every Sunday. In addition, family members frequently constrain one another’s schedules and preferences. For instance, when one child in the family becomes vegan, that creates new challenges for shopping and preparing meals. At times, families seem like nothing but a hassle! And yet most of us would never consider giving up our families. We love our family members, and we want them in our lives.
To reduce the tendency to make mountains out of molehills, we can take responsibility for our perceptions and our responses to them. My partner, Robbie, is hopelessly forgetful, and that isn’t going to change. If I focus on that (the keys he misplaces, the errands he forgets to run), I make myself unhappy with him and with our marriage. Notice that I am owning responsibility for how I choose to focus my perceptions and how that choice affects how I feel and act.
When her children were young, my sister Carolyn sometimes said to me that she found it frustrating that her children were so well behaved with others but sometimes spoiled brats at home. She interpreted their misbehavior at home as evidence that they respected her and her partner less than they respected people outside of the family. Another mother offered Carolyn the insight that children act up where they feel most safe, secure that they can do so without losing others’ affection and love. Once Carolyn interpreted her children’s occasional misbehavior at home as evidence that they felt secure and loved, she was less frustrated by the behavior. She still corrected them, but she no longer interpreted their misconduct as a sign that they disrespected her and her partner.
We can also monitor the self-serving attribution that may lead us to overestimate our good qualities and behaviors and underestimate those of our partner. When I used to get angry at Robbie for being forgetful, I conveniently overlooked my own failings and his grace in accepting them. I am not as punctual as Robbie is, so he’s often ready and waiting for me. Yet he seldom criticizes me when I’m a few minutes late. Realizing that he accepts qualities in me that he doesn’t like makes it easier for me to return the favor.
In their book Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff in Love, Richard Carlson and Kristine Carlson (1999) advise us to take charge of our own happiness. When we say, “I’d be happy if only she would stop doing A” or “I’d be happy if only he would do B,” we’re assuming that another has control of our happiness. Of course, your happiness is affected by others, particularly intimates. However, the fact that others affect how you feel doesn’t mean they are responsible for your feelings or your happiness.
When we take charge of our happiness, we can also take ownership of our issues. Ask yourself whether the issue is the other person’s behavior or your own feeling about it. For years, I fussed at Robbie for not keeping our home neat. When I saw newspapers left on the table or bath towels not folded on the rack, I grumbled, “Why can’t you be neater?” Robbie’s gentle response was, “Why does it matter?” He had a good point. The desire for neatness was my issue. My own desire for neatness—not Robbie’s leaving newspapers or towels around—made me displeased when things were not arranged as I wanted them to be. I couldn’t and still can’t control Robbie (thank goodness!), but I can control how I respond to stray newspapers and unfolded towels.
Chapter Summary
In this chapter, we focused on communication in families. We first examined many forms that families take and the goals they serve in our era. We then focused on long-term commitments, including marriage and cohabitation. Once again, we noted the variety in long-term relationships. In the third section of the chapter, we considered a model of the family life cycle. In our discussion, we noted ways in which the model is limited to certain kinds of families, and we considered how it might be adapted to fit other sorts of families. Social media have greatly increased family members’ ability to stay in touch, share photos, and interact.
The final section of the chapter identified guidelines for communicating effectively to meet the challenges of family life. First, building and maintaining equitable relationships is critical to family satisfaction and stability. Second, ongoing, daily choices enhance family relationships. Small choices can matter as much as or more than big ones in weaving the fabric of family life. Third, we pointed out the value of showing respect and consideration to family members. Too often, we save our good manners for social relationships and behave less respectfully and considerately with our partners and children. Finally, we repeated the guideline first offered in Chapter 10: Don’t sweat the small stuff. Irritations are inevitable in family relationships; focusing on them is not. Save your energy for working on big stuff.
Key Concepts
Practice defining the chapter’s terms by using online flashcards.
- conformity orientation 344
- consensual family 345
- conversation orientation 344
- equity 352
- laissez-faire family 345
- pluralistic family 345
- protective family 345
- second shift 353
- psychological responsibility 353
- social exchange theory 352
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