Two Plus Two

Couples and Their Couple Friendships

Geoffrey L. Greif, Kathleen Holtz Deal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136502811
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Interpersonal Relations in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Friendships are undeniably important to an individual's health, longevity and wellbeing, but they can be equally important for the health and happiness of a couple. Just as a friend can provide a mirror to the self, another couple can provide a reflecting team that supports or impedes a relationship's growth. Two Plus Two: Couples and Their Couple Friendships offers an important framework for helping couples to have conversations about their friendships with other couples and to enrich their own relationships. When couples agree about how to spend their time alone and with others, they are more likely to have a happy marriage or relationship.

Couple friendships have not been researched previously, despite their numerous benefits. Authors Geoffrey Greif and Kathleen Deal take an in-depth approach to this important topic. Based on interviews with more than 400 people--some of whom were interviewed with their partners, some who were interviewed alone, and some who have divorced--they find that couples fall into three general categories of making couple friendships: Seekers, Keepers, and Nesters. Drs. Greif and Deal discuss the different styles of interaction they've observed in couples as well as the findings from their research. Readings from their interviews illustrate what characteristics define Seekers, Keepers, and Nesters. Couples at any stage of their relationship will get a fresh understanding of how to seek, foster and sustain positive, healthy friendships.

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Two Plus Two

Couples and Their Couple Friendships

Tracy is a pediatric surgeon and her husband, John, is a stay-at-home dad with their 2-year-old son, Jeff. By any standard, she is highly successful. She is one of a few females in a traditionally male branch of medicine. John balances a part-time job that requires international travel with his child rearing responsibilities in this couple with reversed roles. Very much in love with each other, they want to add to their family. Getting pregnant a second time was difficult for them but, after a recent round of in vitro fertilization, twins are on the way. Tracy works long hours, sleeps little, and crams Jeff into her awake time at home. Tracy and John were once self-described party animals with a wide circle of friends and family to keep them company on their jaunts. That was before residency and parenthood brought their socializing to an inevitable end. That was also before they moved to Chicago to pursue her career.

They had couples friends in their hometown, friends of long standing that each had brought into the marriage. Tracy admits she and John are not socially adventurous now—they tend to stick within their own circle. They don’t interact easily with others, in part because of their rare living arrangement of a working mom and stay-at-home dad. They had hoped Jeff would be the conduit to new couple friends but that has not happened, due perhaps to their reverse child care and work arrangement. It is difficult for John to make friends with stay-at-home moms. Tracy recently met another female surgeon at the hospital, but she is married to a man in his 20s, someone to whom Tracy, in her 30s, cannot relate. While she does not believe her marriage is suffering because they are couples-challenged, she would like to use the little free time she and John have to socialize with each other as well as with another couple, preferably one like them—with children. She misses the magic of couple friendships they had when they were first married and living in another city. Other couples were fun to be with, and Tracy and John often found themselves going to events or activities they would not have chosen on their own. These other couples helped Tracy and John enjoy each other more, too. But in a new city, such friends are hard to find.

Michael and Abby live in a small college town where he is a professor and she is a museum volunteer. Now in their late 50s, they have been married 20 years after having been fixed up by a matchmaker service before such services went online. Looking for another couple to befriend, with whom they could go to dinner or the movies, they advertised on craigslist. What they got were invitations to swing. They removed their ad.

Greg is the manager of a large home improvement store, and Sally is an elementary school teacher. Both are in their 40s. He works long hours, often on weekends. They’ve been married 3 years, and both have teenage children from previous marriages. Sally and her first husband enjoyed friendships with other couples they met through his job as a police officer, but these friendships ended with their divorce. She’d like to develop some new couple friendships with Greg. He’s less interested in spending time with other couples, and his weekend work hours make it hard to find couples who can accommodate their schedule.

FRIENDSHIPS WITH OTHER COUPLES—GETTING STARTED

What do Tracy and John, Michael and Abby, and Greg and Sally have in common? They are all interested, to varying degrees, in the prospect of making friends with other couples. Tracy and John are desperately seeking other couples— they are new to town and want to construct a friend-filled life like they had in their hometown. Michael and Abby, though childless, are in a similar boat but in a much smaller environment. Their odds of finding a couple where they both like both partners are slim. Sally and Greg are in a different predicament— she is in the hunt and he is not. What these three couples also have in common is that they all find this process is difficult and demanding at worst and highly fulfilling at best.

THE IMPORTANCE OF COUPLE FRIENDSHIPS

People with friends live longer, healthier, and happier lives.¹ Friends keep us on our toes, socially engaged, and mentally active. They teach us how to play bridge, shoot a basketball, and cook a new dish. They point us in the direction of the next Oscar-nominated movie, Pulitzer Prize–winning book, and the best wine for the value. We place sports bets with friends, watch how they raise their children, and travel with them to near and far places.

Friends monitor our health² and can be the portals to better health care. Many of us have friendships where psychotherapy, exercise, annual checkups, weight watching, and smoking cessation are encouraged. We drive friends to the doctors and nurse them with chicken soup, pep talks, telephone calls, e-mails, and home visits. These are the fruit that individual friendships bear.

Couples who get along happily with each other benefit from their relationship. Linda Waite, a sociologist, and Maggie Gallagher, Director of the Marriage Program at the Institute of American Values, write, “Overall, the portrait of marriage that emerges from two generations of increasingly sophisticated empirical research on actual husbands and wives is [that] … a good marriage enlarges and enriches the lives of both men and women.”³ According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s Web site for the Healthy Marriage Initiative, those men who are happily married, as compared to those unhappily married, are physically and emotionally healthier and live longer. Women who are happily married are also physically and emotionally healthier than those who are not happily married.⁴

Spouses (partners) often consider each other friends and sometimes each other’s best friend. Equality between partners can be an important ingredient in building a solid relationship.⁵ Marriage Enrichment groups often teach the importance of friendship, according to Lauri Przybyzs, Coordinator of Marriage and Family Life for the Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore. Many of the Marriage Enrichment Web sites support this as they encourage partners to be friends with each other so a spouse will not seek friendship outside of a marriage. Research suggests that if one does not have a best friend, the spousal relationship becomes even more important to one’s well-being.⁶ Friendship between partners is also recognized as a key ingredient in marital happiness, according to psychologist John Gottman,⁷ whose thinking we will discuss shortly.

Further, couples who share friends (which include individuals or family members) tend to be happier.⁸ These couples get to be together with friends and family and engage in enjoyable and meaningful activities. They are more fully integrated into their social network if friendships are shared and this may reinforce their own relationship.

So here we have the benefits of individual friendships, the benefits of being happily married to a person who is also a friend, and the benefits of sharing friends. This book will explore how friendships work between couple friends and how we believe a better understanding of these friendships leads to a happier marriage or partner relationship. We believe couples may not only derive great enjoyment from their friendships with other couples but they are likely to appreciate each other more. Their marriage or relationship will be strengthened by couple friendships. Tracy and John, while not unhappy, would be happier, she says, if they had couple friends.

We maintain a focus on partnerships as well as marriages because partnerships are becoming an increasing part of the couple landscape. According to a recent Pew Report, 39% of those polled believed marriage was becoming obsolete, up from 28% 30 years ago. In addition, a higher percentage of adults (48%) are now not married, whereas in 1960 28% were not married. Finally, cohabitation has been on the rise, particularly among those under 50, 44% of whom indicated they have cohabitated, nearly twice the percent as in 1990.⁹ In our sample, nearly one quarter of those interviewed are not married.

Friendship with another couple is “value added.” As we will discuss in the next chapters, with the help of the voices of many couples, well-functioning couple friendships make a marriage more fulfilling and exciting because of the following reasons:

1. Each partner is comfortable with the couple friendship, and the nourishment and fun that arises from that friendship make partners more attractive to each other.
2. The couple’s marriage or relationship is more apt to be reinforced by being with another couple (as opposed to being with a single friend).
3. Each partner interacts with the opposite sex friend, which can lead to greater understanding of his or her own partner and men and women in general.

In addition, and related to marital happiness, couple friendships can strengthen individual friendships that the couple has with one or both members of the other couple. Many of the couples interviewed for this book described friendships that began on a one-to-one basis; the men knew each other from college or the women met at work and then introduced their spouses to each other. The opportunity to still go out alone with the close friend as well as with the other partners of the friends reinforces the earlier friendship.

What Affects Friendships?

Despite some of the obvious advantages to great couple friendships, making friends with another couple is not always easy. To understand why it is difficult, we first need to break the friendship-making process down to the individual level. This is where many friendships begin.

Research (ours and others’) confirms that men’s and women’s friendships are constructed differently and, because of this, working together to make friends as a couple can be daunting. For example, women’s friendships have been portrayed as based on face-to-face interactions as opposed to men’s on shoulder-to-shoulder activities. Women will get together for coffee, sit across from each other, and talk. Men will watch a game (sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on the couch while they do so) or compete in a sport. Men are activity driven, perhaps because our cavemen relatives hunted side-by-side while our cavewomen relatives conversed and cared for the children in the village (or the cave). Women’s friendships are more verbal, physically expressive, and self-revelatory than men’s. In addition, and not insignificantly, women need more frequent contact with their friends to maintain their friendships than do men.¹⁰ Men do not need as much conversation and, instead, are in greater need of sharing an activity.¹¹

Differences Between Women and Men

Other differences exist between how men and women manage their friendships with their same-sex friends. From research specifically comparing men and women, men are more likely to engage in sports with their men friends than women are with their women friends. Women are more likely to shop with their friends than are men. Men are more apt to help their friends by giving advice while women help their friends by being verbally and emotionally supportive. Finally, women are less likely to express concerns about appearing homosexual when with their same-sex friends than are men. This concern prevents some men from being as expressive with their male friends as they wish to be.¹² This affects what they do with guys and to what extent they pursue friendships with other men. This is why, in part, sports play such an important role in their friendship activities—it is a socially acceptable way for men to spend time together.

These differences, which are just a few of the ones we could have cited, affect what couples want from their couple friendships, what they do when with other couples, and how often they need to see other couples to maintain the friendship. For example, based on these findings, conversations between couples may be more satisfying for men if concrete advice is given about how to solve a work-related problem. Women tend to process the problem more, be supportive and less direct with suggestions. Women may feel they need more contact with the other couple to maintain the friendship than do men. When socializing with the other couple, women may feel more comfortable being emotionally expressive. In numerous interviews for the book, men described feeling as if a boundary had been crossed when their partners began discussing issues they thought were just between them. Women, in turn, sometimes felt the focus was too much on politics or sports and not enough on emotional sharing.

In one situation we know, the wife is concerned the husband is not talking about his feelings enough with others. At some point in the evening, and acting out of loving concern for him, she may engineer a discussion of a topic so that he will have an opportunity to hear how others feel.

Age as a Factor in Friendships

It is not just that women’s and men’s friendship styles are different. Other considerations are also at play when we think about couples’ friendships. Take age, for example. Remember the intensity of friendships in the teen years? Forget homework, housework, or studying for the SATs. Being with friends took precedence. Knowing that Sally told Jerry about what Susie and Billy did behind the backs of Johnny and Monique at Michelle and Henry’s party after the prom surpassed in all importance what happened in Sarajevo that sparked World War I. Friendships do not remain at that level of intensity throughout adulthood for many of us. With age, they tend to reduce in intensity when we marry (or partner), get to the world of work, and have children. We have less time to extend ourselves outside of the home. We are trying to earn a living, attending parent-teacher conferences, and grabbing a few minutes of alone time with our partners. Friends often become temporarily less vital to our well-being if our lives are filled with other obligations. But friends return in importance later in life. When the children are grown, jobs are stable, and retirement looms, we become interested in friends again, as we have more free time.¹³

With age, we also become more relaxed about friendships. Age brings greater acceptance of others. According to research, both men and women are more tolerant of friends (we are less judgmental) and make greater attempts to resolve differences with age.¹⁴

Gender and age can intersect. Though we are less likely to show the gender-specific behavior we displayed when younger,¹⁵ differences based on gender do remain. Older women continue to have larger, more emotionally close, friendship networks than men.¹⁶ Older men, like younger men, are more apt to try and “go it alone.” For example, if they are taking care of an ill spouse, they are less likely to reach out to others for help than are women. This could result in greater social isolation for a man.¹⁷

Sometimes men end up relying on their wives for help. We found that men are more likely to credit their partners as the social secretaries than the reverse. One woman, responding to one of our blog postings about friendships recently wrote:

My husband doesn’t have any real friends in our city because he says he already had a group of good friends back home (it’s across the country and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• PREFACE
• AUTHORS
• 1 TWO PLUS TWO: COUPLES AND THEIR COUPLE FRIENDSHIPS
• 2 HOW WE CONDUCTED THE STUDY AND WHAT WE DISCOVERED
• 3 STARTING OUT: COUPLES IN THE FIRST YEARS OF MARRIAGE/PARTNERSHIP
• 4 THE MIDDLE YEARS: COUPLES RAISING FAMILIES AND BALANCING FRIENDSHIPS
• 5 OLDER COUPLES AND THEIR COUPLE FRIENDSHIPS
• 6 WHEN COUPLES HAVE BEEN DUMPED (OR DUMP); LIKE HER AND HATE HIM (OR VICE VERSA)
• 7 THE IMPACT OF DIVORCE ON COUPLE FRIENDSHIPS
• 8 WHEN TWO COUPLES GET IT RIGHT: AN INTERVIEW ABOUT 38 YEARS OF COUPLE FRIENDSHIP
• 9 ONE COUPLES GROUP: A POSSIBLE BLUEPRINT FOR OTHERS
• 10 BUILDING COUPLE FRIENDSHIPS FOR THE FUTURE
• APPENDIX A: HOW WE CONDUCTED THE STUDY AND IMPLICATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
• APPENDIX B: QUESTIONS FOR MARRIAGE ENRICHMENT GROUPS
• APPENDIX C: COUPLE’S QUIZ
• ENDNOTES
• REFERENCES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• AUTHOR INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX