A Clinician's Guide to Maintaining and Enhancing Close Relationships

John H. Harvey, Amy Wenzel, John H. Harvey, Amy Wenzel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135656683
• Subtopic: Clinical Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In the past 10 years, there has been a substantial increase in the number of theoretical and empirical investigations into the maintenance and enhancement of close, romantic relationships. This literature targets the everyday behaviors, expressions of love, and cognitive styles that characterize such relationships. Chapters provide a sampling of the expanse of topics in the domain of how clinical scholars and practitioners address the timely topic of maintaining and enhancing close romantic relationships, including marriage. A distinguished group of scholars and therapists discuss specific problems, such as alcoholism and therapeutic interventions, such as insight therapy. Topics include maintenance issues relevant to: depression, anxiety disorders, the role of children in affecting close relationships, how premarital therapy may serve as an antidote to early relationship problems, forgiveness, remarriage issues, and peer marriage. This volume is intended for practitioners in the field of close romantic relationships, such as marriage, family and relationship therapists, and clinicians.

PART I
THEORETICAL LINKS TO PRACTICE

CHAPTER 1
Issues in Ebb and Flow: Management and Maintenance of Relationships as a Skilled Activity

Masahiro Masuda

Steve Duck
University of lowa

This chapter explores relational maintenance from the point of view of the everyday ordinariness of relationships, such that when they are maintained, ordinariness is maintained. Most approaches to maintenance (Canary & Stafford, 1994) are based on the assumption that conflict and argument are sites that produce a need for maintenance and resolution of relationship difficulties, but we disagree. Conflict, argument, and resolution are special and atypical instances of maintenance of relationships, the everyday ordinariness of routine activity being the basis of many real-life conflicts anyway. Also, although special issues of conflict management constitute extraordinary occasions for management and maintenance of relationships, most of life is ordinary. Yet, ordinariness itself presents many simple, routine, and unconscious ways to maintain and manage relationships. The skills of relationship are not specific to special conflicts and arguments but impinge on and derive from abilities to handle “the everyday” also, a point that is all too often overlooked.

We, therefore, agree with Acitelli (2001) who uses the term “maintenance” to refer not to “repair” but to keeping the relationship running well This notion of maintenance therefore largely overlaps conceptually with the notion of relationship satisfaction. We also explore relational maintenance from the point of view of the skills involved in sustaining routine everyday behavior, because recognizing, polishing, and repairing such skills may be addressed through clinical solutions.

Everyone with competency at conducting relationships has a number of implicit skills: awareness of the skills of interpersonal relating as these are valued in a particular culture or in the local social context where the relationship is played out; the ability to enact those relating skills within different specific relationships; awareness of the fact that maintaining a relationship is a persistent, if not constant, task; and the ability to maintain course and speed as conditions ebb and flow in the normal tides of life.

In this chapter, we consider these needs in the context of the variation in happenings that constitute life’s experiences for all human beings whether or not they are clinical patients. Routinely, people encounter others in moods that are different from last time of meeting; people themselves have bad days and good days; the stress of dealing with a small child or work subordinate can differ from day to day and hour to hour; neighbors and colleagues can be irritating one day and pleasant the next; and feelings for a spouse or close romantic partner can vary in type and intensity according to the activities or circumstances of the moment but without changing the underlying relationships. We do not claim that life is completely chaotic, merely that there are daily variations and patches of turbulence that are routinely managed in relationships particularly and in life in general. A person’s skill in handling this variety and the person’s frame of mind for managing turbulence and change can each be significant influences on subsequent feelings of competence or incompetence, satisfaction or depression, and resentment or contentment. Those people who report a “happy marriage” or “difficulty with relationships” are, we assume, reporting their summary perceptions of a variety of experiences. The nature of their choice of summary terms, choices of metaphors, and style of speech may themselves be indicative of something from which a clinician can derive insights into a patient’s state of mind (McCall, 1982). Someone who reports a relationship as “an empty shell” is having a different psychological experience from someone who reports it as a cage.

Our chapter is thus strongly based on the two notions of the ordinary and variability. Both of these, in their own ways, confront the relational partners with challenges to manage the relationship—perhaps alone and perhaps in concert with others, but always under the eye of the social network. Any discussion of the skills of relating must differentiate between those skills that are (1) generalized within the culture, (2) those that are instantiated and enforced in local networks with whom the two partners come into frequent contact, and (3) those that are negotiated privately by the parties themselves. The ability to negotiate the tensions between these three audiences, representing different levels of standard for competence, is a further skill of maintaining and managing a relationship. We propose that skills are often relationally and personally idiosyncratic and situated within contexts where their appropriateness may best be judged according to the goals of participants and observers (Spitzberg, 1993). Relational behaviors and skills are thus not simply universally applicable in ways that take no account of such contexts, but they require the subskill of recognizing the applicability of rules to particularized circumstances.

Some general skills are assumed in relating, particularly in public places or when the partners are expecting to be observed by other people. For example, a typical assumption will be that one should follow cultural norms of polite behavior in public (Goffman, 1959), although the negotiation of behaviors in private will be part of the special topical skill that creates a sense of uniqueness in the relationship. For example, cruelty is not accepted as a normal mode of public conduct of relationships, but in private, sadomasochism may be part of a couple’s sexual practice. This may be one reason why, as noted by Aron, Dutton, Aron, and Iverson (1989), all romantic couples feel that their relationship is unique, despite the fact that it appears to the outside public observer as a prototypical embodiment of general patterns of both behavior and feeling.

To present a clinically relevant assessment of relationship maintenance, therefore, the present chapter must explore the nature of “good” or “poor” communication both in general and in specific circumstances. We should also differentiate between those “skills” that apply to public behavior and those that involve private negotiation. Those communicators labeled “poor” by observers who apply the general standard may nevertheless regard each other positively, because they either hold one another to a different standard from the general one, or make allowances in some way, or simply behave in private in ways that the normative standard does not acknowledge. On the other hand, some patients may lack the insight to comprehend that their personal behaviors are insufficiently responsive to the requirements of these different norms or of other people. Failure to recognize these relational subtleties is, of course, a classic symptom of such clinical conditions as borderline personality, anorexia, or depression (Segrin, 2000), and part of the clinical treatment might involve defocusing from self in order to enhance requisite awareness (Duck, 1991). However, many distressed couples exhibit signs of interpersonal misunderstanding simply because of different expectations generated in their family of origin (for example, a partner from one family may have learned to express anger by social withdrawal whereas the other may expect to express it openly and be nurtured—conflicting styles that lead to increased mutual misunderstanding; Gray, 1992).

Forms of relational behavior that are generally regarded as skilled (e.g., particular forms of behavior during relational dissolution, such as saving the other’s “face” by blaming a dissolution on one’s own changing needs rather than the partner’s attributes) may in fact be unskilled if one assumes that skilled relating always produces dyadic satisfaction. As Spitzberg (1993) indicates, there are dialectics of incompetence and, for example, some “lies” are skillful (e.g., keeping a birthday surprise secret) whereas some truths are best skillfully concealed (e.g., where a partner’s new hair style looks terrible). The important issue for deciding whether behavior is skilled or not is the partnership standard within the relationship and the shared meaning that the partners have about each other’s behavior in the context of that relationship once relationship maintenance is seen as relationship satisfaction. Traditional views of social skill therefore need reevaluation (cf. Burleson, Kunkel, Samter, & Werking, 1996) to ensure that the “public view” or only the perspective of the person outside the relationship is not taken as the gold standard for judgment of its merits. If the relationship is satisfying, then a level of skill has been achieved that is satisfactory to partners/insiders even if, to the outsider, the standard appears not to have been reached. For example, as Duck (1984) noted, personal satisfaction can be derived from a “good” dissolution as much as from a good repair, even though the societal standard assumes that any relationship dissolution is a relational failure.

LOCATION OF SKILL

The prior discussion raises the question of whose judgment of skill matters most. We prefer to place clinical evaluation of maintenance relative to the goals and achievements of the performer. This means that evaluation of skill cannot be applied only by an observer simply as a representative of the culture at large but only by someone who has become fully conversant with the personal goals of the partners also. This latter point is one reason why women and men see maintenance behaviors as carrying different weight (Acitelli, 1993, 2001), because their personal goals in talking about relationships are quite different. It is not so much the occurrence of the behavior itself that matters but the ways in which meaning is attached to it, or to its absence, by each person. For instance,

the meaning of the strategy (whether it is seen as planned or routine) can vary depending on [factors such as] gender [and] marital status…. A man may interpret a woman’s talking about the relationships as a strategic maintenance… and feel threatened. A woman may see such talk as routine, something she enjoys doing without the intent of pointing out problems or consciously maintaining the relationship. On the other hand a man may see the need to share activities together in order to strategically maintain the relationship, while his female partner may not interpret such activity the same way. (Acitelli, 2001, p. 154)

Accordingly, the notion of competence may be variously assessed (Spitzberg, 1993; Spitzberg & Cupach, 1984) and when one asks, “What is a ‘competent’ relational partner like?” the question is not an easy one to answer. In most cases, relational maintenance is implicitly assessed by researchers in terms of an individual’s or a couple’s satisfaction with the relationship or with the partner, for example, Spanier’s (1976) widely used Dyadic Adjustment Scale. According to such a judgment standard, therefore, a “competent” partner would be one who satisfies his or her partner and maintains a relationship in a way that leads both parties to express high levels of satisfaction in the relationship and in one another.

In the climate of the present age where “communication,” broadly conceived, is regarded as the basis of good relating, and “good communication” is s...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Maintaining and Enhancing Close Relationships: Linking Theory With Practice
• PART I THEORETICAL LINKS TO PRACTICE
• PART II PSYCHOPATHOLOGY AND CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS
• PART III PREVENTION AND INTERVENTION
• PART IV COMMENTARIES
• Author Index
• Subject Index