Chapter 5:
Relational Maintenance within Families
Chapter Preview
• Relational Maintenance in Different Family Relationships
• Maintenance through Confirmation
• Maintenance through Rituals
• Maintenance through Relational Currencies
Chapter Outline
I. Relational Maintenance in Different Family Relationships
a. Relationship maintenance
i. Actions and activities used to preserve and/or improve a relationship
1. Routine behaviors: everyday interactions/behaviors
2. Strategic behaviors: explicit maintenance efforts
ii. Involves keeping relationship in existence, in a state of connectedness, in
b. Marital/Partnership maintenance
i. High levels of love and satisfaction dwindle in first two years of marriage as
get into routines and recognize flaws (disenchantment); maintaining positive
feelings in early years promotes long-term relationship maintenance
ii. Relational maintenance strategies promote marital resilience: a process in
which couples respond to difficulties and engage in maintenance behaviors,
communication, and actions to repair, sustain, and continue relationships
1. Positivity: communicating in a cheerful and optimistic way
2. Openness: self-disclosing one’s thoughts and feelings generally and
explicitly discussing the relationship and sharing thoughts and feelings
about relational problems
iii. Strategies vary across relationships and over time
1. Similar for same-sex and heterosexual couples (shared tasks)
iv. Interdependence: partners’ perceptions of satisfaction and commitment is
related to own and partner’s maintenance behaviors
c. Parent and child relational maintenance
i. Responsibility for maintenance becomes shared over time
ii. Complicated family structures require more attention to relational
maintenance (e.g., stepfamilies)
d. Sibling or step-sibling relational maintenance
i. Siblings are involuntarily linked, but most report having a commitment
v. Key findings from research
1. Female siblings use relational maintenance behaviors more than males
2. More intimate adult siblings use maintenance behaviors more
frequently than those in congenial or apathetic relationships
II. Maintenance through Confirmation
a. Confirmation occurs when one person communicates with another person in ways
that validate the other person as a respected human being
i. Qualities of confirming messages
1. Acknowledges the person’s existence
2. Affirms the other’s communication by responding to it
3. Reflects and accepts the other’s self-experience
4. Suggests a willingness to become involved with the other
ii. Imply accepting, as opposed to rejecting (imply other is wrong/unacceptable)
or disconfirming (invalidation; imply nonexistence/ignoring)
b. Recognition, dialogue, and acceptance characterize confirmation
i. Recognition: inclusion, acknowledgment of name/existence, willingness to
become involved
ii. Dialogue: interactive, conversational involvement between people
c. Respect characterizes confirmation
i. Respect involves acting in a way that demonstrates honoring and caring for
another and his or her well-being
III. Maintenance through Rituals
a. Rituals are an essential type of everyday, lived communication behavior, beneficial to
the development and maintenance of interpersonal relationships
b. Family rituals: communication events that are voluntary, recurring, and patterned;
connecting members in meaningful ways and (re)producing family identity
i. Celebrations: often tied to cultural norms, include the way holidays are
of increasingly patterned (or habitual) interactions
c. Couple rituals: a couple’s expressions of affection, code words or secrets, and
repetitive daily or weekly experiences indicate a developing relational culture and
signaling “coupleness” to outside world
i. Couple time: enjoyable activities, togetherness rituals, escape episodes to
create boundary around couple)
ii. Symbolic/idiosyncratic: favorites, private codes, play rituals, celebration
rituals
d. Intergenerational rituals: bond family members of all ages across generations,
providing a sense of family identity and connection
i. A way to pass on family stories, histories, and memories
ii. Connecting children, parents, grandparents, and other relatives
iii. Reflect family and societal changes
e. Stepfamily and single parent rituals
i. Stepfamily rituals embrace features of former families while creating new
ones, so members of both old and new family structures feel connected
1. Some unsuccessful old rituals carried over perceived to threaten new
2. Ritual practices help well-functioning stepparents and kids accept
historical roots while constructing new ones
ii. Post-bereavement stepfamily rituals
1. Integrated families create rituals to memorialize parent’s life
2. Denial families had no rituals acknowledging deceased parent
2. Spiritual rituals: attending weekly church services or praying before
each meal helped provide meaning and sense of peace
3. Love rituals: verbally and/or nonverbally expressing affection on a
f. Rituals and health
i. Rituals may be good for family members’ physical and emotional health
ii. Family rituals tend to provide socio-emotional support
iii. Rituals emerge from economic status
g. Family ceremonies and celebrations
i. Family ceremonies serve as major rites of passage and involve elaborate
preparation
IV. Maintenance through Relational Currencies
a. Relational currencies refer to communication behaviors that carry meaning about
the affection or caring dimension of human relationships
i. Positive verbal statements: oral, written, and electronic messages indicating
love, caring, praise, or support
ii. Self-disclosure: self-revelation, or taking the risk of voluntarily telling another
individual personal information or feelings that he or she is unlikely to
discover from other sources
iii. Listening: carries a message of involvement with, and attention to, another
iv. Positive nonverbal affect displays: spontaneous indications of feelings
v. Touch: contact carries a range of messages about caring, concern, love,
comfort, or sexual interest
xi. Favors: performing helpful, thoughtful acts for another willingly, rather than
in response to a spousal or parental order or expectation
xii. Service: caring effort that evolves into a habitual behavior
b. Meanings and currencies
i. Relational satisfaction is tied to perceptions about the relational currency
exchange process
1. Spouses with more similar affection exchange behaviors more likely to
report high levels of perceived equity and higher satisfaction
2. When meanings are shared, rewards are experienced; when meanings
are missed, costs are experienced
ii. High-affection communicators receive advantages in psychological,
emotional, mental, social, and relational characteristics
V. Discussion Questions
a. How would you respond to someone who believes that “If you have to work at a
relationship, there is something wrong with the relationship?”
b. How might you become a more confirming communicator in your family?
c. Is disconfirmation merely the opposite of confirmation? How might individuals be
both confirming and disconfirming at the same time?
VI. Case Study Questions
a. Considering “Staying Close While Far Apart,” how well do you think Samiera and
Desmond’s plan to stay in touch during his deployment will work? Considering what
you have learned throughout the book, why are these good/bad ideas? What
currencies or rituals are at play? What other ideas would you recommend?
b. In “Separation Anticipation,” how might Charlie and Noel maintain their sibling
relationship and adult friendship despite the different paths in life that each of them
might take after graduating from their respective schools? What recommendations
would you give, specifically to siblings? How might this be different for other
relationships?
Activities
Relational Currencies: Make a pile of relational currencies and costs. Give a random stack
(comprised of both currencies and costs) to small groups of students. First the students should
separate the costs and the currencies (like a pro/con list). Next, have students discuss the
implications of this list for a given relationship. What might be the individual or relational
effects? How does perception play a role in establishing what “counts” as a currency? How does
equity matter, in terms of who is giving/receiving currencies?
Discussion of Relational Effort: Discuss the role of effort in relationship maintenance. Some
people insist: “If you have to work at a relationship, there’s something wrong with it.” In your
discussion examine the following questions:
• What is the role of effort in relationships?
• What if one person is putting forth more effort than another?
• Is there such a thing as too much effort? If so, what does that mean?
Affection Survey: Ask students to interview two friends about the ways in which they learned to
share affection from each of their parents and grandparents. Have students describe each
person’s experience in one or two paragraphs, or in class discussion. How did different members
learn affection differently from different family members? Why? Remind them to tie in cultural
heritage when appropriate.
about their experiences with rituals in their families. Below are a few options for
assignments/discussions to these ends:
• Romantic relationship rituals: Have students interview a person in a romantic relationship
and ask him or her to describe three rituals that help to sustain their relationship and to
identify the origin of the ritual, if possible. Analyze the effect of their rituals on their
behaviors performed and meanings attached to the category of ritual.
• Stepfamily rituals: Brainstorm with a classmate a set of suggestions about the use of
rituals you would develop for persons who are creating a stepfamily. How would you
suggest they deal with the rituals of the past? What would you tell them about the
importance of rituals in the new family form? How might these new rituals be created?
Couple Interview: Have students interview couples who have been married for a long time and
who appear to have a very close relationship. Ask students to try to discover how the spouses
have remained “connected” to each other over the years and the role that communication has
played in that process. They can report the results of the interview to the class or may record the
results in a paper or journal. You could also have students form groups to analyze their
interviews based on maintenance strategies. You may wish to compare their responses to the
findings of relationship research, for example:
Gottman, J. (1994) Why Marriages Succeed or Fail. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Gottman. J. & Silver, N. (1999) The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work.
New York: Crown Publishers.
Wallerstein, J. and Blakeslee, S. (1995) The Good Marriage. New York: Houghton Mifflin.