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Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
Lecture Notes
Chapter 10: Staying Close: Maintaining Relationships
Chapter Outline
I. Defining Relational Maintenance
• People usually try to maintain and mend their relationships with others through contact
and communication.
• Keeping relationship in existence: Although some relationships are kept in existence
through extensive contact, others require minimal effort.
• Relational maintenance involves keeping a relationship in a specified state or
condition, or at a stable level of intimacy, so that the status quo is maintained.
• Keeping a relationship in satisfactory condition: Dating and married couples often try
to rekindle the romance in their relationships to keep them satisfying.
• Keeping relationship in repair: Idea here is that people work to prevent problems from
occurring in their relationships, and to fix problems when they do occur.
• Relational maintenance components overlap: In a broad sense, relational maintenance
can be defined as keeping a relationship at a desired level.
II. Behaviors Used To Maintain Relationships
A. Prosocial Maintenance Behaviors
1. Promote closeness, trust, and liking: Five primary prosocial maintenance
2. Relational satisfaction: The “pleasure or enjoyment” that people derive from
their relationships. Positivity, assurances, and social networking are
especially important for predicting how satisfied couples are with their
relationships.
3. Important in family relationships:
a. Spending time together is also important because it creates feelings of
companionship, cohesion, and openness.
4. Relationships characterized by high levels of prosocial maintenance also tend
to be stable and committed.
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
5. Not used consistently by couples:
a. Couples may use the highest levels of relational maintenance when they
are moving their relationship from casual to committed or when they are
trying to rekindle or repair their relationship.
B. Antisocial Maintenance Behavior
1. Antisocial maintenance behaviors may also be used to try to keep a
relationship at a given level of intimacy or closeness, as is often the case
when people use avoidance as a maintenance strategy.
2. People sometimes use jealousy induction as a maintenance strategy,
supposedly to spark feelings of love and possessiveness, making a partner
more likely to stay in the relationship.
3. Spying or surveillance may also function to maintain relationships by
providing information that reduces uncertainty about rival relationships and
helps a jealous person compete with potential rivals.
4. Infidelity, destructive conflict, and allowing control:
a. Perhaps people seek to get back at a partner who was unfaithful in the
hopes that they would be hurt enough to come back or stop cheating.
5. Can backfire leading to breakup:
a. Some of these antisocial maintenance behaviors may even represent
desperate attempts to hang onto a relationship that is in trouble or be
signs of a toxic relationship.
b. People who report using the antisocial maintenance behaviors of
C. Modality of Maintenance Behavior
1. Modality refers to the channel of communication and some researchers
consider mediated communication to be a special category based on its
modality.
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
2. Mediated forms of maintenance behavior include communicating via social
networking services, e-mail, text messaging, Snapchat, blogging, the
telephone, and cards and letters.
3. Positivity and implicit rules:
a. According to these rules, people expect others to present themselves and
their friends positively and to refrain from posting anything that could
hurt a person’s image.
4. Rabby compared four relationship types:
a. Virtual relationships where partners had only communicated online.
b. Pinocchio relationships where partners first meet online but then start
meeting in person.
5. Some types of maintenance behaviors are especially amenable to mediated
communication and therefore more likely to be used in long-distance
relationships.
D. Strategic and Routine Maintenance Behaviors
1. Strategic maintenance behaviors: Intentionally designed to maintain a
relationship. Actions are deliberate and intentionally designed to maintain a
positive relationship with someone.
2. Routine maintenance behaviors: Less strategic and deliberate, they are used
III. Maintenance Behavior in Romantic Relationships
A. Changes in Maintenance over the Course of Romantic Relationships
1. Stafford and Canary compared couples at four relationship stages: casually
dating, seriously dating, engaged, and married.
2. Dating versus marital relationships:
a. Dainton and Stafford found that spouses shared more tasks than daters,
who however, engaged in more mediated communication.
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
3. Amount of effort people put into a relationship reflects the depth of their
feelings and eventually their level of commitment.
4. In marriages, relational maintenance may follow a curvilinear pattern.
Spouses may use more maintenance behavior in the early and later years of
marriage.
B. Maintenance in Gay and Lesbian Relationships
1. Partners in same-sex romantic relationships reported that it is important to
live and work in environments that are supportive and not judgmental of their
relationships.
2. Being “out” socially: Spending time with friends and family members who
recognize and accept their relationship was a key relational maintenance
behavior.
3. Gay and lesbian couples tend to see their relationships as similar to
heterosexual relationships in terms of commitment and communication but
dissimilar in terms of nonconformity to sex-role stereotypes, but subtle
differences exist.
a. Gay and lesbian couples reported using more maintenance behaviors that
show bonding.
IV. Maintenance Behavior in Same-Sex Friendships
• Expected to maintain with little effort: People are taught that romantic relationships
require a spark to get started and that the spark needs to be rekindled from time to time
if the relationship is to stay strong.
• Friendships do require maintenance: Fehr suggested that three maintenance behaviors
are particularly important in friendships: (1) openness, (2) supportiveness, and (3)
positivity.
• Openness, reporting, and other behaviors:
o Openness includes both routine talk and intimate self-disclosure.
A. Talking Versus Doing
1. Women’s friendships are “face to face” because of the focus on
communication. Men’s friendships are “side by side” because of the focus on
activity.
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
2. This sex difference, albeit small, appears early in life and extends to mediated
communication such as texting and online gaming. It is also similar in some
ways.
3. Women get together more often just to talk and spend time with one another
and use maintenance strategies. Whereas men get together more often to do
something specific.
B. Men and Women Are From the Same Planet
1. Research suggests that some sex differences exist in how men and women
maintain their friendships.
2. Men and women are generally more similar than dissimilar, and when
differences are found, they tend to be small.
V. Maintenance Behavior in Cross-Sex Friendships
A. Challenges in Cross-Sex Friendships
1. The Emotional Bond Challenge
a. Men and women are socialized to see one another as potential romantic
partners rather than platonic friends, which can lead to uncertainty.
2. The Sexual Challenge
a. This challenge involves coping with the potential sexual attraction that
can be part of some cross-sex relationships.
b. Friends with benefits refers to nonromantic relationships between friends
who have sex.
3. The Public Presentation Challenge
a. This challenge arises when other people assume there is something
romantic or sexual going on in a cross-sex friendship.
B. Coping With Romantic Intent
1. Romantic intent is the desire to move the friendship toward a romantic
relationship and is related to maintenance behavior.
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
2. Platonic cross-sex friendship: Both friends reported on the degree of romantic
intent that they felt toward their cross-sex friend.
a. Cross-sex friends report different levels of some maintenance behaviors
depending on their romantic intentions.
b. Platonic cross-sex friends use the most relationship maintenance
strategies than various types of sexually involved couples.
3. Using prosocial maintenance behavior:
a. Friends in the mutual romance group said they used the most
maintenance behaviors.
b. People who desired romance but believed their friend did not were less
4. Individuals of low-level romantic intent:
a. Individuals in rejects-romance and strictly platonic groups reported using
less joint activity and flirtation but more talk about outside relationships.
b. Individuals who want to keep the relationship platonic refrain from
flirting with each other and also limit their public appearances.
C. Keeping Friendships Platonic
1. Reasons for defining strictly platonic:
a. Important to safeguard the relationship and worry that a shift toward
romance result in a breakup.
b. They are not attracted to their friend in a romantic or sexual way.
c. Network disapproval if they became romantically involved with their
friend.
2. Women are more likely than men to want to safeguard the relationship and to
say they are not attracted to their friend in a romantic way.
3. Using different maintenance behaviors.
VI. Maintenance Challenges in Other Relationships
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
A. Friends with Benefits Relationships
1. In contrast to platonic friendships, some friends decide to have sex but stay
friends rather than become a romantic couple, a type of relationship called the
friends-with-benefits relationship.
2. These relationships also occur between same-sex friends who are gay,
lesbian, or bisexual and can take many shapes and forms.
3. True Friends: Close friends who add sex to their friendship but don’t
consider themselves a couple even though they care about each other as
friends.
6. Transition Out or Ex-Sex: Former romantic partners who are no longer an
official couple but continue or resume their sex relationship sometime after
they breakup.
7. Intentional Transition in: Partners decide to start out in a friends-with-
benefits relationship with the intention of becoming a couple if everything
goes well and then they successfully make the transition to a romantic
relationship.
10. Relationship may not fit category:
a. In an on-again, off-again relationship, what starts out as a transition out
(ex sex) may turn into an intentional or unintentional transition back in.
b. One person may intentionally transition in, while for the other person the
transition in was unexpected.
11. Advantages and disadvantages:
a. Overriding theme is that a person is able to have “sex with a trusted other
while avoiding commitment,” mainly an advantage for those who are true
friends, in the same network, just friends, or exes.
b. Lack of commitment and “becoming closer” were mentioned as
advantages, the latter being likely for those who intend to become a
couple or for those in an on-again, off-again relationship.
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
c. Concern about developing romantic feelings was the top disadvantage,
followed by lack of commitment, and possible negative consequences of
having sex.
12. Friends with benefits often keep the sexual aspect of their relationship
private, yet are more likely to continue if their broader network of friends is
accepting of the type of relationship they have, which is the most challenging
to maintain.
B. Long-Distance Relationships
1. A primary challenge for maintaining long-distance romantic relationships
which is believed to be the glue that holds romantic relationships together.
2. Distance prevents partners from displaying nonverbal affection and engaging
in the same type of daily routine talk.
3. Individuals in romantic long-distance relationships are just as happy and
maybe even more “in love” with their partners than are people in proximal
romantic relationships.
4. Idealization: People describe their relationship and their partner in overly
positive terms that sometimes reflect unrealistic expectations but keeps
people committed to their relationships.
5. People in long-distance relationships often compensate for the lack of face-to-
face communication by increasing their use of texting and social media.
C. Cohabiting Relationships
1. Relationship Stability
a. Cohabitation represents a looser bond than marriage because cohabitation
involves more autonomy, less commitment, and fewer social and legal
barriers to dissolution than does marriage.
b. Selection effect: People who choose to cohabit rather than marry have
certain preexisting personal characteristics and attitudes that make it less
likely that their relationships will last.
c. Throughout the 21st century, there has been a consistent pattern with
couples who cohabit before marriage more likely to divorce than couples
who do not, irrespective of culture.
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
d. Couples who wait to move in together until after they are engaged are
less prone to divorce than couples who move in together without being
engaged.
2. Relational Quality
a. Married couples who do not live together prior to marriage are more
satisfied with their relationships than are cohabiting couples.
b. Cohabiters who planned to get married were just as satisfied with their
relationships as married couples, whereas cohabiters who did not plan to
marry were less satisfied.
e. Satisfaction levels appear to decrease over time in marriages regardless
of whether couples cohabited or not.
3. Communication Patterns
a. Cohabiting couples reported the most conflict, followed by transitioned
couples, and married couples least.
b. Couples who lived together before marriage were more likely to engage
in violent behavior than couples who did not live together prior to
marriage.
c. Willoughby and his colleagues classified couples into the following four
groups: Couples in the engaged/fast and engaged/slow groups fared best
VII. Equity Theory
• Equity and inequity:
o Equity theory focuses on determining whether distribution of resources is fair to
both relational partners, measured by comparing the ratio of contributions (or
costs) and benefits (or rewards) for each person.
• General and specific equity:
o General equity (or inequity) represents an overall assessment of balance between
two people’s benefits and contributions.
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
o Specific equity focuses on the balance between specific areas such as physical
attractiveness, financial resources, social status, ability to influence each other, and
supportiveness.
• A relationship can be unbalanced in terms of specific equity but balanced overall.
A. Principles of Equity Theory
1. People feel distress when inequity is perceived to exist. Five principles help
explain why benefits and equity are associated with relational satisfaction and
commitment:
2. These principles have been tested and supported for people in the United
States and other Western cultures.
a. Couples in expressive cultures such as the United States and Malaysia
use more equity-based relationship maintenance strategies than cultures
like Singapore that are influenced by Confucianism.
3. While equity is an important concept in the United States and other Western
cultures, it is somewhat less important in other cultures.
a. People in Australia, North America (excluding Mexico), and Western
Europe prefer equity, which means that they believe resources should be
distributed based on the contributions people make.
4. One study examined the link between equity and relational maintenance
behavior, which was strongest in the United States, followed by Spain.
5. Benefits of Equity
a. Around half of spouses in the United States report that their marriages are
equitable and partners who perceive equity tend to be satisfied with and
committed to their relationships.
b. Couples and friends in equitable relationships report using more
relational maintenance behavior and express anger, guilt, and sadness in
more constructive ways than those in inequitable relationships.
c. Inequitable relationships overbenefit and underbenefit:
i. The overbenefited individual receives more benefits or makes fewer
contributions, or both, than does the partner, so that the ratio between
them is unbalanced.
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
d. Because people tend to overestimate their own contributions to
relationships, both dyadic members might think they are underbenefited
even though this is not actually the case.
6. Consequences of Underbenefited Inequity
a. Underbenefited individuals are more distressed than overbenefited
individuals, report the least relational satisfaction, tend to feel cheated,
used, taken for granted, and experience anger or sadness.
b. People who are underbenefited in terms of supportiveness or physical
attractiveness put less effort into comforting their partners when they are
distressed.
7. Consequences of Overbenefited Inequity
a. Overbenefited individuals tend to experience less distress than their
underbenefited counterparts but more distress than individuals who are in
equitable relationships.
B. Reducing Distress in Inequitable Relationships
1. Restoring Actual Equity
a. Overbenefited partner might contribute more to the relationship, whereas
the underbenefited partner might do less while asking the overbenefited
partner to do more.
2. Adjusting Psychological Equity
a. People sometimes reassess their costs and benefits and decide that they
are actually getting a fairer deal than they first thought.
b. Sometimes mental adjustments represent the situation more accurately
than an initial assessment.
3. Leaving the Relationship
a. People temporarily leave as a way to try to restore equity.
b. Sometimes a last resort, this is most likely to occur when people are
receiving few benefits and making considerable contributions to the
relationship.
C. Combined Influence of Benefit–Cost Ratios and Equity
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
1. Costs include people’s contributions such as time and effort put into
accomplishing tasks and maintaining relationships and negative consequences
of being in a relationship such as having conflict and losing opportunities.
2. Overall level of benefits associated with a relationship is more important than
equity and some level of inequity might be inconsequential if both partners
are receiving enough benefits.
3. Relationships that are inequitable with benefits outweighing costs should also
be satisfying, especially if the benefits are high and the inequity is fairly
small.
