Marital Communication (eBook)

Douglas Kelley (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2014
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
978-0-7456-8080-4 (ISBN)

Infos

Marital Communication provides insight into healthy relationships for those who want to better understand key communication processes between long-term, committed, romantic partners. Writing with students, teachers, researchers, practitioners, and couples in mind, this book uses marriage as a proving ground to understand the processes necessary to build and maintain positive romantic relationships.
Marital Communication develops the idea that marriage is a distinctive communication context (long-term, romantic, and committed) that uniquely influences various relationship processes. It focuses on three essential elements needed for healthy marital functioning: positive everyday communication, intimacy and love, and productive conflict management. The book finishes by describing how these essential elements change across the life-span, by examining marriage’s dark side, and by focusing on the use of forgiveness to ensure a healthy longevity.
Soundly documented with current research and written in a manner accessible to student and researcher alike, Marital Communication is an ideal supplement for current courses focusing on family communication, interpersonal and relational communication, and conflict. It is also an excellent, resource for the relationship professional.

Douglas L. Kelley is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Arizona State University.

Inhalt

1: The Uniqueness of Marital Communication

2: Living and Working Together

3: Closeness: Achieving Intimacy and Love in Marriage

4: Close Conflict

5: Couple Communication Across the Life Cycle

6: Destructive and Restorative Marital Processes

References

Index

Rezensionen

"A valuable foundational text"
Communication Research Trends

"Douglas Kelley thoughtfully and wisely weaves together his years as a communication researcher, counsellor, and teacher. He bundles all this knowledge and experience into a book that is accessible and insightful to students, professionals, and couples seeking a deeper understanding of marriage and communication."
Dawn O. Braithwaite, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

"In Marital Communication, Dr. Kelley brings the same deep research, interdisciplinary focus, and degree of conceptual, theoretical, and methodological care familiar from his work on forgiveness. From the outset, he is careful to consider marriage as a recent and cultural phenomenon and takes pains to reflect how this relationship has taken form and the forces that are at play within and outside of it. He seamlessly blends more psychological theories on relationships into the stream of everyday communication, reflecting well the potential influence of communication on relational satisfaction or the erosion of relational quality."
Valerie Manusov, University of Washington

"Marital Communication offers an expert blend of research, theory, and practice. Dr. Kelley has a unique talent for translating complex concepts into recognizable everyday issues in marriage. He offers a definable roadmap for couples to follow in unpacking intimacy issues, conflict, and relational pitfalls. His insightfulness offers a complement of information for students, practitioners, and scholars."
Sandra Petronio, Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis

Textauszug

2

Living and Working Together

Effective Daily Interaction

Angie and Steve had been married six months. They experienced the normal ups and downs of a young couple adjusting to married life. Overall, they were excited about their new marriage – their lives were filled with learning to live together and manage their home, beginning their careers, and hanging out with friends. When asked what was most surprising about their first six months of marriage, Angie quickly answered, “He is always there.”

Angie’s response betrays a truth that many young couples don’t realize until they are in the midst of negotiating their new relationship – it is often the “small stuff” that makes a difference. Angie didn’t mention that they were arguing more than she expected or that his parents were driving her crazy. No, it was the simple act of trying to coordinate their daily interaction, and balance their autonomy and togetherness, that was the surprise.

Daily interaction is the mortar between the bricks of marital communication. The remaining chapter topics of this book (e.g., intimacy and love, conflict, forgiveness) form the bricks of the relationship. They are the elements typically noticed when a relationship is going well or falling apart. They are what movies are made of. However, daily interaction is the mortar that holds the bricks together – it is the stuff of which successful marriages are made.

The bulk of married couples’ lives is spent in relatively mundane, seemingly unmemorable interactions. Couples accomplish daily chores, such as grocery shopping, mowing the lawn, taking the kids to soccer practice, and paying the bills. They choose times and ways to relax, like watching television, walking the dogs, or sitting in the hot tub. They make the bed, pick colors to remodel the kitchen, and take one another to the airport. They play cards or tennis, or ski together. In essence, they connect, they plan, they coordinate their actions.

It is easy to pass over routine processes as significant to marital interaction; however, Duck (1988) points out the importance of daily interaction in personal relationships: “It is very clear, but often under-appreciated, that daily events are typically centered on and intertwined with our relationships in remarkable ways” (p. 6). He highlights the seemingly mundane as significant to how we relate to one another. Driver and Gottman (2004) suggest that “[t]he mundane and often fleeting moments that a couple experiences in their everyday lives may contribute to the health or deterioration of a relationship by serving as a foundation to major couple events such as conflict discussion and caring days” (p. 301).

Likewise, Victor Frankl (1963), in his classic book Man’s Search for Meaning, demonstrates the importance of the little things. Here he discusses the memories of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps:

When given free rein, his imagination played with past events, often not important ones, but minor happenings and trifling things… . In my mind I took bus rides, unlocked the front door of my apartment, answered my telephone, switched on the electric lights. Our thoughts often centered on such details, and these memories could move one to tears. (pp. 61–62)

Remarkable – the emotional power of memories that reflect the mundane, the daily. In a similar way, a student of mine who was researching this area found herself in conversation with an older man in a grocery store checkout line. She told him that she was researching love in long-term marriages. He looked at her and said:

Do you want to know what love is? I’ll tell you what love is. Love is no longer being able to make toast in the morning, because your wife has died. Every morning I used to put the toast in the toaster and, when it popped up, she would butter it. Now, I can’t make toast any longer.

Apparently, it is the seemingly insignificant that makes up the stuff of life. As such, in this chapter I examine how communication is related to the daily stuff. As Gottman (1999) has pointed out, “Every couple in their daily life together messes up communication …” (p. 7). As such, the chapter begins by examining behaviors associated with marital satisfaction. Then, recognizing that different approaches to daily living result in different interaction patterns, I describe the various means by which couples maintain their relationships and how they engage decision making. I finish the chapter by looking at specific issues, such as how couples organize their relationships and the ways they learn to live together.

Communication and Marital Quality

The way marriage partners communicate with one another affects their sense of relational quality. To fully understand this dynamic we need first to examine what is meant by marital quality, then focus on how communication affects couples’ relational experience.

Marital Quality

Marital quality has typically been understood as individuals’ subjective evaluations of their marital experience. Researchers have used various concepts to assess couples’ experience in marriage, such as marital adjustment, satisfaction, quality, happiness, success, intimacy, and complaints (Fincham & Bradbury, 1987; Sabatelli, 1988). According to Sabatelli (1988), while marital adjustment, satisfaction, and quality have been most commonly used to assess marital relationships, there is considerable confusion between these terms. Marital adjustment has been conceptualized as a process whereby couples move along a continuum, being well adjusted or maladjusted. Spanier’s (1976) Dyadic Adjustment Scale has been one of the most frequently used scales to assess adjustment. For Spanier, marriage (dyadic) adjustment consists of movement toward or away from dyadic satisfaction, dyadic cohesion, dyadic consensus, and consensual agreement. Within this framework, satisfaction is seen as one of four components comprising adjustment. Spanier’s scale uses both behaviorally based items (e.g., “How often do you and your partner quarrel?”) and subjective evaluations (e.g., “In general, how often do you think things between you and your partner are going well?”).

Others have argued that quality should be measured using global evaluations rather than behavioral descriptions (Fincham & Bradbury, 1987; Norton, 1983). From this perspective, including descriptions of marital behavior in marital outcome measures may obscure the need to study the behavioral items (e.g., communication). In addition, behavioral items complicate the ability to study marital behavior because of built-in correlations between behaviorally based satisfaction scales and other behavioral measures. Norton (1983) suggests the following non-behavioral terms to assess positive evaluation of the marriage relationship: good, strong, stable, a team, happy, satisfied.

It is important to recognize that most research in this area does not distinguish whether communication behavior leads to increased couple satisfaction, or if being in a positive relationship leads to communicating in more positive ways. Likely, this is a reciprocal relationship – good communication leads to increased liking and positive affect, and feeling good about the relationship and one’s spouse leads to increased positive communication.

Marital Satisfaction across the Life Cycle

A considerable body of research has demonstrated a U-shaped relationship between satisfaction and time: that is, marital satisfaction is highest in early marriage, drops when children join the dyadic system, and then rises again (although not necessarily to original levels) once the children leave the household (S. A. Anderson, Russell, & Schumm, 1983; Belsky, Lang, & Rovine, 1985; Patrick, Sells, Giordano, & Tollerud, 2007). In fact, Glenn (1990) posited that this relationship is one of the few certainties in social science research. Researchers have speculated that the transitory nature of satisfaction is due to the transition to parenthood, resulting changes in partners’ roles, length of marriage and quality of long-term marriages, adaptation to changing beliefs, and intimacy and differentiation (Glenn, 1998; Patrick et al., 2007).

It should be noted that in spite of the prevalent finding that marital satisfaction is U-shaped over time, not all researchers have reached the same conclusion. Some have argued that the pattern is more one of a steady decline in satisfaction or an initial decline and then a leveling off (VanLaningham, Johnson, & Amato, 2001). Conversely, Gottman (1999) actually claims that “many couples followed the opposite pattern, growing closer over time” (p. 21).

Several elements must be taken into consideration when trying to understand the satisfaction-over-time effect. First, much of the research is cross-sectional in nature: that is, the researchers have examined couples in various stages of marriage rather than following the same couples over time. Second, the longitudinal research that has been done has typically only followed couples for relatively short periods of time. Third, certain effects, such as couples entering marriage with unrealistic relational expectations, may give a false sense of whether “real” satisfaction has actually deteriorated in the relationship. Some of the drop in satisfaction may represent a natural process of adjusting expectations. Fourth, changes in marital satisfaction over time may not indicate that marriage doesn’t...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 3.3.2014
• Reihe/Serie: Key Themes in Family Communication
• Reihe/Serie: PKOS - Polity Key Themes in Family Communication series
• Reihe/Serie: PKOS - Polity Key Themes in Family Communication series
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Entwicklungspsychologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Medienwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Mikrosoziologie
• Themenwelt: Technik ► Elektrotechnik / Energietechnik
• Schlagworte: Communication & Media Studies • Kommunikation • Kommunikation u. Medienforschung • Marriage, Communication, Families
• ISBN-10: 0-7456-8080-1 / 0745680801
• ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8080-4 / 9780745680804