Communal Relationships

Mutuality and Symmetry of Communal Relationships

Communal relationships are typically mutual with both persons willing to noncontingently benefit the other as need for and as opportunities to convey care arise. Communal relationships also are often symmetrical, with partners assuming equal responsibility for one another's welfare. However, even in mutual and symmetrical communal relationships, enacted responsiveness often will be uneven because needs themselves are often uneven. In well-functioning communal relationships, this is accepted.

Communal relationships can be one-sided in the sense that assumed responsibility for a relationship member's welfare goes only in one direction. That is, one person can assume communal responsibility for a partner who feels no particular responsibility for the other person. The parent of a child so severely handicapped that he or she does not even recognize the parent, for instance, might have a nonmutual, one-sided communal relationship with that child. More commonly, communal relationships are mutual but asymmetrical. Relationships between parents and adolescent children often fall into this category. The parent and child may each assume some responsibility for the other's welfare, but the parent assumes far more responsibility for the child than vice versa.

Distinguishing Communal from Exchange Relationships

Communal relationships were initially differentiated from exchange relationships in the late 1970s by Margaret Clark and Judson Mills. The distinction was a qualitative one based on differences in the norms governing the giving and receiving of benefits. In exchange relationships, benefits were said to be given contingently, with the expectation of specific and timely repayments consisting of benefits of comparable value. In contrast, in communal relationships, benefits were given noncontingently on the basis of needs. Early research revealed that experimental manipulations increasing expectations and desire for friendships or romantic relationships also increased keeping track of a partner's needs, helping, responsiveness to a partner's expressions of emotion, and expectations that a partner would be responsive to one's own needs. At the same time, those manipulations also resulted in negative reactions to receiving repayments or requests for repayments and led to people avoiding keeping track of individual inputs into joint tasks for which there would be rewards.

A Quantitative Aspect of Communal Relationships

Shortly after proposing the qualitative distinction between communal and exchange relationships, Clark and Mills highlighted a quantitative dimension of communal relationships, communal strength. Communal strength refers to the degree of responsibility people assume for the partner's welfare and therefore, the effort and costs to which they will go to benefit that partner's welfare noncontingently. Most people have very weak communal relationships even with strangers. They meet small needs of strangers noncontingently by, for instance, telling the stranger the time with no expectation of repayment. On the other hand, most people have very strong communal relationships with their own children and go to enormous lengths in terms of time, money, and effort to benefit their children. Many communal relationships such as typical friendships fall in between these extremes in terms of strength. Along with the amount of support a person is willing to provide noncontingently to a partner, greater empathic compassion to a partner's plight or greater empathic joy in response another's good fortune serves as an indicator of the strength of a communal relationship.

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