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Maintaining Relationships

Scholars often have insights about how people maintain their close relationships, as many entries in this volume indicate. However, the purposeful, direct examination of various factors that specifically address how people maintain their relationships is a recent enterprise. Still, a substantial number of scholars have now converged on behaviors directly relevant to the domain of relationship maintenance.

This entry focuses on research that has directly sought to reveal how people maintain their close relationships—emphasizing both stability and quality. First, relational maintenance is defined. Next, two metaphors that several scholars have used to portray maintenance processes—centripetal force and centrifugal force—are described. This entry concludes by observing that maintenance processes occur at several levels, from the individual to the cultural.

Defining Relational Maintenance

Five definitions of relational maintenance have been offered in the literature. (1) Perhaps the most obvious definition concerns stability, or how people keep the relationship intact. Here, relationship maintenance refers to those behaviors that keep a couple together over time—the longer, the better. (2) A second definition involves sustaining desired features of the relationship. From this view, it is not enough to have a stable relationship; relationship maintenance means retaining a high-quality involvement. Accordingly, relational maintenance refers to engaging in actions that promote important relationship features, such as satisfaction, commitment, trust, love, and so forth. (3) Third, relationship maintenance refers to how people repair their close involvements that have been somehow damaged. In this sense, maintenance behaviors are reactive; people do not engage in maintenance until the relationship needs repair. (4) Fourth, relational maintenance concerns keeping a relationship in a specified condition. That is, a particular type of relationship and level of intimacy are maintained. For instance, platonic friends engage in maintenance behaviors to keep the friendship as nonsexual. (5) Finally, from a dialectical perspective, relational maintenance refers to how partners adapt to change that is inherent in relationships. In other words, relationships do not have a static status quo; rather, relational partners experience ebbs and flows of various tensions that need to be managed for the relationship to be sustained.

Researchers tend to adopt one definition in preference to others. However, these definitions are probably more mutually informative than mutually exclusive. That is, relational maintenance most likely occurs in all forms but at different times. At a minimum, people need to keep their relationships in existence, and at times, that is the critical goal. But in addition, people work at maintaining important characteristics of the relationship—as one that involves commitment, trust, and so forth. And when partners have a falling out, they then need to repair the damage done. During periods when both parties are content, they work at sustaining those times of continuity, although the status quo of relationships is not static but involves change.

Forces That Push and Pull on Relationships

Some people believe that relationships are easy to get into but difficult to get out of, whereas other individuals hold that people must work to maintain their relationships or they will fall apart. The idea that relationships are hard to leave invites a centripetal analogy, and the idea that relationships fall apart unless some force holds them together suggests a centrifugal force at work. Research shows that both centripetal and centrifugal forces function to maintain close involvements, such that one should leverage the forces that keep relationships intact and combat the forces that pull relationships apart.

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