Storytelling

Building and Maintaining Relationships through Stories

Storytelling helps to build and maintain social relationships over time. For example, people exchange stories in the beginning of a relationship because doing so is a way to get to know one another by sharing important information about the past. As relationships become well established, two different features of storytelling activities have been examined.

First, people develop stories that characterize their relationships. In this work, the relationship is the context within which stories develop and change. For example, couples often share stories about “how we met” or about important relationship experiences with others, which can restore or enhance feelings of warmth and intimacy with the partner even when the partner is not present. Such stories develop over time within relationships as partners practice telling them over and over again and incorporating new events into their story. As pairs and families interact and engage in storytelling, one person may take on the primary role for telling a particular story, with others in the family providing helpful commentary. Research shows that narrating a family story allows a person to make sure that other family members share his or her memory and perspective on an important family event. As relationships become truly well established, as in long-term marriages, the way people share responsibility for telling relationship stories can evolve. Stories are also implicated in the dissolution of relationships, as people build an account of their relationship that justifies and explains why the relationship ended.

Second, some relationship stories are more adaptive than others. There is good evidence that telling stories that emphasize closeness and positivity, and perhaps even idealize the relationship partner benefit the longevity and quality of a relationship over time.

Idealizing one's partner may help people to get through imperfect periods in a relationship, give partners the benefit of the doubt, and facilitate working together in stressful transitions, such as becoming parents. Creating stories that idealize one's partner is one way that idealized images can be created and maintained, and thus provide these benefits. Telling a more complete story about the ending of a relationship also is associated with a greater sense of control and recovery from a breakup.

Storytelling as a Context for Fulfilling Relationship Functions

People in relationships also exchange their individual stories. This kind of storytelling has many functions and is seen in nearly all relationships—parent-child, friend, romantic, and family. This type of storytelling provides the partner with information about the person's experiences, thus maintaining intimacy and connections. Because one of the most common patterns in the exchange of stories is to relate series of common experiences, this type of storytelling creates intimacy via both sharing and building a sense of a similar history. People also use this type of storytelling to seek validation of their beliefs about themselves and the world, to seek emotional support and reassurance, and sometimes to resolve problems in other parts of their lives. For example, spouses sometimes argue with each other about the stories they tell. Such disputes are less likely to concern what happened than to concern what the experience meant—or its larger significance. Similarly, parents and children don't always concur about how the child felt during a particular experience—with the child telling the story about sadness, for example, and the parent telling it with an emphasis on anger. In both cases, the process of storytelling allows the pair to reach a common understanding of experiences that, under ideal circumstances, includes and validates multiple perspectives on a single event.

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