Close Relationships

Definition

Why are we attracted to some people? How do people know they are in good relationships? Why do people fall in love? Does good communication really produce successful relationships? Are men really from Mars and women from Venus? These are just some of the intriguing questions that social psychologists attempt to answer. Indeed, the study of close relationships has become one of the most important domains in social psychology over the past several decades.

But what are close relationships? It turns out that answering this question is not as easy as it seems. One key concept, developed by Harold Kelley and John Thibaut in the 1960s and 1970s, describes close relationships in terms of interdependence. Close relationships differ from having acquaintances by the profound way in which the well-being and psychological [Page 142]processes of one individual resonate with, and are tied to, the same processes in another person. Furthermore, close relationships are characterized by relatively high levels of trust, love, knowledge, commitment, and intimacy. However, close relationships themselves divide into two further categories: platonic friendships versus romantic relationships. Romantic relationships differ from close platonic friendships in two major ways. First, romantic relationships contain the elements of sex and passion, and second, individuals are typically involved in just one romantic attachment at one time. Friendships can be intense and are of enormous psychological importance in our lives, but most research in social psychology has been devoted toward understanding romantic relationships. Accordingly, this entry focuses on this domain in this synopsis.

A Brief History

A social psychological approach to close relationships focuses on the interaction between two individuals, paying close attention to both behavior and what goes in people's minds (emotions and cognitions). Within social psychology, up to the late 1970s, research into relationships concentrated on interpersonal attraction; namely, what factors lead people to be attracted to one another at the initial stages of relationship development? This research tended to be atheoretical and the results read like a shopping list of variables that influence attraction, including similarity, proximity, physical attractiveness, and so forth. In the 1980s the psychological zeitgeist shifted toward the study of the much greater complexity inherent in the development, maintenance, and dissolution phases of dyadic romantic relationships. This shift was prompted by several key developments in the 1970s. First, John Gottman and others in the clinical area began research that, for the first time, observed and carefully measured the dyadic interchanges of married couples in an attempt to predict who would divorce. Second, Zick Rubin and others became interested in love and devised reliable scales that could measure the concept. Third, Harold Kelley led a team of social psychologists in producing a seminal book published in 1983 (Close Relationships), which presented the first full-blooded treatment of close relationships from an interactional, social psychological perspective.

Social psychological research in psychology over the past two decades has been marked by three major developments. First, there has been an explosion of work concerned with understanding the role that social cognition (beliefs, cognitive processes, etc.) and emotions play in intimate relationships. This work has borrowed theories and methodologies from both social and cognitive psychology. Second, there has been a burgeoning interest in how attachment and bonding processes contribute to adult romantic relationships. Attachment research in adults appropriated the basic theories from the work in the 1960s and 1970s by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth concerning infant– caregiver attachment bonds. Third, the study of interpersonal attraction (in the context of romantic relationships, this is typically labeled mate selection) has once again become a hot topic, but under the new banner of evolutionary psychology. This approach is based on the evolutionary work of Darwin, but it has been honed into modern social psychological guise by figures such as David Buss and Jeffry Simpson.

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