Marriage Work

A useful way to examine the active involvement of friends in each other's marriage is in a process I call marriage work, building on Arlie Hochschild's concept of "emotion work."^[1]Marriage work refers to reflection and action to achieve or sustain the stability of a marriage or a sense of its adequacy. I see marriage work as a voluntary and individually improvised effort rather than one institutionally specified. The term work is not a synonym for role. Bather, work indicates the purposive and exertive quality of the activity and connotes a sense of craft; it is purposive because it is intentional. Within this component I might include unconsciously destructive motives and marriage work that proves ultimately subversive of marriage.

Marriage work may intend to influence or accommodate. Influence-oriented marriage work uses power to produce effects on marriage. Its strategies may be coercive, combative, manipulative, or based on bargaining. Accommodative strategies aim to adjust oneself to a situation or capitulate to the demands of another. I consider accommodation a strategy in this discussion because the object of action is commitment, not power. A strategy of accommodation may sustain one's marriage commitment. Moreover, marriage work may aim at oneself or at one's situation, which in-eludes others.