The Concomitants of Collective Marriage Work

Inevitably, when another person helps work out a personal problem, the work is not idiosyncratic or unmediated; the contribution shows. In short, problem solving and emotion work are subject to social control. Collective marriage work reinforces possibly latent but nonetheless influential values that are in theory variable. In my interviews, however, they varied little. Women reported that they sought accommodative marriage work with friends or met it regardless of their wishes. They did not describe this patterned influence as social control, however. Their language rarely evoked the quality of constraint. They called the influence "objective" or "unbiased," as did Rita and Karen, who stated without irony: "She'll be objective and say, 'How do you think you can do that differently?'" and, "Friends help you become more objective and accepting of how they [husbands] are."

When the women used terms like "objective" and "unbiased,"

they meant the advice was impartial, disinterested, not swayed by emotions. Yet most admitted that criticism of their mate, disinterested or otherwise, was unacceptable. The meaning of "objective" that is implicit in their examples is "determined by and oriented to a goal or object," the object being to keep commitment to marriage.

A friend's bias, then, turns not on favoring the interests of one partner or the other but on favoring individual needs and interests over fidelity to marriage. If we assume that in marriage work the goal of preserving a marriage and commitment to it overarches the goal of working out marital solutions that fit the needs of the individuals involved, then the discussions of marriage women reported were objective indeed. We need to evaluate the effect of this particular collaborative marriage work and then suggest different effects that marriage work might have in an alternate ideology or situation.

To appreciate the varied meanings of "objective" marriage work in the lives of different women, compare these three accounts. In chapter 2, Nancy described how Annette helped her work on her jealousy of her son's girlfriend. Annette found Nancy's jealousy understandable (she had sons of her own) but inappropriate, so she helped Nancy plan how to act in a way that reduced the jealousy. Confiding these uncomfortable feelings to Annette and allowing Annette to help her manage them, Nancy relieved undesirable emotion. And she found a strategy for handling residual feelings to avoid undesirable reactions, including her husband's disapproval.

In the second account, also introduced in chapter 2, Sally empathized with Arlene's periodic despair that everything her husband did was irritating; but Sally told her outright that this generalized fury was "ridiculous . . . you'll survive." Arlene told this story with amused appreciation and the conviction that her own current sense of contentment with her marriage proved her friend right.

In the third story, Mary told how, when she considered leaving Hal, Vera discouraged her by recounting the loneliness of a past separation of her own. "She tells me how she's been through the same thing and gotten herself out of it. She points out why Hal is doing these things, why I should understand him more and try to make a go of it."

In each example the friend's "unbiased" mediation moved the woman to a more "objective" state of mind or behavior. But the personal cost of her objectivity was different in each case. The first mediation tempered a mother's response that was irrational within a system where children marry outside their family. Following the dictates of jealousy promised Nancy nothing in either personal well-being or improved family relations. The second situation is more ambiguous, at least excerpted from context. Did Sally's exchange with Arlene simply intervene in an emotional eruption— the stuff of daily life in intimate relations—or did it subvert a charged but salutary attempt to insert long-denied personal needs into marriage bargaining? Arlene seemed firmly convinced that it was the former. She felt she had made her peace with the uncommunicativeness of her husband and wished to sustain this peace on the occasions when emotions eclipsed her reasons for the adjustment.

The last example is even more ambiguous. A few times in the past Mary had clutched at a last straw. She could no longer abide her husband's drinking and the chronic marital antagonism it created. Her job was secure; her son had grown and left home; she felt she no longer loved her husband; and she suffered daily anger, regret, and despondence. But Vera's objective mediation pressed Mary to endure, regardless of circumstances. Mary preferred to have a man in her life and knew the odds against a woman her age; how would she even try to find another? Vera's concern unquestionably spoke to one side of Mary's ambivalence. So Mary recounted this collaborative marriage work as appreciatively as she could. In her voice was not so much doubt as a weary wish not to think about it further.

Contrast the mediations already described with this one. Lee, a young, unencumbered single woman, described how her best friend, also young and single, helped her leave a relationship she was not at all sure she really wished to end.

I was choosing to leave a man who I absolutely adored. I said, "Look, I'm trying to leave him and I can't." She came and packed me up and moved me out of the apartment. She put me up, she made me tea, special meals. She'd take me out for walks and point things out. And when I wouldn't see them, she'd turn my head. It was the greatest help I've ever had from anybody.

Our earlier discussion of reasons for accommodative marriage work should indicate why the stories of young, single, childless women depart so sharply from the others. Indeed, women in one or more of these categories were more likely to have a friend discourage accommodation, criticize her partner, or strongly advocate individual self-interest over obligation to a relationship. This last mediation, Mary's story, and the following accounts of divorced women should establish that in collaborative marriage work friends do not simply discover and support a woman's basic intent, to stay married or move toward divorce. "Divorce work" emerged as a very different process in the friendships of the women I interviewed.

Divorced respondents told of support and sacrifice by friends after their marriages ended. Close friends were as dedicated to helping women "work out" their divorces as they had been to helping them "work out" their marriages. But none said she had been told "He's the wrong person, anyhow" before the decision, only afterward. "I know my friends would support me if I did go. But I've never heard any of them say, 'Go, he deserves it,' or, 'How can you put up with it?' and that sort of thing." Only two of the six ever-divorced women I interviewed identified themselves as the one who left the marriage; all of them claimed to have been very unhappy before divorce. Yet only Cass, who described how family members took a gun and chased out her abusive husband, received support for abandoning a marriage. Each of the others said friends responded with support for divorce only after her husband left or, in Lynn's case, after she firmly decided to leave.

Hilda divorced in an era when, she said, friends showed more reserve in talking about marital problems. She remembered her surprise when one friend came forward to confide the grave marital difficulties the friend had weathered and to persuade Hilda to try to do so as well. After she divorced, many friends helped her and her children. But not even witnesses to her husband's abuse had encouraged thoughts of divorce.

Help along the course of her decision to leave a relationship rarely appeared in the accounts of the women I interviewed—not just divorced women, but my entire sample. The exceptions involved Lee, the young, single woman; Cass, whose family gave material support throughout her marriage and finally rescued her

from battery; and married women who recalled events from their youth. I would expect a larger study to reveal subtle variations in this pattern of response to evaluations of a friend's resources of survival. Here, support for divorce was primarily a post-divorce phenomenon. Marriage work was prescribed until divorce work became unavoidable.

For emotion management and marital recommitment, two heads are likely to be better than one; our examples illustrate the point. Collaborative marriage work is efficient as well as effective, although it is labor-intensive. Arlene explained why'. "Had I spent some time thinking about it, I might have come to the same conclusion on my own. But she was there when I was still angry about it and not yet heading in the right direction. She helped me resolve that problem a lot quicker than I'd have done if I was doing it on my own."

Now that divorce is widespread, its threat hangs over marital conflicts as never before; the speed with which conflicts are resolved can be critical. Will this fight be the last straw; and if so, whose? Anger is especially resistant to deft emotion work, particularly when the only other person involved is one's combatant. Collectivizing marriage work is a particularly effective way of speeding up conflict resolution (if such is its aim). Further, its labor-intensiveness may not detract from its efficiency. By defusing conflict, collaborative marriage work may spare husband and wife the greater effort of repairing relations that deteriorate when there is no "objective" mediation.

It is evident that collaborative marriage work does something more than filter idiosyncratic or momentary emotional reaction. It allows (although it does not cause) a patterned injection of socially approved interpretations and responses. In the majority of instances reported, collective marriage work reinforced accommodation and recommitment to the marriage; "objectivity" replaced unreconstructive response to conflict. This objectivity generally casts a friend's (cold) eye on the sentiment and behavior that threaten to escalate marital conflict; it fatalistically views a woman's current situation as her best option. Even when stability in marriage is the utmost value, however, socialized marriage work assembles a curriculum of strategies that amplify the powers of the weak and that a different set of circumstances might transmute into a culture of resistance.

If, explaining why women want to remain in their marriages, I have argued well, I may have provoked a question about the causal efficacy of friends' marriage work in stabilizing marriage commitment. If women find ample reasons to stay in marriages, in what way is socialized marriage work crucial?

I think that collective marriage work operates most directly on the feelings and values of commitment rather than its logic. Women may adapt instrumentally (with calculation) because they perceive doing so is their safest or most reasonable alternative and yet not feel either satisfied or morally right. Collective marriage work often helps the cognitive process of commitment, but it probably operates with more independent effect on emotion and belief. Since larger structural and cultural forces may very well account for much of women's accommodation in marriage, collective marriage work contributes more to emotional and moral commitments, strengthening bonds that instrumental accommodation simply attaches. It is in this way that marriage work with friends may appropriately be said to shape and solidify commitments to marriage.