Subordinating Friendship to Marriage

The higher obligations of marriage, family, and work constrain patterns of friendship even though its norms stress autonomy from these institutions. Although it adapts to other institutional commitments, friendship shows little strain of adjustment. Women's close friendships appear to be crucial ingredients of their well-being and satisfaction and an important support for their marital and familial commitments. Given the importance and distinctive character of these friendships, and considering the expectations that generally accompany such important relationships, we might expect contention between family and friends. We might look for conflicting demands on women's time, jealousy of attachments, and competing loyalties, like those that occur when women are heavily involved with close kin as well as family.^[21] In fact, I turned up little evidence of conflict. Women reported few antagonisms between husbands and friends. They rarely experienced difficulties in balancing their obligations in these two arenas; friendship and marriage appeared effortlessly harmonized. How do women operate in two different spheres of strong emotional attachments without feeling torn between them? What orderings of obligations and expectations underlie this apparently peaceful arrangement?

This section explores these questions, attending to the explicit and tacit ways friends adjust to each other's marriage obligations. I summarize this material with Simmel's work on discretion in mind and extend the notion of discretion beyond his focus on revelation and concealment to clarify the relation between social struc-

ture and the culture of friendship. The discussion should also illuminate the particular individuality practiced and promoted in women's friendship.

Just over half of the women I interviewed reported they had to "choose" between their friends and their husbands or families; but they said this conflict occurred only once in awhile. All but one of the currently married women rarely experienced conflicts between their alliances with friends and with family (although the divorced women were more apt to recall conflicts). When asked what they did to keep obligations to friends from competing with obligations to husband and family, most women had to stop and think. "That's the most difficult question you've asked," Thea responded. Then she continued: "But it has the simplest answer: it's just realizing that my family always comes first. Period. Any friends I have know that."

I heard versions of that answer over and over:

I don't think it's ever been a question. Sally and I are both aware that our families come first.

My obligations to my family come first. Keeping a home, providing for my husband and children, making sure there's a meal and that they have clean clothes—all that comes first. After that it's a priority list of what's most important at the time. If it's more important that Helen is upset about something, then I talk to her, and the kids will have to wait.

Women so much take for granted that obligations to family come first that they rarely remember ever explicitly negotiating those obligations with friends:

It just kind of falls into place.

There's never any question that something Sally and I might want to do would come before our kids or our husbands.

All I have to say is, "Oh, I just have to go home and make dinner." I may have to do what I don't want to do. But I've got this obligation first. [----Do friends ever have difficulty understanding your obligations?] No, not my friends—never.

Some, however, were aware that they had worked out methods of balancing the two sets of obligations, even though most friends had not discussed these arrangements.

I divide my time. I go to visit Lily in the morning, when Dwight is at work. We've got an understanding—when Dwight comes in from work, I'd rather not have any company. When her husband comes home, I leave too. We just do our spare time together when the kids are at school. And we just resume the next day.

I would say timing—when I go out. I'll try to do it when he's at work. And frequently—not just when I go, but how often. I try to work it out between me and him.

There's an understanding that my weekends are pretty dear. Sometimes I'll have to say, "That's Lloyd and my night for ourselves—can't we make it a daytime plan?"

Martin and I are flexible about finding family time that fits our schedules. But I don't usually plan outside things on weekends. When I'm not working, it's easier to do things with friends strictly during the day, avoiding time when husbands are home.

I try to limit calls in the evenings. We all do.

I'll try to do things that bring people to my house, so I don't have to be away. Or I try to find ways to include families.

Some of the arrangements women friends worked out involved very contingent commitments to joint plans.

We're good enough friends that she would know that if we had plans and then Jerry wanted to do something, we'd just postpone. She wouldn't get upset with me. She understands that he would come before her as far as doing something social.

It used to be if Gwen and I had plans and Fred decided he wanted to go out together, I'd say, "I just agreed to go out with Gwen." He didn't like that. Then I thought, "Wait, the husband comes first." So, now I just tell Gwen, "Fred just called about going out," and she understands.

I just try not to commit myself too much. I'll say, "Yea, probably, we'll see." Then I have a way out if I need it.

If Jay and the kids came up with something to do and I'd made plans to go out with a friend, I'd probably change that arrangement.

Yet, in spite of their precautions and reservations, women occasionally found themselves explicitly choosing friends.

One time Lily was upset about something with her husband. She asked if I'd come down and visit her and talk to her. Dwight said, "No, you can't

go now? But if I see that she's really upset, I'll just have to go on and see her. I feel he's wrong to say no. Because if I were in her place, I know she'd come to me. It just troubles me to have to choose like that.

Like Janine, above, others had made the choice of friends' needs over family wishes; and all had found the decision stressful. Several said husbands felt "hurt" or "left" by their choice; some said husbands or children objected or became angry. Unexpectedly, Betty found herself upset at her husband's cooperativeness when she anticipated an objection to putting her friend first. “I didn't expect it. I thought, 'Hell, this means he just doesn't care.'"

Some of the women volunteered strategies they used to reallocate time peacefully from family to friends. Three strategies cropped up a few times. The first involved "brownie points" or "buying time":

I do my home work. I live up to my role here. Even if I'm going to go out, I'll have dinner ready for him. Then he feels taken care of and that cuts down on the static.

The three of us would say, "Let's get together in two weeks." Then someone would say, "Well, I'll spend this weekend with my husband." That meant she could get to join us. There would be some consulting of calendars: if we're going to take a night out, what do we have to do to buy that time. But it wasn't something we really talked about. It was more subterranean.

The second strategy involved simple justice:

I just say, "You're not home that much either. Or when you are, you're drinking. If you go your way, I'll go mine."

If I'm going to do something at night, Ill ask way ahead. But if it comes down to an out-and-out negotiation, I'll say, "Well, how many times did you play baseball this month?" But it doesn't usually come down to that. I don't ask much, so he doesn't often say no. I've never said, "I'm going somewhere and that's it!"

A third strategy involved the telephone. Friends stole brief visits during family time, sometimes extending phone conversations "until somebody complains." Debby laughed sheepishly when she revealed her sense of deprivation when that strategy is not available: "The main problem [in keeping obligations from competing] is the telephone, especially in the evenings because we try to save

that kind of time for family. I should really limit my calls more. We often unplug the phone in the evenings. But I find it really hard to cut ourselves off—we might miss something."

Women take as their obligation to one another the responsibility for learning the subtleties of a friend's familial constraints. An example of this attention to subtleties is Lynn's account of how her friend Donna sensed the appropriateness of her presence when Lynn's husband was home. "She could figure out if it's O.K. to visit just by walking in and seeing what's going on between Jerry and me. She'd just read her cue to exit if she sensed something was going on between us. It doesn't happen that often, but she could tell if we were in the middle of a fight or something."

Lynn and her friend extended permissible visiting time into what, for many of the women I spoke to, was time for family alone or for socializing as couples. The price of extending the friendship's time boundaries was a delicate sensitivity to relations between Lynn and her husband and a willingness to defer immediately to a signal of desire for privacy. Lynn and Donna never talked about how and when to undertake these mutual adjustments. They "just know." Others noted the same tacit agreement: "I can just hear Leslie saying, 'We didn't even include you in these plans because I know you have family then.' Or 'I'm sorry to call you now because I know this is your family time.'" Underlining the general rule, another said, "With Sarah, I just know not to call at night."

The expectation that friends recognize and adjust to each other's primary commitments to family is observed so meticulously that one only becomes aware of rules in their violation. But, when a rule is violated, women seem quite disposed to making it explicit.

Gloria's husband was always out with friends at night. She'd get lonely and drop in over here. I finally told her what I felt about friends dropping in like that. I thought she understood, but she kept it up. I was furious. So this time I made it clearer. She was hurt, but she stopped. And we're still good friends.

A lot of the women in my [volunteer] group are younger and single. A lot of things they'd like to do together are easy for them, but hard for me because of my home obligations. I try to get them to understand my situation and I ask them not to put the pressure on.

The acknowledgement of the priority of family obligations was not simply descriptive; it was normative. In answering questions about how friends generally should behave, women underlined their convictions that friends should accord family first place. A majority (ten of seventeen women) answered "Always" to the question, Should friends expect each other's first loyalty to be to a husband? The remainder, those who answered "Sometimes," offered only circumstances of extreme need to justify contravening what they saw as the general rule. The answers were similar for the question, Does a friend have the right to ask an important favor that is likely to create conflicts or problems at home for the woman from whom she's asking help? A third of the women selected the most negative of their three choices, "Hardly ever." The remainder, nearly all of whom chose "Sometimes," explained that an "important favor" should indeed be critically important to justify such an intrusion. "I would hope I wouldn't have to ask."

Although few of the women I spoke to found it easy to identify the kind of limitations they placed on friendships, those who did stressed placing family first and avoiding "excessive demands" on friends. I asked, Are there things you'd never ask of a friend? One woman put the contrast in absolute terms: "I'd never ask her to make decisions about her and her family versus me. I'd never make any of my friends choose." Another generalized: "I wouldn't do anything that would greatly inconvenience her, if I could help it." A third woman stated specifically, "I'd never ask for financial assist-ante, although I could."

In general, women wished to avoid entering into the exchange of resources over which they did not have sole jurisdiction. These included family time, family territory, and money. These limitations on the exchange of friendship were the form of discretion I heard most about in women's descriptions of friendship.

Certain characters appeared over and over in the women's accounts, those friends who failed to get the message about the priority of husband and family. There were the husband's pals, who continued to "hang around" after the couple married; the single women friends, who did not have similar obligations; the occasional married friend whose husband "doesn't always come first"; and close kin—often aging parents—who asserted kinship obliga-

tions. Women tended to see such asymmetries in expectations as structurally determined but still amenable to reform; they generally attacked the problem directly, with good results. Kay's stow about the friend who dropped in late at night is one example. Another is Rita's account of her attempt to educate single friends about the demands marriage made on her free time. Rita was less successful in limiting the demands of one of her younger friends: "She had tremendous expectations of my being available to her at all times. She wanted me to be more like a mother to her than a friend. At first I was very gentle; then I began to say no; and finally I withdrew altogether."

The women I spoke to had tolerated differences of opinion with friends, distaste for friends' life-styles, friends' distaste for their husbands, and various disappointments and disagreements. They did not tolerate "unreasonable" demands on their time. The few accounts I heard of deliberate withdrawal from friendships all involved a friend who wanted more of a woman's time than she could give. Respect for constraints on a woman's time emerged as a primary rule of friendship—uncodified but clearly recognizable in reports of its transgression.

Parents, close kin, and husbands' pals presented problems more difficult to solve. The reform of husbands' friends was the responsibility of husbands, who frequently viewed things differently. Parents and close kin presented ambiguous problems because the priority of family over kin obligations is not as clear as the priority of family over friends; kin networks, closer-knit, do not allow people to withdraw as easily as do looser networks of friends. I heard many more accounts of recurring disagreements between spouses about a women's attentions to kin than disagreements involving friends. Women capitulated to husbands' disapproval or jealousy of friends—resentfully perhaps, but more frequently than when the object was close kin.

Another mechanism that subordinates friendship to family is that friends do not discuss the relationship itself among themselves. Friends may recognize each other through a self-conscious conferral of the status "best friend," but they do not otherwise make the relationship a topic of discussion (or even, it appears, contemplate it privately). Friends do not assess friendships in the way couples often assess marriages. They do not identify problems

in the relationship and discuss ways to solve them (indeed, as the last chapter showed, friends actively suppress conflict). They do not often mention problems in their dose friendships to spouses or other friends. Eight of sixteen said they would rarely, if ever, talk with friends about problems with other friends. Only a few volunteered that they talked about their best friends with theft husbands.

Inexperience with reflection on friendship caused most of the women to express surprised satisfaction at the end of the interview. They had never thought so clearly about their friendships before— what they shared, how they felt, what they wished. They were often moved by what they had just told themselves aloud. Although many had exposed deep feelings and complex arrangements, sometimes giving them eloquent expression, little of this kind of language had ever passed between the friends. Of course, many women rarely discussed theft assessments of their marriages with their husbands. Even these women, however, had assessed or critically reflected upon their marriages privately; and many had clone so with close friends.

This silence about the relationship does not mute emotions but deflects evaluation that could interfere with a woman's commitment to putting family first. It is particularly eloquent in a period which increasingly applies voluntarist ideals of mutual gratification and good companionate relations to all close relationships, including marriage and kinship.

In sum, by explicit or tacit agreement and by unreflective but regular arrangement, women friends subordinate the claims of the most valued friendships to the claims of marriage and family. To find a framework for interpreting this coexistence of deep attachment and psychological intimacy with fairly rigid constraints and explicit second-priority status, I return to Simmers work on invasion and reserve in friendship.

Simmel argues that the ideal of modern friendship, which developed in a romantic spirit, aims at absolute psychological intimacy.^[22] But modern men (and, increasingly, women) are too "differentiated" and "individualized" to engage in friendships of such full reciprocity. Friends practice discretion regarding invasion and reserve, revelation and concealment; they respect the vast unfamiliar and unknowable regions of each other's life and mind. Dis-

cretion, according to Simmel, allows friends to avoid the painful experience of the structurally induced "limits of their mutual understanding."

My interviews with women, including those in the most modern social and economic sectors, revealed that women do not extensively practice this form of discretion. Rather, women's close friendships achieve the affective depth embodied in Simmel's ideal by striving toward full reciprocity in knowledge of the other. In contrast to relations in traditional society, private regions of modern experience may be less knowable and familiar to close friends. Yet women friends exercise the "creative imagination and . . . divination . . . oriented only toward the other" that allows them empathic access to a considerable breadth of each other's private experience.^[23] Occupying specialized social roles does not seem to lessen their ability or willingness to engage in mutual understanding with their closest friends.

The women I interviewed do practice another form of discretion, however. They scrupulously distinguish arenas of individual liberty from those of communal responsibility, and they deliberately practice reserve in the former. Now it may be that men practice this form of discretion as well. The women I spoke to, however, believed that their husbands, and men in general, do not develop many nonkin ties that would elicit the same degree of communal responsibility. And however close or attached their friendships may be, if men practice more concealment—more discretion, in Simmers sense of the term—they have a narrower terrain of moral exchange and fewer opportunities for commitment and constraint.

A second form of discretion these women practice, with great subtlety and delicacy, is prudence regarding the higher commitments of marriage and family. Again, it is likely that men also practice this form of discretion. Yet the women I interviewed believed that their husbands, and men in general, do not share ardency and intimacy with friends or acknowledge a need for close friendship. If this is so, the task of prudence regarding a friend's obligations is likely to be more formulaic: men are not foregoing relations they deeply need or putting someone so important in second place. Prudence for men friends may require the sacrifice of self-interest but perhaps not deeply felt need. Moreover, if men's time together

is more child-free, they are less consistently called upon to practice this form of discretion.

This chapter has presented women's close friendships as singular relations of individuation. The interviews offered persuasive evidence that women friends uniquely support individual aspirations and efforts, that friendships enhance self-development, and that the values of friendship favor individual liberty. Both the autonomy of friendship and its mutual support for individuality are, however, constrained by communal obligations within friendships and by communal values that oftentimes supersede individual ones. Women friends construct and enhance individual identities that are both individuated and interdependent.

The dynamics of constraint in contemporary friendships are not as systematic or effective as those in traditional community. Individuality is a much stronger theme. Yet women's entrenched social position strengthens an ideology that subordinates obligations of friendship to those of family, and individualism to family responsibility. Friends accept and attempt to realize this ideal, harmonizing friendship and family commitments to a degree that seems astonishing when we consider women's emotional investment in both spheres. Yet women's culture of friendship—the quality and content of relationships, the manifest ideals of individuality and interdependence—holds the possibility of an expanded role for both community and autonomy as women's social position advances.