In a recent New York Times column, Bruce Feiler
weighed the pros and cons of having one’s spouse as one’s best friend.
Although happily married individuals often claim this to be the case,
Feiler ultimately concludes that there’s a fairly large downside to
having the same person as your lover and your best friend: “After all,
if your spouse is your best friend, then who do you complain to your
spouse about?”
Unfortunately for many people in long-term relationships, friendship
networks shrink over time, leaving them with fewer people outside the
relationship to serve as friends, much less best friends. In what’s
called “dyadic withdrawal,” couples become increasingly likely to
abandon their individual friends and instead establish their friendships
within those shared by their partner, in addition to the partner
himself or herself. Common sense also dictates that couples only have a
certain amount of time for socializing, and therefore the boundaries
between themselves and their separate friendships essentially collapse.
Even if people have good friends outside the relationship, there's no
guarantee that the friends they turn to will, in fact, be able to help
them. In a 2016 study, the University of Minnesota’s Kirsten Lind Seal
and colleagues wished to investigate what makes a friend a good
confidant for people who aren't getting along with their partners. Their
hope was to provide an empirical basis for an intervention designed to
help people become better confidants for friends or close relations
experiencing relationship pain. As background for what they call the
“Marital First Responder” training program, the Minnesota team
questioned help-providing and help-seeking among people in close
relationships. Using a national database from a study of 1,000 adults
ranging in age from 25 to 70, Seal et al. asked participants about their
confider and confidant experiences.
Two theoretical frameworks guided the study: Social network and social organization. From the social network perspective, people’s feelings and behaviors “flow” through informal networks, of which the confiding relationship is one. Social organizational theory proposes that when people confide in each other, they create “social capital,” or feelings of trust, reciprocity, and cooperation.
This social capital accrues and can expand the capacity of the
community to support close long-term relationships. The authors sought
data to support the Marital First Responders intervention as a method
that communities could adopt to concretely provide support to
relationships in trouble.
The data were collected via a national panel consisting of 1.2
million U.S. residents who agree to participate in Internet surveys if
recruited for specific studies. For this particular investigation,
participants were sampled to achieve a representative panel based on gender, age, race, education, party identification, belief system, and interest in politics. All participants were recruited within a three-week period in summer 2013.
To determine an individual’s confidant status, participants were
asked to indicate whether they had ever served as a confidant for anyone
in a troubled marriage
or long-term relationship. They were also asked if they themselves had
confided in anyone. Confidants were asked to indicate the nature
of the problem their confider presented to them, and confiders were
asked which responses from their confidants were most helpful.
If you’ve ever served in the role of confidant, it might be
worthwhile for you to think of times that you’ve provided help or
support and, if you've been a confider, what responses were most helpful
to you. If it was relatively easy for you to think of a time you’d been
a confidant, you won’t be surprised to learn that nearly three-quarters
of the sample indicated that they had served in this role, and most (66
percent) within the previous year. A smaller but still substantial
proportion (63 percent) were themselves confiders. Friends were most
likely to be confidants, and most of the women confided in other women,
while men confided in other men to a much smaller extent (33 percent),
with the remainder more likely to confide in a woman (33 percent) or
equally likely to confide in a male or female (33 percent). When family
members confided in each other, it was typically within “horizontal”
relationships between siblings, rather than the "vertical" relationships
between members of older and younger generations.
Now think about the types of problems you’ve either sought help with
or provided help with to a confider. The Seal et al. participants were
most likely to talk to their confidant about feeling they were growing
apart from their partner; their inability to talk to their partner; and
lack of attention from their partner. To a lesser extent, confidants
sought help with the way their partners handled money, engaged in
undesirable personal habits, or, more seriously, whether their partners
were considering divorce. Infidelity
was a problem for half the sample, and 43 percent sought help with a
partner’s infidelity. And a substantial proportion (about a third)
reported that they sought help for physical violence or substance abuse
by their partners. Thus, the majority of problems were “soft” problems,
in the framework of the authors—money, habits, and the like—compared to
the “hard” problems of divorce, abuse, and addictions.
Confiders, for their part, chose from a checklist of help-giving
approaches recommended by Seal herself and by collaborators who worked
in marriage and family therapy.
Given how personal the problems are that confiders bring to their
friends are, it’s clear that everyone could use help navigating these
complex areas when providing support. These were the three most
effective ways to respond, from the standpoint of the confiders:
BEST
1. Simply listen. Being a sounding board for your confider is more helpful than you realize. Just pay attention.
2. Give emotional support. Beyond listening, show that you’re there for your friend, without passing judgment. This was particularly important for women confiding in their friends.
3. Give helpful perspective. You might suggest what the partner might be thinking, or you can assist your confider in understanding where he or she is coming from. Providing perspective was more important for men than women in the sample.
WORST
1. Give too much advice. You can go over the line in
providing advice, or you can provide advice that isn’t all that helpful
because it's impractical or doesn't fit with the confider's personality or available options.
2. Talk too much about yourself. It is helpful to share your own relevant experiences, but don’t turn the confiding session into one that’s just about you.
3. Be critical of the spouse/partner. If you’re
close friends with someone, it’s likely that you’ve seen some of the
problems which your confider is raising. However, be careful about
jumping onto the bandwagon and heaping criticism on their partner. You
might also want to avoid suggesting that your friend seek an end to
their relationship; this also bothered confiders in the Seal et al.
study.
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