Yesterday, I listened to an eminent relationship scholar talk about the research he has been conducting for decades. It is great work, and the talk was impressive. Except for one thing: When he talked about “relationships,” he was actually referring to just one kind of relationship – a romantic one.
In our everyday conversations, we often use the word “relationship” in that one specific way. So when you ask someone whether they are in a relationship, they will answer “no” as long as they are not in a coupled relationship.
“Relationship,” though is a great big word. It covers all sorts of human connections, including ties to friends, parents, children, siblings, other family members, coworkers, neighbors, mentors, and more.
There is a lively academic field of personal relationships, complete with multiple journals, annual conferences, funded research projects, and stacks of books. Asked for a formal definition of “relationship,” no scholar would limit the description only to connections that might include sex. Yet, that’s how academics use the word in their talks and even in their scholarly publications.
Articles published in relationship journals have titles such as these:
- “Theories of relationships”
- “Reciprocity in relationships”
- “Relationship quality and self-other concepts”
Yet these articles, and many others like them, aren’t actually about relationships, in the big, broad, accurate sense of the word; they are only about couples’ relationships.
Decades ago, when scholars did studies that included (say) only men, they could publish titles and summaries that referred to people in general, giving readers the impression that their research was about all of humanity. Only when readers got to the methods section would they realize that there were no women included in the research. These days, that’s not allowed. First, unless you are studying something like prostate cancer, you can’t include only men in your research and still get federal funding. Second, if you have a compelling reason to study just one group, you need to acknowledge that limitation in the abstract (summary). It is time for relationship researchers to do the same.
There’s something much more troubling than the use of the word “relationship” in a way that excludes all relationship types except one. All of the other adult relationships are rarely studied.
In 2002, Karen Fingerman and Elizabeth Hay searched through all of the articles published over the course of six years in the six academic journals that most often publish relationship research. They found 976 relevant studies. Then, for each relationship type, they counted the number of studies that included that relationship. Here are a few of their findings:
- 432 studies of spouses
- 245 studies of romantic partners
- 12 studies of best friends
- 124 studies of friends
- 40 studies of siblings
The field of relationships research is dominated by the study of coupled relationships. Yet, if you were to ask people, all through their adult lives, if they have a romantic partner, a friend, or a sibling, you would find at every age that more people have a friend and more have a sibling than have a spouse or partner.
At a party held after the scholar’s talk, as I was holding forth about how we should not use the word relationship to refer only to coupled relationships, someone asked why academics have focused so overwhelmingly on just this one relationship type. I don’t know the answer, and will save my guesses for some other time.
For now, my bottom line is this: If you have a friend, a sibling, a parent, a child, a cousin, a coworker, a neighbor, or just about any other person in your life, and you maintain a connection with that person, you have a relationship. You are in a relationship.
I feel the same way about love. As I explained here, it is a word with big, broad meanings. Let’s celebrate all of them.
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Bella (Ph.D., Harvard, 1979) is a social psychologist and the author of Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After (St. Martin’s Press) and of Single with Attitude: Not Your Typical Take on Health and Happiness, Love and Money, Marriage and Friendship. In her writings, DePaulo has drawn from social science data to challenge the stereotypes of people who are single. DePaulo has also offered seminars and workshops on the science of singlehood. She is the recipient of a number of honors and awards and has served in various leadership positions in professional organizations. DePaulo has published more than 100 papers in professional journals and has written op-ed essays for publications such as the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Newsday, Forbes.com, Alternet, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She writes the “Living Single” blog for Psychology Today, and is also a contributor to the Huffington Post. Bella DePaulo has discussed the place of singles in society on radio and television, including NPR and CNN, and her work has been described in newspapers (such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today) and magazines (such as Time, the Week, More, the Nation, Business Week, AARP Magazine, and Psychology Today). She has been a Visiting Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara since the summer of 2000. Visit her website at www.BellaDePaulo.com.
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Bella,
Very great point! I”m glad that someone finally put this t words. Interesting when you broke down the 976 studies, there were no studies found on parent-child relationships. Honestly, research needs to be done on relationships in all of the other areas that you mentioned. Perhaps we would understand adult coupled relationships if we had some better understanding of all the other relationships that shaped the person who would one day exist as the other half of a coupled relationship. No doubt, who we are as adults is in a great way influenced by our primary relationships and platonic relationships. If you can’t be a good friend, sister, or daughter, how would you ever be a good partner or wife? I’m thinking maybe since there’s little information about these other sort of relationships and their significance, members of a society don’t take them as seriously and will hence abuse these other primary important connections to other people. If the only important enough relationship to study is a coupled relationship, than the other ones must not be all that important might be the subliminal message here.
Thanks for the eye opener!
Eryn
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Great points! One more thing: The journals in these studies covered adult relationships. If you look at child development journals, there’s tons of interest in parent-child relationships and in children’s friendships. It is as if the scholars of adult relationships have decided that friendships are for kids.
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