Category Archives: close relationship

How Gratitude Benefits Our Relationships

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Gratitude benefits are culturally normative in all major cultures, which encourage people to be grateful and express their gratitude to others. The cultural norms of gratitude have been highly valued across civilizations and cultures. In the ritual of “giving thanks,” people expressed their gratitude to God, spirits, mother nature, and others.

Interpersonal relationships commonly involve the experience and expression of gratitude. Gratitude entails more than simply saying “thank you.” It entails acknowledging and appreciating others and what they do for us. Gratitude is the thankful love—the love for what another person did or does for us. Gratitude is an important constituent of love.

Gratitude strengthens our connections with others. When individuals experience gratitude, these emotions strengthen their sense of belonging to and connectedness with others. They feel fewer boundaries between themselves and others. In another article, I explained what gratitude is and why it is important for our lives and well-being.

Gratitude Benefits Make Our Relationships Better

Social bonding entails giving and receiving on both sides. These actions are essential for the proper formation of obligations between individuals and the maintenance of interpersonal bonds within human communities.

Gratitude involves social obligations as well as personal benefits for our relationships, self-esteem, and wellbeing. Feeling and expressing gratitude improves our mood and makes us feel better. In many ways, it improves our lives and interpersonal relationships.

A Study of Gratitude Revealed:

The recent qualitative study by the researchers from Sofia University in California, Patty Hlava and John Elfers, explored how people experience the meaning of gratitude in their lives and what positive changes they get when they experience and express gratitude. In particular, they found that

Gratitude Strengthens our Connections with Others

When people experience gratitude, these emotions enhance their feelings of connectedness with others. They feel that their boundaries with another person have become shorter and softer. A range of their feelings involves the sensation of being physically close, not separate or alone. They get a sense of community, enjoy deep communication, and have the feeling of merging with something larger than themselves.

Here are the examples that authors provide to illustrate these feelings:

That feeling of being enveloped, or embraced, or being touched. It’s like they just know you, like they’ve been there forever, and you’ve been with them forever. (Goldie)

It’s more a sense of feeling connected to people, not that they’re giving me something, a material object but that they’re giving me a part of their heart or something. (Allison)

It was a sense of connectedness. I felt that even sort of our heartbeats sort of synced, just a oneness about the whole situation. (Sue)

(Hlava & Elfers, 2014, p. 438).

By experiencing and cultivating the attitudes, feelings, and expression of gratitude, people experience transformation in their personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal relationships. They experience a sense of belonging to a group, community, or something else outside themselves.

“Friends with Benefits”: Single Men and Women in Relationships

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Throughout the last couple of centuries, traditional ideals of romantic love have suggested people find their soul mate, marry the loved one, have children, and live happily ever after. The cultural beliefs in love marriages have long shaped people’s dreams of a happy married life and kids.

However, many modern single men and women can also experience joy and be apparently happy in their lives. It turns out that for many, being single doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Marriage may appear to be desirable, but it is not always a necessary condition of well-being and happiness. 

Kim Mills, in her recent interview with Geoff MacDonald, a professor at the University of Toronto in Canada, asked:

“Now when you’re studying people who are single, does that mean that they can’t have relationships, that they can’t have intimacy with other people?”

“Speaking of Psychology: Living a happy single life,” Episode 215

In his answer to the question, Geoff MacDonald explained that single men and women have lots of opportunity for relationships and intimacies with their friends and family relationships.

Being single, they still have romantic and sexual connections. Culturally, over the last few decades, social norms of relationships have shifted toward more variety and flexibility. Currently, social norms allow more opportunities for casual relationships and sexual encounters. The line between dating and not dating is blurry. For instance, people can be some kind of “friends with benefits.”

What Is a “Friend with Benefits” Relationship?

What kind of relationship does a “friend with benefits” have?

As Geoff MacDonald comments,

“We know that there are a number of single people who tell us that they’re sexually active. And what we do know is that single people who are higher in sexual satisfaction tend to be happier with singlehood.”

The data, on the other hand, suggests that

“Singles who are happier with their sex lives are also more likely to end up in relationships down the road.”

As Geoff MacDonald further explains, it is possible that

“…being with people in sexual and romantic relationships, it’s not shopping for a product where if you don’t like it you take it back. The human heart works such that relationships are kind of sticky. And even when you are in casual sexual relationships, for example, next thing you know you’re leaving a toothbrush, and next thing you’re leaving a set of pajamas, and next thing you know it’s easier to just move in because you’re already spending three nights a week there.”

So, it is likely that

“even though sexual satisfaction is definitely something that’s associated with happiness in singlehood, that might also indicate somebody who’s on the road to being in a committed romantic relationship.”

Geoff MacDonald, “Speaking of Psychology: Living a happy single life,” Episode 215

How “Progression Bias” Works

“Progression bias” is the tendency of people to make decisions that sustain relationships rather than dissolve them. For example, Samantha Joel and Geoff MacDonald (2021), in their recent study, showed emerging evidence of a progression bias in romantic relationships.

People are biased to make pro-relationship decisions over the course of relationship progression, according to the authors. In other words, they feel predisposed to making choices that favor the initiation, advancement, and maintenance of their romantic relationships.

Progression bias takes place in the contexts of relationship initiation, investment, and breakup decisions.

“getting into a relationship is often easier than getting out of one, and why being in a less desirable relationship is often preferred over being in no relationship at all.”

(Joel & MacDonald, 2021, p. 317).

“Progression bias” occurs in a situation:  

“when you get into a casual sexual relationship, and then it’s all of a sudden you find yourself more and more committed.”

Geoff MacDonald provides a couple of reasons why this “progression bias” can occur in the course of relationships. One of these is the evolutionary explanation.

In the cases of such relationship development, the mere exposure effect can be another psychological mechanism at work, supporting the progression bias.

Happy People, Happy Relationships

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Long-standing cultural ideologies of love have encouraged men and women to fall in love, get married, and spend their lives happily with their spouses.

In recent decades, the modern culture of relationships has evolved and transformed into new forms. Traditional marriage evolved into the varieties of singlehood, not necessarily making men and women unhappy. And the old-fashioned stereotypes of singlehood may no longer be variable.

It turns out, however, that many single men and women can also be happy. And being single is not always a negative circumstance. Single women and men can be just as happy as those who are married.

So, do love and marriage bring us happiness? Or do we ourselves bring happiness to a relationship?

What Makes a Single Person Happy?

People who have never been in a romantic relationship or have never been married are more likely to be happier as singles compared to those who have ever been in a romantic relationship or have ever been married.

Researchers don’t really know so far why that’s the case because they don’t have direct evidence from their studies. An expert in relationship research, Professor Geoff MacDonald, proposes the following explanation. He thinks that most people intuitively know what is good for themselves and follow their own path.

Are You Happy to Be Single? Really?

The traditional beliefs of cultural love ideology are that romantic relationships and marriages are good for people. These centuries-old myths can create cultural and personal biases against being single. The cognitive dissonance between holding this cultural belief and the reality of being single can cause personal unhappiness.

Other people, however, can feel themselves free from the cultural pressure of such a love ideology. They just intuitively know and recognize that romantic relationships are not for them and that marital relationships will not make them happy. So, they decide to stay single.

When Divorce Is Bad and When It Isn’t So Bad

One of the challenges that can make people unhappy is a divorce. People who have been through a divorce tend to feel worse about being single and struggle with lovelessness. Some evidence suggests that divorce can be psychologically fairly damaging to at least some individuals, even though we as a society may not have thought this way.

Happy People Bring Happiness into Their Relationships

People who do well in life in general usually feel well in their lives as singles. Those who feel securely attached in their relationship don’t worry much about getting rejected by others. They do well in romantic relationships and feel comfortable in their close relationships with others. But they do well in singlehood too.

As Professor Geoff MacDonald said about this,

“Maybe one of the reasons for that is that people who are happier in singlehood are also people who have good relationships with their friends and good relationships with their families. And that skill set that comes with attachment security, the ability to be comfortably close to people, to take emotional risks that allow you to get close to people, that’s not just limited to romantic relationships. Those people are going to bring those kinds of skills to their friendships and their family relationships.”

Some people believe in the old-fashioned wisdom that if they get into a romantic relationship, they will become a happier person. People who are happy as singles are also happy in relationships. As Geoff MacDonald noted in this regard,

“it suggests that maybe the best idea is to get right with yourself first and go towards a romantic relationship when you’ve done whatever that work is.”

In conclusion, people of this kind bring their attachment security, comfort, and happiness into relationships if they decide to be involved. In other words, not romantic or marital relationships bring them happiness in life. But rather they themselves bring their well-being in those relationships (Karandashev, 2019; 2022).

Recent studies have shown that modern single men and women can be happy or unhappy in a variety of ways that are not necessarily related to their marriages.

The Need to Belong: Individual and Cultural Perspectives

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The “need to belong” is, at its core, a desire to feel loved and accepted. And all men and women have such needs and strive to fulfill them in their relationships with caregivers. Infants, from the early days of their lives, experience this kind of need as attachment.

Everyone has “the love need,” which is the need to belong to a group of significant others (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Maslow, 1943). In the same way, we can define love as the physical and emotional connection that a person feels for other people (Pinkus, 2020). Affiliative love and the need to belong can be fulfilled in various kinds of in-group relationships.

When the Basic Need to Belong Meets the Feelings of Attachment

Humans as a species are “social animals.” They are dependent on each other. Their need for interpersonal bonding implies the basic need to belong and be attached to others, which is significant for their physical, social, and psychological survival.

Infants and small children are dependent on adults as caregivers for care, support, and protection. In the early years, a child feels the need to belong to and be cared for by caregivers. This can be a group of caregivers, as in the case of tribal or kin community bonding. This can be one or two caregivers, as in a case of pair-bonding.

In various aspects of their lives, children experience attachments to their caregivers. They need to be close to significant others to feel physically and emotionally secure. These feelings fulfill their need to belong to the caregiver or a group of caregivers who protect them and deliver them an experience of psychological safety and comfort, like being in a “safe haven.” (Ainsworth, 1989; Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978; Bowlby, 1969, 1973, 1980, 1988/2008; Harlow & Zimmerman, 1959; see for review Karandashev, 2022).

Culturally different ways of socialization and childrearing practices in different societies can use ethnically specific strategies and methods to fulfill children’s needs to belong. These approaches vary in tribal communities, extended families, and nuclear families and may include multiple caregiving practices. These varieties of relationship systems incorporate culturally different models of attachment (Karandashev, 2022; Keller, 2013; Keller, 2018).

In any case, children feel secure when their need to belong is met and insecure when it is not. In later years, the need to belong to the “safe haven” of one or several caregivers transforms into the need to belong to a peer or a group of peers.

How Individuals Feel the Need to Belong

The need for bonding and the need to belong are among the most basic human motivations. However, individuals vary in the degree of these needs. Some individuals have a stronger desire to belong to a group, while others have a weaker desire to belong.

On the one hand, would you agree that…?

  • You need to feel that there are people you can turn to in times of need.
  • You want other people to accept you.
  • You do not like being alone.
  • You have a strong “need to belong.”
  • Your feelings are easily hurt when you feel that others do not accept you. 
  • You try hard not to do things that will make other people avoid or reject you.
  • It bothers you a great deal when you are not included in other people’s plans.

If you agree with most of these statements, you probably have a strong “need to belong” to the circle of another person or others.

If you strongly disagree with these statements, you probably have a low “need to belong” to the circle of another person or others.

On the other hand, would you agree that…?

  • You seldom worry about whether other people care about you.
  • Being apart from your friends for long periods of time does not bother you.
  • If other people don’t seem to accept you‚ you don’t let it bother you.

If you mostly disagree with these statements, you most likely have a strong “need to belong” to the circle of another person or others.

If you agree with the majority of these statements, you probably have a low “need to belong” to the circle of another or others.

Answering these questions gives an idea of how strong or weak your need is to belong to a group of others, even one.

You can find the full scale to assess the need to belong at http://www.midss.org/sites/default/files/ntb.pdf

See also the references in Baumeister and Leary (1995).

A Cultural Need to Belong

Regardless of our individual differences and interests, the cultural norms of our society encourage us to feel that the need to belong is important or less important in our daily lives. The cultural value of the need to belong is high in interdependent collectivistic cultures, like in Eastern societies, while it is lower in independent individualistic cultures, like in Western societies (Karandashev, 2021; 2022).

In other words, when compared to people living in modern Western individualistic societies (like north-western European countries, the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), people living in traditional collectivistic societies (like Japan, China, and other eastern-Asian countries) have a tendency to feel a greater need to belong in their communities. The values held by Eastern-Asian collectivistic societies encourage a sense of belonging, connections, and kinship among members of the community (Karandashev, 2021, 2022).

Therefore, societies teach individuals to belong or not belong according to their cultural values, despite people’s individual differences. Societies don’t like diversity, while individuals do.

The Cultural Evolution of Human Bonding

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Animal species’ need for positive social connections and bonding has deep evolutionary roots. According to scientific evidence, many animals, including birds, dogs, cats, and primates, exhibit social emotions, behaviors, and a need for bonding and love. They are capable of loving and need the love of others.

Humans have evolved into one of nature’s most social species, though sociability varies between individuals. People’s feelings of love for one another have evolved into more complex forms of bonding.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that the origins of the need for love and attachment are the needs for bonding and belonging. We may therefore assume that love and the need for love are widespread among animals and humans, with species and individual differences (Karandashev, 2022).

Human bonding and love have evolved over time, both biologically and culturally. Researchers have traced their evolutionary roots all the way back to the beginnings of biological evolution and human domestication, as well as the history of cultural evolution (Karandashev, 2022, chapter 3).

The Evolution of the Need to Belong to an In-Group

Humans developed motivation for positive social connection with others early in their cultural evolution. Their need for human bonding and love evolved. Due to biological and cultural evolution, humans are the most “social animals” among various animal species. People have survived by working together, assisting, and supporting one another, their families, and their tribe.

Early tribal societies required cooperation and coordination, which inspired the development of bonding, attachment, and love. The main driver of emotional attraction and attachment between people that consolidated their relationships was “love,” understood broadly as “bonding.”

The distinction between “ingroup” and “outgroup” provided the evolutionary basis for the need for community bonding and kinship love. People were able to differentiate between those they identified as members of their “ingroup” and those they identified as members of their “outgroup.”

Since then, their need to belong to the “ingroup” and to love the members of the “ingroup”—kin, family, and significant others—became their intrinsic human motivation. The feeling that they belonged to an “ingroup” provided them with security, sustenance, and psychological ties with significant others.

Early Community Bonding and Dutiful Love

Cultural evolution began with tribal and community love. This kind of love fitted the ecological, economic, and social conditions of those ancient times. Tribal community-based societies had united, collaborative, supportive, and responsible social relationships. The “need to belong” and “community love” bonded individuals within a group—the tribal community, kin, and extended family.

This dutiful love suited people’s interdependent lifestyles in those ecological and social conditions perfectly. Men and women experienced this “collective love” as community responsibility. People in a tribe worked cooperatively, supported and protected each other, and raised their offspring. An extended family and tribal community rather than parents raised their children together. The saying “it takes a village to raise a child” was a community-bonding reality.

Cultural Evolution and Varieties of Relationship Systems

Human societies, like social animal groups, have a wide range of mating and social bonding relationship systems. There are varieties of multi-male and multi-female social groups. In these types of societal organizations, groups comprise several adult males and/or several adult females, as well as their offspring.

These types of sociality, for example, are common in many nonhuman primates. The relationship systems of primates vary greatly in their community and family organization. In such multi-male, multi-female societies, many male and female individuals form large social groups. They practice polygamous relationships, in which both females and males can mate with multiple members of the opposite sex.

Many of our human ancestors also had multi-male and multi-female social organizations of this kind. However, different from their ape ancestors and other species, human relationship organization and mating systems have evolved further (Chapais, 2011; de Waal & Gavrilets, 2013; Flinn, Geary, & Ward, 2005).

Human evolution developed a different relationship system that emphasized long-term pair-bonding mating and extended and nuclear families. Since then, people in many traditional collectivistic societies live in extended or nuclear families and reproduce offspring with substantial parental investment. Evolutionary forces have made it advantageous for humans. The “need to belong” to a tribal community transformed into the need to belong to an extended or nuclear family. Long-term pair bonding has evolved and become a widespread cultural form of relationship systems in many societies around the world. (Geary & Flinn, 2001; Hill et al., 2011; Rooker & Gavrilets, 2016).

Evolution of Pair-Bonding

Later in human social evolution, in addition to social bonding, the relationship system of pair bonding and attachment evolved as the evolutionary mechanism of bonding. Human societies’ extended family structures began to give way to nuclear family structures.

In the process of natural selection, the human “attachment behavioral system” evolved over time as a motivational system “designed” to regulate proximity to an attachment figure. The attachment behavioral system gradually became more favorable to pair-bonding attachment (Bowlby, 1969, 1973, 1980). 

Can Sharing Bad News Improve Close Relationships?

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Men and women in close relationships hope to experience joyful and optimistic times together. They are happy to share everything good that happens in their lives. The people close to them are happy to hear the good news. It is widely held that sharing in a relationship—telling another about one’s emotional experiences—makes people feel better.

What about bad news? Does it make sense to share with others in their close relationships something bad that happened to us? Some may want to avoid spoiling their good moods.

Does it help people themselves when they share with others their bad news? People often feel worse after discussing negative events that have occurred to them. They perhaps replay the negative experience in their minds.

Something even worse may occur. Social sharing tends to lower the mood of the person listening to the disclosure. But why is social sharing so popular if it has emotional costs for both sharers and listeners? In their recent article at Character & Context Blog, German scholars Antje Rauers and Michaela Riediger from the University of Jena discuss this controversy.

People Tend to Share their Bad News with those Close to Them

For decades, scientists have tried to answer this question. Studies of intimate relationships provide a possible clue. Research shows that sharing stories about feelings can bring people closer together. As a result, perhaps the positive effects of sharing are not related to mood but rather to the quality of the relationships between people. Perhaps in times of crisis, the act of telling one another bad news strengthens our bonds with one another.

People usually share meaningful experiences with close friends or family members. To explore how and why they do this, Antje Rauers and Michaela Riediger designed a study with the goal of capturing social sharing as it happens in real life. Researchers asked 100 romantic couples over cell phones about their experiences as they went about their daily lives. During a period of three weeks, both partners recorded their current mood and how close they felt to their partner six times per day. Every time, partners also documented if they had any problems and whether they had shared with their partner their experience. Researchers were particularly interested in situations in which people had indeed just experienced a hassle. Then, they compared how people felt if they told their partner about these incidents with how they felt if they kept that bad experience to themselves.

What Did Researchers Find in Their Study?

Unsurprisingly, people felt worse following adversity than they did in the absence of such events.

Yet, researchers wanted to know if social sharing helped people emotionally recover from the hassles. Perhaps not necessarily. Some did not feel better after sharing, while some did. Some men and women also felt worse after hearing their partner’s story, whereas others did not. In other words, social sharing resulted in both emotional gains and losses for the couples.

Their sharing, however, significantly increased their relationship’s closeness. Both men and women experienced these benefits. And both the sharers and the receivers experienced these benefits. Researchers also examined how people in close relationships felt prior to sharing.

The main conclusion was that sharing did make people feel closer, no matter how close they had felt before. 

Social Sharing Affects Future Closeness in Relationships

Here is another question of interest. Are they fleeting experiences, or do they accumulate over time to increase closeness? How long do these increases in relationship closeness last?

According to the theory, social sharing generates virtuous cycles of mutual trust and even more sharing, which increase relationship closeness over time. Researchers asked the couples about their relationships 2.5 years later.

Results showed that those who had frequently shared their problems with their partners reported greater relationship closeness 2.5 years later. People who rarely shared with their partners, on the other hand, lost some of their closeness over time. Thus, the author’s findings suggest that social sharing can help to strengthen relationships both in the present and in the future. This psychological discovery explains why, despite the emotional costs, social sharing is so popular. Sharing bad news may not necessarily help to improve our mood, but it can aid in the formation of our close bonds.

How Expressive Is the Culture of Intimacy in a Relationship

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The feeling of intimate belonging fulfills people’s needs for intimacy. However, people can satisfy their need to belong in various ways in different cultures, depending on their norms. A distinction between collectivistic (interdependent) and individualistic (independent) values is especially important for our understanding of intimacy as a fulfilled need to belong.

The Cultures of Intimacy in Collectivistic and Individualistic Societies

People in an individualistic, independence-oriented society like the United States are constantly assured from childhood that they belong and are loved. Yet, as they grow in childhood, parents encourage them to be independent and autonomous. Over time, they feel proudly autonomous, yet they may feel a little lonely. Parents are busy with their jobs and own problems. Therefore, teenagers strive to break through such lonely autonomy and look for other intimate bonds, such as moving in with someone else, marriage, and family.

People in a collectivistic, family-oriented society like Japan feel embedded in a family group from childhood. They implicitly feel these intimate ties with other members of the family. Therefore, they do not really need the reassurance of intimacy in family bonds. This is why they don’t really feel the need for another source of reassurance of intimate belonging from their marital partner, at least not to the same degree as people in individualistic cultures do.

What Is Special about Japanese Intimacy?

Some studies have shown that Japanese intimacy is not low – just different from North American and Western European views and notions of intimacy (see for review, Karandashev, 2019).

As I said above, Euro-Americans living in individualistic, middle-class, or urban cultures are proud of being independent in relationships. However, despite this feeling of being autonomous, they feel an obvious need to belong to their parents’ family.

When pushed out of their parental nest, they look for another source (a partner) to whom they could belong. And, as before in childhood, they need to feel from others that they are accepted and doing a “good job!” And they frequently do this to each other, both verbally and explicitly. It is because they have an implicit feeling of autonomy and independence. They need to hear that “they are doing great!” explicitly and repeatedly. Yet their need to belong must also be assured through direct verbal communication.

On the other hand, Japanese people have different cultural socialization strategies and childrearing philosophies. Children living in a collectivistic culture from birth already feel embedded in their family ties. Their model of attachment in childhood is culturally different. They are already aware of their intimate connections with other members of their family. Therefore, they don’t need constant and explicit verbal confirmation that they belong, as European Americans do (see, for instance, Keller, 2013, 2018).

This is why the Japanese may appear less direct in their intimate communication. It is because they understand it implicitly. However, Japanese couples in committed love relationships are high only in such qualities of intimacy as mind reading, compassion, assurance, and social network support (Roland, 1988).

Expressive versus Low-expressive Intimacies

The comparison of Japanese culture, as an East-Asian collectivistic culture, with European-American culture, as a Western individualistic culture of expressions of intimacy, might be simplistic. Many other non-collectivistic cultures can still be reserved and emotionally inhibited in their communicative preferences.

The difference in high-contact versus low-contact cultural values could be another explanation. Not only are Asian societies low-contact cultures (Barnlund, 1975; Klopf & Thompson, 1991; McDaniel & Andersen, 1998).

The Cultures of Low-Expressive Intimacies

People in Scandinavian and Nordic societies also display a low-expressive style of interpersonal interaction (see more in Karandashev, 2021).

Finns, like Norwegians and Swedes, prefer silent speech with relatively long pauses and slow-moving turns of speech. They often listen to each other without external evidence or feedback, yet this is their way of listening most attentively (Nishimura, Nevgi, & Tella, 2008; Tella, 2005).

For instance, in Finnish culture, people use the word “rakkaus” (love) only occasionally. Several other Finnish words implying the emotions of love without direct reference to the word “rakkaus” are also used by Finns (Haavio-Mannila & Roos, 1999).

Here is a folklore anecdote on Nordic marital intimacy. A Finnish couple, husband Eino and wife Aino, are celebrating their 5-year anniversary of marriage. She asked:

  • Eino, do love me?

Eino answered:

  • Yes, Aino, I already told you about this five years ago. If something changes, I will let you know.

This joking folklore anecdote is surely an exaggeration. But the reserved expression of intimacy is quite common for Nordic people, such as in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, as well as for East-Asian people, such as in Japan, China, and Korea.

Interpersonal Self-Disclosure Differs in Different Cultures 

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Self-disclosure is the way an individual communicates and shares personal information with another. Values and opinions, goals and aspirations, plans and thoughts, feelings and preferences, achievements and failures, fears and hopes, dreams and disappointments—all these internal personal things can be disclosed. They can be private and confidential to a greater or lesser extent. Some information can be sensitive because it makes a person vulnerable in a relationship.

Self-disclosure can be verbal or nonverbal. People differ in their willingness to self-disclose.

Cultural patterns of self-disclosure in romantic and marital relationships vary across societies. Societies differ in their cultural norms of how close the interpersonal relationship between partners should be and how emotionally intimate they should be in a close relationship.

Intimacy as Self-disclosure

Self-disclosure of personal information is the way to express intimacy in relationships. Partners do this both verbally and nonverbally. Many Western scholars and laypeople conceptualize intimacy as self-disclosure, as the way of revealing personal values, thoughts, and feelings to another person. Many European Americans consider such experiences and expressions as important things for personal growth and relationship satisfaction, while many Asians and Asian Americans don’t think this way.(Altman & Taylor, 1973; Derlega, et al., 1993; Ignatius & Kokkonen, 2007; Jourard, 1971; Sprecher & Hendrick, 2004, see Karandashev, 2019, for review).

Cultural Differences in Self-disclosure

Cross-cultural studies have shown that the degree of self-disclosure between American partners is usually higher than between Japanese or Chinese partners. These cultural differences might be due to their differences in individualism and collectivism as cultural values (Barnlund, 1975; Chen, 1995; Hocker and Wilmot, 1995; Gudykunst & Nishida, 1983; Ting-Toomey, 1991; see for a review, Karandashev, 2019).

For instance, spouses in North America communicate verbally more than Chinese spouses. Self-disclosure is frowned upon in Chinese culture, which encourages greater self-restraint in marital communication and limited self-disclosure. These differences can be due to differences in corresponding cultural values. Alternatively, people in different cultures can express their personal information and feelings in various ways (Chen, 1995; Hocker & Wilmot, 1995; Fitzpatrick et al., 2006; Juang & Tucker, 1991; see Karandashev, 2019 for a review). 

The boundaries and meanings of privacy, intimacy, and self-expression may differ across cultures. Various aspects of what is viewed as private, intimate, and public are culturally determined (Coffey, 2017; Heitler, 2012; Moore, 2003).

Self-disclosure in Individualistic Western Cultures

Western individualistic cultures consider self-disclosure as the prototypical expression of intimacy (Jamieson, 1998, 1999). For example, North American culture encourages men and women to communicate in relationships in an open, direct, and assertive manner. As a result, Americans naturally use self-disclosure to lower emotional distance and foster marital intimacy (Bradford et al., 2002; Hocker & Wilmot, 1995; Rosenfeld & Bowen, 1991; see for a review, Karandashev, 2019).

American men and women believe that self-disclosure with a partner is a vital process to achieve closeness in a relationship. This possibility reflects their individualistic ideals like independence, autonomy, self-assertion, and directness. This perspective appears to be more consistent with an American emphasis on verbal and non-verbal self-expression than with a Chinese emphasis on restraint and silence.

Self-disclosure in Collectivistic Eastern Cultures

Sharing personal information and the exchange of feelings are less important in East Asian cultural settings (Chen, 1995; Goodwin & Lee, 1994). For example, Chinese and Japanese cultural norms teach people to be restrained and reserved in interpersonal interactions. Societies frown upon being too expressive.

These cultural factors determine the manner of reserved self-disclosure in Chinese marital relationships. According to research findings, Chinese native spouses disclose less than North American spouses. For Chinese men and women, self-disclosure can reflect their collectivistic values like harmony, connectivity, and solidarity (Chen, 1995; Hocker and Wilmot, 1995; Fitzpatrick et al., 2006; Wolfson & Pearce, 1983; see for a review, Karandashev, 2019).

In Chinese households, disclosure is layered: the most intimate expressions are shared with the spouse, while less sensitive information is shared with other family members or strangers. As a result, in both cultures, a married relationship can be intimate yet linked to different social values (Ow & Katz, 1999).

What Is Closeness in a Relationship? It Is Culturally Diverse.

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Scholars and laypeople frequently refer to psychological closeness in interpersonal relationships as “intimacy.” It might be either physical or emotional proximity, or their combination. It can be bodily, sexual, physical, emotional, or intellectual. The understanding of intimacy is also culturally diverse.

Intimacy is not the same as sex or sexual intimacy. “Being intimate and close” does not necessarily mean being in a romantic relationship. To various people, intimacy and closeness can mean different things.

Experience of Interpersonal Closeness in Love

Interpersonal closeness is behaviorally evident in such indicators as partners’ sleeping privacy and proximity, the organization of their eating, spending leisure time together, the husband attending the birth of his child, and other qualities of their interactions (de Munck & Korotayev, 2007).

Partners experience closeness in subjective feelings such as openness to self-disclosure. They express closeness through the sharing of intimate thoughts, feelings, and experiences, interdependence, and emotional warmth (see Karandashev, 2019 for a detailed review).

Romantic and marital interactions are not necessarily intimate or close. Intimacy as closeness is the feelings which develop through time when we connect with someone, grow to care for them, and become more and more comfortable being with them. Cultural values and norms for closeness between husband and wife are related to women’s status in a society. Intimate relations imply relative equality and a friendly disposition toward another with whom we are in a relationship.

Western European and European American Values of Interpersonal Closeness

The feeling of interpersonal closeness assumes that the other person is different and unique, that a person has a sense of self, and that he or she is autonomous from others. Western, individualistic societies that place a high value on interdependence also place a high value on interpersonal closeness.

The value of closeness varies across cultures (see, for example, Karandashev, 2019).

Intimate closeness in relationships is a highly valued experience in current Western societies. Many men and women in Western individualistic societies (such as countries in Western Europe, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia) expect to establish emotional intimacy with their romantic partner and spouse. In their romantic and marital relationships, the higher degree of closeness is related to their higher physical, psychological, and relational well-being.

Western European and Euro-American research on romantic and marital relationships widely explores intimacy in the sense of a high degree of interpersonal closeness. C. Hendrick and S. Hendrick (1989), in their factor analysis of five love scales, identified closeness as one of the five major factors of love in their studies of American students.

The Value of Closeness in Eastern Cultures

On the other hand, traditional Eastern cultures may have different attitudes toward love and marital intimacy. Many collectivist and interdependent Eastern cultures place a lower normative value on romantic and marital intimacy.

In Eastern societies, the intimacy of heterosexual love has traditionally been less important. However, in those cultural contexts, conceptions of intimacy may be different (Karandashev, 2019).

Early cross-cultural studies revealed that American men and women have higher levels of intimacy in their love relationships than do Japanese people. East Asians have less intimacy in their marital relationships than Westerners (for a detailed review, see Karandashev, 2019). 

Interpersonal Closeness in Relationships Depends on Gender Equality

Gender roles and the status of women determine the norms of interpersonal intimacy in premarital and marital relationships. If a society values intimate relationships, then interpersonal relationships can develop beyond their “functional” requirements. For instance, the formation of intimate bonds between husband and wife is substantially less likely if the wife’s status is significantly lower than her husband’s (de Munck & Korotayev, 2007).

The extensive cross-cultural investigation conducted by de Munck and Korotayev (2007) has demonstrated several other interesting and important tendencies for public understanding.

  • Polygyny appears to stifle wife–husband intimacy in at least three ways: by increasing socialization for violence, lowering parental warmth levels, and lowering female kin power.
  • Large family sizes and dependence training may also restrain the development of wife–husband closeness.
  • When boys are socialized for aggressiveness, the development of close relations between wives and husbands within a given society is substantially less likely.

If, in a given culture, mothers expend a high level of maternal warmth toward their sons, then the development of intimate relations between wives and husbands is substantially more likely.

How Social Propinquity Leads to Love

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The article explains how social propinquity and residential proximity affect our interpersonal relationships, love, and marriage.

Men and women tend to like those with whom they get together frequently. In social science, this is called the “propinquity effect.”

They have favorable attitudes and interpersonal attraction towards them, unless there is some aversion from the first encounters. Social psychologists call this phenomenon the “mere exposure effect.”

This is often how our positive relationships and in-group bias develop. This is how we often find friends and fall in love with a girl or boy in our immediate proximity. This can be a benchmate, a classmate sitting next to you, or a guy living nearby in the neighborhood. This can be a spatial or virtual proximity between people who meet in person or online.

The Effect of Residential Proximity and Social Propinquity on Love

Residential propinquity is the geographic proximity and physical closeness between people residing in certain neighborhoods. Spatial nearness is an important factor for the initiation of different kinds of relationships (e.g., Alphonso, 2016).

As for romantic and marital relationships, the role of propinquity is evident both in traditional and modern societies.

How Residential Propinquity Affects Marital Choice in the United States

In America, the early studies examined the residential propinquity of couples in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and New Haven, Connecticut. In 1931, sociologists examined the residential distance between the partners before they dated each other. About one-third of married couples resided within five or fewer blocks of each other when they first met. In cases where men and women resided farther from each other, the chance of marriage was lower—markedly and steadily (Bossard, 1932; Davie & Reeves, 1939).

Residential segregation was the most likely ecological factor explaining why propinquity influences marriage selection. Homogamy of economic, social, and cultural traits as well as ethnic endogamy could also explain why closer neighbors are more likely to marry each other. The propinquity effect was especially strong among American Jews, American Italians, and African Americans, probably due to their tendencies to settle in proximity to their cultural residential communities (Kennedy, 1943).

Another American study was conducted in the 1950s in Duluth, Minnesota, demonstrating the same propinquity effect.

Only “one-fifth of all the couples lived within five or less blocks of each other. The percentage of marriages decreased as the distance between residences increased…”

(Marches & Turbeville, 1953, p. 592).

However, the results showed a weaker propinquity impact than the earlier study in Philadelphia 20 years before. The effect of residential propinquity in marriage selection was once again confirmed. However, the importance of geographical location was lower—likely due to historical changes in the degree of residential segregation.

How Residential Propinquity Affects Marital Choice in New Zealand

Researchers also found the effect of residential propinquity and segregation of social status groups on marital choice in their study in Christchurch, New Zealand (Morgan, 1981).

How Residential Propinquity Affects Marital Choice in Israel

Another study was conducted in Israel, a society where young men and women often reside far from their permanent home regions (due to military service) for several years. As a result of such high mobility among youth, the effect of residential propinquity on dating was less important. The marriage records of 1974–1975 obtained in a centrally located town showed that the effect of residential propinquity on marital choice is lower in that country, with some variations. Cultural factors, however, influenced the effects of residential propinquity: Jews of Eastern origins were more affected by propinquity than Jews of Western origins (Tabory & Weller, 1986).

Residential propinquity and marital choice in India and Pakistan

How Residential Propinquity Affects Marital Choice in India

The factor of territorial propinquity is salient in tribal and traditional societies with limited relational mobility, such as the Lingāyats, a religious group in southern India. Interviews with the heads of the Lingāyat families in a suburb of Dharwar City showed that kinship marriage is preferential. Endogamy and hypergamy are very important rules of mate selection. The rules of this cultural group’s endogamy determine the geographical propinquity of their marital relationships (Chekki, 1968).

How Residential Propinquity Affects Marital Choice in Pakistan

The same role of residential propinquity was found in the study of an urban Muslim community in Karachi, the largest city in Pakistan, conducted in 1961–1964 (Korson, 1968). While among the lower class, the residential distance between husband and wife at the time of marriage was shorter, in the upper social class, the residential distance was higher.

Residential Propinquity and Homogamy in Relationships

The residential structure of a neighborhood according to socioeconomic class, race, and ethnicity, as well as limited communication between cultural groups, certainly lead to segregation. Such segregation, along with propinquity, can be a factor affecting in-group bias in marital choice. Propinquity usually causes homogamy: partners are more favorable to one another in the same local community, church, city, or country. Due to these factors, partners in a dating relationship are often similar to each other in social class, culture, religious affiliation, and education.

Although propinquity generally means physical proximity, modern online technologies of mating extend the concept and expand the opportunities for meeting potential partners. The reported level of intimacy in computer-mediated relationships is not related to the physical distance between partners. Geographical distance does not play the same role in this case as the level of self-disclosure (Merkle & Richardson, 2004).

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