Maintaining Long-Distance and Cross-Residential Relationships

Laura Stafford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135607968
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This thought-provoking volume offers an innovative and intriguing approach to the study of long-distance relationships. Author Laura Stafford examines romantic long-distance relationships and then expands the conception of long-distance relationships to include other relational types. She summarizes literature across the social sciences on various types of long-distance relationships and extracts themes and patterns across the relational types. In so doing, she reconsiders approaches to and offers an expanded vision of relational maintenance.By expanding her scope beyond romantic relationships, Stafford includes those that span residences and relational types, such as noncustodial parent-child and geographically and residentially separated adult children and parents. She contends that face-to-face interaction is not necessary to maintain healthy relationships, and questions the assumption that maintaining, rather than terminating, a particular relationship is always best for the involved parties.With its interdisciplinary approach to challenging commonly held assumptions about communication and close relationships, Maintaining Long-Distance and Cross-Residential Relationships will be engaging reading for scholars in communication, psychology, sociology, mass communication, and family studies. It is also appropriate for special topics graduate courses on long-distance relationships and human communication, and will serve as a unique supplemental text for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in interpersonal, relational, and family communication and family studies.

1
Introduction

Numerous individuals in the United States live apart from someone about whom they care whether lover, friend, parent, child, sibling, grandparent, or other relation. People may have long-distance relationships (LDRs) for a variety of reasons, such as educational or career pursuits, military deployment, incarceration, divorce, or simply growing up or moving away In many cases, individuals have close ties to people who may be geographically close but who do not live together, such as children and noncustodial parents. These cross-residential relationships share similarities with LDRs in that access for day-to-day communication is limited. Given the priority granted frequent face-to-face (FtF) interaction to sustain close relationships, it is remarkable that the maintenance of geographically distant and cross-residential relationships has been given so little academic research attention.

Much of what we do know about LDRs and cross-residential relationships is not derived directly from studies on them. Rather, proximity and residential structures are often included as one of many constructs of interest in studies on family relationships or mobility patterns. Thus, for this volume, insights into these relationships are drawn from numerous disciplines including, but not limited to, interpersonal communication, relational studies, social psychology, family studies, media studies, military science, gerontology, sociology and criminology.

Long-distance and cross-residential relationships occur in opposition to many U.S. cultural assumptions about the nature of communication and close relationships. Such presumptions especially relevant to LDRs include: frequent FtF communication is necessary for close relational ties; geographic proximity is necessary for relationships to be emotionally close; shared meanings are necessary for relational maintenance; and family members, especially married parents, and parents and young children, are supposed to share a residence. These relationships, and hence this text, challenge such assumptions.

The knowledge base on which this text is founded is not without limitations. Research on dating relationships, dual-career relationships, and young adult-parent relationships is based almost exclusively on Caucasian middle-class heterosexual samples. Studies concerning separation due to occupation, military deployment, incarceration, extended family relationships, and friendships come from a much broader racial and socioeconomic spectrum. The literature on cross-residential relationships predominately concerns the effects of the absent father, as mother absence remains under-studied. Research on how family relationships are maintained and managed across residences is sparse.

Limited consideration is given to cross-national relationships, although 11.5% of the current United States population was born outside of this country (Schmidley, 2003). Intuitively most of these individuals left behind family and friendship networks. Research on most international immigration is limited as its focus is much more on assimilation or adjustment to life in the United States than on ties with those in the home country.

It is not the intent to privilege one group or type of relationship over another. Rather, space limitations and the deficit of research in some areas dictate a relatively narrow scope. The following paragraphs outline the chapters to follow and offer a brief organizational overview of the text.

Chapter 2 offers a rationale for the study of LDRs and working definitions of critical concepts, and it overviews some cultural assumptions about relationships. Chapter 3 turns to selected theoretical orientations to the study of relational maintenance in particular and relationships in general.

Chapters 4 and 5 focus on romantic relationships, college dating relationships, and adults who are separated because of occupation, military duty, or incarceration.

Chapter 6 considers young children who are separated from one or both parents as a result of divorce, nonmarital childbirth, parental military or occupational reasons, or parental incarceration. Chapter 7 turns to intergenerational relationships among adult children, parents, and grandparents. Peers, including adult siblings and friends, are covered in chapter 8.

Chapter 9 focuses exclusively on computer-mediated communication (CMC) and in doing so cuts across many relationship types, including relationships formed online and offline.

Chapter 10 returns to cultural assumptions, offers propositional conclusions, notes gaps in the extant literature, and outlines some practical implications. The closing chapter proposes extensions to one particular program of research on relational maintenance to be inclusive of the relationships considered herein.

A wide variety of research has been conducted on LDRs and cross-residential relationships; thus, no two chapters follow exactly the same format. However, within each chapter on a specific relational form, an attempt has been made to offer an approximate number of individuals or relationships that are long distance. Similarly, for each relational type, parameters for success are articulated. The little that is known about maintaining relationships is also included in each chapter.

It is hoped that this book might serve as a heuristic, prompting more critical thinking about the varied and complex forms of LDRs and cross-residential relationships, reconsideration of cultural assumptions relevant to communication and close relationships, and theoretical and pragmatic advances toward understanding the manner and desirability of relational maintenance.

2
Rationale, Definitions, and Assumptions

Though academia has largely ignored LDRs, popular culture is obsessed with them, especially those that are romantic. Interest also extends to numerous other types of LDRs. Long-distance friendships, noncustodial parents, and other kinships such as long-distance grandparent-grandchild relationships, young adult-parent relationships, and sibships are the subjects of this text. First, it is necessary to delineate why the study of LDRs is valuable, provide working definitions of LDRs, relational maintenance, and outline cultural assumptions surrounding such relationships.

Why Study LDRs?

Popular interest in LDRs is due in part to the sheer number of individuals involved in one form or another. The occurrence of long-distance families is increasing as more women seek careers, join the military, or go to prison. Committed unions without marriage are becoming more prevalent; thus, the number of long-distance, nonmarital unions past the college years will likely grow as well. Periods of heightened military deployments or economic instability are also correlated with a rise of families whose members live apart from each other. Divorce and children born to single, noncohabitating parents also continues to contribute to children living away from one parent.

LDRs are not limited to romantic partners or parents and young children. More young adults attend college or live separately from a parent before marriage or in the absence of marriage than in previous years. The image of extended families residing together in the recent past is predominantly a myth, and most extended families still do not reside together. Thus, relationships among relatives such as grandparents and grandchildren or adult siblings are likely to be across residences, if not across communities. Moreover, given the mobility of society we often make close friends in one locale that we leave behind geographically.

In short, in addition to relatively long-standing reasons for families and friends to live apart for substantial periods (e.g., military duty), numerous societal trends are converging that contribute to an increased proportion of the population that is involved in some type of personal relationship maintained across distance or residential boundaries. Thus, given the number and multiplicity of forms of LDRs, their study is timely.

The current popular fascination with LDRs has not been widely shared by scholars of communication or other social scientists. In 1995, Wood and Duck referred to LDRs as “understudied,” and overall the scene has changed little since that time. However, it is not the ubiquitous nature and vacuous knowledge of LDRs alone that make the topic worthy of study. When these factors are considered in conjunction with U.S. cultural assumptions about the nature of close personal relationships and the communication considered necessary to maintain them, LDRs merit notice.

Definitions

Before turning to the assumptions surrounding relationships, it is first necessary to provide working definitions of relationships, LDRs, and relational maintenance.

Defining Relationships

Delineating the scope of relationship and interaction is a useful academic exercise challenging social scientific disciplines to engage in self-examination and refinement of theoretical positions. What constitutes a relationship, much less a close relationship, has been debated by numerous scholars, and that debate will not be resolved here. (See Duck, Acitelli, & Nicholson, 2000; Conville & Rogers, 1998, for insightful discussions of what defines a relationship and the implications attached to adopting various definitions of relationships.)

For some, LDRs are an inherent oxymoron; relationships are conceived as existing only when participants are interacting in the same physical space or are otherwise interacting in some manner, such as through mediated means. Relationships are bound by interaction (Goffman, 1983; Rogers, 1998).

Others take a cognitive approach, contending that relationships go beyond copresence; social relationships do not cease simply because members are not in physical presence or engaging in interaction (Sigman, 1991). It is acknowledged that such a perspective is not endorsed in most relational communication scholarship (Sigman, 1991). However, scholars must examine how relation- ships extend beyond any specific transaction (Sigman, 1998). Though the study of interaction is important, “there is a danger in research that limits relationships to interaction or treats relationship and interaction as largely synonymous” (Sigman, 1991, p. 108). For most of us moving throughout our daily lives, such distinctions carry little import. The position taken here is that relationships are both based in mutual interactions and go beyond interactions. Though “our relationships are derived from previous communicative exchanges, it is our mental images of them that creates their reality for us” (Wilmot, 1995, p. 3). In other words, relationships are continued in our minds; individual-level constructions are present in every relationship (Kenny, 1988). One’s affective feelings for or perception of a relationship with one’s spouse does not cease to exist simply because interaction is not occurring at a given moment. Communication, relationships, and perceptions are the same phenomenon; they are simply viewed from different vantage points (Sillars, 1998).

Obviously, carried to the extreme, completely cognitive relationships that are formed outside of mutual interaction might range from mild parasocial relationships¹ to delusional encounters with imaginary friends named Fred. Yet, debating the line among delusion, parasocial relationships, and true relationships is not ventured here. For example, if a grandfather gains comfort through a mental construction of a relationship with a grandchild he has never met, far be it from a scholar to declare that the grandfather has no relationship with his grandchild.

In fact, society deems that the grandparent does have a relationship, of some kind, with the grandchild by virtue of the fact that they are related legally or biologically or both. They are culturally considered grandparent and grandchild. In other words, relationships exist and are maintained not only in our minds, but also through culturally recognized structures and conventions. Relationships are conferred on individuals, whether they like it or not. For example, another grandparent may disavow a grandchild; nonetheless, the relationship exists because of its ascribed status. In short, subjective perceptions of the mere existence of a relationship may be out of step of with interactional parameters or societal relational definitions.

Following Sigman (1991), Rawlins (1994) offered a scheme for classifying friendships, which is extended here as applicable to many other types of relationships. Rawlins considered friendships as active, dormant, or commemorative. Active relationships are characterized by “availability satisfactory contact, and emotional commitment” (p. 292). Dormant (or latent) relationships “share a valued history and/or maintain sufficient contact to anticipate or remain eligible for resumption of the friendship at any time” {p. 292). Other relationships are commemorative. These remain meaningful “as poignant symbols of particular places and moment of the life course” (p. 292). Rawlins’s descriptions offer a useful way to consider multiple forms of relationships and thus are used throughout this text.

Defining LDRs

LDRs defy precise definitions. They may best be considered as an injunctive construct. Injunctive concepts do not have sharp lines of demarcation but rather gradually merge into neighboring concepts (Lorenz, 1966). Instead of attempting a formal definition of this fuzzy set of relationships, a guiding principle is adopted: Relationships are considered to be long distance when communication opportunities are restricted (in the view of the individuals involved) because of geographic parameters and the individuals within the relationship have expectations of a continued close connection. In this view, cross-residential relationships, such as those between parents and nonresidential children, may be considered a form of an LDR, even if the physical residences are geographically close. The term LDR here should be read to be inclusive of cross-residential relationships.

Defining Relational Maintenance

Maintenance is both a state and a process (Duck, 1994a; Stafford, 1994). As a state it has a temporal form. “Most scholars do agree about when maintenance occurs—namely, just after a relationship has finished beginning and just before it has started to end” (Montgomery, 1993, p. 205; see also Dindia, 1994; Duck, 1994a).

However, viewing maintenance as a“middle” period is remiss when applied to many forms of relationships other than those that are romantic. Similarly, neither relational development nor demise is particularly meaningful for some relationships, such as nonvoluntary, culturally ascribed kinships (see Hess, 2003). Also, some relationships may develop, and instead of dissolving, be redefined, such as when ex-spouses reconfigure their relationship from one as a romantically involved couple who also coparent to one based solely on coparenting.

Maintenance is also a process, and in moving to this level more conceptual tangles transpire. Multiple definitions of relational maintenance as a process have been offered (see Dindia & Canary, 1993). The definition adopted here is the one offered by Stafford and Canary (1991): Maintenance behaviors serve to sustain “the nature of the relationship to the actor’s satisfaction” (p. 220). This comports with a process definition of maintenance as serving to keep a relationship in a specific condition or state (Dindia & Canary, 1993).

Communication processes of maintenance are of primary interest to scholars of communication, yet other mechanisms also serve to maintain relationships. As noted earlier, and will be revisited, relational maintenance may also occur through sociocultural presumptions of relationship status or mental constructions.

One purpose of this book is to synthesize the little that is known about maintaining LDRs. In most cases, success encompasses the continuance of the relationship, but not always; sometimes, defunct is the preferred relational state, though this is seldom societally recognized as a success (Masuda & Duck, 2002). One does not have to look far to uncover dysfunctional relationships that should be terminated, such as abusive relationships. As another example, in chapter 4 it is argued that the continuance of long-distance college dating relationships is not necessarily functional. In short, although mechanisms of relational maintenance are a focus of this text, no argument is made that the mainten...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Rationale, Definitions, and Assumptions
• 3 Theoretical Orientations
• 4 Long-Distance Dating Relationships
• 5 Adult Romantic Relationships
• 6 Young Children and Parents
• 7 Across Generations: Adult Children, Parents, and Grandparents
• 8 Peer Relationships: Siblings and Friends
• 9 Computer-Mediated LDRs
• 10 Propositions, Implications, Limitations, and Lacunae
• 11 Toward an Expanded Vision of Relational Maintenance
• Epilogue
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index