The Fund o/ Sociability

Relationships u'ith other people are essential and their loss can be traumatic

R O B E R T S. W E I S S

Why do people require relationships with one another? What needs are being expressed ? We recognize constantly, sometimes with surprise, how important relationships are to us. Newly divorced individuals are distressed by loneli- ness, even as they congratulate themselves on having ended a conflict-laden marriage. Individuals who work alone, such as writers, complain of isolation, even as they prize

their autonomy. Travelers on shipboard, separated from their network of friends, may find themselves greeting with enthusiasm an acquaintance from their home town who, in other circumstances, they might have barely acknowledged. In all these ways social needs express themselves. What can be their nature ?

In trying to find answers to this question, people have

36 TRANS-ACTION

generally taken two lines of argument. One, associated with some schools of sociology, has been to assert that relation- ships which are close, so close they may be called primary, provide the individual with his understandings of reality, his moral values, his goals, even his sense of self. Relation- ships are important because through them the society or- ganizes the individual's thinking and acting. Essentially, the society teaches its members what they want.

The second view, associated more with psychology than with sociology, has been that people have a number of needs or requirements which only relationships can satisfy, and that without appropriate relationships the individual will suffer. These needs are intrinsic to the individual, and are not formed by the society in which he lives. They may include needs for recognition, for affection, for power, for prestige, for belonging, and many more.

How can we move from these fairly general theoretical positions to a testable formulation of why people require relationships? Perhaps the simplest hypothesis we can phrase, one which would seem to be an implication of the first view but not of the second, is that of the "fund of so- ciability." According to this idea individuals require a cer- tain amount of interaction with others, which they may find in various ways. They may with equal satisfaction have a few intense relationships or have a large number of rela- tionships of lesser intensity. They would experience stress only if the total amount of relating to others was too little or too great.

The "fund of sociability" idea seemed to us to be a useful starting point in our effort to learn more regarding the assumptions, content, and functions of social ties. The research strategy that seemed to us a promising way to test this hypothesis was to seek out a group of individuals, all of whom had lost an important relationship but who also had the opportunity for unlimited sociability. It might then be seen whether increased sociability in some way com- pensated for the loss of the relationship.

For about a year, a colleague and I attended meetings of the Boston chapter of Parents Without Partners, a national organization of people who have children but who are liv- ing alone because of separation, divorce, or the death of their spouse. By listening to discussions of their past and current problems, and also from interviews with a good many members and former members, we hoped to b,e able to specify the nature of the losses sustained by these men and women with the end of their marriages, and the way in which membership in Parents Without Partners was useful to them.

We found that most members had joined simply be- cause they were lonely, although there may well have been other reasons, including concern for their children or the desire to help others. The loneliness resulted directly from the absence of the marital relationship, rather than from such secondary factors as change in social role.

According to the "fund of sociability" hypothesis, we

should expect to find members reporting that they had been lonely and restless after the dissolution of the mar- riage, but that interaction with others in Parents Without Partners had made up some part of that loss. We found, however, that although Parents Without Partners offered its members help with a host of difficulties, the sociability of belonging did not particularly diminish the sense of loneliness. Dating helped a good deal, but friendship did not. Although many members, particularly among the wom- en, specifically mentioned friendship as the main contribu- tion they received from Parents Without Partners, and these friendships sometimes became very close and very important to the participants, they did not compensate for the loss of the marriage. Friends and activities (discussion groups were perhaps the best) made the loneliness easier to manage, but they did not end it or even appreciably dimish it. One woman said, "Sometimes I have the girls over, and we talk about how hard it is. Misery loves company, you know."

Simple Sociability Not Satisfactory

Clearly the social needs satisfied in marriage, and, ap- parently, in dating, were not satisfied by simple sociability, no matter how much of it there was. But this raised the question of whether friendship was simply inadequate to supply the kind of interaction required, or whether friendship supplied something quite different, something that might not be found in marriage.

It seemed to us that friendship did offer something dis- tinct from what marriage provides. But how to test this? We needed to find people who were married, but without friends. If friendships met social needs distinct from those met by marriage, then people without friends should be in distress, even though married. However, if friendship pro- vided only a kind of time-filling sociability, then married people without friends should get along almost as well as married people with friends.

We began with a pilot study of six couples who had moved to the Boston suburbs from at least two states away. Our respondents were all middle-class and they had moved to Boston because of the husband's job.

Soon after the move, all but two of the wives were seri- ously unhappy; they were feeling a sense of social isolation similar in intensity (albeit shorter in duration) to the sense of emotional isolation that seemed to follow the dissolution of a marriage in others. The problem appeared to be that the housebound wife had no one with whom she could share the concerns of her daily life. Husbands could not really discuss with interest the dilemmas of child care nor the burdens of housework, and though they sometimes tried, they simply could not function properly as a friend. They might even compound the difficulty by saying they couldn't understand what was happening to their wives, and sometimes be downright unsympathetic because of what they felt were their own more serious problems of

JULY/AUGUST 1969 37

proving themselves on the new job. They were not troubled by the lack of people with whom they could share common interests, because at work they found men to talk to about the things that concerned them; the job, politics, sports, the local driving patterns, and the like. Two of the men with

whom we worked listed for us the people they talked with during the day, and the number was impressive.

Meanwhile, the newcomer wives were likely to become painfully bored. In the absence of anyone with whom they could share their interests, they found housework and child care increasingly unrewarding. One wife who had been so- cially active and had considered herself reasonably happy in her former home began to drink heavily. Another wanted her husband to give up the promotion that had brought him to the Boston area, and to return to her parents' home town.

Of the two wives who did not seem to suffer from ned-

comer blues, the first was a woman who had no children and who immediately solved the problem of social isolation by going to work. The other was married to a man who in a previous move had bought a house in an old and settled neighborhood where friendships were well-established. To escape social isolation, she began taking night-school class- es, and as her husband said when he talked with us, he hardly saw her except when they passed each other in the driveway. This time the husband moved into a new de- velopment where other homes were also owned by new- comers to the region, and spent his first weekend making friends with the new neighbors.

It now appeared dear to us that just as friendships do not provide the functions ordinarily provided by marriage, neither does marriage provide the functions ordinarily pro- vided by friendship. Our current work on the nature of marriage suggests that marriages may vary in this, but nevertheless we believe that even in the most companionate of marriages, some important interests will not be shared within the marriage, and for women in the social group of the newcomer sample and even to a greater degree among poorer women the concerns of managing a family are not shared with the husband.

At this point, the hypothesis of a "fund of sociability" could be confidently rejected. It was clear that there were different kinds of relationships, providing different func- tions. The question then arose, how many relationships seemed to be necessary, and what functions did they seem to provide ?

On the basis of further work with Parents Without Partners, we have been led to develop a theory that might be characterized as "the functional specificity of relation- ships." We believe that individuals have needs which can only be met within relationships, that relationships tend to become relatively specialized in the needs for which they provide, and as a result individuals require a number of different relationships for well-being.

Although there are many variations in the way people

organize their lives, one can in general say that relations with kin seem to be reliable as sources of help, but not as sources of companionship; friends offer companionship, but not intimacy; and marriage or a near-marital relationship

offers intimacy, but rarely friendship. We are not sure why

this specialization develops. Undoubtedly, much has to do with underlying cultural definitions of the relationship. If wholehearted commitment between friends is difficult - and this seems the case in adult American l i fe-- then it will be possible for friends to share interests, but extremely dif- ficult for them to develop the level of trust which would permit emotional intimacy.

The marriage relationship may be an exception to the generalization that relationships are specialized in function. In marriage each spouse provides for the other a degree of

emotional integration, and also provides collaboration in managing the mechanics of life. But even here there may be conflicts between the way of relating to one another that is associated with the one function, and that associated with the other. In terms of the collaborative relationship, for example, it may be reasonable for a wife to criticize her husband's capacity to earn, but since she is also a source of emotional integration, her criticism can be devastating.

The specialization of relationship is probably always in- complete. Undoubtedly every friendship involves some emotional exchange and has the potential for more. Yet going beyond the understood assumptions of the relation- ship can endanger it. When it happens, for example, that one partner in a friendship seeks to move the relationship to one in which there is an assumption of unbounded trust, the more usual assumptions of the friendship may be temporarily flooded out. The consequence is likely to be uneasiness when the friends later find it necessary to return to the old basis. Generally there is so much resistance to

changes of definition of a relationship that if a person loses the relationship that provided a particular function--as through the death of a spouse--he will be able only tem- porarily to alter his remaining relationships to fill the gap. Among members of Parents Without Partners, for example, we found a good deaI of bitterness that stemmed from the failure of their friends to respond to their new rela- tional needs.

Five Categories of Relationships

On the basis of our material we believe we can identify five categories of relational functions, each for the most part provided by a different relationship. All these func- tions seem to us to be necessary for well-being.

1) Imimac)'. for want of a better term, is used to char- acterize the provision of an effective emotional integration in which individuals can express their feelings freely and without self-consciousness. It seems to us that this function of relationships prevents the individual from experiencing the sense of emotional isolation that is expressed in the term "loneliness." For a relationship to provide intimacy,

3,q TRANS-ACTI(-)N

Only in marriage or a near-marital relationship can be found the intimacy that enables people to express their feelings freely and without self-consciousness, a comforting defense to loneliness and an essential ingredient for a healthy personality.

there must be trust, effective understanding, and ready ac- cess. Marriage provides such a relationship and so, often, does dating, at least for a time. Occasionally a woman may establish a relationship of this kind with a close friend, her mother, or a sister. And under some circumstances a man may establish a relationship of this sort with a friend.

It may be noted, parenthetically, that the relationship between sexual involvement and emotional intimacy, when the individuals concerned are potentially appropriate sex- ual partners, is quite complex and may well vary by social group and by circumstance. Certainly sex and intimacy are not necessarily associated. Still, rather fragmentary evi- dence suggests that in the groups we have worked with, individuals who are potentially appropriate partners may find it difficult to maintain a non-sexual emotionally inti- mate relationship. Where individuals are not appropriate sexual partners there is no apparent difficulty in maintain-

ing such a relationship. 2) Social h2tegrati()tz is provided by relationships in

which participants share concerns, either because of similar situations ("we are in the same boat") or because they are striving for similar objectives (as in relationships among colleagues). Such relationships allow a good deal of shar-

ing of experience, information, and ideas. They provide the basis for exchange of favors, and sometimes for more substantial help (though not for help continued over time). Among women this function is usually provided by friend- ships; among men, by relations with colleagues, as well as by friendships. The absence of this relationship may be ex- perienced as a sense of social isolation and will, we suspect, be accompanied by feelings of boredom.

3) Opportlolit)' for llnrturaiel behavior is provided by relationships in which the adult takes responsibility for the well-being of a chiht. Our impression, based on ex- perience with Parents Without Partners, is that men seem able to act as foster fathers to children not their own, but that it is much more difficult for women to act as foster mothers. The conditions for the expression of nurturance-- and tile nature of nur tu rance-may be different in men and women. We suspect that absence of this function may be signaled by a sense that one's life is unfulfilled, mean- ingless, and empty of purpose.

4) ReassnraJzce oj u,orth is provided by relationships that attest to an individual's competence in some role. Colleague relationships, and the social support and mutual respect they imply, can do this for some men, particularly

JULY/AUGI_rST 1969 39

those whose work is difficult or highly val- ued. Successful family life may function in this way for other men, competence or worth here depending not on particular skills, but on the ability to support and defend a family. Women who work may also find their employment a source of reassurance of worth. Women who do not work must look to relationships with husbands, children, and acquaintances for recognition of their competence in mak- ing and managing a home. Tile loss of any system from which recognition of work, value, or competence may be gained will, we believe, result in de- creased self-esteem.

5) Assista,ce through the provision of services or the making available of re- sources, although a primary theme in kin relationships, may be provided by a num- ber of other relationships as well, includ- ing friendships and relationships with neighbors. However it seems to be only among close kin that one may expect assistance that is not limited in time and extent. It is the importance of this func- tion for the poor that leads to the de- velopment of relational patterns in which kin ties are of primary importance. We suspect that the absence of any relation- ship providing the assurance of assistance if needed would be reflected in a sense of anxiety and vulnerability.

In addition, there seems to be a sixth function which can be provided by relationships that some people find im- portant. This function might be char- acterized as guida,ce, and may be pro- vided by mental-health professionals such as social workers or psychiatrists, or by ministers and priests, among others.

Undoubtedly there are individual dif- ferences in capacity to withstand the ab- sence of one or another of the functions without giving way to restlessness and to the development of such symptoms as loneliness and boredom. On the basis of accounts of individuals who have success- fully weathered long periods of isola- tion, one might suspect that individ- uals who have more rigid character struc- tures might be better able to forego the

"The aged are vulnerable to . . . loneliness, boredom, and worthlessness, and a sense that they are no longer of critical importance to anyone else."

4O

American Youth: A Special Issue of

Trans-action Coming in September

<'Hell No We Won't Got' DESERTERS AND DRAFT DODGERS IN SWEDEN A N D CANADA by lohn Cooney and Dana L. Spitzer

An Army In Retreat ROTC VS STUDENT MILITANTS

by Joseph W. Scott

Po; Pol, ,cs BEATLES A N D ROLLING STONES by Charles Hollander

The Condemnation and Drsecuuon o/Hippies by Michael E. Brown

Stoptime THE PROBLEM OF YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT by Hugh Folk

Student Dorrn ilories A MATTER OF WHOSE CONVENIENCE? by Sire Van der Ryn

The Mystenbus DisaH)earance o/ The Fighting Adolescent Gangs by Walter B. Miller

absence of some relational functions. One device that seems to have helped these men and women was to estab- lish a detailed daily routine from which they did not deviate.

It is difficult at this point to say that any one of the relational functions is more important than another. The absence of intimacy can clearly be disorganizing for many individuals, and for most it would be accompanied by pain- ful loneliness, but we are not able at this time to say that it is a more serious deficit than the absence of opportunity for nurturance. I have known childless couples to be as downcast by difficulties in adopting a baby as a lonely per- son might be by difficulties in finding love. It seems as though the absence of any relational function will create some form of dissatisfaction, accompanied by restlessness and occasional spells of acute distress.

This theory, like any theory of human nature, has im- plications for the way in which we might deal with in- dividuals in difficult situations. We might consider two possible areas of application of these ideas: to the prob- lem of relational loss, and to the problem of aging.

There are many forms of relational loss. There is the loss of friends that comes with moving from one area to an- other, the toss of colleagues that accompanies retirement, the loss of newly adult children from home, the loss of a spouse through death or divorce. Each of these losses would seem to have two aspects: first, the trauma that ac- companies the damage to the individual's life organization; and, second, the deficit in the individual's life that is a re- sult of the continuing absence of the functions once pro- vided by the now-lost relationship. When individuals move from one area to another, the trauma aspect may be nothing more than sadness at leaving old friends and old associa- tions, and not especially serious. The primary problem of relocation is that of deficit in the wife's relationships, the absence of new friends in the new situation. In conjugal bereavement, the loss by death of a spouse, the pain of loss is ordinarily very great and, for a good while, the trauma of the loss will be the primary source of distress. Yet even when this has been resolved, the life of the widow or widower is apt to continue to be unsatisfactory because of problems of relational deficit. It can be helpful to a widow or widower to recognize these two consequences of loss and to acknowledge that loneliness may be an unavoidable re- sponse to an unsatisfying situation rather than an inability to resolve the disruption of loss. Being able to identify what is wrong makes it easier to find remedies.

To turn to aging, the theory alerts us to the disturbances of social relationships that come with time. These include departure of children, retirement, possibly the loss of spouse, and, as a result of all the preceding, painful and sometimes bewildering reorientation of central life con-

cerns. When their children leave, the older couple may find a

42 TRANS-ACTION

freedom they have not known for decades, but they also lose their opportunity for nurturance. They may continue

to help their now-grown children, and they may be able periodically to indulge their grandchildren, but they prob- ably will never again have the sense of being essential to someone else, which is at least one of the functions small children seem to provide for their parents.

Retirement Removes Important Basis for Self-Esteem

Retirement varies in its implications, but for many men, as Eugene A. Friedmann and Robert J. Havighurst have shown, it removes from their lives an important basis for self-esteem. The parallel, for a woman, would be the loss of a home to keep up. This too can occur in time, but usual- ly at a considerably later point in a woman's life than re- tirement occurs in a man's. It must be said, though, that the loss of children from the home may constitute a partial retirement for women.

Wi th bereavement, the aged person may have no access to intimacy, and despite remaining relationships with grown children, other relatives, and friends, may begin to experience chronic loneliness. The absence of an intimate tie, we suspect, makes it difficult for an individual to main- tain an even emotional balance. Since his emotional re- sponses are not communicated and responded to, they go unchecked, uncorrected by another's perceptions. The result may be distortions either in the direction of pathological distrust or in the direction of depression which are difficult to interrupt.

The aged will lose friends through death, including old friends with whom so much is shared that the relation- ships are irreplaceable. But they also may give up friends because the interests and concerns that were central to the friendship no longer have meaning for them. Losing her husband may change a woman's life so much that she may no longer have anything in common with her married friends. Retirement may make irrelevant a man's relation- ships with former colleagues. And at the same time these bases for former friendships are lost, the afflictions of a g e - - sickness, limited income, dependence--may produce new central life concerns which can be shared by few others. The aged who become seriously ill, or crippled, or have a chronic condition that requires frequent medical care, cannot share with anyone their feelings about these physical problems, even though they may well find them the central concerns of their lives. Small wonder, then, if an aged person who is ill seeks out a doctor just to talk about his condition,

even at the risk of being thought a hypochondriac.

The aged, therefore, are vulnerable to relational losses

that bring in their wake feelings of loneliness, boredom,

and worthlessness, and a sense that they are no longer of

critical importance to anyone else. These feelings, taken to-

gether, have sometimes been characterized as a psychologi-

cal syndrome that accompanies age. A simpler explanation

is that these feelings are normal reactions to relational

deficits, reactions that would be found in any group sim- ilarly afflicted.

This appraisal suggests that the social and emotional dis- tresses that accompany age can be remedied, but only by relationships that supply the required functions. It gives us a guide to the sort of relationships that may help and the sort that probably will not. For the retired, activities that clearly benefit others, or display competence in an im- portant or valued way, may substitute for employment; but a make-work task, a hobby, or just keeping busy will not.

The appraisal also suggests that relational losses can be repaired. Should loss take place, and this is almost inevita- ble with age, then the view taken here suggests that it would be better to advise such people that they attempt to establish new relationships that will provide the same func- tions, rather than "gracefully" accept constriction.

But this recommendation could be made universally. Be- yond a certain point we cannot limit our relations with others without incurring serious loss. Just as it is bad advice to tell a widow to live for the children, or to tell someone who is aged to accept the inevitable losses, it is bad ad-

vice to tell a young person to forego intimacy for a time

while he concentrates on his studies.

Robert S. Weiss is a lecturer in sociology in the Department of Psychiatry of the Harvard Medical School, working in its Laboratory of Community Psychiatry. The work described in the article was in part supported by a grant from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. Carroll Bourg worked with the author in a study of the Parents Without Partners organization and Elizabeth Hartwell Harvey worked with him on a pilot study of newcomers and other, related efforts. Some of the material discussed in the article was included in a paper presented at a conference on aging sponsored by the Harvard Institute on Science and Technology. This paper will be published with other conference papers in a volume edited by Everett Mendelsohn.

FURTHER READING SUGGESTED BY THE AUTHOR:

Kinfhip in an Urban Setting by Bert Adams (Chicago: Markham, 1968). This is an analysis of survey data dealing with the functioning of kin relationships for a sample of married adults living in Greensboro, North Carolina.

HuJhands and Wives by Robert O. Blood, Jr. and Donald M. Wolfe (New York: Free Press, 1960). This is a report of a survey of married pairs living in Detroit which describes in detail how the couples manage their joint enterprises of home and family, and in somewhat less detail how the couples maintain the more emotional aspects of their relationships.

Family and Social Network by Elizabeth Bott (London: Tavistock, 1957) is a study of some different organizations of marital and social relationships which can serve to provide the same set of relational functions.

Sourcebook in ZVlarriage and the Family by Marvin B. Sussman (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1963) is an excellent collection of articles on various aspects of dating, marital relationships, parent-child relationships, and relationships with other kin.

The B~eaning of IF~ork and Retirement, Eugene Friedmann and Robert J. Havighurst (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954) is a collection of studies describing the meaning of work in various occupations.

JUI.Y/AUGUST 1969 43