A Function of Friendship: Social Comparisons as a Frame of Reference for Marriage.

The article examines the perceptions couples have about their interactions with friends and whether these interactions were believed to influence their own marriages. Friendship relationships involve a great degree of privacy and role ambiguity and thus the interplay between marriage and friendship has been difficult to study. However, with the growing interest in applying systems theory and social psychological theories to predict marital and family responses, the role of friendship merits greater attention. The focus of this paper is to describe how marital definitions might be influenced via interactions with friends. The research has four objectives: to examine the extent people talk with friends about each other's marriages, to determine how aware people are of the impact that talking with a friend has on their marriages and whether this could be characterized in terms of making comparisons, to ascertain what spouses share with each other about their friends' marriages and to examine how people think talking with their spouses about friends' marriages influences their own marriages and whether this could be characterized in terms of making a comparison.