Stability and change in newlyweds’ social networks over the first years of marriage.

Journal of Family Psychology, Vol 37(1), Feb 2023, 20-30; doi:10.1037/fam0001016Marriage sanctifies the relationship between two spouses, but what happens to their relationships with family, friends, and others who comprise their social networks? Scholarly accounts disagree about whether couples’ networks strengthen, weaken, or remain stable in the years after marriage. To reconcile competing perspectives, marriage licenses from lower income communities were used to recruit 462 spouses (231 couples) in their first marriages. Each spouse independently provided data on 24 network members with whom they interact regularly (over 11,000 network members). These data were used to calculate 14 dimensions of each spouse’s social network, and networks were assessed in this way three times over the first 18 months of marriage. Over time, spouses’ networks grew to include more of each other’s family members, more married and financially secure individuals and more members with whom they reported good relationships. For husbands, proportions of their own friends and their wives’ friends declined. Proportions of own family and members providing support did not change. With rare exceptions, these changes were not moderated by premarital parenthood, cohabitation, or relationship duration. Thus, regardless of a couples’ premarital history, getting married itself appears to be associated with specific changes in spouses’ social networks. Yet whether those changes broaden or narro...
Source: Journal of Family Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research