Marriage vs. Friendship
8/2/19 - Marriage didn't always wreck friendships among women, as it did the 1950s, or strain both cherished relationships, as often happens today. Stephanie Coontz studies the long history of family structures from forager society to the present. History has some stark (and cheering) lessons about the ways that friendship functions as a deep human bond. Plus, we're renewed, refreshed, and restored after taking a break and doing a full home reorganization.
Transcript below.
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CREDITS
Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Associate Producer: Jordan Bailey
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Laura Bertocci
Ad sales: Midroll
LINKS
We're going on tour!
Read more from friendship and family relationship historian Stephanie Coontz
The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap
TRANSCRIPT: MARRIAGE VS. FRIENDSHIP
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(0:18)
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend.
Ann: A podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I'm Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman.
Aminatou: Okay, what are we actually doing on this podcast today?
Ann: We spoke with an academic, a historian who I think it's fair to say we've both been reading and very interested in for a long time. Her name is Stephanie Coontz. We interviewed her because as we were researching for our book about friendship and about big, important, lifelong friendships we were quickly confronted with the fact that there are precious few experts looking at the topic. I mean we're obviously quoting it in the book but it's so interesting we really wanted to share it in full with all of you.
Aminatou: I'm really excited to hear more about what Stephanie Coontz has to say about marriage and friendship.
[Theme Song]
(1:38)
Ann: Quick admin note we are going on tour! I hope you already knew this but maybe this is news to you and if it is I'm really excited to tell you that tickets are on sale now. In late September and early October we're going to Toronto, Detroit, Denver, Austin, and Houston. There are tickets left in all of those cities and we are going to be having a great time live shooting the shit onstage, chatting with some amazing special guests. We always have a couple of visual elements that are impossible to do over the air on the podcast that are very special to the live experience. So come and see us, callyourgirlfriend.com/tour, and if you have a friend in one of those cities give them the heads-up. We want to meet all of your besties too. Callyourgirlfriend.com/tour.
Aminatou: Hi Ann Friedman!
Ann: Hello.
Aminatou: It's been a long time since we've actually recorded this podcast. How's it going?
Ann: Ugh, do we want to talk about our blissful month of basically not working?
Aminatou: Oh my gosh, I'm still shook in the best way possible.
Ann: I feel like it is now going to be my personal corporate policy that we take a full month off every year. All employees of my corporation which is me get to choose what month they get off for the year then just take a full break because let me tell you it feels different when you have a break of that length from your normal work.
Aminatou: Uh, European people would concur with you. [Laughs]
Ann: I mean I know. I know this is not revelatory information to many people on this planet that have humane labor policies but wow.
Aminatou: It's the best. I feel renewed, refreshed, restored. My edges are back. My crops are thriving. Everything is cool again. I am so . . . it's a huge privilege in America to be able to take some time off but we're also people who work for ourselves so, you know, if we don't give ourselves a break nobody else will.
(3:45)
Ann: Exactly. And I do -- I fully recognize the luxury. I mean privilege doesn't even go far enough in my mind. The pure luxury that it was to have a concerted break. And you know what? I'm so happy to be back. I could not be happier to be talking to you for this podcast.
Aminatou: Same. I'm super happy to be back. If you work in an office and you're listening to this podcast take all your fucking vacation days. Like you don't get to keep those. Just take them. But anyway, back to being back. Being back is like good, you know? It's like my brain is not on fire anymore. We turned in the first draft of our book. We are, you know, thriving. I think that's the word. I'm into it.
Ann: We are doing our best on a little bit more sleep and relaxation than normal is how I would describe it.
Aminatou: [Laughs] Wow.
Ann: I mean I just took a 3 p.m. freelancer shower so I'm like some things have not changed but . . .
Aminatou: I mean, you know, like being back in the frying pan is no joke. It's no joke. I'm reorganizing all my house also because just so many things have been driving me crazy and that's its own full-time job. So I like being able to take a break from just throwing things away and donating things to doing this.
Ann: What is your method?
Aminatou: My method for what?
Ann: For housecleaning. Do you have a . . . do you have a specific set of criteria you're using to decide what stays and what goes? Are you like Kondoing? Are you . . .
Aminatou: So I -- so man, Kondo is not like my jam but I do agree that if you don't feel fondly about something it should probably not be in your house. I think what was really going on for me is I moved to this country with like a backpack and a suitcase and now I own too many things. And owning things really stresses me out but it's also the reality of getting older or whatever. But for me it just really represents a lack of mobility, like if I just -- I'm like weighed down by things.
(5:40)
And so my mission has been twofold. It's like to get rid of as much stuff as I can get rid of but also to streamline my house so that every single thing has a place, like some HGTV shit, but also I want that every time I walk through the door -- because we travel so much -- this is the only place in the world I want to be. And so that's what I'm building for myself.
Ann: Ugh, the only place in the world you want to be standard is so good. I feel like my home is that even though it's full of a lot of things that don't have places or things that probably don't spark joy. I still feel it meets that threshold.
Aminatou: You know, but you're a very good maximalist. You have all the things. I'm always having to buy things because I don't own it. You're the person that's like "Yeah, here's my gorilla glue. Here's my hair crimper." You know, you always have the thing. And so . . .
Ann: [Laughs] I was involved in a conversation about scissors recently where a friend who lives in a very small studio apartment was appalled to learn I own six different pairs of scissors if you count my rotary cutter.
Aminatou: [Laughs] I don't even know what a rotary cutter is so that's what's going on.
Ann: Oh, look it up. [Laughs]
Aminatou: You know what I mean? This is what I'm talking about. But you always have the thing whereas I'm always buying the thing and then I hate myself for buying the thing. And so I'm just trying to make peace with what I have. But the thing that's been really fun about reorganizing also is that I haven't had to buy anything for storage because I own . . . I've just been re-purposing things that I own. Like that makes me feel really happy. It's also forced me a lot to just confront my own consumerism. When I was in boarding school we always made fun of the Americans at boarding school because they would buy everything in bulk, you know? It was always like the girl down the hall would have . . . because of like Costco.
Ann: The Costco roots run deep, yeah.
Aminatou: The Costco mentality, right? It's like damn, you're coming all the way to West Africa with tampons for five years? What? But you were always running into that girl's bathroom because she had everything. So when I've been decluttering my house I'm looking at it and I'm like wow, I have fully turned into that girl down the hall that in high school I couldn't believe people lived that way. And now I'm like why do I have seven different toothbrushes in case people spend the night? You know what I mean? That's such a weird . . .
Ann: [Laughs]
(7:50)
Aminatou: Ann, I had so much toothpaste, so many . . .
Ann: Because you get them free at the dentist. Isn't that the answer?
Aminatou: No. Listen, first of all I like buying fun toothbrushes but I guess dental care is my fear in the apocalypse so I've just been stockpiling things.
Ann: That is very on-brand.
Aminatou: I know. But it's felt really good to go to . . . there's a sober living home around the corner from me and they take donations and so I've just been really happy that all my brand-new, unused, on-trend dental care, socks, and everything has a home. That has felt really good. But I feel really gross as a human being at how much stuff I buy and so I'm thinking about this.
Ann: Okay, I just had a moment where I thought you said dental care socks.
Aminatou: [Laughs] My dental care and my socks.
Ann: I was like are you buffing your teeth with a pair of socks? What's going on?
Aminatou: No, it turns out I'm also collecting socks and you know I don't wear socks because I don't believe in it but it turns out I have a bazillion pairs of them so here we go.
Ann: Wow.
Aminatou: All of this to say also that it's good every once in a while to touch every single item that you own, you know? And especially doing it outside of a move because moving is so stressful. I'm on a serious not allowed to buy things that I own right now and it feels good.
Ann: Congratulations.
Aminatou: Thanks.
Ann: I feel like that's a big . . . like that is big.
Aminatou: I know. Do you need some toothpaste?
Ann: Oh my gosh, you're not shipping me toothpaste. [Laughs]
Aminatou: Ann, if I send you the remaining toothpaste that I have you're not going to buy toothpaste for the rest of the year. Maybe even a year-and-a-half.
Ann: Okay, is it like Tom's of Maine? I don't do any natural toothpaste. I do exclusively like . . .
Aminatou: Okay, I don't do Tom's of Maine but I do have a Marvis stash and the Marvis mint I highly recommend. I also have all this weird Portuguese toothpaste. [Laughs]
Ann: Oh my god, I'm hanging up.
Aminatou: And then the French toothpaste I grew up on. See? I'm telling you I have a problem. So, you know, I'll send you stuff. Don't worry.
Ann: Send me an international toothpaste sampler maybe? [Laughs]
Aminatou: Listen, I love . . . whenever I travel that's one thing that I always get.
Ann: Ugh. Well I suppose we should talk about today's episode.
Aminatou: No, we should keep talking about toothpaste obviously. [Laughs]
Ann: What if that is just . . . the episode is domestic minutia and that is it? Like literally that's the whole -- the entirety of this episode is me talking about how I wanted to organize my bathroom when I was off and also I need a new fabric storage solution and also like yeah.
(10:08)
Aminatou: Ooh! Listen, I have something for you from The Container Store. Let's talk.
Ann: Oh my god.
Aminatou: Let's talk. Okay, what are we actually doing on this podcast today?
Ann: Okay. Well the setup for the interview today is that we spoke with an academic, a historian, who I think it's fair to say we've both been reading and very interested in for a long time. Her name is Stephanie Coontz. I think the first book of hers that I read was this book about American history called The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. Which I can't remember, it might've been some college-era reading for me but . . .
Aminatou: It was definitely one of our early friend conversations. It was like oh, you also read Stephanie Coontz? [Laughs]
Ann: Oh my god. She's like a nerdy . . . she's a nerdy historian who is occasionally found in the pages of like the New York Times op-ed section. But we interviewed her because as we were researching for our book about friendship and about big, important, lifelong friendships we were quickly confronted with the fact that there are precious few experts looking at the topic. There are a few books that are specifically about the history of friendship but they kind of tended more towards the academic and they didn't meet our exact names and we were like what if we call this historian we really like who's been studying a lot of other things about the way we structure our supportive, intimate relationships in American society and I would say also a lot of her work applies to Western Europe as well and ask her some questions about where friendship fits into that picture.
(11:40)
So that was like the genesis of this interview and then it was so interesting. I mean we're obviously quoting it in the book but it's so interesting we really wanted to share it in full with all of you.
Aminatou: I'm really excited to listen to this interview you did and also just think a lot about so much of society is organized around marriage. For some reasons very good, some reasons not so great. But, you know, it's just really interesting to think about what the world looks like if you just let people choose the people who are important to them and how can we structure society in a different way? So I'm really excited to hear more about what Stephanie Coontz has to say about marriage and friendship.
[Interview Starts]
Ann: Stephanie thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Stephanie: Oh it's fun to be here. Thanks.
Ann: We really wanted to speak with you because you're a historian who takes a long view about how family life has changed -- often a feminist view of how family life has changed over the years. And I'm wondering if the evolution of how we view family in our society has affected also how we view friendship and in particular friendship between women.
Stephanie: Well yes. [Laughs] It's affected it tremendously over an immensely long period of time. I was just recently doing some research again into kinship in foraging societies and the closest that we can get to understanding what it was like 50,000 years ago. And one of the things that increasingly I think researchers are beginning to realize is that kinship wasn't necessarily the basis of human cooperation so much as it was the outcome of human cooperation. That people lived and worked together and then considered themselves kin because they shared food or lived together or cooperated. And then of course marriage added to that because marriage was a way of turning strangers into kin.
And one of the things in the earliest history, before you get the development of class society and a lot of inequities, marriage is a way of extending cooperation and reciprocity. So it's not just about the relationship between the individuals or even the immediate in-laws. You've got all of these complicated obligations that are owed to not only your in-laws but the kin of your in-laws. And it functions to make sure you were connected to other people.
(14:10)
And in Native-American societies for example, in many other societies that were pre-state societies, you would have a tradition of also literally fictive kin, you know, sharing blood to solidify a friendship. So it goes back a long ways and it's a complicated and ever-changing relationship and we've seen changes in it just in the last ten to fifteen years. But the changes over the last 200 or 300 years are quite dramatic.
Ann: Yeah. And I'm wondering if you can, when you say forager society, what years are you talking about and where are you talking about specifically?
Stephanie: Well all over the country. All over the world. Human beings lived in band-level societies that did not produce settled agriculture for many millennia, many more years than they lived in industrial societies or even agricultural societies. And what we know about those societies is that they really depended upon finding ways to establish peaceful relations and cooperative relations with people they encountered, the people that they might share a fish run with. So I'm talking about all over the world. I'm not saying they all lived in utopian harmony but researchers have found that the best way when you're a foraging society and don't store surpluses that you can hoard and hide from other people, the best way to survive is to share what you get on any given day. Then literally what goes around comes around.
And I think that you have to trace friendships and marriage and in-laws all back to that sort of cooperative thing. Reciprocity was the most important thing and refusing to share, refusing to reciprocate, was the most important sin in such societies.
(16:00)
Ann: And that wasn't based necessarily on biological kin relationships? Is that what you're saying?
Stephanie: No, a recent set of researchers looked at the DNA going way back and they've discovered that only about 40% of band level was probably related originally by kinship. The rest were friends or collaborators or in-laws but even that we've overemphasized how important the family was in establishing cooperation and maybe underestimated how important cooperation was in establishing the family.
Ann: Oh my gosh, I love that. And okay, so what happens? You mentioned this is sort of like a pre-class society. What happens as humans start to get more organized and maybe settle down or, you know, get into agriculture, like that sort of thing? How does this start to shift?
Stephanie: Well as you get the development of surpluses it's kind of a crisis for foraging societies, you know? Because the idea was that you redistribute. William Penn wrote of the Native Americans he met in Pennsylvania, calling the leaders quite wrongly kings, "The kings distribute and to themselves last." And he captured a very important part of foraging level societies that you have to give to others because that's how you get back.
Well when you start to produce surpluses the question is how, if one group has more surpluses than the other, do they give them away? Do they start keeping them for their own group? And if they do how do they justify that? And you begin to get gradually these class or at least rank differences. And those kinds of things begin to change the idea that you don't share with everybody. Well what's the best justification you can come up with for not sharing with everybody? From the earliest state societies right up to today's hard-charging, selfish businessmen who screw everybody over that they can, "Oh, well I had to provide for my family. I have to save it for my family." [Laughs]
(18:15)
Ann: Right, yeah. The kind of -- that is a justification for selfishness.
Stephanie: Yes, yes, in an odd way. You can be very altruistic with your own family but it also becomes a justification for saying no to other families.
Ann: And where did important non-family relationships or non-blood kin relationships fit in at that point?
Stephanie: Well it all depends on where we're talking about and I don't think we've got three hours to go into all of them. [Laughter] But in pre-state societies you get a lot of ways of organizing. One is influential people attract followers by giving to them but then they get loyalty in return and in a sense more labor. You know, you give somebody a certain amount and if they owe you services in return over time you're actually going to get more and it's going to increase the wealth disparities.
Ann: So less friends, more followers kind of thing?
Stephanie: Yeah, yeah. I mean but friendship was also very important because friendship was a way of saying we're going to have this kind of reciprocal agreement. And again I do not want to romanticize it in any way but it's only in fairly recent times that we've been able to be more casual about friendship, to make it a pick-and-choose thing. I like you, Ann, and I'm going to be a friend with you but I'm not going to be a friend with this person next door because I don't need them. So in the older societies you just needed people and so there was a lot of instrumental practical consideration there but I think sometimes we may bend the stick a little too far when we say that oh, well it must only be emotional. If there aren't instrumental and practical needs for a relationship it's hard to keep up the energy to keep it going.
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(22:55)
Ann: Maybe if you ask people to write down like are friends important to me, yes or no, they would all say yes. But a lot of the societal messages we receive are that it's kind of fun and optional, like that need component you described isn't always recognized by the way at least I think American society is organized today. I'm curious how you think we got to that point in terms of . . . I mean maybe I'm jumping way ahead.
Stephanie: Let's jump way ahead. Let's leave the paleolithic and the Neolithic and jump to . . . [Laughs]
Ann: It's fascinating though, yeah.
Stephanie: Jump up to the 17th or 18th century because . . .
Ann: Great, let's go to the 17th century.
Stephanie: This was a period where you were just beginning to get the development of wage labor in western Europe but it coexisted with older ways of organizing things, remnants of old tribal societies, certainly a lot of the old feudal and then the absolutist monarchies. And friendships are still very important but people cultivate them in terms of what they're going to get back from it.
(24:00)
But on the other hand a lot of your emotion goes into those friendships. If you go back to a 12th century poem, an anonymous poem called The Wanderer where the guy has lost the lord who kept the man mourns with total un-self-consciousness about how he misses the gold giver at whose knee he used to sit.
So the combination of I need you, I get things from you, but I also have a strong emotional connection to you was particularly important not only in the patron and follower relations but in relationships between peers and it stood out above in many cases the marriage relationship. Because up until about the 17th century marriages remained a way of making business alliances, of organizing your family labor force, of expanding your kin networks in a society that didn't have banks. It was a way of raising capital. Of course with the upper class it was a way of claiming -- of finding higher status, of organizing military alliances and peace treaties even. You know, love was nice if it came afterwards but it was not considered a good reason for marriage. And so friendships were very different and perhaps more emotionally-central to people.
Even when we began to get the love match and people began to say in about the 17th or 18th century -- really flourished by the end of the 18th century -- people as the American founders put it had a right to the pursuit of happiness so love ceased to be something that was just like, you know, you hoped it would come from marriage but it became a good reason for marriage.
(25:43)
On the other hand at the very same time the notion of marriage really changed and this is the same time period and the same forces that created the love match created a notion of males and females that today we would consider totally incompatible with love. The idea that they are totally different people.
So with the development of this new idea that marriage is a union of opposites, of two people who love each other precisely because they are so different that you can only get access not only to the resources but the emotions as well as the services of the other because you don't have them yourself, it's a powerful impetus to get married but it's not a very good basis for friendship.
And so what we see in the 19th century is this really interesting paradox that as we -- the more that they romanticize the marriage the more that men and women saw each other as strangers and women write in their diaries about what would it be like to be married to what they call the grosser sex? There was -- people would have . . . women would have a marriage trauma. They would get engaged as soon as they could because they'd get a good -- needed to get married -- but they would actually postpone the marriage as long as they could because it was so frightening to get together with this stranger. And men too recorded about how much they loved and idealized these delicate little creatures but they didn't know what to talk about with them.
Ann: Oh my god.
Stephanie: Yeah, yeah. So this led to this intense romantic romanticization of the other but also it opened the way for a real flowering of male/male and female/female friendships because those were the people that you had everything in common with. And again we're talking about the white middle class here mostly but we also see elements of this modified by the constraints of working class and African-American life and the necessity to have these other kinds of bonds.
But most intensely in the white middle class you have this idea that women have all this in common and men have all this in common and because marriage was not yet sexualized, women were seen as asexual, it was okay to have these intensely passionate relationships and they carried no taint of illicit sex.
So we have diaries of women who write about their deep friendship with Fanny and how they love each other and they carve their initials in the tree and they write to each other every day. And then one of them will say "I accepted the marriage proposal of Mr. R last night" and you go who was that? And he hardly ever appears again in the diary until she announces triumphantly that Fanny came to visit last week and we kicked Mr. R under the parlor and we spent all night giggling and pinching each other. [Laughs] And nobody thought anything bad of it. The husbands and sons of these women donated their books to the libraries. You know, if my son had read one of those diaries I think even as enlightened as young people are today he'd be like eww.
(28:52)
Ann: Well and how do we separate -- like I think some stories like this, like a Boston marriage, right? Like the idea that two women who are not married to men are maybe going to live together and we spent all night giggling and pinching each other. I mean it's hard to I think parse that in light of well you didn't really have an option to live openly if you did want to pursue a sexual relationship with another woman and therefore trying to figure out those lines between this is how marriage between women was different then versus oh, this is because being gay was so repressed and not seen as an option. I don't know. How do you kind of answer some of those questions when you read these old letters?
Stephanie: Well first of all we know that people had same-sex desires, you know, throughout history. But what was interesting was that it was not yet seen as an identity and so expressions of -- and also because female sexuality in particular was seen as so repressed it didn't carry the taint that if you were seen holding hands that it necessarily meant there would be any kind of real sexual contact.
(30:05)
And some of the same freedoms were accorded to men that men record in their diaries, falling asleep entwined in each other's arms and it's not seen as homosexual behavior. Now we know that that went on and that was punished very deeply when it was clear that there was a sexual act. But there was a lot of cover too for people who could play the role and of course what you said about Boston marriages, there were lots of women.
In fact we are uncovering ones where the society accepted that there were couples occasionally in smaller communities especially that as long as they played the role of straight-up married people who were not continually pawing each other the way friends might do, [Laughs] they kind of accepted that there was a female husband who played -- you know, who did some of the men's work and a female wife who did some of the other work. So it's a very complicated kind of thing.
But it all changes in the early 20th century in ways that are liberating in one sense, that allow people to . . . because there's new emphasis on sexuality. First of all it liberates the relations between men and women. It says yes you can explore your sexual desires and you should have satisfactory sexual relations. But it also says to people if sexuality is a really important part of a relationship then my same-sex desires need to be satisfied and I should not commit myself to somebody of the so-called opposite sex to whom I am not attracted at all.
(31:45)
So it was a contradictory thing but for the mainstream society, the Freudian psychologists, the mainstream politicians, everybody who was pushing this new ideal of marriage that was sexual but it was contained within a respectable marriage, it had kind of poor consequences for friendship. It did open up new possibilities for males and females to interact again in the way they had in the past but it meant that male/male -- intense male/male and intense female/female friendships because immediately suspect. So there was a huge -- in the early 20th century -- a huge campaign by the so-called experts to wipe out the idea of these girlish crushes that used to be considered perfectly acceptable and kind of fun. And men found themselves under suspicion if they walked down the street the way they used to with an arm around each other's shoulders.
And by the 1950s you had a really powerful, strong emphasis in mainstream society, sociology, psychology about the need to put -- to not have friendships that compete with your marriage relationship. That that nuclear family was the most important thing. The big play Marty was very popular and became a movie and the whole emotional message of that is this guy lived with his mother and his maiden aunt and he took really good care of them and he had friends from high school that he hung around with and that was a bad thing. And the happy ending -- that happy ending to it is he ditches them, he moves out on the mother and aunt, and he moves in with the high school sweetheart and that's who he really commits to. And this is the message given to women too all the time, that you've got to totally commit to your husband. Put aside your girlish friends or at least, you know, don't ever let them interfere with your relationship with your husband.
(33:54)
And when I interviewed women about their marriages in the '50s and '60s a lot of them said they had very intense female friendships but they were tainted in some ways in retrospect. They thought -- by the fact that they were all about how to interpret the romantic intentions of a man or what they should do in terms of being single. And once they got married they didn't have that much in common except when they got together to talk about their married lives.
So this was the real I think low point [Laughs] in the history of female friendships and of course by that time male friendships were really off the table. Men were increasingly expected to get any emotional support they needed from their wife, not from other men. So I think that's where we got by the '70s and '80s to the point that I suspect you're dealing with in your book and that we've talked about before that people are trying to rediscover how can you have passionate, heterosexual love if you are heterosexual and combine that with passionate friendship bonds? This is something we're just all making our way. How do you develop friendship networks that are really intense but that are not a threat to whether it's a same sex or heterosexual romantic relationship that you're in?
Ann: Yeah. And I think it's so interesting also hearing that timeline, at least for me, my grandparents' generation would be that generation who were sort of taught to feel that friendship was a threat to a marriage and family structure. And I don't know, you know, in the long arc of time if saying that friendships should be an equally important life relationship is all that radical. I mean hearing what you said about the way humans lived for a very, very long time suggests that actually there's a reason why it feels good to me or it feels good to us to feel love and support and get our needs met and meet needs of people beyond a nuclear family structure. It really makes -- it makes a lot of sense. I mean one thing I wonder is how are these ideas transmitted? I mean you do talk about a lot of this stuff originating with a white middle and upper class. But is it all culture? Like how do we get these messages about what friendship is supposed to be and do or what marriage is supposed to be and do?
(36:30)
Stephanie: Well, you know, I don't know that we've totally figured out the exact mechanisms of how these things happen but as people struggle with dilemmas in their lives, with contradictions, with ambivalence, they look around for answers and there's an elite in society, a knowledge elite if you like, or a mass society elite. I mean the fact -- you know, the Internet certainly hasn't wiped out; it's created new kinds of power relations but it hasn't wiped out the fact that we don't all have equal access to influence other people.
And it's those influencers, many of whom are supported by and come out of the class relations and race relations and gender relations, the structures, and they have an interest in supporting those, who even with the best intentions often reinforce them and put down relationships and emotions and ideas that don't seem to further, you know, whatever the organizational priorities are of an economic and political system at the time. And that's what happened in the early 20th century and very much so in the 1950s and was particularly powerful then because that was the period when you first got television and there weren't any other competing media to go to. So you could really broadcast that to everyone.
(37:55)
Ann: Right. It's fair to say that marriage and family are institutions in the sense of all these norms and expectations that maybe you're not agreed upon fully across every demographic line but generally we have a shared understanding of what it means to be married or what it means to be someone's parent or . . . but when it comes to friendship I think one thing we've been struggling with a lot is it does feel like an institution in some ways. I mean it is central to the way many of us are shaped as humans. You know, we do have that need relationship with friends for much of our even adult lives and yet it's not really an institution in the same way because there aren't these external supports that validate it. And I'm just wondering if you could speak to that a little bit, about what makes say marriage an institution and what makes friendship distinct from that?
Stephanie: Well that's an excellent question. I hope you'll try to answer it. [Laughter]
Ann: We are.
Stephanie: But look, you know, in a certain sense marriage used to be much more highly institutionalized than it is and you kind of had to stay in it because divorce was very difficult. There's still high cost barriers to exit in a marriage, far more than there are in a friendship.
And so the question that people have to grapple with in their lives is do you want to lower the barriers to exit in marriage so that it becomes more like friendship? That it's something that you flow. And many people have taken that idea that maybe we're not set to be with one person as our only romantic life partner for our entire life.
Or do we want to maybe raise the cost barriers to exit friendships? But to do that you have to personally do that because society has not established them. We don't have any laws making it difficult to do as my husband sometimes has jokingly said about a friend who's kind of -- like if you have a friend who's ceased to provide support, "Well they've passed their poll date." Well there's nothing that makes you stay past the poll date in a friendship and there's a lot that incentivizes you to stay past the poll date in a marriage.
(40:15)
So one of the big challenges is that very fine balance between leaving enough flexibility in one's life so you can grow and change and leave people who are not providing your needs but at the same time how do you cultivate relationships that are mutually -- so mutually advantageous that there are cost barriers to exiting them even if you're having a bad day? I mean that's a dilemma.
One of the reasons that researchers find is that in old age it's your network of friends. The people with the largest network of friends are healthier and happier and have better well-being than people who most of their networks are family. But here's the paradox: that's because it's easier to get rid of the friends who are not helpful than it is to get rid of family who are not helpful.
So I think this is a tension that you just have to embrace and struggle with. I mean not just like oh, I embrace this great . . . [Laughs] but understand that it will never be solved. The best way to work out both our romantic and our friendship relationships to try to work with that dialectic of how do we preserve things, make them go even during periods that are hard, and yet also preserve our ability to move on to somebody and something else when someone does consistently disappoint their need for reciprocity?
[Interview Ends]
(41:55)
Ann: Ugh, isn't she the best? Sometimes the most interesting way into a conversation about something is to talk about all the stuff surrounding it then you get a clearer picture. It's like oh, right, if this is the way values and norms have changed around blood bonds and marriage and family life then you can really get a clear picture of why certain pressures have been put on friendship or why it's been devalued. It's like duh, of course.
Aminatou: Also lady historians, so important to me. So important.
Ann: It's true. I can't say enough good things about the rest of her work which we will link to. I would say that she is the perfect example in my mind of a historian who's like okay, I'm going to not just tell you the facts of what happened but I'm going to be a little bit of a critic in how I explain to you what was really going on which I appreciate so much.
Aminatou: Hey, I guess I'll see you on the Internet.
Ann: See you on the Internet.
Aminatou: You can find us many places on the Internet: callyourgirlfriend.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, we're on all your favorite platforms. Subscribe, rate, review, you know the drill. You can call us back. You can leave a voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Our logos are by Kenesha Sneed. We're on Instagram and Twitter at @callyrgf where Sophie Carter-Kahn does all of our social. Our associate producer is Jordan Baley and this podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.