Abstract
Relationships are central to human life strategies and have crucial fitness consequences. Yet, at the same time, they incur significant maintenance costs that are rarely considered in either social psychological or evolutionary studies. Although many social psychological studies have explored their dynamics, these studies have typically focused on a small number of emotionally intense ties, whereas social networks in fact consist of a large number of ties that serve a variety of different functions. In this study, we examined how entire active personal networks changed over 18 months across a major life transition. Family relationships and friendships differed strikingly in this respect. The decline in friendship quality was mitigated by increased effort invested in the relationship, but with a striking gender difference: relationship decline was prevented most by increased contact frequency (talking together) for females but by doing more activities together in the case of males.
Highlights
Relationships are central to human life strategies and have crucial fitness consequences
We tracked the entire active personal network of 25 students over a period of 18 months as they made the transition from school to university or work
Our aim was to examine how the emotional closeness of the relationships between participants and the network members changed over the course of the study
Summary
Relationships are central to human life strategies and have crucial fitness consequences. Longitudinal studies can disentangle cause and effect more effectively than cross-sectional studies and can examine how specific life events that involve physical or social separation affect the stability of relationships (Crosnoe 2000). Such transitions shed light on the costs involved in maintaining different types of relationship across time and space. One theoretical model that has frequently been used to understand what happens to social relationships during periods of transition is the Relationship Investment Model (Rusbult 1983) (e.g., Oswald and Clark 2003; van Duijn et al 1999) According to this model, commitment to a relationship is a function of satisfaction with the relationship plus investments into the relationship minus the possible alternatives to the relationship. Moving away may decrease satisfaction with old relationships because of an increase in the availability of alternatives (new, potentially more attractive friends) and an increase in maintenance costs (when physically separated)
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