454 Close Relationships
To push this even further, consider these questions. How
does the ability and enjoyment of giving a benefit figure into
the calculations? If one partner enjoys doing laundry and the
other does not, is laundry done by the latter weighted higher
than laundry done by the former? If one partner does not care
if the living room is cluttered but the other one does, does it
count at all if the latter person cleans up the clutter? These
questions are difficult, and they probably seem silly. We
suggest that the reason they may seem silly is precisely that
people simply do not try to calculate these things in their
day-to-day lives, primarily because in good times issues of
fairness do not occur to them. Moreover, in times of more
stress, when people may have some desire to compute such
things, they realize the futility of trying to compute objective
equality or equity across diverse domains of inputs and out-
comes. (Later we address what we suspect they actually do in
times of stress.)
Even If We Could Follow Contingent Norms, Do We
Have Access to the Necessary Information?
Imagine that one did have the cognitive capacity to keep
track of all benefits given and received in a relationship. Does
one have access to all the relevant input? We do not think so.
Again, consider a husband and wife who live together—a
husband and wife who can surmount the obstacles to record
keeping just discussed. We still think it would be an impossi-
ble task to track everything that ought to be tracked simply
because each person has better access to contributions that
he or she has made to the relationship than to contributions
that the other has made for a number of reasons. The most
straightforward reason is that many contributions one partner
makes to the relationship are made in the absence of the other
partner.
Picture the husband arriving home prior to the wife. He
stops at the mailbox and brings the mail into the house.
He throws out the junk and leaves the rest on the table. He
notices that the cat has tipped over a plant and cleans up
the mess. He listens to three solicitation messages left on the
answering machine and deletes them. Although tired, he
chats pleasantly when his mother-in-law calls in order to
make her feel good and keep her company. He starts dinner.
His wife arrives. She notices the mail on the table and the
dinner cooking, but does she know anything about the other
contributions to the relationship that her spouse has made?
No, and he may well not mention them. The general point is
that because of the lopsided accessibility of information
about contributions to a relationship, there will always be a
bias to perceive that the self has made more contributions
than the partner has made.
ARE CONTINGENT RULES EVER USED
IN CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS?To recap, we argued that the ideal norm for giving and re-
ceiving benefits in close relationships (within an implicit cost
boundary) is a need-based, or communal, norm. We further
noted that when such relationships are functioning well, is-
sues of fairness tend not to arise. This is not, however, to say
that complaints and distress never arise. A need may be
neglected, and the neglected person may become distressed
and complain. Ideally, the partner responds to that distress
and complaint in such a manner as to address the need at
hand, soothe the partner, and maintain the relationship on an
even, communal keel. However, perhaps the need will not be
addressed. It is then, we contend, that processes leading to
concerns about fairness may begin to unfold.
Imagine that a person neglects his or her partner’s needs;
the latter complains, but the former does not respond by ade-
quately addressing the need. Even then, we suspect, the situ-
ation may unfold in such a manner that issues of fairness do
not arise. Specifically, sometimes the partner will respond
with a benign interpretation of the behavior. For instance, that
partner may respond by blaming unstable, situational causes
rather than the partner (cf. Bradbury & Fincham, 1990), and
the behavior may simply be tolerated. Rusbult et al. (1991)
described this action as accommodation, generally, and as an
instance of reacting with loyalty, more specifically.
For instance, consider a woman who lives far from her
family of origin and misses them terribly. She tells her hus-
band of her desire to visit them during their next vacation. He
refuses, countering that he would rather take a relaxing trip,
perhaps one to the beach. She then suggests that they could
go for just a weekend, and he refuses again, saying that he re-
ally wants her to stay home and get some work done and that
he really needs her company. In other words, he does not re-
spond to her needs. In the face of this his wife may interpret
his behavior benignly by attributing it to the situation (“He’s
very stressed. It’s not that he doesn’t love me; he just needs to
relax”). She may then behave constructively by continuing
on with her own communal behavior (acting loyally). She
may even go beyond benignly attributing her partner’s be-
havior to the nonstable, situational factors and actually con-
nect her partner’s faults (as evidenced by the poor behavior)
to virtues, as Murray and Holmes (1993) observed. For in-
stance, his reluctance to visit relatives and his desire to be
with her alone on vacation or at home might be taken as evi-
dence of his love for her and of his sensible nature—he does
not want to take too much on. In any case, she continues on,
maintaining her faith in the overall communal nature of their
relationship.