Putting Relationship Maintenance into Proper Perspectives

Noting that scholars often agree that varying investigations of relationship maintenance are only different mappings of the same territory, this paper organizes and criticizes the literature on relationship change from a position that defines maintenance as behavior that functions to sustain interpersonal bonds towards future interaction. The paper points out that communication scholars need to study maintenance for two reasons: maintenance is becoming lost in a sea of other user-unfriendly, ubiquitous terms, such as meaning, interpersonal, and relationships; and the understanding of communication as relationships, already biased by the dominating cultural ideal of what both "should" look like, will most likely be further problematized by a term laden in mechanistic and therapeutic symbolism. Using J. N. Capella's frame for organizing interpersonal research inquiry, the paper offers some conditions and direction for research in accordance with the defined construct and the varying perspectives on relationships and relationship change. The major section of the paper reviews the existing literature on relationship maintenance, looking at various issues of concern (such as the cultural biases of research). In closing, the paper calls for additional considerations when studying relationship maintenance in the future: (1) scholars should begin to rethink gender as more than a biological classification; (2) they should remember that power is implicit in many theories, but not considered when devising studies or interpreting results; and (3) they should consider the very real phenomena that influence human relationships when modeling relationship maintenance and change. Contains 61 references. (RS)