Before discussing the five areas of behaviour in which identity and stability needs are expected to conflict it seems sensible to provide some introductory information about the marriages of the twenty couples in this study. The introductory topic chosen is the extent to which the marital partners feel they know one another. This is not a purely arbitrary topic but one chosen partly because it should help to show whether the marriages studied are sufficiently significant or important to the participants to allow them to seek identity or stability goals within them. If by chance a couple had been selected who were virtually strangers to each other, sharing the same house merely as a matter of convenience, they would be unlikely to be interested in, or affected to any great extent by, the actions or attitudes of each other, and would be furthering their identity and stability ends solely in relationships with other people. What follows will show that the sample did not include any relationships of this kind, although there was of course a certain amount of variation in the extent to which people felt they knew their marriage partner, or were known by him or her.

Knowing each other

Most people when asked how well they knew their partner and how well he or she knew them said that they knew each other very well (and it was a question they appeared able to answer with ease).

Joint interview

1. Could you start off by telling me something about yourselves, about your background?

Age

Education (school and further education; where; what type)

Jobs (what; where; for how long; reasons for changes)

Where born and lived (place; urban/rural; housing; reasons for moves)

Parents (where living; jobs; any experience of divorce, separation or widowhood)

Brothers and sisters (number; ages; whether married; where living; any children; any experience of divorce, separation or widowhood)

1. 2 Can you tell me something about your relationship?

How did you come to meet?

How long did you go out together before getting married?

Did you get engaged?

How long were you engaged?

How did you spend your time together when you were going out/engaged?

What made you think you'd like to marry [name of spouse]?

What made you decide to get engaged?

What did other people (parents, siblings, friends) say when they heard you were getting engaged/married?

Why did you get married when you did?

Do you think you'd always thought you would get married one day, or not?

Did you ever break off your relationship before you got married?

Did you ever think about living together rather than getting legally married?

The balancing act

There are good reasons for concluding that marriage is in many ways a compromise between stability-maintaining and identity-upholding behaviour, and that on the whole married people perform this balancing act very skilfully. For example, they seem to talk to each other a good deal, and often about things they would keep private from outsiders, but they also avoid talking, often because they do not wish to upset or annoy each other. Apart from when they are at work, they spend most of their time together; but they do have occasional separate outings although they seem aware of a need to limit these and to confine them to ‘acceptable’ activities. They are all conscious that their activities are restricted and that they are constrained to adopt certain patterns of behaviour. But while having cause for some regret, almost without exception people accept these constraints; they get used to them, they are not too heavy a burden, and they are the inevitable accompaniments of the satisfactions which marriage also brings. Again this seems to show a middle way: if the constraint were heavier or lighter dislike would outweigh acceptance. For example, if their responsibilities were greater people would feel overburdened by them, but if they were lighter they would miss the enjoyment or sense of achievement which they also bring. Marriage brings several gratifications; the major ones – apart from having someone to share time and talk with – being children, a home of one's own, and feelings of increased maturity and worth.

The nature of marriage

Marriage in Britain today is a fascinating but bewildering subject. This is partly because so much of a marriage relationship takes place in private, because its character varies from couple to couple, because it is extremely complex, and because it has been subjected to a great deal of change in recent years. These four themes require some expansion.

Whether or not a marriage is a legally constituted one, there is usually public recognition of its existence: the couple's relatives, friends and acquaintances know that they are married or living together. But beyond this fact it is probable that most people will know little about the relationship between the two people involved, for example what they talk about when they are together, even whether they talk at all, what their sexual relationship is like, what if anything they disagree about and how violently, how if at all they share tasks around the house and in the care of children, who takes what sort of decisions, who gives in to whom, and what interests if any they share. Their habits will usually only explode into public view when something abnormal occurs (such as severe marital discord) and outsiders gain information about them through the couple's need to talk or to seek advice or help.

This chapter takes a different starting point from the two preceding ones, in which the specific topics for discussion were imposed in advance and the interviewees were then asked – among other things – whether they felt constrained in any way in these areas of behaviour. In this chapter the topics will not be imposed. The aim is to address those initial hypotheses which posited that married people will wish to impose upon their partners particular types of behaviour, modes of being, or constellations of behaviour and being (which one may call identities) and that they will each feel constrained by the other's wishes and expectations; and that married people will be constrained by the fact that marriage is a publicly recognised institution involving certain typical expectations and pressures towards conformity to certain types of behaviour, modes of being, or constellations of behaviour and being.

Of course it is quite possible that individuals may find their partners' expectations and the expectations (as they perceive them) of the wider society thoroughly in line with their own preferred identities. But there are other possibilities; for example, some may find their partners' expectations problematic because they are not in line with publicly recognised expectations (or vice versa); and some may find both sets of expectations in some ways constraining.