No abstract

Marriage sanctifies the relationship between two spouses, but what happens to their relationships with family, friends, and others who comprise their social networks? Scholarly accounts disagree about whether couples' networks strengthen, weaken, or remain stable in the years after marriage. To reconcile competing perspectives, marriage licenses from lower income communities were used to recruit 462 spouses (231 couples) in their first marriages. Each spouse independently provided data on 24 network members with whom they interact regularly (over 11,000 network members). These data were used to calculate 14 dimensions of each spouse's social network, and networks were assessed in this way three times over the first 18 months of marriage. Over time, spouses' networks grew to include more of each other's family members, more married and financially secure individuals and more members with whom they reported good relationships. For husbands, proportions of their own friends and their wives' friends declined. Proportions of own family and members providing support did not change. With rare exceptions, these changes were not moderated by premarital parenthood, cohabitation, or relationship duration. Thus, regardless of a couples' premarital history, getting married itself appears to be associated with specific changes in spouses' social networks. Yet whether those changes broaden or narrow their networks depends on where in the network one looks. Illuminating how relationships between spouses are shaped by relationships outside the marriage therefore requires multifaceted assessments that are capable of distinguishing among discrete elements of couples' social networks.

Since the onset of COVID-19, a rise in loneliness has raised concerns about the social impact of lockdowns and distancing mandates. Yet, to date, the effects of the pandemic on social networks have been studied only indirectly. To evaluate how the pandemic affected social networks, the current analyses analyzed five waves of detailed social network interviews conducted before and during the first 18 months of the pandemic in a sample especially vulnerable to contracting the virus: mostly non-White couples (243 husbands and 250 wives) recruited from lower income neighborhoods. Pre-COVID interviews asked spouses to name 24 individuals with whom they interact regularly. Post-COVID interviews indicated a nearly 50% decline in face-to-face interactions and a nearly 40% decline in virtual interactions, with little recovery over the first 18 months of the pandemic. Compared with less affluent couples, those with higher incomes maintained more of their network relationships, especially when virtual interactions were taken into account.