Taboo Topics in Close Relationships
- 1 September 1985
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Journal of Social and Personal Relationships
- Vol. 2 (3), 253-269
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407585023002
Abstract
This study is placed within a dialectic framework, illustrating the contradictory needs that exist for relationship openness and closedness. It explores one type of closedness in close relationships - the `taboo topic'. Ninety ethnographic interviews solicited informant accounts of topics which were `off limits' in the context of an opposite-sex relationship in which they were involved. Results indicated that there were six primary types of `taboo topics': the state of the relationship, extra-relationship activity, relationship norms, prior relationships with opposite-sex parties, conflict-inducing topics, and negatively-valenced self-disclosures. Of these topic categories, the state of the relationship was the most pervasive as a `taboo'. In an analysis of the reasons why topics were `taboo', it was apparent that the informants held a negative vision of relationship talk as destructive, inefficient, futile and risky. Extra-relationship activity, relationship norms, prior relationships, and conflict-inducing topics were avoided largely because of the negative relational metacommunication implicit in those topic categories. The findings are discussed in terms of metacommunication and uncertainty reduction.Keywords
This publication has 9 references indexed in Scilit:
- Relationship Theory: An Historical Development in Psychology Leading to a Teleological Image of HumanityJournal of Social and Personal Relationships, 1984
- On the Origin of the Specious: Are Personal Relationships Really Interpersonal States?Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 1983
- Openness as problematic in ongoing friendships: Two conversational dilemmas1Communication Monographs, 1983
- NEGOTIATING CLOSE FRIENDSHIP: THE DIALECTIC OF CONJUNCTIVE FREEDOMSHuman Communication Research, 1983
- Cross‐sex friendship and the communicative management of sex‐role expectationsCommunication Quarterly, 1982
- Metacommunication: A Re-Examination and ExtensionAnnals of the International Communication Association, 1980
- A Markov analysis of strangers', roommates', and married couples' conversational focus on their relationshipsSouthern Speech Communication Journal, 1979
- Concepts in the Analysis of Qualitative DataSociological Review, 1979
- Self?disclosure avoidance: Why I am afraid to tell you who I amCommunication Monographs, 1979