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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

---

结婚头几年新婚夫妇社交网络的稳定性和变化。


婚姻使两个配偶之间的关系神圣化，但是他们与家人、朋友和构成其社交网络的其他人的关系会发生什么变化呢？对于婚后几年夫妻网络是否会加强、削弱或保持稳定，学术界的观点存在分歧。为了调和相互竞争的观点，低收入社区的结婚证被用来招募 462 名配偶（231 对夫妇）的第一次婚姻。每个配偶都独立提供了与他们定期互动的 24 名网络成员（超过 11,000 名网络成员）的数据。这些数据被用来计算配偶双方社交网络的 14 个维度，并在结婚后的前 18 个月内以这种方式评估了 3 次社交网络。随着时间的推移，配偶的网络逐渐扩大，包括了更多彼此的家庭成员、更多已婚且经济上有保障的个人以及更多与他们报告关系良好的成员。对于丈夫来说，自己的朋友和妻子的朋友的比例有所下降。自己的家庭和成员提供支持的比例没有变化。除了极少数例外，这些变化并不受婚前生育、同居或恋爱关系持续时间的影响。因此，无论夫妻的婚前史如何，结婚本身似乎都与配偶社交网络的特定变化有关。然而，这些变化是扩大还是缩小他们的网络取决于人们在网络中的哪个位置。因此，要阐明婚姻之外的关系如何塑造配偶之间的关系，需要进行多方面的评估，这些评估能够区分夫妻社交网络的离散元素。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。