ABSTRACT
THERE are two sets of families involved in every marriage. As they are joined in matrimony, each partner acquires automatically a whole new batch of instant relatives. Through the marriage, two previously unrelated (at least, in the vast majority of instances) family groups become ‘connected’—as Swansea people commonly put it. And eventually, if the union is productive, two sets of grandparentswith perhaps otherwise little in common-will be linked through common grandchildren; and two sets of uncles and aunts and cousins will be linked, if vaguely and indirectly, through common nephews and nieces and cousins. Each marriage is a kind of frontier between two families. Along this frontier there is often considerable tension and rivalry and opposition. To put it another way, the relationship between the families on either side not uncommonly reminds one of a tug-o’-war, with the wife’s mother giving the main tug on one end of the rope and the husband’s mother at the other end, with various family members joining in from time to time. The husband and wife, in this image, are of course the two white handkerchiefs tied to the rope. Neither side is pulling to win, rather to hold their own. It seems to be one of the basic, traditional ideals of extended family behaviour that there should be a proper balance between ‘the two sides of the family’—with the pull from either side, whether fierce or so gentle as to be hardly felt, equally matched. This notion of balance was one of the most persistent themes of our interviews in Swansea. It appeared particularly in informants’ assertions about how people should behave. It was easily recognizable in accounts of how people did behave in a variety of family situations, and indeed it was often easily observable in practice.
