ABSTRACT

We began our research on couple-to-couple friendships with some questions. This chapter explains how we tried to answer those questions by interviewing many couples who generously shared their experiences with us. As qualitative researchers, after our initial findings about how and why couples form friendships with other couples, we checked the accuracy of our answers in additional interviews, refined our questions, and continued to build our ideas about what couple friendships mean and how they begin and develop. In this chapter we describe that process, explain some of the major themes we found during our study, and consider how our findings fit with previous theory and research on friendships and marriage.