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Taboo Topics in Close Relationships

Lewis & Clark College

William W. Wilmot

University of Montana

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.

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