Relationship and Family Rituals Matter

Most of us take part in rituals in our close relationships without much reflection. Routines and traditions include holidays, weddings, weekly dinners, graduations, reunions, movie nights, and other rituals specific to your culture, religion, and type of relationship. Quite often, rituals take place without much of a hitch, until something happens that necessitates attention and change. These episodes include the expected progression of different life stages, relocation, and military service or unexpected events such as illness, divorce, or job loss. As I write this, many people have had to adjust their rituals due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many factors, both positive and negative, can challenge how we communicate and undertake rituals. Some rituals become inconvenient or require more effort or resolve to pull them off. At the same time, the need to make changes in our rituals provides an opportunity for us to think more deeply about our own routines and traditions and reflect on what is and isn't working well.

Rituals Are Created in Interaction

As I have stressed previously, in communication we create, undertake, and change our relationships and families. Rituals are an important site for transformative interaction. Rituals are voluntary, recurring, patterned communication events by which people in close relationships honor what they regard as sacred (see Rothenbuhler, 1998) Wolin & Bennett, 1984). This definition is a mouthful—what does it mean?

First, rituals are social, as they involve other people in our lives. Making your morning pot of tea is a habit, but not a ritual. Rituals must include other people and they are centered in interaction, the primary process that makes us human. In communication, we create and change relationships and ourselves. In our rituals, we honor what we regard as sacred, meaning that which is deeply meaningful for us. For example, my darling husband started a loving morning ritual of bringing me a thermos of wonderful Turkish tea, which we had discovered in our travels to Istanbul.

Second, rituals take place in patterned ways, for example, in the case of holidays, when the celebration takes place, who is invited to participate (and not), the order of the events, the food and drink, gifts exchanged, and how we are expected to interact usually happen in the same or similar ways each time the ritual is enacted. When new people come into our lives, we socialize them into our rituals or expect them to observe and learn what to do and say.

Third, through our different routines and traditions, we create and, hopefully, strengthen the identity of the relationship or family. For example, think about how your family celebrates birthdays. You may make a point to get the same group of people together, ask Grandma to make her coconut cake, and give gifts costing roughly the same amount. This would reflect a value on similarity and equity. In my family, equity was very important, making sure everyone was treated the same. In other groups, rituals may reflect different values, for example, rituals may be successful when people are treated in special and unique ways.

Rituals Can Be Positive or Negative

We may tend to think about rituals as having a positive influence on our relationships and families. In the best of circumstances, rituals are pleasant and meaningful. However, likely all of us have experienced times when our rituals fall short. We might have looked forward to a holiday dinner or a friend’s wedding and been disappointed when things did not go as we expected or wanted. For example, we might look forward to a Sunday dinner ritual with close friends and find it to be marred by participants who drink too much and loudly express their differing political beliefs at the dinner table. In another example, my research team studied stepchildren’s perception of the remarriage ritual of their parent and stepparent (Baxter et al., 2009). While the wedding is a happy event for the adult couple, in most cases, stepchildren experienced the remarriages as largely empty. If nothing else, children must come to terms with the reality that their parents are never getting back together. In addition, a researcher studied how LGBTQ family members often experience family weddings as negative or painful, with so much of the ritual based on heterosexual practices reflected, for instance, in the clothing expected or tossing the bridal bouquet to single women in attendance (Oswald, 2000).

What Happens When We Want or Need to Change Rituals?

Life changes, such as children growing up, friends relocating, or a key member becoming ill or dying, may highlight that our rituals need to change. As with everything else in our lives, our rituals need to be adaptive to stay fresh and meaningful. While ritual changes may be challenging, I believe this is also an opportunity to take a good look at rituals and see if they still fit and work well (see Hartman, 2021).

For many of us, the COVID-19 pandemic starting in 2020 necessitated changing many of our rituals, for example, how we would cope with rituals when people had very different opinions about when it was safe to gather in person and not. In some cases, people discovered very functional ways to adapt their rituals. Some friends and family found they could gather more frequently and include more people if they kept going with their video-based cocktail hours, even when it seemed safe to gather again face-to-face. Needing to evaluate rituals became an opportunity to see how well they were working, altering or ending rituals that were not functional.

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To keep your own routines and traditions fresh and functioning well, questions to consider include:

• How well are our routines and traditions working for everyone?
• What do our rituals represent and reflect about our identity and needs?
• What is the best way to get input from those involved in our rituals?
• Which changes in our rituals should we try and how will we know if they are working?
• Do we believe our ritual adaptations will be temporary or permanent?
• What creativity and supportive functions can we put into place for our rituals to be as enjoyable and meaningful as possible?