Revealing and Concealing Postmarital Dating Information: Divorced Coparents' Privacy Rule Development and Boundary Coordination Processes

Abstract

Divorced coparents struggle with separating from their marriages and establishing independent identities, while simultaneously maintaining parenting relationships. In the time immediately following divorce, many coparents become involved in new romantic relationships to cope with the divorce and establish independence. Their decisions to reveal and/or conceal information about their dating from one another can affect the quality of the coparenting relationship. In this study, 35 divorced coparents were interviewed to identify the process by which they renegotiate previous privacy rules to guide their decisions about revealing and/or concealing dating information postmarriage. Communication Privacy Management (CPM) (Petronio, 2002 Petronio, S. 2002. Boundaries of privacy: Dialectics of disclosure, New York: SUNY Press. [Google Scholar]) provided the theoretical framework of the study. Findings reveal a complex process of rule development through which coparents assess motivation, context, and risks associated with disclosing, along with past communication with the other coparent. Coparents reported a lack of explicit privacy rule and boundary negotiation, which often resulted in boundary turbulence. These findings contribute to a relatively new body of research on postmarital dating and to a growing body of research on privacy rule and boundary development in postmarital relationships.

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