The Secondary Features of a Primary Relationship

This article is devoted to the examination of the sociological concept of primary relation, with special reference to the relation between husband and wife. For those unfamiliar with our textbook terminology a primary relation a la Cooley, is one which involves intimate, personal, emotional and multi-level interaction between two or more total personalities. It implies intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, judgments; judgments of people, not of performance, and of people on their own terms, not in terms of formalized standards with which their behavior is compared.1