Dynamic of Husband-and-wife Relationship in Maintaining Privacy Information Through Postnuptial Agreement

This study aims to analyse the boundaries of husband and wife’s privacy in addressing the dynamics of relationships in households through an agreement contained in a postnuptial agreement. This research uses a descriptive-qualitative approach with a constructivist paradigm. The author uses the foundation of Sandra Petronio’s Communication Privacy Management (CPM) Theory. The informant subjects were taken using the snowball sampling technique as many as two people who are married couples with a marriage age above five years and have made a postnuptial agreement. The research was conducted in the Jakarta area. Data collection was carried out through in-depth interviews and direct observation of informants. The results showed that information disclosure between husband and wife can maintain relationship stability through five basic principles of privacy management theory. The first principle related to private information, both informants disclosed their private information to each other. In the second principle related to privacy boundaries, both informants have no restrictions because they have informed everything to each other. Third, the informants believed that they should be able to control each other’s access to this information as a preventive measure in anticipation of unexpected risks. Fourth, the rules made in the agreement were more derived from the wife’s experience than the husband. Fifth, there is no significant turbulence found in the two informants because the two informants have a thin boundary permeability so that access to information is open between each other. This research is in line with the CPM theory where the postnuptial agreement is used as a form of written communication (non-verbal) in controlling personal information between each husband and wife and providing more specific and straightforward boundaries by the agreement they made.