Communication in Personal Relationships
I.
Personal relationships are voluntary commitments between irreplaceable
individuals who are influenced by rules, relational dialectics, and
surrounding contexts.
A. Most of our relationships are social not personal.
1. In social relationships we interact as we fill social roles rather
than as individuals.
2. The value of social relationships is in what you do rather than
who you are.
B. Unlike social relationships, personal relationships are unique and
particular to the individual.
C. Personal relationships are based on commitment.
1. Passion is feeling an intense desire for another person but is
not the sole basis of enduring relationships.
2. Commitment is a decision to remain with a relationship.
3. Commitment grows out of investments, which are what we
put into relationships that cannot be recovered if the
relationship ends.
D. Personal relationships have rules.
1. Constitutive rules define what various kinds of
communication mean.
2. Regulative rules specify where, when, with whom, and how
to discuss various topics.
E. Personal relationships are embedded in contexts.
1. Neighborhoods, social circles, family units, and society affect
friendships and romance.
2. The many social contexts of our lives affect what we expect
of relationships.
F. Personal relationships include relational dialectics that are
contradictory needs or impulses that generate tension.
1. The autonomy/connection dialectic entails desires for
independence and closeness.
2. The novelty/predictability dialectic entails desires for
spontaneity and routine.
3. The openness/closedness dialectic entails desires for
openness and privacy. Dialectics can be managed in multiple
ways.
a. Neutralization is a response that involves striking a
compromise in which both party’s needs are met to an
extent but neither is fully satisfied.
II.
b. Separation is a response that satisfies one dialectical
pole and ignores, neglects, and/or denies the
contradictory pole.
c. Segmentation is a response that assigns each pole in a
dialectic to specific times or spheres of activity.
d. Reframing is a complex strategic response that
redefines apparently contradictory needs so they are not
really oppositional.
While every personal relationship develops at its own pace and in
distinctive ways there are common identifiable patterns.
A. A model of friendships includes six stages that may be part of
relational evolution.
1. Friendship begins with role-limited interactions where we
tend to rely on standard social rules and roles.
2. The second stage in friendly relations is marked by efforts to
discover common ground and shared interests.
3. The third stage involves stepping beyond social roles to begin
and personalize interactions.
4. Nascent friendship exists when individuals begin to think of
themselves as friends or as becoming friends and when they
begin to work out their own private ways of relating.
5. Stabilized friendship exists when friends are established in
each other’s life and is marked by continuity and trust.
6. Waning friendship involves declines in common interest or
separations often brought on by career demands or perceived
circumstances, and is accompanied by a degradation in
communication.
B. Romantic relationships typically involve three broad phases within
which there are more specific stages.
1. The escalating phase in romantic relationships includes six
stages.
a. The first stage is no interaction where we remain
focused on ourselves as individuals.
b. Invitational communication involves expressing interest
in interacting with another.
a. Proximity and similarity are the two greatest
influences on initial attraction
b. Matching hypothesis predicts that people will
seek relationships with others who closely match
their values, attitudes, and social background.
c. Explorational communication is used to explore the
possibilities for a relationship.
d. Intensifying communication helps the relationship gain
depth. There are six styles of loving that reflect various
levels of intensification:
Eros – passionate, intense and fast moving
Storge – (pronounced “store-gay”) comfortable love
that grows gradually to create stable companionship
Ludus – playful, manipulative love
Mania – loving marked by emotional extremes
Agape – selfless love
Pragma – goal oriented style of loving
e. Revising communication involves a realistic discussion
of the relationship and its future.
f. Intimate bonding signals a decision to stay with the
relationship permanently.
2. Navigating is an ongoing process of communicating to
sustain intimacy over time in the face of multiple changes and
evolving contexts. This second stage in romantic intimacy
can be quite dynamic. Relationship culture is a private
world of rules, understandings, meanings and patterns of
interacting that established partners create for their
relationships.
a. It is the nucleus of an established intimate culture
b. Includes management of relational dialectics and
communication rules
3. The deterioration phase of relationships can be examined
within the boundaries of a five-stage model.
a. Intrapsychic processes trigger dyadic breakdown, where
one or both partners individually think about and
sometimes brood about dissatisfaction with the
relationship.
b. Dyadic processes, which don’t always occur, involve
the breakdown of established patterns, understandings,
and rules.
c. Social support processes signal the likelihood of
breaking up.
d. Grave dressing processes, involve the decision to part
ways and make sense of the ended relationship.
e. Resurrection processes involve each ex-partner moving
ahead to a future without the other.
f. Not all patterns of relationships evolve or devolve in
similar patterns and stages. At times some stages are
skipped while others may be cycled through more than
once.
III.
Four challenges to sustaining fulfilling personal relationships can be met
with communication perspectives and skills.
A. Dealing with distance is difficult.
1. The two greatest problems reported by partners in
long-distance relationships are lack of daily small talk and
unrealistic expectations for time together.
2. Partners in long-distance relationships can sustain fulfilling
intimacy by finding creative ways, such as the Internet or
exchanging home videos, to communicate across distance.
B. Ensuring Equity in Family Relationships is challenging.
1. According to equity theory, people are happier and more
satisfied with equitable relationships than inequitable ones.
2. In more dual-worker heterosexual partnerships, women carry
most of the burden for homemaking and childcare.
3. Lesbian couples generally create more equitable relationships
than heterosexual or gay couples.
4. Psychological responsibility involving remembering,
planning, and organizing family responsibilities, is usually
assumed by women.
C. Resisting violence and abuse in intimate relationships is a challenge for
many people.
1. The abuse cuts across socioeconomic, racial or ethnic
categories.
2. The majority of violence between intimates seems to be
committed by men against women, and is higher with
cohabiting rather than married couples.
3. Abuse is usually not restricted to an isolated incident, but
instead follows a cycle from tension to explosion, to remorse
to honeymooning, and back to tension again.
4. Interpersonal and cultural communication practices can serve
to normalize and promote abuse.
5. Abuse seldom stops without intervention.