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Chapter 8
Developing and Maintaining Relationships
CHAPTER OUTCOMES
•
Explain key aspects of interpersonal relationships
•
Describe why we form relationships
designed to build a relationship; instead, they are instinctive or socially scripted responses
based on people’s social roles.
• Mediated communication can become hyperpersonal communication in that it can exceed
face-to-face relational development in speed, intimacy and self-presentation.
• Types of Interpersonal Relationships focuses on family relationships, friendships, and
o Important characteristics of friendship include availability, caring, honesty, trust, loyalty,
and empathy.
o Social relationships are functional within a specific context, yet less intimate than friendship.
• Romantic Relationships
o Romantic relationships define love as deep affection for others involving emotional ties;
© 2018 Bedford/St. Martin’s. All rights reserved.
o Mania (intense, romantic love)
o Agape (selfless, romantic love)
o Relational harmony has physical and psychological benefits.
interpersonal attraction. Communication has a large impact on perceptions of beauty.
• Similarity with another person leads to attraction. Shared taste in music, religion, and ethical
views are the kinds of traits that are most likely to draw us to others.
• Personal and Social Needs include companionship (inclusion), stimulation, and meeting
living together to save money.
• Reducing Uncertainty
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© 2018 Bedford/St. Martin’s. All rights reserved.
• Dialectical Tensions
o Relational dialectics theory says that dialectical tensions are contradictory feelings we
have in every relationship.
o Autonomy versus connection is a tension between independence and dependence.
o Openness versus closedness is a tension between disclosing information and keeping
information private.
private information through boundaries.
o Privacy management is susceptible to dialectical tensions.
o Privacy management requires people to abide by cultural, situational, and relational rules.
o If there is a threat to privacy boundaries, people experience boundary turbulence and
readjust their need for privacy against their need for self-disclosure and connection.
communication toward personal self-disclosures; this may also include greater understanding
of nonverbal communication.
• The Stable Stage is when partners feel comfortable understanding their preferences and goals
for each other and includes two substages:
o In this stage, partners integrate into a stable bond if they feel the benefits outweigh the
reinterpreting behaviors with a more balanced view, reevaluating the alternatives to the
relationship, and enlisting the support of others to hold the relationship together.
o Partners must focus on the relationship’s benefits, rather than details.
• Termination Stage is where the relationship ends. This can happen gradually through passing
1.
Has Skype, FaceTime, or other face-to-face mediated communication changed your
interpersonal relationships? If so, how?
2.
What does it mean to have “friends” on Facebook? How do those “friends” differ from the
friends you might interact with mostly face-to-face?
3.
Do you think people who hail from the same ethnic group tend to form relationships with
each other more frequently than those who come from different ethnic groups? Why or why
not?
4.
When do you use passive strategies to gather information? When do you use active strategies?
What about interactive strategies? How might those three strategies work if you were looking
for information about a person with whom you were going to interview for a job?
5.
What are some things that might interfere in a relationship with friends? With family? In a
romantic relationship?
© 2018 Bedford/St. Martin’s. All rights reserved.
PERSONAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Make Your Own Network
people you get your coffee from, the mail carrier, or the custodian on your floor. And don’t
forget family.
2. What Is a Family?
your ideas with the class to see how much you agree.
3. The Five Love Languages
your life.
4. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
may also have made it difficult to talk about AIDS prevention, especially in the mid-1980s.
5. Stages in Film
Find examples in film and television of the different stages of a relationship and describe them
in writing, explaining why your examples depict the various stages. What makes them fit each
category?
1.
Networks on a String
Goal: To have students see how networks are created and connected
1. Bring a ball of yarn to class and invite class members to stand with you in a circle.
2. Start by announcing that the ball will be tossed to all the people in the circle who are the
3. Once it has reached the last person of that gender, have that person decide on something
they might have in common with someone else and toss the ball to a person in that group.
2.
The Roommate Connection
Goal: To have students understand their expectations for an interpersonal relationship
1. If your students signed up for roommates on campus using a “matching” service, lead them
2. Next, ask students if they met their roommates on Facebook or on some other social-
networking site before they actually met in person.
3.
It’s Not Real If It’s Not on Facebook
Goal: To have students understand appropriateness of interpersonal communication in a
pseudo-public setting
Time Required: Ten minutes
Materials: Examples of romantic conversation that are posted in an online setting (Note: Be
sure examples don’t include real names or other identifying information inappropriate for a
classroom setting.)
Directions: Read or display the samples of romantic conversations supplied by the students.
4.
Does Beauty Matter?
5.
He’s with Her?
2.
Lead students in a discussion about the matching hypothesis in relation to these pictures.
6.
The Great Grade Exchange
Goal: To have students understand how they adapt their communication based on their
1.
Ask for pairs of volunteers to act out the situations on the cue cards.
3.
Each pair should act out the scenario on their card in front of the class. Once the pair has
finished acting out their roles, lead the class in a discussion about social exchange theory.
What were the costs involved in the situation? What were the rewards? How did the
professor and the student adapt their interaction during the situation?
4.
Repeat for each pair of the “Grade Exchange Cue Cards.”
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© 2018 Bedford/St. Martin’s. All rights reserved.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. Why do human beings form relationships?
2. How can people reduce uncertainty within relationships?
3. Why is self-disclosure important in relationships? What are the risks associated with self-
disclosure?
4. What are the stages of a relationship?
5. How are online relationships different from face-to-face relationships? Write a list of five
6. List the ways a relationship can be repaired.
8. Explain the social penetration theory.
10. What are some termination strategies for romantic relationships?
MEDIA
Capote (United Artists, 2005)
obtain information from various people.
I Love You, Man (DreamWorks, 2009)
within friendships. Peter Klaven is a repressed real estate agent without any male friends,
so he’s encouraged by his fiancée, Zooey, to seek a pal. Eventually, Peter meets Sydney
Fife, with whom Peter shares many common interests. After bonding, separating because
and similar to romantic relationships, and how societal expectations related to gender
inform communication choices.
Little Miss Sunshine (Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2006)
A dysfunctional family manages to hold it together for a cross-country trip so that Olive,
consider how and why families come together in times of need, based on what they have
learned in the chapter about the common characteristics and theories of relationships.
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Meet the Parents (Universal Pictures, 2000)
between the two main characters is maintained and repaired throughout the film.
The Spectacular Now (A24, 2013)
but gets terrible grades and hides his alcoholism. Sutter also suffers from insecurity because
his father disappeared from his life when Sutter was young. When Sutter meets Aimee, an
students in which ways the characters change and/or misrepresent themselves while trying
to make their relationship work.
Unfaithful (Fox 2000 Pictures, 2002)
A seemingly happy marriage, dampened by the routines of affluence, is put to the test when
interpersonal relationships navigate. After an unexpected termination of the affair, consider
how, and if, the husband and wife are able to reconcile.
The Upside of Anger (Media & Entertainment, 2005)
husband unexpectedly disappears. Students should consider the text discussion of family
relationships as they watch the communication struggles between the mother and her
characters.
The Fault in Our Stars (Fox 2000 Films, 2014)
using Stages of a Relationship from the textbook.
HANDOUTS
Grade Exchange Cue Cards
Use the following scenarios to complete the classroom activity “The Great Grade Exchange.”
professor is a pretty casual, laid-back person. Role-play how you would interact with that professor
to change the grade.
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You took an exam. You think you have a good argument for changing the grade on one of the
to change the grade.
professor is a pretty casual, laid-back person. Role-play how you would interact with that professor
to change the grade.
play how you would interact with that professor to change the grade.
to change the grade.
