Journal Reflection Chapter 11 - Romantic Relationships

A romantic relationship is "a chosen interpersonal involvement in which the participants perceive the bond as romantic" (McCornack and Morrison 291). There are different types of love associated with romantic relationships: storge, agape, mania, pragma, ludus, and eros (McCornack and Morrison 291). Understanding the love type specific to your romantic relationship is useful. It is also important to understand that all romantic relationships undergo stages. A relationship consists of stages of coming together and stages of coming apart. It's perfectly healthy to go back and forth at any time. However, if the relationship stays in the coming apart stage for too long sometimes the relationship is terminated if not managed in a timely manner. Lastly, understanding how to maintain romantic relationships is vital to creating a healthy and long-term relationship. Relational maintenance strategies use communication and supportive behaviors to sustain a healthy relationship. Strategies include positivity, assurances, sharing tasks, acceptance, self-disclosure, and relationship talks.

For example, practicing assurances within a relationship may look like assuring your partner that you still love them and want to spend time with them but you are unable to due to your busy work schedule. A simple phone call explaining that goes a long way. Implementing assurance and other maintenance strategies often will improve the connection you have with your romantic partner and prevent conflict.

Comments

Journal Reflection Chapter 12 - Relationships with Family Members

A family is a network of people who share their lives over long periods of time, are bound by blood, marriage, or commitment, consider themselves family, and share a significant history and anticipated future (McCornack and Morrison 327) . Families often possess a strong sense of family identity and share intense complex emotional bonds. There are several different types of families and family dynamics. How families communicate is dependent upon the family communication pattern. The family communication pattern is influenced by two dimensions: conversation orientation and conformity orientation. Conversation orientation is the "degree to which family members are encouraged to discuss a variety of topics" (McCornack and Morrison 334). Conformity orientation is the "degree to which families believe communication should emphasize similarity or diversity" (McCornack and Morrison 334). Dependent on where your family stands on these two dimensions will decide your famil...

Journal Reflection Chapter 3 - Perception

Perception plays an important role in interpersonal communication. The way we perceive someone will directly influence communication with said individual. According to the textbook, several processes occur when perceiving someone: selection, organization, response, and interpretation (McCornack & Morrison, 2019, p.64 ) . These processes occur naturally but it improves interpersonal communication competence when you understand the processes and how they influence your communication with others. Personally, I think it is valuable to understand how you interpret information. The process of interpretation is how you make sense of the communication event. This can be broken down into internal attribution and external attribution. For example, if you are someone like me who typically uses external attributions in explanation for others' comments or behaviors then you are likely to presume that the reason why a friend is late for your lunch date is because of traffic. Whereas s...

Vivian's blog

Search This Blog