Page 161 - Essentials of Human Communication

140 ChApteR 7 Interpersonal Relationships

Communication phase. These stages describe relationships as they are; they don’t evaluate or prescribe
Choice point how relationships should be. For a particular relationship, you might wish to modify
Relationship Stage the basic model, but as a general description the stages seem fairly standard. They are
Your partner gives you a gift also applicable generally to face-to-face as well as to online relationships. As you read
that contradicts your perception of your about these stages, keep in mind that both partners may not perceive their relation-
relationship stage. The gift is much too ship in the same way; one person, for example, may see the relationship as having
intimate and too expensive for the casual reached the intimate stage and the other may not.
nature of what you believe your relationship Social network sites seem to recognize this stage nature of relationships by en-
is. You need to refuse the gift. What can you abling you to treat your online “friends” differently. For example, the circles on
say? What channel would you use? Google+ and the “friends lists” on Facebook enable you to group people on the ba-
sis of the information that you want them to be able to access. This makes it very
easy to distinguish acquaintances from intimate friends, for example, as well as family from
friends from workplace colleagues.

COntaCt
At the initial phase of the contact stage, there is some kind of perceptual contact—you see,
hear, and perhaps smell the person. From this you get a physical picture: gender, approxi-
mate age, height, and so on. Or you might browse a group of photos and profiles from an
online dating site. After this perception there is usually interactional contact, which is super-
ficial and relatively impersonal. This is the stage at which you exchange basic information
that is preliminary to any more intense involvement (“Hello, my name is Joe”); you initiate
interaction (“May I join you?”) and engage in invitational communication (“May I buy you
coffee?”). With online relationships, each of you will have read the other’s profile and so will
know quite a lot about each other before you even begin to talk. According to some re-
searchers, it’s at this stage—within the first four minutes of initial interaction—that you de-
cide whether you want to pursue the relationship (Zunin & Zunin, 1972). At the contact
stage, physical appearance is especially important, because it’s the characteristic most readily
seen. Yet, through verbal and nonverbal behaviors, personal qualities such as friendliness,
warmth, openness, and dynamism are also revealed. With online relations people may pro-
file themselves as warm or open or dynamic and, as a result, you may actually see the per-
son’s messages confirming this labeling.

invOlveMent
At the involvement stage a sense of mutuality, of being connected, develops. Here you exper-
iment and try to learn more about the other person. At the initial phase of involvement, a
kind of testing goes on. You want to see whether your initial judgment proves reasonable.
For cyberflirting see, “Cyberflirting
etc.” at tcbdevito.blogspot.com. You may ask questions: “Where do you work?” “What are you majoring in?” If you want to
How do you see cyberflirting? get to know the person even better, you might continue your involvement by intensifying
What cyberflirting techniques do your interaction and by beginning to reveal yourself, though in a preliminary way. In a dating
you find most interesting? relationship, you might, for example, use a variety of strategies to help you move to the next
stage and perhaps to intimacy.
Here, you’re committed to getting to know someone even better and so you might
follow that person on Twitter or read the postings, photos, and causes, for example, on
Facebook. And at this stage you continue your involvement by intensifying your interac-
tion; the texting becomes more frequent, the Facebook postings become more compli-
mentary and more frequent, and the photos exchanged become increasingly more
personal and revealing.
For example, you might increase contact with your partner; give your partner tokens of
For an interesting article on mov-
ing from involvement to intimacy, affection, such as gifts, cards, or flowers; write affectionate messages on a person’s Facebook
see “From Dating to Mating” at wall, increase your own personal attractiveness; do things that suggest intensifying the
tcbdevito.blogspot.com. Any relationship, such as flirting or making your partner jealous; and become more physically
further suggestions? intimate (Tolhuizen, 1989).