Page 163 - Essentials of Human Communication

142 Chapter 7 Interpersonal Relationships

Skill Development experienCe

exchanging Cherishing messages

Cherishing behaviors are an especially insightful way to affirm another person and to increase favor exchange, a
concept that comes from the work of William Lederer (1984). Cherishing behaviors are those small gestures
you enjoy receiving from your partner (e.g., a smile, a wink, a squeeze, a kiss, a phone call, an “I love you”).
Prepare a list of ten cherishing behaviors that you would like to receive from your real or imagined rela-
tionship partner. Identify these cherishing behaviors according to the following categories:
1. Specific and positive—nothing overly general or negative
2. Focused on the present and future rather than on issues about which you’ve argued in the past
Lists of cherishing 3. Capable of being performed daily
behaviors will also give 4. Easily executed—nothing that you have to go out of your way to accomplish
you insight into your own
If you have a relationship partner, ask him or her also to prepare a list, and exchange lists, and begin ex-
relationship needs and the changing cherishing behaviors. Ideally, you and your partner will begin to perform these cherishing behaviors
kind of communicating for one another. In time these behaviors should become a normal part of your interaction, which is exactly
partner you want. what you’d hope to achieve.

Explore the Exercise
“Giving Repair Advice” at RepaiR
MyCommunicationLab
At this stage of a relationship, some partners may pause during deterioration and try to seek
Communication repair. Others, however, may progress without stopping to dissolution.
Choice point At the first repair phase, intrapersonal repair, you analyze what went wrong and
Relationship Dissolution consider ways of solving your relational difficulties. You might at this stage consider
You realize that your six- changing your behaviors or perhaps changing your expectations of your partner. You
month relationship is going nowhere, and might also evaluate the rewards of your relationship as it is now and the rewards to
you want to break it off. It’s just not exciting be gained if your relationship ended.
and not taking you where you want to go. Should you decide that you want to repair your relationship, you might move to
You want to avoid making a scene. What the interpersonal repair phase—you might discuss with your partner the problems in
would you say? Where would you say it? What the relationship, the changes you want to see, and perhaps what you’d be willing to
kinds of feedforward would you use before do and what you’d want your partner to do. This is the stage of negotiating new
breaking the news? agreements and new behaviors. You and your partner might try to repair
your relationship by yourselves, or you might seek the advice of friends,
family, or relationship therapists.
Fortunately, social media sites offer considerable help in mak-
ing relationship repair by providing ready access to cards and vir-
tual gifts, for example, to help you express your desire to repair the
relationship.

Dissolution
Dissolution—the last stage in the relationship model—involves cutting
the bonds that tie you together. In the beginning it usually takes the form
of interpersonal separation: If it’s an online friendship, you might de-
friend or uncircle or perhaps, most often, just cut off communication.
You might move into your own apartments and begin to lead separate
lives. If the separation works better than the original relationship, you
enter the phase of social or public separation. Avoidance of each other
and a return to a “single” status are among the primary characteristics of
the dissolution of a relationship.