Wednesday, June 25, 2008

friendships, turning points, balance, networks

Like Carmen, I'm interested in research on nonromantic (platonic) friendships. Kathy Werking's groundbreaking book, We're Just Good Friends: Women and Men in Nonromantic Relationships, peeled away some of the mystery of cross-sex friendships. One point Werking makes is that a romantic partner can't be expected to fulfill all our relationship needs. That's why we have friends--both same sex and opposite sex--who round out our relational lives.

beatles123 blogged about turning points in relationships. In many respects, I find the notion of turning points more compelling than relationship stages. What's most interesting for me is that sometimes turning points intersect--both people in the relationship identify the same turning point. Whereas in other cases, a turning point for one is something the other person doesn't even recall.

foodie commented on equity in relationships and maintaining a work/life/school balance, something we're covering in my COMM 144 class this week. Maintaining a work/life balance isn't something we do alone. Others help us out or sometimes hinder our ability to find a healthy balance. Establishing equity in a relationship can be difficult when trying to compare what each person brings to the relationship. And equity may be determined across different time periods--within a day, a week, a month, a year, five years. And as foodie points out, changes in one person's obligations (in this case, school) impacts what is equitable in the relationships.

Gian blogged about an additional relational maintenance strategy--networks and associations. These are relationships to which those in the target relationship are connected. The idea is that these relationships can make your own relationship stronger, especially if a couple has a strong friendship network. One drawback of much of the literature on romantic relationships is the lack of context for understanding them. The larger network within which a relationship is embedded can have a strong influence on how the relationship functions and that relationship can also greatly impact the network (consider what happens when a romantic couple splits up and the two parties have a lot of friends in common).

These are all interesting topics! I look forward to reading about additional interesting topics later this week.

--Professor Cyborg


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