Intimate Relationship Analysis

In the past two months I have come to learn quite a lot about intimate relationships from both my teacher, Youngjin Kang, and our book, Intimate Relationships by Rowland S. Miller. There are many important topics to take out of this class, but there are five that I want to focus on. These topics include: attraction, communication, interdependence, and power. I will relate these topics to me and my girlfriend, Abby. We have known each other for just around two years now and have developed a strong relationship ever since we first met. We have been in a relationship for a little over a year and had known each other for a year before we officially started dating. I chose me and my girlfriend as the couple to evaluate because I am very interested
Mate selection occurred when we first met. We both played hard to get with other people, but we had instant attraction to each other due to proximity and physical attractiveness. We may have wanted each other initially because of these reasons, but also because we were both looking for someone’s attention that night. The Sexual strategies theory would suggest that we were attracted at first for the wrong reasons, but that we soon came to find that we were able to develop a long term relationship. This all began with proceptivity when Abby had given me a stare that drew my attention. Her intentions became more prominent when she stared at me as she was asking her friends about who I was. I had actually performed exactly the same action as soon as I saw her. This could be considered behavioral synchrony because we mimicked each other’s actions without realizing it at the time. Miller says, “Because people like to be liked, pretending to be aloof and only mildly interested in someone is a dumb way to try to attract him or her. Playing hard to get doesn’t work. What does work is being selectively hard to get—that is, being a difficult catch for everyone but the person you’re trying to attract (Walster et al., 1973). Those who can afford to say “no” to most people but who are happy to say “yes” to us are the most alluring potential partners of all (Miller, 2015).” After reading this statement by
Abby and I have had many rewards and few costs that dictate our relationship. We are very fortunate to be able to please each other often with little interruption from the negatives in our lives. Some rewards we experience include my puppy, going on dates often, and being able to see each other often now that we are not long distance. The long distance we experienced has been our biggest cost other than school and work stresses. We have benefited from close proximity to each other. This has kept us very close in the first few months that we knew each other, but we were limited to how often we could see each other once I went out of town for college. The long distance was only for a semester and was caused by Abby transferring to a school in a city two hours away. This made it difficult to carry our relationship and limited our intimacy, but we were able to see each other on most weekends which made the semester much more bearable. I became used to having space and time away from my girlfriend. This made me less dependent of her when I was with my girlfriend. On the other hand, Abby developed more interdependence on me because she never knew when she would see me again. There became an unbalance in our desire to see each other because I wanted the time away from her that I was used to and Abby wanted to make up for lost time. Our expectations were clearly different at this point in time and that may