Interpersonal communication concepts and applications

Interpersonal Communication

The relationship that I am going to discuss is my relationship with my romantic partner. We are in a long-term romantic relationship, past the first stages of falling in love, and while our relationship is, at times, intensely private, it is, at other times, somewhat akin to a business partnership. How we interact when we are with each other impact our interactions with the public at large. As a result, while I would primarily characterize our relationship as a private one, it certainly has public functions.

For example, on many levels I feel as if my partner is irreplaceable. I have never in my life met someone with the same set of characteristics who was able to consistently illicit the same feelings from me. However, that feeling has certainly fluctuated over time. I began the relationship thinking that my partner was interchangeable, not with just any substitute person, but with the attitude that there were plenty of fish in the sea if our relationship did not flourish. Moreover, having observed some serious relationship problems in the past, there are still parts of me that know my partner is, in many ways, replaceable. If we break up, I will be heartbroken, but I will find love again. That new partner will not be the same as my current partner, but I will not be alone forever. One of the skills that I have learned in my relationship is that I can appropriately value my partner as a unique human being whom I appreciate having in my life without taking the fatalistic approach that love would end without him.

In my relationship, we are both interdependent and fiercely autonomous. For example, our daily lives are very interdependent. We eat meals together and I am the cook; I fear he would starve if I were to refuse to cook for him. He changes the light bulbs, and I literally rattle around in a dark room and wait for him to change the light bulb rather than do it myself. On the other hand, both of are capable of trying new things and have no fear of doing things without the other one being near. There is a comfort in us assigning roles to one another, a division of labor that makes our lives easier. We have had to negotiate this relational profile because, when we began dating, he was convinced that intimacy required constant togetherness, while I require a significant amount of alone time. We had to develop rules that made him understand that I need alone time in order to be a better partner.

I would say that our way of knowing one another is both particular and universal. I am very adept at picking up on body language and other forms of nonverbal communication, and, to me, that is a universal way of knowing someone. He is very empathetic, and seems to genuinely feel pain when people he knows are hurting. Because of that, both of us have always related to the world at large in more of a particular/private manner than a universal/public manner. We have always had strangers and acquaintances turn to us for comfort. Therefore, that we relate that way with one another is no surprise, but it is certainly magnified in our personal relationship.