Relationship Maintenance
The routine behaviours and strategies partners undertake to help ensure that their relationship will continue.
Intimacy Process Model
A framework that defines intimacy as arising from interactions in which person A discloses or expresses self-relevant thoughts and feelings to person V and, based on person B’s response, comes to feel understood, validated, and cared for.
Being self-revealing implies…
A willingness to be revealed or exposed to the other. Dropping defences.
How does our partner’s interpretive filter alter our self-revealing?
It can be interpreted as unimportant or trivial, or may fail to pick up on the needs, feelings, or vulnerabilities.
Empathy
The capacity to understand and share another person’s thoughts and feelings.
Relationship Maintenance
All the ways partners keep their relationship strong, prevent it from deteriorating, and work to improve it when problems arise.
___ are essential to relationship maintenance to ensure stability and quality of relationship. Partners must share their thoughts and and have open exchanges about issues that matter to them.
Disclosures.
What does the intimacy process model assert?
Those in a healthy relationship require partners to share their inner experiences, to respond with interest and compassion, and to recognize these responses as sympathetic gestures.
A person feels understood, validated, and cared for according to the intimacy process model when…
The extent that the partner responds to disclosures with genuine empathy and concern.
What are 5 ways through which couples maintain intimacy?
- Shared activities.
- Social support.
- Capitalization.
- Forgiveness.
- Sexual satisfaction.
Self-Expansion Model
A perspective based on two assumptions: people want to increase their capacity and efficacy as individuals to achieve their goals and strive to acquire resources if various kinds, enrich their identities, and elaborate on what they know and what they can do; intimate relationships are a common way people attempt to accomplish self-expansion.
According to the self-expansion model, why do relationships decline?
Because the self rapidly expands in the first part of a relationship, then this expansion dies down as the relationship goes down.
___ activities can produce reliable increases in relationship satisfaction.
Exciting.
Social Integration
A higher number of social ties and more connections among them.
Those with stronger social integration have lower levels of ___.
Mortality.
Social Support
Responsiveness to the needs of others.
Visible Support
Efforts to promote the well-being of a partner that the recipient is aware of receiving, potentially undermining its value.
Invisible Support
Efforts to promote the well-being of a partner that the recipient is not aware of receiving.
Broaden and Build Theory
The idea that experiencing and expressing positive emotions serve two purposes: to expand and enhance how we attend to, think about, and respond to daily events; and to accumulate the resources – including physical health, intellectual and creative capacities, spiritual connections, and social relationships – for maintaining our well-being.
Capitalization
Within an intimate relationship, using poise events in each partner’s life as opportunities to nurture and promote closeness.
Forgiveness
The process, after being hurt by a partner’s behaviour, of transforming anger and the desire to retaliate into an altruistic orientation toward the offender, with a desire for reconciliation.
Silent Forgiveness
When an intrapersonal shift happens, but there is no interpersonal shift.
Hollow Forgiveness
When an interpersonal shift happens, but there is no intrapersonal shift.
The process of forgiveness requires the victim to…
Cancel a debt larger than the one the perpetrator acknowledges.
What are 4 factors that determine whether a partner forgives?
- Minor acts are more likely to be forgiven than severe acts.
- Victims who are empathetic, agreeable, and emotionally stable are more likely to forgive.
- Apologies and remorse tend to promote forgiveness.
- More likely to occur if commitment and satisfaction is high.
Impact Stage
The stage in the forgiveness process when partners learn of the transgression and begin to recognize the effect it has on them and their relationship; a time of disorientation, confusion, and hurt feelings.
Meaning Stage
The stage in the forgiveness process when the offended partner tries to make sense of why the transgression happened.
Moving-On Stage
The stage in the forgiveness process when the victim finds a way to adjust to and move beyond the incident.
Counteract a natural tendency for relationships to stagnate over time. New activities create opportunities for couples to discover unfamiliar aspects of their identities and grow closer as a result.
Shared activities.
Involves one partner assisting the other during times off personal stress. Strengthens trust and commitment, but can be costly if the partners call attention to the support they are providing.
Social support.
Sharing of positive events. Active, constructive discussion of good things happening to partners strengthens their bond, enabling both to feel validated and successful.
Capitalization.
Helps maintain relationships because the offended partner sets aside natural inclinations to retaliate, promoting compassion and sincere apologies.
Forgiveness.
Brings partner together in ways that are not usually shared with others. Relationships that are satisfying in general tend to be fulfilling in this aspect, and vice versa.
Sexual interaction.
