Week 8: Building & Maintaining Relationships
Relationship Stage Analysis
Instructions
This activity helps you apply relationship theories to your own experiences. Take 20-25 minutes to analyze your relationships through these conceptual lenses.
1Practice Prompt
Choose an important relationship in your life (friendship, romantic, family, or professional). Trace its development through Knapp's stages. What stage is it currently in? What communication patterns characterized each stage you've moved through?
Not all relationships go through every stage. Focus on the stages you can identify in your specific relationship.
2Practice Prompt
Think about your typical self-disclosure patterns. Are you generally quick to share personal information or more reserved? How has this pattern affected your relationship development? Give a specific example.
Consider both breadth (range of topics) and depth (how personal) of your typical disclosure.
3Practice Prompt
For a relationship you want to maintain, evaluate which maintenance behaviors you currently use well and which you could improve. Choose one behavior to strengthen and describe specifically how you'll do it.
The five key behaviors are positivity, openness, assurances, social networks, and sharing tasks.
4Practice Prompt
Identify a dialectical tension you experience in a close relationship (autonomy-connection, openness-closedness, or novelty-predictability). How have you and the other person managed this tension? What strategy might help you manage it better?
Remember that these tensions are normal - the goal is managing them, not eliminating them.