Page 72 - Effective Communication Skills by Dalton Kehoe

Talking Our Way to Lasting Relationships
Lecture 21

We are born into a web of relationships and spend most of our lives
creating, sustaining, or ending them. Central to our emotional and
social lives are friendship and long-term romantic relationships:
Living in a caring, long-term relationship with someone we love is the
key to living happier, healthier, and longer lives. Maintaining a positive
connection with another unique person through the ups and downs of
life requires real work and the ability to communicate effectively. Let’s
see how this process works.

aring relationships meet our basic need to discover ourselves
and the world around us. Without them, we can’t completely ¿ ll
Cour need to know ourselves. So how do we know if we are in a
satisfying long-term relationship? Here are the three key characteristics of
such relationships:
Lecture 21: Talking Our Way to Lasting Relationships
x Investment. We—and the other—give our time, energy, and mental
focus to building and sustaining the relationship.
x Commitment. As a result of our continued investment in the recent
past, we believe in the future of the relationship.

x Trust. Trust is built by each of us being dependable and keeping
our promises.

There are also three key tensions that underlie all long-term relationships.
These occur when we are trying to balance two or more desirable but

contradictory actions. In openness/closedness tension, the dif¿culty lies in
maintaining the exclusivity of our connection to the other while retaining
some openness to other relationships in our lives. This tension is highest in
the early stages of relationship building, when each person in the couple tries
to maintain a larger social net of connections while at the same time trying to
create a deeper, exclusive relationship with the other.

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