hello students can you believe that you are over two-thirds of the way finished with this course that semester went by so fast i hope that you are all doing well um i hope that you are all staying safe if you are having any issues if you are ill please message me in case we need to make some adjustments to the calendar but otherwise i hope that everyone is doing really well so this video is all about chapter 11. it is one of my favorite chapters in the textbook and usually when i'm teaching it's the chapter that most students want to read about and it is of course communication in romantic relationships so this chapter is wonderful whether you are in a new relationship whether you've been married for decades or if you just want to get yourself prepared to be in a relationship there's some really good information what i really like about this textbook is that towards the end of the book chapters 11 12 and 13 we're going to be talking about communication in romantic relationships communication with family members and communication with friends and so when you think about interpersonal communication those are the relationships that probably are the most meaningful to you right and those are the people that you spend most of your time communicating with um or at least most of your intentional time communicating with and a lot of the information transfers so the things that you're going to learn in chapter 11 about romantic relationships some of that you'll be able to apply to chapters 12 and 13. so i think that your textbook does a really nice job of integrating those three chapters together so let's get to it chapter 11 communication and romantic relationships okay i will be looking at my notes as i'm talking to you all um so one thing i want you all to remember is you are going to set the tone for a romantic relationship based on how you started okay so if you are beginning a relationship and you're always doing what the other person wants and not expressing your own desires then that's how the relationship will be set up and in six months or three years or ten years down the line you may look up and think why is my relationship like this this isn't what i want and you may need to go back to the beginning and look how your relationship started so please keep that in mind that how you start a relationship that foundation that you're laying really sets the tone for the duration of the relationship okay so just something to think about when we're talking about romantic relationships there's some common issues that couples have and these are issues whether your relationships are if you're just dating if you're living together if you're married if they're same-sex if they're heterosexual but some of the common issues are access to cell phones that's always a great conversation when i teach face to face if you're in a romantic relationship can your partner go through your phone okay what about passwords do they know your passwords to your email or your facebook or each other's phones uh what are the relationship rules in terms of how you engage with your exes are you friends with exes is it okay in a romantic relationship for you to have lunch with an ex does it matter how long you were with that person right and so what are the rules surrounding relationships time spent with others how much time do you a lot for your romantic partner how much time for your friendships and your own personal interests and then when does your romantic partner have access to meeting your family and how do you all manage the holidays do you do holidays together do you do holidays separately if you have children together and you're no longer together how are you going to co-parent what is that relationship going to look like what happens when someone starts dating someone else how are you all going to work with the communication in that situation so there's a lot of things to consider when you're talking about maintaining a romantic relationship or maintaining communication after a romantic relationship has ended okay so with that being said let's think about some types of relationships now i am not here to make a value judgment on anyone's relationship right however you situate your relationship is fine as long as both parties are okay with it so if you want to have a very traditional heterosexual relationship where the man is the one that has a job and the woman stays home and takes care of the house and takes care of the kids and she does the dishes and he takes off the garbage that's fine with me as long as that works for those people if you have a relationship where um you decide that it is okay to date other people within the confines of your relationship that's fine as long as it works for the people involved okay so that is the most important piece here so it's also important however for you to be authentic for you to express what your desires are in a relationship and not have to worry about um trying to please someone else and going along with what they want and not really getting your own needs met that doesn't usually work out well someone gets very resentful rightly so okay so different types of relationships there's traditional monogamy where you have a man and a woman one man one woman traditional type of heterosexual relationship those are probably the most common relationships and they are the relationships that most often lead into a legal marriage okay you also have same-sex relationships we know that marriage equality was passed in the united states right by the supreme court june 26 2015 by a vote of five to four so it was a very very narrow margin but we do have marriage equality and we've had marriage equality for five years now in the united states so same-sex marriage is a type of relationship we have interracial marriages so most marriages are intra-racial in the united states meaning that most people who get married marry someone within their same racial group that's an intra-racial um marriage but an inter-racial marriage would be people who have two different racial groups and they get married so while there are more people in the united states uh who more couples who are involved in interracial marriages most marriages still tend to be intra-racial okay arranged marriages arranged marriages have existed in the united states particularly among some religious groups but generally speaking we don't really see a lot of arranged marriages here in the united states unless you're thinking about what is the reality show i really like it married at first sight that's an arranged marriage okay but generally speaking with an arranged marriage it's two families coming together and they decide on a partner okay so you know i might say to someone's family hey you know my son here are his credentials here's what he likes to do here's his religion here's what his education level is and i would talk to another family and we would decide okay this sounds like a good match and we would arrange that for our children so while those are dwindling a bit in popularity there are some countries where a range of marriages still take place i am not talking about child brides right and so in no way am i talking about child brides or um or forced marriages that that you've probably heard about in the united states and some smaller demographics that's not what i'm referring to i'm referring to consenting adults so i have known people who have been in arranged marriages and what they have said to me is that i was committed to the idea of being married and then the love came later okay i've known three couples who had arranged marriages all three are from different parts of india but again what they were committed to was that they were building a life with someone and then they all grew to love their spouses so it's just a different way of looking at romantic relationships and what your parents are looking for is something different than what you're looking for so in the united states what we typically have are love matches you meet someone you get along you think they're attracted they give you butterflies um you fall in love and and you get married where with arranged marriages the families are thinking what makes sense right what are the education levels what are the are the religions what are some of the values what's going to make sense long term and that's what they're looking at i am not again making a value judgment one is not better or worse they really are just different and it's just a different way to view a relationship okay so we also have polygamy polygamy is not legal in the united states but polygamy is when you have one man with multiple wives and then they would be each other's sister wives so you may have seen the reality show sister wives um there was one called seeking sister wives there's my five wives so it's become increasing in popularity in in the reality tv world so but polygamy is when you have one man married to several women so like i said polygamy is illegal in the united states so the first marriage marriage is usually the legal one the other marriages are what we would consider like a spiritual marriage right they're not legal polyamory that's another type of relationship poly meaning many emory meaning love right and so people who are polyamorous believe that you can love more than one person and so they situate their relationships where you may have your primary partner you might be legally married to them or not but you have your primary partner and then you may have another boyfriend or a girlfriend it's not considered cheating because everything is done in the open no one is hiding anything and it's really just this idea that that you're able to love more than one person or this idea that you don't have to expect to find everything you need to fulfill yourself in one person so some people have said that monogamy is a failed social experiment that human beings were never meant to be monogamous that's just something that we've kind of tried out and we see that it doesn't work by all the infidelity or people longing for other relationships so again i'm not placing a value judgment now i would caution you i have known people who have entered into polyamorous relationships not because they believed in polyamory but because they wanted to be with that specific person that usually doesn't work out very well so if you're going to engage in polyamory it needs to be something that you really believe in a way of life that you want to live not because you want to be with someone finally we have an open relationship or an open marriage this differs from polyamory in that polyamory is about a loving relationship a connection oftentimes an open marriage or open relationship is just primarily about sex so you might have an open marriage where i don't know once a month you you have sex with someone else or you go to swinging parties together or um once a year you're allowed to have this hall pass and there's rules around that it can't be someone you know or you can only be intimate with them two times or whatever the rules may be but that's about a physical need not about developing a relationship and polyamory really is relationship building so i bet you didn't think about that right about how many different types of relationships there are again chapter 11 is a really interesting chapter i find the study of relationships so fascinating um but it's all about what works for you and what works for your partner okay you can't blueprint your relationship off of someone else's because that just may not be realistic for you so you have to do what works for you and it has to work for the other person as well okay all right now i want to talk to you a bit about something called relational dialectics and this is something to consider when you're in a relationship and here's the wonderful thing about what i was saying relational dialectics you will see this again when we get to chapter 12 on relationships with family members and when you get to relationships with friends okay again the beauty of this textbook is that at the end all of these chapters really weave together very well so um relational dialectics is this idea that in a relationship there are two competing forces and you have to manage them notice i did not say eliminate them i said you have to manage them and this this concept was thought of by someone named leslie baxter so what leslie baxter says is that in a relationship one one person in the relationship may feel more a need for connection while the other person feels a need for autonomy and that may cause some conflict now the person who feels con the need for connection right now may not always be the person who feels the need for connection so in six months it may switch and the other person wants to be more connected and you want more autonomy okay but when you have these kind of opposing forces happening what happens is it causes conflict and tension in the relationship so if you think about an issue that you may be having in your relationship so again right now we're focused on romantic relationships but certainly this can be applied to um relationships with family members or with friends so when there's a conflict think about is this a relational dialectic and how is this manifesting in my romantic relationship so you have autonomy versus connection you have predictability versus novelty so one person in the relationship has a desire for routine and the other person has a desire for surprises and we also have openness versus privacy one person has a desire to share a lot of information and the other person has a desire to keep some things to themselves and so again these things manifest themselves in different ways so let's take a look at how relational dialectics may be manifesting in your relationship openness versus protection one of the common things that couples struggle with is how many people have you had sex with right do you tell your partner how many people you've had sex with do you give them a list of all the people you've had sex with um so someone might say yes i want to know everything someone might say why is that information important to you so how do you manage this how do you manage that in a relationship well you might say um i'm not going to tell you the names of everyone however if we are out somewhere and there's someone i've been intimate with i'll make sure you know that i'm not going to put you in a situation where i've been intimate with someone and we are all interacting and you don't know or you can say um i'm not going to tell you how many people i've had sex with but we can go together to take an std test to make sure that we are both safe so there are ways in which you can manage this tension you may not necessarily eliminate it but you might manage it um something else that often comes up with this dialectic openness versus privacy is the issue of cell phones can i look through your cell phone why do you want to look through my cell phone what are you trying to hide i'm not hiding anything well then why can't i see it well why don't you trust me well why can't i just look through it so i know that nothing's going on well why can't you take my word that nothing's going on right and it's this vicious circle so why might someone want to go through your cell phone is it that they don't trust you or is it that they're concerned about a particular person so perhaps one of the ways you manage it is no you can't go through my cell phone however if i get a text from tim i'll make sure to show you that text message that could be a way that you handle it you again you're going to have to be creative think about why you want that information think about why you don't want to give this information and figure out is there a way where we can both get what we want sometimes you won't be able to sometimes the answer is no someone's going to have to give in but a lot of times with some creative thinking and really understanding the root issues you both may be able to get what you want okay autonomy versus connection how much time do you spend with your partner and how much time do you spend just for yourself so when you first get into a relationship you want to be together all the time all the time right and your friends might be saying i really miss you now that you have a new boo i don't see you anymore but what happens when one person says we don't spend enough time together and the other person says all we do is spend time together how do you manage that perhaps you say you know what let's make sure that we have date night at least once a week i'm still going to spend time with my friends you spend time with yours but at least once a week it's just going to be the two of us or you might say listen tonight i'm going out with my friends uh you go out with your friends and then we can all meet up later or why don't we host a game night and we can bring our friends so we're spending time together but we're also spending time with our friends so you need to figure out a way to fulfill the desires for autonomy as well as connection and then the last one talked about in your book is predictability versus novelty so some people like the surprise so i know the surprise and some people like the routine i know a couple who have been married for i think 48 years now true story with some very few exceptions they have eaten pizza every friday night every friday night for decades they eat pizza that's a lot of predictability the novelty aspect is they don't always get pizza from the same place and sometimes they make the pizza and sometimes they you know dine in but they always have pizza it's something that they've been doing since high school so the predictability aspect is that here's our thing every friday night sometimes it's just us sometimes we double date but we don't always go to the same place and that's the surprise of it or perhaps you and your partner decide we're always going to take a vacation but we're never going to go to the same vacation spot so you have that predictability but you also have the novelty of doing something new so like i said relational dialectics just exists there's nothing wrong with having these tensions in a relationship it's just a part of relationships and what you have to do is figure out how to manage them and like i said this happens with family relationships too especially um autonomy versus connections right so think about as you were getting older i know for me with my son when he graduated from high school this summer he when he graduated from high school and he was moving on to college and he was going to be going he was only about he's only about an hour away but i felt a great desire to be connected i went let's go to family dinners let's take one more family vacation spend time let's watch a movie together and he really did not want to do that right for him it was like i've been with you for 18 years i want to go spend time with my friends i want to get ready for college and do my own thing and he was pulling away and i was trying to bring him in closer and it's a struggle it's really tough for your parents so be gentle with your parents but it's just a transition okay and that's something that you kind of have to figure out so one of the things we did was we did go on another family vacation but i did not insist that he do all the activities with us so we all went on vacation but a couple of the activities he was kind of on his own and then i was with the younger kids and it worked out fine so there are ways to manage it so that both people can get their needs met okay all right moving on your book introduces a theory which i find fascinating it's called the social exchange theory okay so what the social exchange theory posits is that um when you want to know whether or not to stay in a relationship you use this mathematical type formula benefits minus cost equals outcome and it sounds very basic and it's probably something that you have done but you just didn't know that it was officially called the social exchange theory so when you're trying to decide should i stay in this relationship or should i end it well what are the benefits of being in the relationship the benefits are that i have someone there to support me that you know they get along with my family and friends um that they you know their we have the same values what are the costs this person doesn't want to have kids so what's the outcome do you stay in the relationship or do you leave the relationship so some people might say the benefits of being with this person outweighs the fact that they don't want to have children so i'm going to stay and i'm going to be okay not having kids or you might say the benefit of being with this person does not outweigh the cost of one day having children because i would like to have a family therefore i'm going to leave the relationship the reason i bring this up is because um sometimes you might have a friend who's in a relationship and you think to yourself why are they with that person i don't get it i don't understand why that person is not good for them or that person has done horrible things or they just don't always think why are they with them it's because for whatever reason the benefits of being in that relationship for your friend those benefits outweigh the cost of leaving so they stay so what's important for you to know is that you don't get to decide for anyone else the benefits and costs right they decide that for themselves and so when we're again we're deciding should i stay or should i go really do the benefits outweigh the cost if they do i'll stay if they don't i'll leave okay all right naps model you all have probably seen the graph knapp's model of relationships coming together and their relationships coming apart so for those of us who kind of follow getting a love match not an arranged marriage but a love match where you meet someone you fall in love you get married this this model is for that type of relationship so there's five stages of relationships coming together the first stage is called initiating okay that's when the person first catches your eye you see someone across the room you think oh they're kind of cute okay or you're online and you you like someone's status and do a little winky face or whatever it is it's just that initial spark of attraction okay that initial hello then you move to the second stage known as experimenting and when you're experimenting that's when you're dating right you're hanging out you've exchanged phone numbers maybe you're texting maybe your facebook messaging my son told me that young people don't facebook they instagram they do something but not facebook in any case you are you're just casual at this point okay then you have intensifying when you get to that intensifying stage that's when you start um considering yourselves a wee but so do other people they see you as a we this might be the time if you are on facebook where your status changes from single to in a relationship okay but this is when people start to see you as a wii so if i'm going to invite you out i might say hey do you and jacob want to come because i'm assuming that if you're coming you're bringing jacob because i see you all as a wii the next stage is integrating um now knapp's model says that is when people have sex i tend to disagree i think that in a sexual in a romantic relationship that is sexual that probably happens before integration but i could be wrong but integrating is when you have this exchange of belongings in some way right maybe you have a drawer at their house maybe um there's a coat and you just take ownership of it you know you just you share things it's not mine it's kind of like oh i got this for us to use and then you have your bonding and bonding is the public ceremony the public um realization that you all are together and usually that's going to be a marriage but it could also be you know buying a house together living together okay so again those are the five stages that's typically how relationships come together there's no set stage when you move from experimenting to bonding so there's people who might be together for 10 years before they get married or there's people who might meet i actually i do have a friend she married her wife i don't know they were together maybe six months maybe six months and then they got married so there's no set stage i don't know of any research that suggests um some type of correlation between the amount of time in a relationship before marriage and likelihood of divorce later i'm sure that information exists i just happen not to know it okay so that is the the first set or relationships coming together now what goes up must come down not really however nap also provides a model of relationships coming apart and so we have five stages there too so the first one is differentiating and differentiating is those first signs of conflict after bonding okay this does not mean that prior to getting married you did not have an argument it doesn't mean that differentiating just recognizes that after you've had this bonding right you've you've gone up these um five steps of coming together and now we're on the other side coming apart so those first lines of conflict is what we call differentiating that's normal that's going to happen in a relationship right that's just a part of a relationship that's not problematic after differentiating you get to circumscribing and that's when you start thinking ah we probably shouldn't talk about this particular topic anymore you start realizing that there's some things you don't you know you don't want to talk about after circumscribing you get to stagnation and this is when you just think i can't talk to them about anything that's a dangerous place to be when you start stagnating because really you've stopped trying so back when i taught at um i used to teach at nku and i had a student who was engaged and she said my fiance and i we don't talk about our families or religion or politics or church and school i mean she had this long list of things that her romantic partner couldn't talk about and i remember saying um what does that leave so it is okay in a romantic relationship to have you know one or two topics of conversations like and this probably isn't a good topic for us but your romantic partner your life partner should be the person you're able to talk to about everything at least most everything and so you don't want to get in a situation where you're with someone and you really can't go to them because they should be your emotional support and vice versa okay we then move on to avoiding when you get to the avoiding stage this is a very dangerous time in a relationship and this is the time when couples need to seek third party intervention which is just another term for some type of counseling right you you need someone to kind of help you mitigate the situation avoiding is when my partner my husband or wife gets home at eight o'clock i'm gonna make sure i leave the house at 7 30 or i get home and they're upstairs to sleep i think i'm just gonna sleep on the couch tonight this is when you don't want to be in their physical space that's not a good thing in a relationship your romantic partner may get on your nerves from time to time however you should not have a desire to distance yourself physically from your romantic partner that's usually the sign of some pretty serious issues and i would encourage anyone experiencing that to seek some counseling the final stage is terminating you have to end the relationship and what does that mean what does that look like to end a relationship well it looks different if you are renting a house a place together or if you own a house together that may be different when you decide to end a romantic relationship there are a lot of things you have to consider if you have children what's going to happen with these kids and how are we going to manage the holidays if we're no longer together romantically but we have children do we spend the holidays with each other what if one of us starts dating if i start seeing someone and they're around the children are you okay with that there's a lot of things to consider when you have kids even when you don't have kids let's say your romantic partner has established a good relationship with your parents can they keep talking to your parents what if they've become great friends with your brother or sister do your brother and sister still hang out with your ex-partner how do you manage this in a romantic relationship so all of these things have to be figured out now i want to make sure you understand i am in no way suggesting that all relationships are going to get to that deteriorating phase not at all they will probably get to that differentiating and stagnating phase and still be a very healthy um happy romantic relationship but there are people who do terminate and there are people who end up terminating they end up breaking up and getting back together or they end up getting a divorce and remarrying each other so just because something terminates doesn't mean it will be permanently terminated but you know that is kind of that last stage of coming apart okay so we've looked at how relationships develop and how relationships come apart and again that is knapp's model now there are some academicians in the communication field that have a slightly different model of relationships coming together and coming apart but naps is the most widely used and most recognized within our field okay all right so we've talked now about the different types of romantic relationships there are we looked at how you decide whether or not to stay in a romantic relationship we've talked about knapp's model how do you maintain a relationship right that's the question dr thrower you've told us all this now how do we make sure that our relationships last because isn't that what we want i'm going to give you some strategies well i will talk to you about the strategies that your book outline the first is called positivity now some of these seem very simple and you'll you'll probably be thinking duh that's common sense i promise you some of the easiest things to do that seem the most quote-unquote common sense are the things we forget to do positivity you should be positive about your relationship and that when you're talking to other people how do you speak about your relationship have you all ever heard that saying speak those things as though they were or you speak life into a situation positivity so i have a very good friend and he was married um and he asked if if we would hang out with his wife so we could get to know her so we had like a a girls night out i am not even kidding she spent a good portion of that night being very unflattering to my friend right she said some pretty unkind things about him and about the nature of their relationship and i remember thinking does she like him let alone want to be married to him does she even like him um they did end up divorcing right so when you're in a romantic relationship it's important to be positive about it and to speak positively about your relationship okay especially to other people by the way assurances this one is key so here's what happens you're in a relationship in the beginning stages of a relationship where you're trying to to develop a relationship with someone and you're very complementary to them and you tell them how special they are you tell them how attractive they are and then one year three year five years down the line you stop doing that you have to continue to assure your partner that you love them and care about them right that you are still just as attracted to them as you were the little things that you did to get them are the things you need to do to keep them now of course it's not going to be to the same degree and your relationship is going to change all relationships change and grow still we need to make sure that we give our partner assurances and you're going to see this come up in the chapter on family and communication you still need to assure your family members that you love them and care about them even if you are growing up and you've gotten you know you don't live in the house anymore or now you have your own family you still need to provide those assurances sharing tasks so they have done research suggesting that couples who report the most relational satisfaction also report that they believe that their spouses share a task with them so this goes back to what i said at the beginning it doesn't matter what i think it matters what works for your relationship so if one person says i'm gonna be responsible for cooking dinner and cleaning the house and the other person says i'm gonna be responsible for taking care of the outside of the house if that's what works for you and you see that as an equitable exchange then that's fine okay but oftentimes what happens is one person thinks i'm doing all the work you're not pulling your weight you're not helping enough and that reads resentment so it's incumbent upon both partners to recognize that so one person has to recognize if i want help i need to ask for it and i can't just say i need you to help more you need to be specific about what you want or need okay no one can read minds no one has a crystal ball you need to be specific the other person if you see your partner struggling you need to step in and help them it's not okay to sit and watch someone you care about struggle and not offer your assistance because if you're not going to help why are you there so again sharing tasks it just depends on what works for that couple in terms of what they find equitable but couples who feel that there is an equitable split between sharing tasks report the most relational satisfaction and sharing tasks might be that we're both financially responsible for the household if we have kids we're taking care of kids how are we taking care of planning family outings who's the one making doctors appointments all of those components to running a family and having life together those are all tasks so please keep that in mind sharing task is vitally important acceptance you need to accept your partner for the person they are now a lot of times people get caught up in liking someone's potential okay this person would be great if they did a b or c you need to love your partner for the person that they are in this moment at this time okay no one deserves to be in a relationship with someone who doesn't value them for who they are in this moment okay that's that's a very unkind thing to do for to someone so you need to accept them for who they are now this is not to say that your partner may have some irritating partner behaviors and what you all learned about in the chapter on conflict some irritating partner behaviors and you say hey can you stop this or hey kim can we try and do this a different way that's fine but at the core you should care about your partner and accept them for who they are in this moment okay self-disclosure it is important that you self-disclose to your romantic partner your partner should probably be the first person you're going to right when you when you have information you need to talk to them when you're scared when you're feeling vulnerable when good things have happened when you have news from work your partner should be the one that you're sharing that with oftentimes when couples start drifting apart one of the key elements that you can tell that a relationship is starting to drift is when couples stop self-disclosing to each other this isn't to say that you shouldn't talk to your best friend or your or your mother or your father but your partner really should be your primary source of support and when that stops happening when you start going to other people instead of your partner that's a pretty dangerous time in a romantic relationship and chances are high that there are other issues going on as well and again i would suggest some type of third party intervention okay relationship talks this is another key component to maintaining a relationship do you have a conversation about the status of your relationship what does that mean it means saying how are things going okay now i do know a couple they've been married for years so i guess it's effective for them but every year they sit down and they renegotiate their contract that is what they call it renegotiating the contract and what they do is they talk about here's what is working for me in this relationship and here's what is no longer working so i know before that i said i would kind of take charge of the cooking and grocery shopping however i've gone back to school or i've gotten a promotion at work or i'm too busy i can't be the one doing all this we need to renegotiate that we need to talk about what this looks like or you know how are you feeling about the progress of our relationship are we moving in a direction you want us to move are we moving too fast are we moving too slow is there something else i can be doing i tend to be more of a formal communicator so i really like the idea of sitting down and renegotiating the contract or just saying hey let's have a relationship talk but you don't have to be so formal maybe you're just having dinner and you say hey so you know how's everything going how are you feeling about our relationship and it can be more of a casual conversation but having relationship talks is vitally important it doesn't mean something is wrong so if your partner comes to you and says we need to talk don't panic that does not mean that they're trying to end the relationship i mean they might be saying that but that's not always what that means it really is a good practice to be talking to your partner about what's happening okay so that if there's some issues you can nip it in the bug and it doesn't end up being you remember when we talked about conflict when your book talks about conflict kitchen sinking right and how you have these um these issues that never get resolved and they just keep piling up because it's really hard to come back from that so relationship talks are vitally important finally social networks okay do you involve your partner in your social networks do they know who your friends are do they know who your family is now if your romantic partner doesn't want to introduce you to their friends and family i'm not saying you should break up with them right now i'm saying i would wonder why that is okay because your friends and family are really important to you and why would you not want your partner to know them because in getting to know them they also come to know you in a different way okay what happens when you and your partner have some type of conflict are you running to tell your friends and family what happened we all know that is not a good idea because here's what happens you and your partner have a big fight okay they've done something that really hurt your feelings you tell your sister what happened well you and your partner make up they've apologized you have talked to each other you've made a plan how not to let this happen again and you're good but your sister over here remembers that you called her crying she's not good with it so now she doesn't want to have anything to do with your partner so what happens at thanksgiving do you not take them around your family because your sister has told everyone what a jerk they were to you what happens when they say i don't want you to go to their house because i don't like the way your sister treats me anymore so this can be very problematic so hopefully you have someone in your life who's objective my best friend is very objective i can tell her um if my girlfriend does something i can say let me tell you what just happened and i know that my best friend can be objective and say okay we'll look at it from this side look at it from that side if i decide to get over it she's not going to hold a grudge but she's probably the only person i can do that with maybe one more person so you should have people in your life that you can go to but for the most part issues in your relationship really need to stay between you and your partner okay all right so those are seven maintenance strategies positivity assurances sharing tasks acceptance self-disclosure relationship talks and then social networks okay all right we are almost finished i know this is getting a little long but there's so much good information in chapter 11. the last thing i want to talk to you about is the dark side of romantic relationships so your textbook talks about betrayal jealousy intrusion and violence i'm not going to go over violence i am going to do a separate recording for that probably in the next week or so and that one will be specific to violence and romantic relationships it will be a difficult conversation but a very necessary conversation and i feel i would be doing a disservice if i did not devote the time necessary to that conversation but right now our video is running about 45 minutes long so i'm gonna go ahead and just talk about those three pieces and then i'll do a separate video next week okay so betrayal betrayal happens in a romantic relationship and it's not always sexual infidelity so oftentimes when we think someone betrayed you in a relationship the first thing we go to is oh my gosh they cheated on you they had sex with someone else that's not the only way that you can betray someone in a relationship okay you might um experience betrayal if they have told a secret you've told them something in confidence and they share that with someone else okay um perhaps they've been dishonest about what they've been doing perhaps they've been spending money in ways that you all have agreed not to spend money so again sexual infidelity is not the only way that relationships experience betrayal there's also jealousy jealousy is a natural human emotion jealousy is going to happen in romantic relationships friendships siblings jealousy happens so if you think about jealousy as a natural human emotion and if you remember in chapter four we talked about blended emotions two or more emotions at the same time that's all jealousy is um fear sadness anger you put those together you get jealousy if you think about jealousy as a blended emotion then you can take each piece of it and have it make sense so your best friend has a new friend and you're feeling jealous they used to spend all their time with me now they keep talking about this other person what's making you feel jealous well let's break that down you might feel sad because you miss spending time with your friend perhaps you are feeling angry because you're being left out perhaps you are fearful that you are growing apart in your relationship is ending and if you put that together well now we have jealousy but once you look at it for what it is you're better able to manage it so then you might say okay i'm feeling um a little bit angry because i was excluded let me let me have a conversation about my feelings of exclusion i'm feeling that we're drifting away so what can i do so that we can kind of reconnect so it's easier to manage jealousy when you really understand why you're why you're feeling that way okay and when we don't demonize people for it there's this fabulous concept i really love it it's called wedging and wedging is when someone is using online methods to try and interfere in a romantic relationship and why i love this so much is that our use of social media is so much so that academicians have created a whole term just for people trying to make others jealous using online means i just think that's so fascinating in any case let's say you're in a new relationship and you're you and your ex are still facebook friends and they go through and they like all your posts or they start posting things remember that time when we went on vacation and we were in the hot tub that was so much fun or they post old pictures if they do this and they know that you're in a relationship you can tell them you need to stop wedging that's a real term okay so that's wedging and then intrusion intrusion um it could be stalking but intrusion is when you post relationship so after relationship has ended if you are following someone around you um you you show up where they are just by accident right you're intruding on their life post-relationship that's it that's relational intrusion okay so again that's considered the dark side of romantic relationships betrayal jealousy and intrusion and again i will be sure to talk to you all about um violence and relationships next week okay all right so thank you for hanging in there with me this long i know it was a long recording but this really is such a fascinating chapter and i really hope you enjoyed it as much as i enjoyed talking about it but really what i want you to take away from it is that a lot of the information here applies to communication and relationships with family members and communication and relationships with friendships and remember however you want to situate your relationship is fine as long as it works for you and for the other person and be authentic don't agree to a particular type of relationship to try and keep someone that does not end up well you have to be authentic and do what is in your best interest it is okay to do what's in your best self-interest that's not um selfishness that's survival okay you deserve it so for your uh question i'm gonna post a question on blackboard i'm gonna i'm gonna post a couple of things after this video i'm going to post two clips one is called um it's from the moth in love with a younger man and one of them is uh two exes that are talking they broke up and they are meeting to talk post breakup so i'm going to post those and i want you to watch those and then i'm gonna post a question about relationship rules and then you'll respond to those in your discussion board post so again thank you for hanging in there with me i hope you all are doing great you are almost to the end of the semester so hang in there i know you're probably getting stressed you may be tired you have a lot of work due in the next couple of weeks with all these different classes that you're taking but you are so close to the finish line if there's anything i can do please contact me email is probably still the best way to get a hold of me and we can make adjustments when necessary okay again i hope you have a wonderful week take care