Intimacy involves including another in your self-concept.
The attribution process: attributions made regarding a close other are more similar to the types we make about ourselves compared to the types we make about strangers.
Resource allocation: people make less of a distinction between themselves and close others when allocating resources than they do with a nonintimate other.
Communal vs. exchange relationships: in intimate relationships, we do not think as much about rewards and costs as we do in nonintimate relationships.
Self-schemas: we can integrate some of our partner's self-schemas into our own self-concept.
Transactive memory: people in intimate relationships have a shared memory system for encoding, storing, and retrieving information that is greater than either of their individual memories.
II. Parent-Child Attachment and Later Adult Relationships
Children develop different attachment styles with their parents.
Generally speaking, throughout childhood securely attached children exhibit greater social competence and higher levels of self-esteem and self-concept complexity than children in the two insecure groups (avoidant and anxious-ambivalent).
Attachment styles learned in childhood influence adult romantic relationships.
Securely attached people have learned how to foster intimacy, while both avoidant and anxious-ambivalent adults have learned how to destroy it.
Securely attached adults are attracted to one another and are the happiest couples.
III. Friendship
Self-disclosure is an important element in friendship development and maintenance.
Social penetration theory.
The development of a relationship is associated with communication moving gradually from a discussion of superficial topics to more intimate exchanges.
Cultural differences in self-disclosure.
North Americans tend to disclose more about themselves in a wider variety of social settings than people from collectivist cultures.
In Western cultures, social expressiveness tends to be a sign of social competence, yet in Eastern cultures being socially nonexpressive is often interpreted as an indication of emotional strength and trustworthiness.
There are gender differences in heterosexual friendships.
Intimacy.
Women's friendships tend to be more intimate and involve more emotional sharing than men's friendships.
Women generally self-disclose more than men, especially in intimate relationships.
Self-disclosure.
Women self-disclose more than men, especially in intimate relationships.
One reason men avoid self-disclosing is because of increased risk of being viewed negatively by others.
Physical touching: male friends employ significantly less touching than either female friends or mixed-sex friends.
The avoidance of intimacy in male friendships.
According to one theory, to be masculine in this culture requires men to avoid acting in ways that might indicate homosexuality, including expressing warmth, tenderness, and affection in friendships with other men.
There is a gravitation to the "intimacy mean" in cross-sex heterosexual friendships.
Men tend to be more emotionally open and self-disclosing than they are with their male friends, while women disclose less and are not as intimate as they are with their women friends.
Gender differences disappear in same-sex homosexual friendships.
Gay men and lesbians were equally open, disclosing, and satisfied with their casual, close, and best friendships.
IV. Romantic Relationships
There are numerous myths about the nature of love.
Myth #1: True romantic love is exclusively heterosexual.
Counter to cultural stereotypes, many lesbians and gay men establish lifelong partnerships, and the psychological dynamics in these relationships are more similar to than different from those of married heterosexual partnerships.
Myth #2: Historical beliefs about the nature of love are unchanging.
Modern beliefs are a synthesis of changing beliefs throughout history.
Myth #3: Cultural views of love are unchanging.
Compared to individualist cultures, in collectivist cultures it is more common for people to get married, and then to fall in love.
Myth #4: You must love yourself before you can love another.
There is little evidence that people with high self-esteem - those who love themselves - are more capable of loving than those with low self-esteem.
Those with secure attachment styles have the most stable kind of "self-love" that promotes healthy relationships.
Initial romantic encounters are often ambiguous.
Reading signals of attraction.
The distress of unrequited love: being at either end of unrequited love is a distressing experience.
Social scientists have identified many different types of romantic love
A triangular theory of love: love can be thought of as a triangle, with its three corners consisting of the three components of passion, intimacy, and commitment.
Love styles. In Lee's typology of love styles, he identifies three primary styles of love.
eros (passionate love)
ludus (game-playing love)
storge (friendship love)
These three types can be combined to create other forms of love.
Passionate love is most intense early in a romantic relationship.
Passionate love can be triggered by excitation transfer.
Passionate love is likely to occur when three conditions are met.
You must learn what love is and come to expect that you will eventually fall in love.
You must meet someone who fits your preconceived beliefs of an appropriate lover.
While in this person's presence, you must experience a state of physiological arousal.
Companionate love is more stable and enduring than passionate love.
Companionate love exists between close friends as well as between lovers.
It develops out of a sense of certainty in one another's love and respect, and a feeling of genuine mutual understanding.
There appear to be gender differences in the experience of love.
Men appear more eager to fall in love than women, but once a man and woman take the plunge they seem to both be very emotionally involved in the ensuing romantic intimacy.
There are potential sociocultural and evolutionary explanations for this phenomenon.
V. Will Love Endure?
Perceiving partners in the best possible ways leads to satisfying, stable relationships.
The partner-enhancing bias not only makes lovers feel better, but can also create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Partners are satisfied when the ratio between their rewards and costs are similar.
Social support predicts relationship satisfaction, but there are gender differences in providing such support.
In general, women are better at providing emotional support than are men.
We are meaner to those we love than we are to total strangers.
People use different strategies to cope with a troubled relationship.
Four potential strategies are loyalty, voice, neglect, and exit.
Romantic breakups often cause emotional distress.
Men and women experience the effects differently and deal with them in different ways.
VI. Applications: How Can You Cope with Jealousy?
Jealousy is the negative emotional reaction experienced when a relationship that is important to a person's self-concept is threatened by a real or imagined rival.
Jealousy-coping strategies boil down to two major goal-oriented behaviors:
