Building Positive Close Relationships

Name:

Institution:

Course:

Instructor:

Date:

Summary of the Chosen Article

Relationships are an integral part of human life and before one can establish a concrete and trustworthy relationship, study and understanding of its principles is necessary. According to Finkel et al. (2016) in the article The Psychology of Close Relationships: Fourteen Core Principles, relationships are made up of fourteen main elements. The article starts by looking at major theories that make up relationship science, and this includes attachment, interdependence, and the social psychology of groups theory. The authors utilize a culinary metaphor strategy to fish out the fourteen different principles of relationships from the numerous major theories that build up the understanding of relationships. The fourteen extracted principles are uniqueness, integration, trajectory, evaluation, responsiveness, resolution, maintenance, predisposition, instrumentality, standards, diagnosticity, alternatives, stress, and culture. The principles relate in that a relationship is a unique integration with trajectories, and it operates with evaluation, responsiveness, maintenance, and resolution. Relationships entail tendencies such as standards, predisposition, and instrumentality, making it to be affected by stress, culture, alternatives, and diagnosticity.

The Article’s Connection With the Course and Textbook

Establishing and maintaining long-term relationships such as marriages has become a controversial issue in modern society. There is a huge need for improvement in creating positive relationships and understanding of challenges that affect modern relationships, and the creation of positive emotions may prove helpful. Positive interactions are heavily needed in close relationships. The emotional bank accounts idea found in the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People offers a better understanding of the principles of a close relationship (Lambert, 2020). Finkel, et al. (2016) indicate that the main principles that can explain what a relationship means are uniqueness, integration, and trajectory. Uniqueness implies that a relationship is made up of the specific qualities in the partners and the unique patterns created by the coming together of the qualities. Therefore, the common opportunities for positive relationship creation are unique to each pair of partners. Integration is made up of motivations and opportunities for interdependence, influencing individuals’ behavior, cognition, and emotions. Gratitude and forgiveness among partners foster better motivation and interdependence opportunities, and so boosting the relationship bank. Trajectories enrich the relationship bank appreciates that relationships change with time, and perceptions influence relevant relationship experiences and interactions. Thus, spending time together initiates a neer ending process of learning about each other.

Knowing how relationships operate is another essential way to establishing positive relationships. Relationship operation consists of evaluation, responsiveness, resolution, and maintenance (Finkel, et al., 2016). Responsive behaviors are integral in any relationship, and a partner may evaluate the positive or negative constructs of the other through responsiveness. Capitalization and active-constructive responding satisfy the two relationship science principles as they establish positivism in applying the principles. Resolution is how couples communicate and deal with relationship issues, while maintenance involves the partner’s commitment to the relationship. Positive actualization of the two principles will ensure that it is easy for partners to have better conflict management strategies while still being grateful for each other and establishing successful long-term relationships. The presence of alternatives, stress, cultural aspects and diagnosticity in a relationship hinder a positive development, which initiates withdrawals in the relationship bank. However, emphasis on the predispositions and instrumentality establishment of standards in the interaction makes it easy to make deposits as each partner will try to build the other one.

Controversies

The major controversy concerning the fourteen core principles of a close relationship is the cohesive perceptive it takes on building relationships. Such is a subject of friction or competing ideas, but the ideas generated the only consensus, and there is no critical questioning of the theories used. Evolutionary psychology tends to disagree with some of the theories, which poses a challenge to better understanding relationships. The adaptive values of a successful pair and the potential in them are left out by relationship science.

References

Finkel, E. J., Simpson, J. A., & Eastwick, P. W. (2016). The Psychology of Close Relationships: Fourteen Core Principles. The Annual Review of Psychology, 383-411.

Lambert, N. M. (2020). Positive relationships. Champaign, IL: DEF publishers. Retrieved from http://noba.to/z7bf68n5