Whether it is one of life’s big moments or an everyday encounter, inter-personal communication is how you share experiences with others and form the bonds that anchor any relationship. Knowing how and why you create such relationships is the first step toward understanding how you communicate within them.

Think about all the people you interact with and meet, online and off, every day—acquaintances, neighbors, service providers, lovers, family members, classmates, friends, coworkers. Across all of these encounters, how many people do you make the effort to get to know well? How many would you consider “relationship worthy”? It’s likely that only some of these people reach such a status and that you feel “close” to even fewer.

What leads you to form relationships with only a select few individuals, given the vast number of people you interact with every day? To answer this question, let’s first define relationships. Interpersonal relationships are the emotional, mental, and physical involvements that you forge with others through communication. Scholars suggest that five factors influence whether these interpersonal relationships form or not: proximity, resources, similarity, reciprocal liking, and physical attractiveness (Aron, Fisher, Strong, Acevedo, Riela, & Tsapelas, 2008) (See Table 9.1.) These factors influence your relationship choices regardless of gender or sexual orientation (Felmlee, Orzechowicz, & Fortes, 2010).