Chapter . Critical Learning Exercises - Close Relationships

Students’ experiences with close relationships will vary but should draw on attachment theory and research. Students may include in their discussion whether they have or had a secure, anxious-ambivalent, or avoidant attachment style based on their parental interactions. They may discuss how their childhood attachment led to their current working model of relationships, or how they may have changed or retained their attachment style in relation to the two attachment dimensions: attachment-related anxiety and attachment-related avoidance.

Opinions of a good single long-term life partner may differ but may include a focus on physical and mental health and well-being benefits, such as the impact of a life partner on enhancing self-worth, validating our worldviews, increasing self-esteem, managing fear of death, expanding the self, and so on. Students may also discuss how consummate love, which includes intimacy, passion, and commitment, is an ideal to many but that a person’s comparison level may contribute to what type of relationship or partnership leads to individual satisfaction. Students may also include the role of the three main facets of Sternberg’s triangular model of love to demonstrate how different relationships can be satisfying depending on what one wants from a relationship, the cost-benefit perspective on relationships related to social exchange model based on self-interest, equity theory or assortative mating based on fairness, or cross-cultural differences in intimate commitments.

Recommendations for how someone should communicate about an issue with a spouse will vary. Possible suggestions may include using an active and constructive voice response to managing conflict, taking a partner’s perspective, and using an integrative strategy (i.e., raising concerns while seeking areas of agreement, expressing trust and positive regard, and negotiating alternative solutions through frank and positive discussions).

Students will likely include some of the following strategies from the text for how to keep passion and stimulation alive over time in a long-term relationship: both partners should continue to grow and change so they remain stimulating to each other; partners should support each other’s growth; partners should offer emotional support and active interest to each other; partners should endorse more approach (rather than avoidance) relationship goals; partners should do novel and arousing activities together; partners should spend time alone doing enjoyable, stimulating things; and so on.