Printed Page 190

Managing Relationships

In Alice Sebold’s (2002) award-winning novel The Lovely Bones, Indian high school student Ray Singh is desperately in love with the central character, Susie Salmon. Seeing her sneaking into school late one morning (while he himself is cutting class and hiding out in the school theater), he decides to declare his feelings.

“You are beautiful, Susie Salmon!” I heard the voice but could not place it immediately. I looked around me. “Here,” the voice said. I looked up and saw the head and torso of Ray Singh leaning out over the top of the scaffold above me. “Hello,” he said. I knew Ray had a crush on me. He had moved from England the year before, but was born in India. That someone could have the face of one country and the voice of another and then move to a third was too incredible for me to fathom. It made him immediately cool. Plus, he seemed eight hundred times smarter than the rest of us, and he had a crush on me. That morning, when he spoke to me from above, my heart plunged to the floor. (p. 82)

Verbal communication’s final, and arguably most profound, function in our lives is to help us manage our relationships. We use language to create relationships by declaring powerful, intimate feelings to others, “You are beautiful!” Verbal communication is the principal means through which we maintain our ongoing relationships with lovers, family members, friends, and coworkers (Stafford, 2011). For example, romantic partners who verbally communicate frequently with each other, and with their partners’ friends and families, experience less uncertainty in their relationships and are not as likely to break up as those who verbally communicate less often (Parks, 2007). Finally, most of the heartbreaks we’ll experience in our lives are preceded by verbal messages that state, in one form or another, “It’s over.” We’ll discuss more about how we forge, maintain, and end our relationships in Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, and Chapter 12.