When thinking about what to write about for this assignment, I realized that McKenna’s Relationship Facilitation Factors played a role in my last relationship. My boyfriend and I met briefly at a party, and afterwards he found me on MySpace (it was high school). This would refer to the Identifiability factor, because we were able to see each other’s friends and pictures, so it was not quite as anonymous and made self-disclosure easier. Once we started talking more, whether it was through Instant Messenger or over the phone, the factor of connecting to similar others came into play. We went to different high schools, but after talking we realized we had a lot of common ground. We knew a lot of the same people and had been to the same parties and somehow never met. “Getting the goods,” which refers to getting information about a person prior to meeting them, was also a factor in this relationship, because between MySpace and talking online, we were able to find out a lot of information about each other before our first date (especially since he took forever to finally ask me out).
When we continued the relationship long-distance into our freshman year of college, the same factors played a role in how our relationship went, as well as Interactional Control, because we were both able to choose which medium of communication to use, and better control the conversation. The best example of this that comes to mind is that almost every time we got mad at each other, we argued about it over Instant Messenger rather than over the phone. On the one hand, we were less inhibited and said how we really felt, but it was much easier for messages to get misunderstood and situations to get blown out of proportion, and quickly led to the end of the relationship (which happened over the phone, another example of interactional control).
Although McKenna’s Relationship Facilitator Factors were not enough to maintain a long-distance relationship for my previous boyfriend and I, they definitely made our first meeting and early stages of the relationship more comfortable.
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I think that you did a good job of explaining how McKenna’s relationship facilitation factors played an important role in the beginning stages of your relationship with your boyfriend. What most interested me was your description of how you mediated your long-distance relationship in its later stages. You stated that you chose to use AIM whenever you and your boyfriend argued. In doing so, the main points of your arguments were often times misinterpreted and consequently blown out of proportion. This reminded me of theories that we learned about earlier in the semester. The Media Richness Theory would have stated that the ambiguity and equivocalness of argumentation would lead you to use a richer medium, like the phone, when you needed to argue. However, your choice of AIM for arguments was more indicative of O’Sullivan’s Impression Management Model. Because of the negative valence associated with fighting with your boyfriend, it suggests that you would prefer a mediated interaction to create a buffer between the two of you. O’Sullivan’s model is exactly the method you seem to have used, which you unfortunately said even appeared to have influenced your breakup.
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