Knapps Relational Model

Hello again!

This week I'm going to talk about Knapp's Relational Model and take look at a relationship of mine while drawing connections to some of the key stages. First, a brief description of Knapp's Relational Model is it's an explanation of how relationships grow and climb the steps, coming together and maintaining that or take steps downward leading towards moving apart and separation. This can apply to all interpersonal relationships we have in our life.

Something that has lead me to a lot of reflection recently is a long term friendship I had since 6th grade recently ending. Not only was our friendship during a long span of our lives but it was also long-distance for the majority of the time after she moved to Texas in 9th grade. We spent hours at a time on facetime frequently talking about everything going on in our day to day lives. We would trade off visiting each every one to two years making a lot of awesome memories. I believe without technology we wouldn't be able to maintain our friendship for as long as we did. However, in 2020 communicating through the phone became less frequent and we started making less of an effort to connect, this stage was the "differentiating". When we did talk it was mostly small talk, and then we'd argue about how we weren't talking.  It felt like we were in the stagnation stage and avoidance stage at the same time. We at that point decided trying to maintain/ repair our relationship at this time was not something we could focus our attention on. I hope we will reconnect someday in the future and we will go through the coming together stages again.