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I had to force Joy is apologize after she stole my phone and texted a bunch of people from it, ultimately losing my trust in her

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I had to force Joy is apologize for texting other people off of my phone, ultimately losing my trust with her

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One of the many times Joy didn’t understand personal space

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Joy and her many facial expressions

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Conclusion

In doing this scrapbook, an overall understanding of why Joy and I’s relationship works the way that it does, helped a lot.  From talking about the difference in cultures, to explaining how our different personalities balance each other out, I realized that our friendship isn’t so cut and dry.  From this project, I learned that not every relationship is simple and you use different communication concepts with different people.

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Introduction

Communication is the act of transferring information from one place to another.  In every relationship, interpersonal communication can be used to describe them.  An interpersonal communication perspective is important to understanding a relationship is because it helps analyze why things are the way that they are in the relationship and it could also help to see if you need to change something within the relationship.  With this scrapbook, I will be analyzing my relationship with a friend that I met this school year named Joy.  In terms of my relationship with Joy, the six concepts that I will use to help describe it are haptics, kinesics, trust, I-though relationship, self-disclosure, and culture.  

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Concept #6

Haptics

One form of nonverbal communication is haptics.  Haptics is using your sense of touch.  Many people believed that touching and being touched is a good source of a healthy relationship.  Like with babies, the ones that are nurtured and held close end of having more self-confidence than the ones that aren’t.  Touching also communicates power and status.  People with high status tend to touch more than those with lower statuses.  Women are more affectionate and touch more than men do.  At a younger age, men are touched a lot more aggressively than women are.  As adults, women are more likely to use touch as a intimacy form, whereas men use it to assert control and power.  Hugging it also a big deal with teenagers nowadays.

Joy is a very touchy-feely type person and I am not.  Because of this, we clash a lot.  She always feels like she needs to touch someone when she’s communicating, and she doesn’t.  For example, one time she tried to bear kiss everyone in our friend group.  None of us wanted her to do it, and we would try to pull away, but she kept trying to get on top of us.  She also tries to touch our boobs and grabs my butt all of the time.  We tried to tell her that that’s not normal, but she’s a different type of person.

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Concept #5

Kinesics

There are many types of nonverbal communication styles, one of them being kinesics.  Kinesics refers to body position and body motions, including those of the face.  Before talking verbally, humans communicated by gestures.  We use gestures to emphasize verbal language and to express feelings.  When it comes to different cultures, not all gestures translate the same way.  Our faces can intricate messengers too.

Joy is a very animated person.  Since she doesn’t fully know how to communicate verbally when it comes to English, she will use gestures to explain what she means.  A lot of the time it doesn’t make sense, so I just have to laugh at her.  She also uses a multitude of facial expressions.  She is the best when it comes to funny faces and wearing her emotions on her face.  On snapchat, there’s a feature where you can cut out certain parts of a picture and I have so many ugly cutouts of Joy’s face.  When I want to emphasize a certain thing, I will use her face to show it.  Joy can be a bit of a drama queen, so her facial expressions are always over the top, especially when it comes to her pretend cry.    

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Concept #4

Trust

In the textbook, they say healthy relationships exist when the people in them create a satisfying communication climate by developing trust.  There are two dimensions of trust; confidence that others will be dependable, and knowing that a friend cares about us and our welfare. Trust develops gradually in degrees.  We learn to trust people over time with how we interact with them and discover if they do what they say they will.  The development of trust between friends depends on a number of factors: history, availability, and culture are just a few of the many factors.

I am not a very trusting person and it takes a lot for me to trust people, no matter who they are.  With Joy and I’s friendship, we have very little trust in each other.  We do things to each other that we tell each other that we won’t do, but it’s in a teasing type of way, like I said before.  For example, I’ve been talking to this guy, and I texted Joy something about him, she screenshot it, then sent it to him.  It wasn’t anything bad, but it did make me not want to open up to her over texts.  Also, I cannot trust her at all with my phone, because she takes my roommates and I’s phones all the time and somehow get into them and text guys saying stupid things.  It’s all fun and games, and we’re still friends, but I don’t just Joy at all.

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Concept #3

Culture

In interpersonal communication, the generalized other is known as the general, or overall society.  In society there are social groups that have values or traditions that are shared, but they’re not necessarily shared by outsiders.  In terms of culture, every one has values, norms, and ways of interacting that most members in the particular culture follow.  There are three ways people learn their culture’s values: by interacting with others with the same culture, by participating in institutions that embody cultural values, and through media.  

Joy is from Vietnam and she came to the US her senior year of high school.  When getting to know her, I figured out her cultural norms are different than mine.  I think the thing that stuck out for me the most is that in Vietnam, when they are using the restroom, they have squat toilets.  I also learned that when it comes to their names, they don’t have first or last names; they have “family names.”  Their family names would be equivalent to a last name in America, but when you say your name in Vietnamese, the family name is first.  The weird thing about Joy is, that she’ll do certain things that isn’t really acceptable in America, so as a friend, I have to tell her that it’s not, and she’ll explain how it’s different in Vietnam.  I think it’s pretty cool that I got to get a new perspective on the culture of Vietnam.  

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Concept #2

Self–Disclosure

There are four specific elements when it comes to satisfying personal relationships investment, commitment, trust, and relational dialects. Investment is when we want to know what we put in or get out of the relationship.  Commitment is an active decision or process that you constantly have to work on.  Trust is a belief in someone’s reliability and emotionally rely on them.  Relational dialects is when tensions are natural and normal for all relationships. When it comes to trust, self-disclosure is the main part of it. Pearce and Sharp described self-disclosure as “close personal relationships as a transactional process of deliberately and voluntarily sharing private information during an interaction that others are unable to discern or find out through other sources,” (Tilton-Weaver, pg. 3).  When you self-disclose things to someone you are revealing personal information about yourself.  With self-disclosure, the Social Penetration Theory explains how relationships begin and deepen through self-disclosure.  The five stages of the theory are orientation, exploration, affective, stable, and de-penetration.  Orientation is small talk and getting to know each other, exploration is when you get a little bit more comfortable, affective is being more comfortable being ourselves, stable is having a fully committed relationship, and de-penetration is when you stop sharing because you broke the trust.  “The key idea in social penetration theory is that intimacy grouws as interation between people penetrates form the outer to inner layers of each perosn’s personality,” (Wood, pg. 314) With Joy and I, we’re very good at self-disclosing things to each other.  Some can honestly say we disclose a little too much to each other.  When we first met each other, I was very quiet and she was very open.  On the first day we met, she was actually naked and she introduced herself to me and I was wondering to myself why she was disclosing so much.  Later on, I realized that that’s just who she is; she’s very open.  On the first night I met her, I was in the orientation stage so I wasn’t saying much, just observing.  It’s funny, because she now tells me that she thought I was shy and nice at first, and now I’m the total opposite now when it comes to our friendship.  We reached the exploration stage when one day in October we were all over her neighbor’s house doing homework and Joy said that she was prettier than Rihanna.  At that moment, I knew she was crazy, but in a good way.  When we were all joking and laughing and posting on snapchat, that’s when I knew we were going to get along just fine.  I don’t necessarily remember when we reached the affective stage, but it might have been when we added each other on Snapchat and started a streak.  A streak is when you have to send pictures to each other everyday on snapchat.  Joy and I send each other funny pictures and not just snaps of a blank screen saying “streak.”  We’ve been doing our streak for over 100 days now, which is a huge milestone when it comes to streaks on snapchat.   I always like to joke that you know you’re my friend when I can share my sassy side with you.  When it comes to my sassy side, I’m the type of person to get an attitude with you and call you names, but in a joking manner, some of my friends may call me a specific word that starts with a b.  With Joy and I, we established that stable stage in the social penetration theory when we were able to tease each other and call each other names and not get butthurt.  In our friend group, we do some pretty horrible things to each other because we’re so comfortable in our friendship to be able to do it, but at the end of the day, we care about each other and we like each other, but we also hate each other.   Joy and I haven’t hit the de-penetration stage and I am glad about that.  I don’t want to see our friendship end, even when we leave for the summer, and I transfer schools.  I still want to have inside jokes with her, still want to continue our Snapchat streak until Snapchat dies off like Myspace, still want to “ruin her life” as she likes to say, all of it.     Tilton-Weaver, L. C., Marshall, S. K., & Darling, N. (2014). What's in a Name? Distinguishing Between Routine Disclosure and Self-Disclosure. Journal Of Research On Adolescence (Wiley-Blackwell), 24(4), 551-563. doi:10.1111/jora.12090 Wood, J. (2015). Interpersonal communication: Everyday encounters (8th ed.). Boston: Wadsworth.

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Concept #1

I  - Thou Relationship

In interpersonal communication, there are many features when it comes to the different ways we communicate.  One feature is selectively, which includes I-It, I-You, and I-Thou relationships.  I-It relationships are relationships that aren’t deep at all, kind of like when you tell someone hi and bye and that’s it. I-You relationships are relationships that are a little deep, such as acquaintances.  I-Thou relationships are the ones with true interpersonal connections, where you can have deep conversations and connect with each other. “Achieving the growth that allows for I–Thou relationships requires an appreciation of the reality of others’ experience and the limitations of one’s own,” (Brenner, pg67).  What I got from this is that in order for an I-Thou relationship to work with someone, you really have to listen, keep an open-mind, and not let your experiences cloud your judgment of theirs.

With Joy and I, it wasn’t hard for us to achieve an I-Thou relationship.  Joy is really open and friendly, maybe a little too friendly, so we became friends quickly. Joy is from Vietnam so the way that Vietnamese people talk to each other is different than in the US.  When it comes to our relationship now, we can talk to each other about anything and everything.  We have inside jokes that no one else will understand.  One specific instance when our I-Thou relationship can be shown happened a couple of weeks ago.  A few weeks ago, I was in the worst mood.  I found out some things back home that happened, and I was just so angry. When I’m not in a good mood, I don’t like talking about things, so when people asked me what’s wrong, I said nothing. At first, I said the same thing to Joy. She knew that I wasn’t okay, so she kept asking me what’s wrong, and at first that annoyed me too, so I spent the rest of the day alone in my apartment.  She kept snapchatting me, telling me everything’s going to be okay. After a while, I felt a little bit better, so I met her and a couple of other friends for dinner.  I noticed that Joy and my other friend A’Marus were the only two actually worried about how I was so we split up from the rest of the group and that’s when I was comfortable to confide in them about what happened while we were waiting for the bus.  Even though when you talk to Joy, she doesn’t quite understand everything you say to her, she listens and sometimes she’ll give you good advice.  At the time, I don’t think she gave me the best advice because she didn’t quite understand, but just knowing that I could confide in her and A’Marus, was good enough for me.  Also, at the time, I wasn’t in the mood to laugh but she said something funny about gangs, and I couldn’t help but laugh because I can never tell what’s going on in her mind to think the things she does.

 Citations

Brenner, A. (2014). Internalization, Internal Conflict, and I–Thou Relationships. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 21(1), 67-70. Johns Hopkins University Press. Retrieved February 28, 2018, from Project MUSE database.

Wood, J. (2015). Interpersonal communication: Everyday encounters (8th ed.). Boston: Wadsworth.