Friendship and Love Relationships

1
CHAPTER 8

• Friendship and Love Relationships

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Attraction

• Familiarity and attraction
• Familiarity is necessary for a close relationship
  to develop (according to social psychologists).
• For the most part, friends and lovers are people
  who have been around each other for a long time.
• Similarity and attraction
• Opposites may attract in some cases, but our
  friends and lovers are much more like us than
  unlike us.
• Consensual validationour attitudes/behaviors are
  validated when someone elses attitudes/behaviors
  are similar to ours

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Attraction (cont.)

• Physical attractiveness
• Men prefer good looks more than do women.
• Women rate considerateness, honesty,
  dependability, kindness, and understanding as
  most important.
• Men prefer good looks, cooking skills, and
  frugality (cost-conscious/thrifty)
• Matching hypothesiswe end up choosing someone
  who is close to our own level of attractiveness
• Gender-based tactics (Buss, 1988)
• Men used tactics that involved resource
  possession (cars, money) and display (strength in
  athleticism).
• Women use tactics that altered their appearance
  (make-up, stylish clothes, jewelry).
• Personality traits and attraction
• Positive traits that attractsincere, honest,
  understanding, loyal, truthful, trustworthy,
  intelligent, dependable
• Negative traitsmean, obnoxious, insulting,
  greedy, conceited, rude, thoughtless

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Friendships

• Close relationships that involve intimacy, trust,
  acceptance, mutual liking, and understanding
• Benefits of friendships
• Reduces loneliness can be a source of
  self-esteem provides emotional support
• Friendships and gender
• Women have more close friendships, and their
  friendships involve more self-disclosure and
  exchange of mutual support.
• Female friends like to talk male friends engage
  in activities (e.g., outdoor activities)
• Male friendships are more competitive than female
  friendships (men disagree more).
• Can men and women be friends?

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Love

• Liking (sense that someone else is similar to us)
  vs. loving (being close to someone)Rubin, 1970
• Types of love
• Romantic (passionate)sexuality and infatuation
• Im in love.
• Affectionate (companionate)desire to be near
  deep, caring affection
• Consummate (passion, intimacy, commitment)the
  strongest, fullest type of loveSternberg, 1988

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Attachment and Romantic Relationships

• Three forms of attachment identified by
  Ainsworth
• Securetrust is formed between caregiver and
  infant
• Avoidantinfants suppress desire to be close to
  caregiver
• Ambivalentinfants may cling anxiously to
  caregiver and then fight against the closeness by
  pushing away
• Attachment styles during infancy/childhood appear
  to be linked to attachment styles during
  adulthood.

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Gender and Love

• Men
• conceptualize love in terms of passion
• refrain from disclosing as much as women
• in marriages, have more trouble understanding
  what wives want from them
• Women
• think of love more in terms of friendship
• rate affection as more important than do men
• disclose more
• more spontaneous in expressing positive emotions
• wives more likely to initiate divorce

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Falling Out of Love

• Can be painful and highly emotional
• May be wise if
• You are obsessed with a person who repeatedly
  betrays your trust
• Youre being drained emotionally and/or
  financially
• Your feelings arent being returned
• Can lead to depression, obsessive thoughts,
  sexual dysfunction, inability to work
  effectively, difficulty in making new friends,
  self-condemnation

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The Dark Side of Close Relationships

• Anger
• Anger justifies itself pattern
• Passivity and outburst pattern
• Catharsis-perceived injustice pattern
• Jealousyfear of perceived possibility of losing
  someones exclusive love there is a challenge to
  a special relationship, or we think there is
• Men are more concerned about sexual infidelity
  women are more concerned about emotional
  infidelity

10
The Dark Side of Close Relationships

• Spouse/partner abuse
• Myths about domestic violence
• Batterers are just being men and they cannot
  control their violence, which is biologically
  caused.
• Battering behavior is a mans response to
  provocation by the woman.
• The man only uses violence because he is drunk or
  high on drugs.
• Battered women stay in battering relationships,
  so therefore they must be masochistic or like
  being beaten up.
• Dependency
• Some individuals never develop enough
  responsibility and depend excessively on others,
  especially partners in close relationships.
• Loneliness
• People have a basic human desire to seek the
  company of others.Chronic loneliness can be
  linked with impaired physical and mental health.