Dear COMM 107 Letter and Response - Essay Example

Third, she mentioned that she met a co-worker who is an extrovert like her and who brings her to fun places. She stressed that they do not have romantic relations, and that she continues to love her boyfriend. She found her platonic relationship with her co-worker as a win-win situation because she could satisfy her extrovert needs without losing her loved one. Fifth, she stated that she and her boyfriend are having more arguments because he is jealous of her male friend. The paper assumes that the couple wants to preserve their relationship.

The main problem is the rise of differentiating practices during the integrating stage of their relationship, while the resolution is to apply several relational maintenance strategies to continue integrating as a couple without losing individual autonomy and identity. Knapp’s Staircase Model of Relational Development (the Model) can help analyze the concepts operating in the woman’s romantic relationship issue because it captures the stages of coming together and coming apart that are appearing in her relationship.

The Model asserts that communication is fundamental to developing and maintaining relationships (Guerrero, Andersen, & Afifi, 2014, p. 115; McCornack, 2013, p. 293). It also uses the staircase as a metaphor for a relationship, wherein the coming-together stages refer to movements upward a staircase, while the coming-apart stages pertain to movement downwards it (McCornack, 2013, p. 293). The five stages of coming together are initiating, experimenting, intensifying, integrating, and bonding, while the five stages of coming apart are differentiating, circumscribing, stagnating, avoiding, and terminating.

At present, the woman’s relationship overlaps the integrating and differentiating stages. The woman’s romantic relationship is in the integrating stage because she and her boyfriend see themselves as a couple and practice self-disclosure. They present themselves to the