Week 3: Knapp's Relationship Model

Relationship type: friendship

For this topic, I will talk about a person that I met in OSU the last term and that now I consider a friend, to respect her privacy and not harm our relationship I will call her Juliet because I have always loved the name, Juliet.

[Knapp’s Relationship Escalation Model (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site., 2013]

Knapp's relationship model (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. states that the third step towards “coming together” in an interpersonal relationship is intensifying. 

According to the relationship model of Knapp, in the intensifying phase of “coming together” people within an interpersonal relationship try to share personal information to strengthen the relationship and expects to spend more time with the other person.

In this phase, Juliet and I emailed each other to figure out our availability to meet on campus. We both have an email app on our cellphone, so our emails reached each other almost immediately. The online communication that we had and have is mostly emails asking a time to meet and talk. I believe that the facility to reach each other through email helped our relationship, because in many of my previous relationships the problem was that me or the other person couldn’t reach each other to meet and talk, most of those relationships are still on hold because we only talk when we see each other on campus, which is very unlikely due to the size of the campus.

Another online communication that we used to grow our relationship was a social media where we shared images of our pets. The social media capability to share images helps relationships because it allows people to find each other's interests and surroundings, example, if somebody shares a picture of their cat, you can immediately share the picture of your cat or pet and find a common interest.