Assign #5: My long distance relationship

McKenna’s relationship facilitation factors have played a big role in a long distance relationship of mine. My freshman year of college, I was engaged in a very long distance relationship. While I was attending school here in Ithaca, my (then) boyfriend was going to school up in Montreal, Canada. We were nervous that the large physical distance between us would pull us far apart from each other, but we found that we became closer as the year went on. We continually communicated over the phone and online, either through E-mails or Instant Messages. McKenna’s relationship facilitation factors illustrate how we were able to not only uphold our bond but make it stronger. McKenna states that increased identifiably will lead to increased self-disclosure. Through various mediums discussed earlier, my ex-boyfriend and I began disclosing very personal information to one another. One example is how he started writing me poems. Of course the first few were about me but then he began writing about his feelings pertaining to missing his family and insecurities about succeeding in life. The fact that he was opening up to me caused me to open up to him. Even though it was in poetic form, I still wrote him E-mails that exposed my inner thoughts and feelings. McKenna’s also states that increased self-disclosure leads to increased relationship development. Our self-disclosure towards one another led to a very large increase in our relationship development. When we returned home the summer after our Freshman year, I felt closer and more in tune with his emotions that ever before.

I feel that the development of my long distance relationship can also be explained through the Social Penetration Theory. The four steps of this theory include orientation (initial introduction), exploratory affective exchange (sharing some emotional ideas), affective exchange (disclosing more personal information), and lastly stable exchange (ongoing consideration for another). Although we had already reached the affective exchange period, our self-disclosure (poems and emails) caused us to move into the next stage of stable exchange. Perhaps these two theories work together, since it would be difficult to increase self-disclosure without first having positive affective exchange with another.