On the Origin of the Specious: Are Personal Relationships Really Interpersonal States?

In considering the prevailing theoretical representation of personal relationships as interpersonal states (and development of relationships as movement between states or levels of intimacy), we identify four erroneous assumptions of previous approaches These are the tendency to treat relationships as the products of the partners' responses to each other, or of the mixing of partners' attributes, the tendency to assume that people do very little processing of their interactions with other people; the view that relationships can be objectively defined, and the view that people conduct relationships with ubiquitous self-awareness and intentionality In rejecting these errors, we propose instead that relationships are processes, and that a full understanding of them requires study of the behavioral consequences of negotiating a suitable role relationship between partners, of the adverbial properties of relationships, of the existence and amount of discrepancy among various observers' views of the relationship; and of the editorial work that people do in respect of relationships. We contend that a fuller understanding of relationships and their disorders will be produced by such changes of emphasis in the study of this social phenomenon, which has importance for both social and clinical psychologists.