Relationships and Communication

I am going to share the relationship with my friend . We started our friendship back in 2016 during the campaign season. I was helping my husband with the campaign he was managing and she was running for a position. We quickly became a working relationship, helping each other out with the campaigns. Now, looking at this through the Knapp's Relational Model for Coming Together you see that we were in the initiating stage. This begins with finding what we have in common, campaign season and responsiveness, if we were not able to respond we would quickly tell the other person. I think you can look at it like, this is the person you are considering being friends with, what things do you have in common? Are they willing to respond to you? Are they receptive. 

We kept in close contact through the campaign, scheduling door-belling together and coffee, getting to know each other more on a personal level than that of a working relationship. We talked about our husbands, kids and animals at home. Self-disclosed our lives in short. I would not say that it was too much information but it was enough for the other to get an understanding of who you are and what kind of person you are. By the end of the campaign season we invited her over for a party at our house, now is where our relationship turned from working friends to friends. We hung out together and she even stayed over at the house. Our personal relationship was intensifying. 

After this night we began to hang out more and text more. Amy and I are still friends to this day. We live in different cities but we get together as much as possible. Our relationship is in the bonding stage and I think it will stay there for a long while. We have not yet had an argument or any part of the stages of coming apart. So for now I would say we are bonding and that stage can last for a long while. I do know if we do not see eye to eye, we will talk about it but I think we would both work hard for it not to fall apart and keep our friendship. 

At first we communicated through Facebook, that was the easiest point of contact for her since she was running her own campaign. I would message on there a date that we could go doorbelling together and what location. Soon it turned in to asking how she was and what were her plans for the following weekend. The Online communication did cut out the awkward silences, and made it easier to plan our events together. Even now, we hardly communicate by talking on the phone or even in person. We use text messages, even adding in lighter forms of communication with emoticons and GIF's.