Relationships

hello people!

hope you had an eventful week.

I sure had mine,

though "eventful",

doesn't entirely consider a total positive connotation over here.

oops!

anyways,

this week's COMS lecture included the

most common topic we have around us daily:

Interpersonal Relationship.

with regard to this,

i refer to this article about problems a hollywood couple faced.

http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20309161,00.html

The contemporary definition of personal communication holds that it is when we make personal contacts, build a connection with, and establish a relationship with another individual to satisfy our social needs and realize our personal goals."

As we now clearly live in a place and space where societal views define our every move,

I guess it is true in the sense that we seek a partner no longer just for:

simple communication, clearing boredom but more of the social needs.

By that I do not mean what you think is a need in life, but what the society sees as a need in life.

The couple in the article, I believe, is not just the only celebrity couple I can justify my hypothesis on.

From the states, we also have Vanessa Hudgens and Zac Efron, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

In the local context, we have Daniel Ong and Jean Danker, Christopher Lee and Fann Wong.

Sometimes, we fail to realise that all kinds of communication thrives on the word "propriety".

I refer to celebrity couples because they can most prove my point. As celebrities, much of their original identity is greatly erased once they've stepped into the media. They become people whom they once never thought of becoming, in terms of action, behavior, tastes, interests, habits: everything has changed. The paparazzi and so-called fans have shaped these attributes more then themselves. Subsequently, they realize that the change is due to not innate/conscious reasons but more towards the environment/unconscious factors. How people view them, how and what people want them to be in order to be considered safe-to-stay in the media industry. This becomes such a big causation that even life's big decision like marriage is somehow influenced by "the people" and "their views". Therefore, building a relationship to satisfy social needs may sometimes triumph over realizing our personal goals.

Perhaps ,I am being a little too extreme in that view, because we definitely cannot rule out the fact that celebrity couples do have feelings for each other before getting hitched. Nonetheless, can you just imagine if having a relationship at a tender 13 is not such a trend in schools these days. Would the phenomenon of relationships be so huge now?We may think that " I need you in my life, love" is something that is gearing towards personal needs. But in actual fact, did people not panic themselves over not getting hitched beyond the age of 30 or not having a boyfriend at a tender age "because all my friends have this "great" person in their lives?

I refer back to the article on Pratt and Montaq. According to Knapp's model of rational development, this couple should be at stage 5 of the model:bonding. Personally, I feel that the model provides quite an accurate but standardized version of basically how a relationship goes.

Take for instance this sentence in the article: "She's not the kind of person who would lie – she would just walk away and not answer the question," he says. This proves that the couple has already undergone stage 3 where disclosure of feelings have occurred such that each party is relatively clear about the other person's characteristic and mentality.

Due to this clash in ideology, the couple now faces a problem that none of them are willing to give way to. Stage 6 might follow whereby this intense differentiation may reflect a relationship that has developed too fast. Before getting married, plans of giving or not giving birth to children should have already taken place instead of getting into a problematic situation after marriage. Since sex and babies are almost an integral part of a couple's journey in life, this difference should not have occurred unless there wasn't proper discussion or planning before marriage. Montaq is only 23, 2 years after the the "legal" age of 21. Could the relationship have developed too fast in this case? Were the both of them really thinking that after marriage a consensus would be reached and hence ignored the problem?

If this problem does not find itself a solution, stage 7,8 ,9 and even 10 may concur.

The couple might very well find themselves "not wanting to talk about it" because they are sick of it, enter stagnation whereby there is an absence of joy and excitement in the relationship, avoid one another and stage 9:"termination" ends it all...:(