The concept of interpersonal relationship involves social associations, connections, or affiliations between two or more people. Interpersonal relationships vary in their degree of intimacy or self-disclosure, but also in their duration, in their reciprocity and in their power distribution, to name only a few dimensions. The context can vary from family or kinship relations, friendship, marriage, relations with associates, work, clubs, neighborhoods, and places of worship. Relationships may be regulated by law, custom, or mutual agreement, and form the basis of social groups and of society as a whole. Interpersonal relationships are created by people's interactions with one another in social situations.
Infidelity is a violation of a couple's emotional and/or sexual exclusivity that commonly results in feelings of anger, sexual jealousy, and rivalry.
Open marriage is a form of non-monogamy in which the partners of a dyadic marriage agree that each may engage in extramarital sexual relationships, without this being regarded by them as infidelity, and consider or establish an open relationship despite the implied monogamy of marriage. There are variant forms of open marriage such as swinging and polyamory, each with the partners having varying levels of input into their spouse's activities.
Emotional intimacy is an aspect of interpersonal relationships that varies in intensity from one relationship to another and varies from one time to another, much like physical intimacy. Emotional intimacy involves a perception of closeness to another, sharing of personal feelings, and personal validation.
An open relationship is an intimate relationship that is sexually non-monogamous. The term is distinct from polyamory, in that it generally indicates a relationship where there is a primary emotional and intimate relationship between two partners, who agree to at least the possibility of sexual or emotional intimacy with other people.
An intimate relationship is an interpersonal relationship that involves physical or emotional intimacy. Although an intimate relationship is commonly a sexual relationship, it may also be a non-sexual relationship involving family, friends, or acquaintances.
Couples therapy attempts to improve romantic relationships and resolve interpersonal conflicts.
John Mordechai Gottman is an American psychologist, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Washington. His work focuses on divorce prediction and marital stability through relationship analyses. The lessons derived from this work represent a partial basis for the relationship counseling movement that aims to improve relationship functioning and the avoidance of those behaviors shown by Gottman and other researchers to harm human relationships. His work has also had a major impact on the development of important concepts on social sequence analysis. He and his wife, psychologist Julie Schwartz Gottman, co-founded and lead a relationship company and therapist training entity called The Gottman Institute. They have also co-founded Affective Software Inc, a program designed to make marriage and relationship counseling methods and resources available to a larger audience.
Self-disclosure is a process of communication by which one person reveals information about themselves to another. The information can be descriptive or evaluative, and can include thoughts, feelings, aspirations, goals, failures, successes, fears, and dreams, as well as one's likes, dislikes, and favorites.
In psychology, the theory of attachment can be applied to adult relationships including friendships, emotional affairs, adult romantic or carnal relationships or platonic relationships, and, in some cases, relationships with inanimate objects. Attachment theory, initially studied in the 1960s and 1970s primarily in the context of children and parents, was extended to adult relationships in the late 1980s. The working models of children found in Bowlby's attachment theory form a pattern of interaction likely to continue influencing adult relationships.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to interpersonal relationships.
Diana Adile Kirschner is an American psychologist and author. Early in her career she was involved in the field of integrative psychotherapy, a movement that seeks to find the best practices from among the major schools of therapy. Kirschner's work involved integrating individual therapy, couples therapy, and family therapy into an approach called Comprehensive Family Therapy. The book she coauthored, Comprehensive Family Therapy, was nominated by the American Psychological Association as one of the 100 most important books on family psychology.
The social penetration theory (SPT) proposes that as relationships develop, interpersonal communication moves from relatively shallow, non-intimate levels to deeper, more intimate ones. The theory was formulated by psychologists Irwin Altman of the University of Utah and Dalmas Taylor of the University of Delaware in 1973 to understand relationship development between individuals. Altman and Taylor noted that relationships "involve different levels of intimacy of exchange or degree of social penetration". SPT is known as an objective theory as opposed to an interpretive theory, meaning it is based on data drawn from actual experiments and not simply from conclusions based on individuals' specific experiences.
Relationship education and premarital counseling promote practices and principles of premarital education, relationship resources, relationship restoration, relationship maintenance, and evidence-based marriage education.
Sexual desire discrepancy (SDD) is the difference between one's desired frequency of sexual intercourse and the actual frequency of sexual intercourse within a relationship. Among couples seeking sex therapy, problems of sexual desire are the most commonly reported dysfunctions, yet have historically been the most difficult to treat successfully. Sexual satisfaction in a relationship has a direct relationship with overall relationship satisfaction and relationship well-being. Sexual desire and sexual frequency do not stem from the same domains, sexual desire characterizes an underlying aspect of sexual motivation and is associated with romantic feelings while actual sexual activity and intercourse is associated with the development and advancement of a given relationship. Thus together, sexual desire and sexual frequency can successfully predict the stability of a relationship. While higher individual sexual desire discrepancies among married individuals may undermine overall relationship well-being, higher SDD scores for females may be beneficial for romantic relationships, because those females have high levels of passionate love and attachment to their partner. Studies suggest that women with higher levels of desire relative to that of their partners' may experience fewer relationship adjustment problems than women with lower levels of desire relative to their partners'. Empirical evidence has shown that sexual desire is a factor that heavily influences couple satisfaction and relationship continuity which has been one of the main reasons for the interest in this research domain of human sexuality.
Sexuality can be inscribed in a multidimensional model comprising different aspects of human life: biology, reproduction, culture, entertainment, relationships and love.
Behavioral marital therapy, sometimes called behavioral couples therapy, has its origins in behaviorism and is a form of behavior therapy. The theory is rooted in social learning theory and behavior analysis. As a model, it is constantly being revised as new research presents.
Marriage and health are closely related. Married people experience lower morbidity and mortality across such diverse health threats as cancer, heart attacks, and surgery. There are gender differences in these effects which may be partially due to men's and women's relative status. Most research on marriage and health has focused on heterosexual couples, and more work is needed to clarify the health effects on same-sex marriage. Simply being married, as well as the quality of one's marriage, has been linked to diverse measures of health. Research has examined the social-cognitive, emotional, behavioral and biological processes involved in these links.
The Vulnerability Stress Adaptation (VSA) Model is a framework for conceptualizing the dynamic processes of marriage, created by Benjamin Karney and Thomas Bradbury. The VSA Model emphasizes the consideration of multiple dimensions of functioning, including couple members’ enduring vulnerabilities, experiences of stressful events, and adaptive processes, to account for variations in marital quality and stability over time. The VSA model was a departure from past research considering any one of these themes separately as a contributor to marital outcomes, and integrated these separate factors into a single, cohesive framework in order to best explain how and why marriages change over time. In adherence with the VSA model, in order to achieve a complete understanding of marital phenomenon, research must consider all dimensions of marital functioning, including enduring vulnerabilities, stress, and adaptive processes simultaneously.
The Cascade Model of Relational Dissolution is a relational communications theory that proposes four critically negative behaviors that lead to the breakdown of marital and romantic relationships. This model is the work of psychological researcher John Gottman, a professor at the University of Washington and founder of The Gottman Institute and his research partner Robert W. Levenson. This theory focuses on the negative influence of verbal and nonverbal communication habits on the success and/or failure of marriages and other relationships. Gottman's model uses a metaphor that compares the four negative communication styles that lead to the breakdown of a relationship to the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, wherein each behavior, or horseman, compounds the problems of the previous, leading to the total breakdown of communication in a relationship.
