The two responses to others need to be 100-130 words each and reflect on comment of that student in a meaningful way by reacting to the questions that were answered by a student.        

1-Kaila Weigelt Range 

 1. The factors that most describe my interpersonal relationships are disclosure, reassurance, and openness. I believe all the factors play a big role in my relationships and are big roles in relationships in general. These three factors all work coincide with each other. Having disclosure to be completed honest with yourself and relationships help build trust which brings openness. Openness allows you or the people in the relationship to feel comfortable to talk about everything whether it is something small they wanted to share or an issue that has been in the mind, with being open allows reassurance. Reassurance is so important. Having openness allows you or the people in the relationship to as for reassurance or communicate when their needs are not met. Reassurance is such a simple way of communicating that there is still love and care for the relationship.

2. The kind of of positive and open communication to help maintain your relationships are forgiveness and empathy. Once again I believe these two work together. You and your partner must be able to take a step back and understand each other perspectives and understand that no human is perfect. All our minds work different, and there is an importance of using empathy to understand each other. Forgiveness is hard, but to create a positive relationship you must allow yourself and your partner to grow within forgiveness.    

2-Jacob Morgan 

 I believe the greatest factors in my most important interpersonal relationship, which is my romantic relationship, are similarity and complementary. I think me and my partner have a great mix of these two factors. We are similar in a lot of ways, our humor is similar, we have similar family values and aspirations in life, but we also have differences that complement each other. As the reading mentions we tend to fall into dominant and passive roles, with her preferring me to make the decisions on what we’ll be doing for fun, how chores are distributed, and other general planning. Once I make a plan I tell her about it and she usually suggests some changes and then we do it. This works for us as I like having control and planning things while having control and planning things is super stressful for her. The key to making this work is that I have to realize that the input she gives is more valuable than my own input since I created the base model of what we’ll be doing. 

I think the relational maintenance techniques we use most often are openness, assurances, and sharing tasks. I’m an extremely open person and this carries over to my relationship as well. We’re generally comfortable talking about how specific situations made us feel in a pretty direct way while avoiding being confrontational, we see each other as two players on the same team.  Assurances are very important to both me and my partner as we both have a great deal of anxiety, so it’s important to both of us that our love is expressed openly and often. Sharing tasks is also very important in our relationship, she often works the closing shift at Starbucks so she’s home around 11 pm a lot of days. I don’t have a job right now as I’m taking double full-time credits as an engineering student so I try and make her feel appreciated by cooking dinner for her every night, along with cleaning our living space.