Running Head: LETTER of ADVICE

Advice for a New Couple
Jean VanDyke
COM: 200 Interpersonal Communication
Teresa Plummer
September 16, 2013

Dear Nora and Lou,
How to talk to an engaged couple
If they were real close friends and I knew that what I would say to them would make them listen and hear me, this is what I would tell them.
Identify the barriers to effective interpersonal interactions. If you do not talk about the things that are important to you at the beginning of your relationship, you will find yourself starting to resent the other person. Most people will just go along with what the other person wants to do or says until all at once they just explode. Then it is usually too late, and the words cannot be taken back. If you refuse to communicate or just keep quiet about what is bothering you, it will definitely hurt your lasting relationship. Playing games with each other is also not the way to go. If you are going to commit to each other, then by all means be only with that person. So many people will tell the person that they love them and only want to be with them, and then something happens that makes one or the other mad, and the next thing you know one or both of them are out with someone else. This is not the way to communicate. More than likely there will never be the trust they once had.
There are three reasons why there is trouble in any relationship:” (1) silence or refusing to communicate; (2) placating, which means to soothe or calm someone by being nice or by giving in to demands; and (3) playing games”. Any and all of these play a very important part in our interpersonal lives. In order to have an understanding of what is going on around us, people need to pay closer attention to what is going on around them. Chapter 9.1.
Assess their personal communications and improve their communication competencies.
If the person that is having a problem with the other person’s habit, dislikes, or religion, they should sit down and discuss this before they continue. They should see if they want to have children, how many, how to raise them, schools they will attend, and last but far from least, who is going to stay home with them? If they continue to ignore these problems while in the beginning of a relationship, the problem(s) will grow until they seek help or end the relationship. This is something that should be worked out long before they become really committed and decide to get married or even live together.
Recognize how words have the power to create and affect attitudes, behavior, and perception.
Chapter 4.1 states that “words have the power to make you happy, comfort, calm you, and also hurt you”. Words can even cause a relationship to begin or end. For instance, you can find that by talking to a person whether they are telling you something you want to hear, or if they are telling you something they think you want to hear, or actually telling you how they really feel. (Lakoff, 2001, p.20). They sometimes have mixed meanings, which is called metamessage. In chapter 4.5 the best way to avoid confusion is to improve your vocabulary and to understand their meaning.
There are so many ways that words, actions, or body language can be misunderstood. For instance you might ask where are we going tonight, and he says probably just hanging out. Which could mean going to the bar, a ball game, or just sitting at home. So you put on old jeans or sweats thinking that you are just going to hang out, and you end up going out to dinner and a movie with some of his friends that are dressed really nice. Let’s be honest your looks and body language let him know that you are very upset. He just laughs it off. Then when you get back home you both are in a very bad mood. You want to discuss what happened and he just wants to go to bed. Now it is not a good idea to go to bed angry, so you try to talk with him and he just utters yes dear, anything you say dear, and then the final one which seems to calm you is “you are so right, I should have told you where we were going. So as you can see words have a whole lot of power.
Define emotional intelligence and its role in effective interpersonal relationship.
In chapter 2.3 “it says that it is a set of skills that can be learned. We can improve them by increasing our emotional issues and improving our ability to identify, assess, and manage our feelings”.
This is where we need to assert our reasoning, of people skills, emotional, listening, effective, and communicating skills. What this means is that we as a person going in to a relationship should listen with our mind, eyes, and ears to what is being said around us. If we do not listen to what the other person is saying, how do you expect to know what is going on in his world? Being emotional at certain times is alright as long as you do not turn on the water works every time you want him to do things your way. If you have good people skills, you can pretty much get things done in a way that will not alienate him or his friends. As for communicating skills, this goes towards your ethics as well as his. If you cannot be upfront and honest with him then how do you expect him to be upfront and honest with you? In a relationship if two people are not honest with each other than what good does it to do to be any relationship?
According to pro quest on emotional intelligence and relationships “The role of emotional intelligence (EI) in various domains has been supported through scientific studies and contemporary psychologists have started to promote this concept for better quality of life (Geher & Renstrom, 2004). Researchers working on issues like marital adjustment, conflict resolution, and domestic violence have recently renewed their interest in the role of EI in marital relationship. The review of studies conducted in west suggests that EI holds moderate to high predictive validity for concurrent marital adjustment. Some components of EI (e.g., optimism, empathy, emotional expressiveness, emotional self-awareness, and impulse control) appear to possess greater importance in couples' relationship. Researches done in Pakistan suggest that there is a dire need to investigate the role of emotional intelligence in healthy marriages”. If this is what the Pakistan feels can you just imagine how the rest of the world needs to investigate what is happening in other marriages and relationships?

Evaluate appropriate levels of self-disclosure in relationships. There comes a time when you feel that you have known this person long enough and really want to commit. So, you decide to confide in him some of your most personal feelings. You go out to dinner and let him know that you really like him, and have some things that you would like to tell him after you get home. He is interested in hearing what you have to say, but you tell him that right now is not the time as it is too personal. By this time he should be as far into the relationship as you are or you are going to feel like a fool for telling him all about your past and your feelings for him. Giving you this information on advice was almost like a Dear Abby, but take it from a person that has been there more than once. Once it is out there you can never take it back, just like all the hurtful words that was spoken when you are angry. So my last advice to you both is, make sure you really want to be together for the rest of your lives before you commit to a relationship that could never be. Love is one of the dearest forms of relationship there is which in the long run leads to marriage and life ever after. As an afterthought just remember one thing. When you get married, you are marring each other not the other person’s family. Have a wonderful, happy, and long life together.

The appropriate time to disclose very private and intimate information is after you have known the person for a long time and have finally realized that you can thrust them. Usually by this time all of the persons involved have either told you something or by their actions have given you reason to confide in them your most private thoughts. You also, need to make sure that what you tell is the appropriate time and place. (Chapter 7.5).
“Self-disclosure is an act of intimacy and serves as a maintenance strategy, and yet very little prior research has examined self-disclosure within relationships with data collected multiple times over an extended period of time and from both partners. With one data collected from both partners in young adult dating couples, we examined how self-disclosure is associated with both individual. Overall, men and women indicated a similar high level of self-disclosure. As hypothesized, positive associations were found between self-disclosure and the individual characteristics of self-esteem, relationship esteem (confidence as an intimate partner), and responsiveness (as indicated by data collected at Time 1). Self-disclosure also was positively associated with relationship quality (satisfaction, love, and commitment)”.

References:
People who have good interpersonal skills are expert communicators. By Sole, K San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education, Inc. Retrieved from http://content.ashford.edu.
Retrieved from the ProQuest database found in the Ashford Online Library