What is the first stage of friendship communication?

Posted by: taraburke | April 18, 2009

Whether it is friendship between two males, two females or a male and a female, there has been a model that is supposed to explain how these friendships develop.  Created by Bill Rawlins, there are 6 stages that you go through when being someones friend.  I have found that this model is very accurate and that I can think of a friend, named Jim*, that I have gone through all of the stages with:

1. Role-Limited Interaction:  this is when two people make the first contact.  Since neither person knows how this friendship is going to end up, they are wary about revealing personal information.  This happened with Jim and I went we first met in biology class are barely talked, I thought he was really strange.  He also threw up in the middle of class one times so I didn’t really want to talk to him.  

2. Friendly Relations:  This is when small talk starts and you legitimately decide if you want to be friends or not.  You talk about interests, hobbies, experiences, etc and “seek to determine whether our interest is reciprocated” (Gamble and Gamble, 145).  This happened with Jim and I when we were in the same PE class and started spending a lot of time together, talking and actually getting to know each other.  We found out that although we were really different, we complimented each other well and had some common interests.  He is also really funny so I wanted to be around him.

3. Moving Toward Friendship:  At this point, people started spending time together voluntarily and look to expand on the friendship.  You also increase breadth and depth by talking about attitudes and values.  Jim and I started talking on the phone constantly and the conversation shifted from just jokes and class to issues in our lives and things we needed help with.  We also discovered that we lived close enough to each other where we could hang out occasionally.

4. Nascent Friendship:  Interaction between the two people become regularized and standards or stereotypes you put on friendships is eliminated with this person.  People set up their own rules.  As Jim and my’s friendship became more intense, we definitely exhibited these patterns.  We would talk on the phone a lot of nights, or hang out, usually after midnight just because of work schedules, and this both worked for us in the summer.  I don’t ask a lot of my friends to hang out that late.  We also knew all the details of the romantic relationships in each others lives so that would be a point of discussion that I didn’t really share with a lot of people.  

5. Stabilized Friendship:  Here, both parties depend on the friendship and the two people count on each other automatically.  They trust each other, share intimate information, and expect that you will be friends for awhile.  Once Jim and I started talking about romantic relationships, I knew I could count on him.  I have called him crying before because I knew that he would be there, and when he started his current rocky relationship, he would call me.  A lot of the time I would just expect that we would hang out after he got off work or on the weekend.  

6. Waning Friendship:  Unfortunately, all good things start to slow down.  At this stage, something comes between the friendship and it is harder to maintain than before.  For us, it was him becoming engaged to a girl who hated me and was jealous of our friendship.  I also moved to college so that didn’t help.  We still maintain some type of friendship today, but it is not as close as it used to be.

Gamble, T. K., & Gamble, M. W. (2003). The Gender Communication Connection. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Hi there, guys! In the last our article, we learned about the theory of social penetration - the theory that in the process of communication people open more and more (like onions) and their conversations become more personal therefore taboo topics can arise in communication. Today we want to tell you more about the main stages of bringing people closer together.

Stages of self‐disclosure

Most of us have one or two "best friends" and several "close friends" or "good friends," the exact number depending on the way in which you define and distinguish. (Crockett, Losoff, and Petersen, 1984) Also, just good friends can become best friends, let us see how that happens.

The development of relationships between friends goes through several stages of self-disclosure and in the half-last stages of this self-disclosure of two persons, we can consider that this is platonic love.

The first stage of self-disclosure is orientation. At this stage, people are careful to share information about themselves, without delving into personal problems and experiences. People only show the image of their public self without the manifestation of any of their sides, which can be assessed by society as negative. For example, they behave as politely as possible and try to avoid conflicts.

Exploratory affective exchange is the second stage of self-disclosure. At this stage, people are less careful and share more detailed information about themselves that goes beyond the superficial. However, they still stick to their public selves. In addition, at this stage, the range of topics that people can inspire increases, but still they remain at the level of topics that we can discuss with our acquaintances or not close friends.

At the third stage, which is called affective exchange, people are ready to disclose more personal information about themselves and more disclose their private self. Interaction between people becomes more spontaneous, as well as the disclosure of more intimate information becomes accidental, the same initiation of conflict may be present. This happens because people in communication with each other move to a more comfortable level. At this stage, people are freer to poke fun at each other, give nicknames, and make sarcastic remarks. We may assume that this stage refers to interactions between close friends or romantic partners.

The final stage of self-disclosure is stable exchange. This stage is characterized by the constant disclosure of a person's private self. People feel comfortable with each other and can freely share their personal information, their fears, and secrets. They freely express their opinions and feelings. This phase refers to relationships between close family members, close friends, and romantic partners.

Ending a relationship

Sometimes even the closest friendship or relationship can end, and we are just as interested in knowing how and why this happens, so we want to tell you about another concept - social de-escalation or de-escalation.

Social depenetration is the deliberate closing off of some portions of a person�s life to his or her partner. (Carpenter & Greene, 2015)

This process can signal a gradual or abrupt end or revision of relationships and friendships. The degree of self-disclosure at this stage decreases and the reason for this may be conflicts, misunderstandings, or other stress factors in the relationship. Friends or romantic partners may completely stop interaction and communication, or the interaction will change depending on the circumstances.

In this article, we told you a little about the main stages of human interaction, their self-disclosure in front of each other. However, we also want to add that these stages are conditional and often the relationship does not follow clearly step by step along this list. Life is not so easy and that makes it more interesting :)

We think that many of you have had occasions when you met a person with whom you felt spiritual and psychological closeness, when you knew quite a bit, your kindred spirit. And, for example, in such a situation, you most likely do not go through all the stages that we wrote about until the last one, or you go very quickly.

Thus, you need to understand that such stages of interaction, of course, take place, but still there are stories when such a clear distinction does not fit.

So, we hope that you, as well as we were, were interested in learning more about concepts such as social penetration and social de-penetration! And soon we will meet you again on the pages of our new article.

Sources:

1. Taylor, D. A., & Altman, I. (1987). Communication in interpersonal relationships: Social penetration processes. In M. E. Roloff & G. R. Miller (Eds.), Interpersonal processes: New directions in communication research (pp. 257�277). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
2. Carpenter, A., & Greene, K. (2015). Social Penetration Theory. In The International Encyclopedia of Interpersonal Communication (pp. 1�4). American Cancer Society. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118540190.wbeic160
3. Crockett, L., Losoff, M., and Petersen, A. C. "Perceptions of the Peer Group and Friendship in Early Adolescence." Journal of Early Adolescence, 1984,4, 15s-181.

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