Obviously, the hardest thing about long-distance relationships is the distance. Proximity is argued as the greatest indicator of friendship. Proximity is essentially how close you are. This can be physical closeness, or how frequently you interact with someone online. If you meet someone online frequently, you can say you have closeness with them. This makes plenty of sense, saying you can't become friends with a person you never cross paths with, whether it be in the real world or online. The problem with attending different universities, though, is greater than just being apart. We both have full schedules, and are busy doing many different things. This means that even if we'd like to, we can't even engage in CMC when we'd like too. Its during these bouts of limited interaction that we are most likely to get into arguments. This element of our relationship that is best explained by Wallace, when she says that we experience the most attraction to people who we are familiar with and spend a lot of time with. When we are together, over breaks, and the summers, we spend every day together, and we get along swimmingly.
The second attraction factor presented by Wallace is physical attraction. In the online world, this is created by getting to know someone. This doesn't necessarily apply to our relationship, because we met in person first. I'm sure my dashing good looks had everything to do with our falling in love. But seriously, the first time I saw Lianne, I was immediately physically attracted to her, but when she responded positively to my introduction, and she displayed potential interest in me, that was even cooler. This shows how positive feedback can enhance attraction.
When Lianne and I departed for different colleges, we knew we would be losing common ground. Having coming from different high schools, we'd already gone through having different circles of friends and trying to mesh spheres of influence. As our college experiences continued, we lost more common ground as we gathered new friends and experienced. We overcome this issue by making sure to introduce each other to all our friends, and show each other our respective schools when we visit each other. By sharing this with each other on the phone, and than showing each other in person, we can maintain common ground. With out this element, I'm fairly certain our relationship wouldn't work. It would be like just pushing pause whenever we are apart, and than play when we got together. Relationships really can't function like that.
So even though our relationship started in the real world, Wallace's attraction factor's still apply.
2 comments:
Your experience is interesting. Congratulations on having the resolve to stick with a long distance relationship for so long.
I would be interested to know how McKenna's concept of identifiability affected your relationship after it became long distance. Did you find it easier to disclose information due to an increase of private self awareness and decrease of public self awareness? McKenna would say that anonymity would lead to relationship development through greater self disclosure, but I'm not sure sure my personal experience corroborates that fact.
@ nina.
No not really.. In fact sometimes its discouraging how skin deep our mediated conversations can be. "oh you went to class today? yeah me too...."
I have noticed, however, that after being apart for a few weeks, when we come together we are especially mushy, and experience much higher rates of disclosure. I think this has to do with having all our cues back again, if you will. I suppose that would be a counter argument against McKenna's concept of identifiability. We disclose more in an environment with a higher sense of public self awareness (guilty of PDA). As far as self awareness, I haven't really figured out if I'm more aware of myself in real life or online. I'm still not convinced I'm more me online.
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