Assignment 3 - Passion

Passion is something that I think both men and women strive for. The text book states that the media's portrayal of passion is what society's idea of passion is. What we see in the movies is what we want. In the beginning of my husband and I's relationship everything could have been considered passionate. We had only known each other a short time so everything was new and exciting. We were able to do spontaneous things  and experience our first date, our first kiss, our first Christmas, our first apartment and so on.

All of those things created passion in our relationship. Over time though these things have stopped creating passion. Christmas no longer brings passion, but frustration. Moving into a new apartment is not fun and exciting, but hard work and annoying. Things that once brought great amounts of passion to our relationship no longer do. However, I do not think that this means that the passion in our relationship is gone. I think it means that we, as a couple, need to find new things to introduce into our relationship to bring in passion. A surprise date, gift, hairstyle, or act of kindness can inspire passion.

The change in passion in our relationship can effect the way we communicate together. Because I do know him so well now, things that once excited me and made me excited to communicate with him no longer do.  I used to think his tendency to switch topics quickly in a conversation  was cute, whereas now I sometimes find it annoying that he can't stay focused. In these types of ways, our communication has changed with the passion levels.

I do think that some level of passion is necessary throughout most of our relationships. I think it is possible to have a happy relationship without passion, but I think maintaining a level of passion makes relationships flow easier. Passion in a long term relationship brings two people together. Although my husband and I don't have the amount of passion we had while we were dating, passion is still something we chase after. As our relationship grows we will find passion in new ways. The book implies that once passion is gone, it is gone forever. I don't agree with this at all. I have seen couples that have been married for 20+ years and have more passion that newlyweds. I think passion is something every relationship can have if they are willing to work for it. And I think it is a worthy thing to work towards.

Assignment 2- Listening Styles

I took a short quiz in my text book and discovered what type of listening style I have. I found out that I am a people-oriented listener. This really does not surprise me at all. The other options for listening styles were action-oriented, content-oriented, and time-oriented.

Being a people-oriented listener means that during a conversation my main focus is on the person that I am listening to. More specifically, I am interested in my conversation partners feelings and emotions while they are taking to me. When my husband tells me about his bad day, I'm more interested in the emotions that the bad events caused rather than what the actual events of his day are. It is easy and natural for me to 'put myself in someone elses shoes'. I am doing this almost subconsciously  every time I listen to someone else speak. The benefits of this listening style are that it makes it very easy for me to become emotionally close with someone. Because I focus on a very personal aspect of the conversation, it is easy for me to find things to relate to with most people. A downside of this type f listening style is that it is very easy to become too emotionally involved. If someone is telling me something bad or sad that happened to them, it is hard for me to not continue thinking about it when I leave the conversation. This can effect my mood greatly if I let it. I'm not sure I've ever noticed when I'm conversing with someone with a different listening style. If I did pay attention to that, I would probably notice that the other person would seem to be interested in different areas of the conversation than I would be.

According to the book, most women tend to be people-oriented listeners. Once again, this is no surprise. Women tend to be more people-oriented in many scenarios. Men are more action and content oriented. I've seen this is my husbands listening style. If i tell him I had a great time doing something, he wants to know all the details behind what it was that I did.  Our American culture is thought to be less people-oriented than other cultures.  Although I do not fit this, I do see how Americans can tend to be more time, action and content oriented listeners. Us Americans are always in a hurry, so while someone is in  a conversation, they have the mentality of 'hurry up and tell me what you wanna tell me so that I can go do something else'.

Space Invasion - Assignment 1

For my Interpersonal Communications class we had an assignment that we had to complete, and then make a blog post describing what happened.
For our first assignment, I had to invade somebody's personal space. I chose to use my mother-in-law as my test experiment in this assignment. I chose her because she is not a "touchy feeling" type of person. She does not get physically close with very many people, so I thought if I invaded her space she would notice.



My husband and I spent the evening with her and on 3 occasions during the evening I got abnormally close to her. Her response was a little tough to read. She never verbally recognized the fact that I was invading her space, which was a surprise to me. On all three occasions I would kind of creep closer to her, and it seemed like on all three occasions as soon as i got too close, she would walk away.
She didn't just step back, she would stop what it was that she was doing and leave and go do something else. I think this is because she didn't want to verbally or non verbally recognize the fact that I was invading her space. So her idea of fixing the fact that I was too close was to just leave the situation all together.  Her verbal communication did lessen with the closer that I stood to her, as if she was afraid to talk with me being so close.


It was kind of awkward for me to be that close to her, since we do not communicate physically too often. I was kind of nervous to stand that close to her because I didn't know how she was going to react. It was kind of fun to invade her space and make her feel awkward, I may do this experiment with other people later on to see what kind of other reactions I can get.