The Importance Of Personal Relationships

As a college student, I’m exploring my values, beliefs, and identities that I will have as an independent adult. Through this exploration process, I’ve had to adjust to living with people in close proximity (dorm)—including managing my social relationships with those people. As a result of adjusting to and exploring adult independence, I’ve both gained and lost social relationships. For example, I have a friend that identifies herself as an atheist. One of the identities that I’ve become strongly committed to in college is being a Christian. As a result, she and I disagree on many ideas and beliefs. The relationship that I had with her has become weaker, compared to the beginning of my freshman year. As we developed our own adult independence, our beliefs have started to affect our relationship

In other words, the rewards of the relationship must outweigh the costs in order for people to be satisfied and maintain that relationship. Rewards are the personal characteristics of a person that one finds rewarding in the relationship. In my personal experience, I tried to maintain the relationship between my friend and I in exchange for the rewards of emotional support (good listener, supportive, etc.). In contrast, the costs of a relationship includes the time and effort put into the relationship, as well as the rewards forgone if the relationship were to end. For example, the costs of my personal relationship included the large amount of time and effort that I had to spend to maintain the friendship (talking about differences), as well as the other friendships that I was afraid to lose if I stopped continuing the relationship. I was afraid that my other atheist friends wouldn’t want to continue our friendship because of their like beliefs to my other friend, as well as their relationship with