Interpersonal Theories

In my sisters junior year of college she met a guy at a local bar who she found to be extremely outgoing and handsome.  Little did my sister know that after leaving the bar that night that she would soon be dating him, and then be engaged to him and then finally reach their wedding day.  Two weeks before Bret(now my brother-in-law) engaged to my sister he had found out that he was hired to work for Nestle Food Company doing marketing and research.  My sister was extremely proud and supportive of his new job except for one little fact.  Bret had to then move out to California for his new job.

My sister and Bret had to make decisions fast. My sister recently had just gotten a job at the local high school teaching 10th grade Chemistry.  She knew she could not let the job down but she also knew that she could not leave her love of her life.  They knew it would not work long distance so for a week or so they were in a very rocky position in their relationship.  Bret obviously ended up engaging to my sister and she had agreed to move out to California with him in the Fall.  They are now happily married and they never once regret their decision moving out to California. 

This particular situation with my sister and brother-in-law exemplifies the filtering theory.  This theory states that we use a series of filters to judge how close to others we want to become.  The most important type of filter that my sister and Bret used and engaged in(no pun intended) was the sociological or incidental cues.  this filter are the demographic or environmental factors that determine probability of contact.  This filter includes factors such as where we work and live, how frequently we travel, and so on.  "Obviously, we cannot form relationships with people we have never met, and maintaining contact with someone thousands of miles away is extremely difficult." I underlined and bolded part of the previous sentence because it made my personal story of my sister and my brother-in-law ten times more probable.

I added a clip of the famous movie, The Notebook.  In this clip, the couple is seen doing everything together and some things done seperately, which can be called autonomy-togetherness dialect.  If you skip to about 45 seconds into the clip you will see the couple rope swinging into a lake, the next scene you can see the husband trying to teach the wife how to drive a stick shift.  Although he was getting very annoyed and angry with her he still found time to laugh at it until the next scene.  In the next short part the couple got into a slight argument but immediatley got over the situation.