Some friendships last while others diminish and fade away with time. My senior year of high school was when I lost my best friend of four years due to miscommunication and false rumors that were spread during our time as football managers. To have a successful friendship you have to recognize what it takes to have a successful friendship; communication, loyalty, honesty, and the freedom to be yourself. When you work on communicating within the friendship even during the tough times, you can strengthen the friendship you have.
Case Analysis: Stages
When I got into my seventh grade year, I met Danielle who quickly became my best friend. Instead of starting in the Initiating phase of Knapp’s Stages of Relationship Development, we …show more content…
Identity management is known as labeling yourself to some degree giving people an insight to you and what you define yourself as or with (Adler, Rodman, du Pre, 2014, p. 62). Danielle had chosen to identify herself as Jacob’s girlfriend and she truly trusted Jacob. She stopped identifying herself as my best friend and with the loss of that identity, she let go of the trust she had in me at the same time. She turned the trust she had for me into trust for Jacob.
When we had our miscommunication problems, she began stage hogging, which is when someone turns the attention to themselves rather than the topic of the conversation (Adler, Rodman, du Pre, 2014, p. 139). Danielle had made the problem about her and how I was wrongfully saying things about her as well as destroying our friendship and trying to turn her against Jacob. She had turned the attention to her instead of focusing on what the true problem was and trying to communicate with me.
Fixing the …show more content…
Through Knapp’s Stages of Development, I learned how much difference we really had and how the friendship advanced then fell apart. Recognizing the problems in our communication as well as the willingness to work on those problems could make a difference in a friendship. The communication problems we experienced, I could have worked on them and maybe kept the friendship. If I had gotten the chance to fix the communication errors we had, I think Danielle and I would still be friends. This helped me to learn what I need to do for future friendships if I want to be successful in