5.3 Thinking Like a Social Psychologist about Liking and Loving

There is no part of human experience that is more important to our survival than our close relationships with others. Without close relationships, we could not successfully reproduce, and without the social support provided by others who care about us, our lives would be less meaningful, and we would be less mentally and physically healthy. Hopefully, this chapter has reminded you of the importance of your relationships with others, or perhaps taught you to think differently about them.

Perhaps you are already in a happy, close relationship, and this chapter may have given you some ideas for keeping it happy and healthy. Perhaps you are thinking more now about your commitment to the relationship, the benefits and costs you receive from it, the equity between you and your partner, and the costs or benefits you and your partner gain from it. Is your relationship communal or more of an exchange? What can you do to help ensure you and your partner remain one interrelated pair?

Or perhaps you are not currently in a relationship and are hoping to develop a new close relationship. In this case, this chapter may have given you some ideas on how to get someone to like you and see you as an appropriate partner. Maybe you will think more about the important roles of actual and assumed similarity and reciprocal disclosure in liking, and about the role of proximity in attraction.

In any case, hopefully you can now see that even close relationships can be considered in terms of the basic principles of social psychology, the ABCs of affect, behavior, and cognition, and the goals of self-concern and other-concern. Close relationships are particularly interesting in terms of the last factor because they are one of the ways that we can feel good about ourselves by connecting with others.

Image Attribution

• “thinking” by Christopher Mance, Public Domain Mark

References

Jhangiani, Rajiv, and Hammond Tarry. “7.2 Close Relationships: Liking and Loving over the Long Term.” Principles of Social Psychology – 1st International H5P Edition, BCcampus, 2022. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.