Personal Reflection on the Relationship - Essay Example

My Personal Reflection: I am in a long distance relationship with my boyfriend who lives in Boston,while I am in Seattle. This is a romantic relationship since I have feelings towards him and he has the same towards me. We have met twice during our dating period and we use twitter, facebook and skype as modes of communication, and it is a five month old relationship. My boyfriend has instilled in me concepts of high self-esteem which I lacked due to my physical appearance and various negative comments that emanated from my friends about my physique, behavior and attitude. He is an intelligent man, highly educated and emotive at times due to loss of his twin brother and use of one kidney which makes him have a poor health status. To support him, I encourage him on most occasions, offering emotional support which I know he needs considering the fact that those close to him, like his parents are far off. This paper is a reflection of my relationship with Tony, my boyfriend and it analyzes it using the concepts of mediated communication, the self-concept and emotions. Due to the nature of our relationship, we had to use different media of communication just to convey our concerns and emotions towards each other. We have mostly used the internet via twitter, facebook and skype and as outlined in different section of my paper. These agents of mediated communication have their pros and cons which directly affected the scope of our relationship. A brief definition of the concept of mediated communication is that it uses a medium to transmit a message (Wright et al, 4). The concept of self outlines my esteem and how my boyfriend managed to make me feel confident of myself. Another aspect involves emotions, and it depicts the weaker side of my boyfriend and me. This paper reflects on how through collaborations, we managed to take care of each other’s emotions and resulting to a stronger bond between us. The relationship with my boyfriend can be termed as a long distance relationship by all definition, we are constantly communicating with each other. Thanks to the agents of mediated communications, namely the internet (Wright et al, 5). The internet as a medium has twitter, facebook and skype, which enables us to communicate constantly and effectively with my boyfriend. With the help of skype, we manage to chat and use video calls to communicate and express our emotions and share our daily events. On most occasions and I tweet my boyfriend just to express my love to him, and he responds back. We are able to follow each other’s daily activities through facebook by various posts we add on our blogs concerning our daily activities. However it has not been easy to builds a relationship using this aspect of communication. For example, it may take a while before my boyfriend responds to a twit. This usually builds anxiety on my part not knowing the time it will take for him to respond, but because I understand his nature of work and sometimes he might be concentrating on other aspects of his work, my anxiety always disappears. The best medium of our communication is skype. This is because skype is a type of transactional communication where communication is sent and a feedback is received immediately. Both of us become communicators and therefore creating a sense of understanding and self-esteem amongst us because of positive communication. From skype, I am able to see the various gestures my boyfriend makes and they are aspects of communication. From the gestures, I am able to know to know whether my boyfriend enjoys talking to me, or pretends. However, there are challenges that emanates by use of skype in communication, and they are presented by the environment. For instance the physical location of my computer at times is near student centers where there is a lot of noise coming from students making me not concentrate in the communication process with my boyfriend. This usually affects the understanding of some concepts between him and me, with at times accusing me of neglect and lack of attention because of failure on my part to respond adequately to his messages. For example, one day, he asked me how I was. Due to extensive noise from the background, I didn’t understand the question and replied that I am from class. This did not go down well with my boyfriend and he accused me of not paying attention to what he was saying. On explaining the circumstances I was in, Tony understood and partly because, he too at one time, was affected by noise while communicating with his mum through skype. Anytime I use skype to communicate with my boyfriend I am always comfortable knowing that he will respond immediately and with a relevant message. This is unlike using twitter and facebook, which usually create a relational dimension of anxiety. The reasons of my anxiety in the use of twitter and facebook are because I am unaware of the expressions of Tony and how he would react to them; the only issue is that I can idealize his expression. Despite this challenge facebook and twitter have managed to bring our relationship closer by minimizing the perceptions of our differences and stimulating a sense of direct questioning and self-disclosure. Basing on self-disclosure, before I met Tony, my self-esteem was low. This greatly affected my communication ability, not only with my friends but also with Tony. I developed a negative self-concept, because of constant negative utterances from my friends and school mates concerning my physique. Self-Concept is a notion of how one views him/herself out of the views of others (Allen, 8). I came to acknowledge these utterances and believe them, as a resulting lowering my self-worthiness before my friends and everyone that I associated with, including Tony. For example, one day, while passing through a group of my male classmates, they made a comment that I am too simple to date since I don’t put on make-up and my cheeks are chubby. This was too harsh and impacted a negative attitude of low self-esteem to myself. I believed them and was frightened that Tony will soon leave me in favor of a more attractive woman. This was an aspect of self-prophecy, which means my expectations influencing my behaviors. Due to this self-prophecy and my low esteem, I became critical of any beautiful woman that passed before me. I did not have any positive comment towards anybody that others viewed beautiful and I started comparing myself with almost any woman that passed me or was a friend to me. For example, one day I made a comment concerning a close friend of mine that she was not as beautiful as I was, and this did not go down well with her. With the help of Tony, I managed to change my low self-esteem and negative attitudes towards my friends and everybody around me. Through skype, Tony taught me on how to change my negative self-concept by having a realistic perception of myself. Through the principles of religion, Tony taught to know that God created every one of us in a unique and beautiful way (Allen, 19). This changed my view of myself, and increased my self-esteem. From this, I started creating realistic expectations of my behavior and interaction with my friends and thereafter increased my will to change my negative utterances towards others beauty and comparing myself with my classmates and friends. I sought advice from psychologist and this turned my life around, since currently I value myself highly, thanks to Tony and my will to change. Tony helped me in containing my low self-esteem and therefore I was obligated to help him control his emotions, particularly anger. Emotions are positive or negative reactions that engage the body and the mind and have a probability to change our physical or psychological wellbeing. Anger is an aspect of a negative emotion. Tony had uncontrollable expressions of anger, and I gave an example earlier of how he angrily reacted to my answer of the question he asked on how I was feeling. On most occasions, this really affected our communication process and therefore this type of emotion from Tony is a delibatative emotion and it needs to be checked out for Tony to communicate effectively. Delibative emotions refers to a type of emotion which detracts from effective functioning, for example it prevents effective communication between partners.(McCann, 12). However, to help guard Tony against contacting diseases, I encouraged him to express his emotions without controlling them, especially if he was with me. At first Tony reacted angrily, accusing me of undermining him, but later I talked some sense in him and he agreed to change. This is because I understand him and appreciate the way he is and my desire is to help him. Another factor is because, I and Tony are in a close relationship and people in a close relationship are likely to express their emotions, this is an aspect of individualistic culture found in America. I explained to Tony on how to minimize his debilitative emotion and steps involved monitoring his emotional reaction, acting upon the activating event, recording his self-talk, reappraising his irrational beliefs and thinking constructively (McCann, 34). I emphasized strongly on his irrational beliefs, since by definition, they are beliefs that are not logical and therefore do not serve or advance his purpose. For example Tony’s phobia of death came from his belief that functioning with one kidney is a sure way of death. This is an aspect of irrational belief since by care and good medication; Tony’s chances of long life are high. Tony’s ability to solve problems was low, as a result I advised him to read books and develop skills on how to identify problems and solve them. This is an aspect of constructive thinking which refers to an enhanced ability to solve problems. From this analysis, the communication between me and my boyfriend is effective; therefore it can be termed as competent. In communicating, we are able to choose the context of our communication style basing on the knowledge we have of each other and the goals that each of us pursues. Use of channels of mediated communication have been important to us, since they have played a greater role in bringing us together in solving our problems and expressing our concerns. For instance, it is through skype that Tony helped develop a high self-esteem in me,and it is through the same media that I encourage Tony to solve his emotional problems. To me, this relationship is a success, thanks to mediated communication. Works Cited Allen, Richard L..The concept of self: a study of black identity and self-esteem. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001. Print. McCann, TimothyB..Emotions. New York: Kensington Books, 2002. Print. Wright, Kevin B., and Lynne M. Webb.Computer-mediated communication in relationships. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. Print. Read More