by The Open University
Available in 36 free installments
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As young people in the UK grow into adulthood the potential for establishing more intimate relationships opens up considerably when they leave home for university, enter vocational training, or move directly into the workforce. Each of these changes provides new opportunities for contact with a range of different people. These new settings often include opportunities to form close intimate relationships.
The bulk of research on relationships has concentrated on those in western societies, with its underlying idea of romantic love and free choice of partners. It should be remembered that this is far from the universal approach to long-term relationships. Would you be surprised to hear that the majority of marriages that take place in the world are more or less arranged or based on considerations beyond notions of romantic love? David Buss (1994) studied the citizens of different countries and found they tended to highlight different reasons for getting married. To give some examples, he found that in Iran factors such as education, ambition and chastity were seen as more important for choosing a spouse while in Nigeria, citizens ranked good health, refinement/neatness and desire for home/children highest. Also, most of the research carried out in this area has focused on heterosexual relationships. However it has been found that there are far more similarities between homosexual and heterosexual relationships than there are differences.
This section focuses on people's experiences of intimate relationships both in terms of what attracts us initially and what keeps us together in the longer term.
What is it that attracts us to other people for these more romantic relationships? Psychologists have identified a number of factors to explain why we might be attracted to one person but not to another. Three of the most important influences are:
Proximity and familiarity
Similarity
Physical appearance
Proximity means geographical closeness. An obvious and basic requirement for forming a relationship is that the people involved need to be geographically close enough to have opportunities to interact with each other. You may find a certain film star very attractive but if you never get the chance to meet them or talk to them then you'll have no chance of forming a relationship. If you examine friendship patterns of people living in blocks of flats then they will be much more likely to be friendly with the people who live near them on the same floor than with people living on different floors just because they have more opportunities to meet and get to know each other. Similarly people are more likely to form friendships at work with the people working near them and students will be more likely to form friendships with people studying the same subject and attending the same classes.
Having more chances to interact with another person means that we become more familiar with that person and numerous studies have shown that we prefer people who are familiar to us rather than strangers. This is known as the ?mere exposure effect? (Robert B. Zajonc, 1968) which states that the more often we are exposed to a stimulus whether it is a sound, picture or person the more positively we will rate that stimulus. The reason why we are more likely to be attracted to people we meet more often may be because we feel more secure with people that we know. However, we are also more likely to be in regular close proximity to people with whom we share interests: working together, undertaking leisure activities, being within the same friendship group and similar social circumstances. You will see in the next section that similarity also has a part to play in attraction.
