Mending My Relationship

My focus is on my relationship with my best friend. We have been best friends for a while, coming up on nine years here at the end of the semester. Though we have been best friends for so long, here recently we have had a few instances where we have felt distant and disconnected from one another. We both feel that these feelings are because of our lack of communication. Throughout the entire time of our friendship we have only had a very small amount of issues between us. The most recent event was just a few weeks ago. I was feeling as if we are growing apart. Our communication is very minimal and our commitment to our friendship is wavering. We both have let our school, work, and life schedules get in the way of our friendship. There are a few ways I believe I can go about mending our friendship. Sacrifice via direct reciprocity and building trust back up, and hopefully restoring our commitment to our friendship. Another method that I believe would be productive and beneficial would be through a gentle operant conditioning approach. I believe that both of these methods could be productive in mending our friendship. Direct reciprocity is doing as the other has done to you. If they help you, you help them in return. I plan to use sacrifice as the objective in this case. My method will be that I will sacrifice some of my time when I am busy and she is available to give her my time and theoretically she should do the same for me. For example, I may stay up late one night to get an assignment done the day before so I can take that time and spend it with her instead of doing the assignment. In doing so this will show her I will always be there for her even when times are busy and rough. Through the sacrifice, trust will be built. Trust builds up commitment to our friendship. Now I know that trust is not the only component to commitment, but it is the major entity to our friendship and our situation. In sacrificing my time for my best friend and her doing the same for me, trust will be rebuilt. With high levels of trust we can be assured that the other is going to be there for us. As a result of building our trust, our commitment to our friendship should flourish. Operant conditioning is a learning method that rewards admired behaviors and punishes the undesirable ones. My best friend is not a very good …show more content…
If the methods are carried out properly our relationship could flourish and the communication between us would be better than ever before. Direct reciprocity of sacrifice would generate a mutual feeling of love, kindness and respect towards the other person. In doing this the relationship would become stronger as each individual puts the other person first more frequently and trust builds. Operant conditioning would be more of a direct approach to the issue. In turn operant conditioning would train her to communicate more of how I would want her to. Which does seem inhumane. However, this would still increase the communication and boost the relationship.
A Disclaimer: I would never actually condition and manipulate my best friend. This is just one tactic that could help our communication issues and overall our