Assignment

For this research and reflection, you can consider personal relationships, professional relationships, past relationships, and/or future relationships. The purpose here is for you to assess your relationships with those around you, how those can be beneficial/harmful, and making conscious, meaningful choices about those relationships to enhance your life.

Remember that you can draw on our class discussions and class readings for this assignment, but it is also required that you search for 1-2 other information sources to enhance your learning and make connections to your personal interests and concerns. All sources (both class assigned and those you research on your own) must be properly cited both in text and on a works cited page.

Part 1: Establishing Relationships

1. What are the best ways to establish relationships? How do you meet the people you want/need to meet? What does the University setting do/provide to help establish these relationships?

2. In the University setting, what stands in the way of establishing the types of relationships you would like to establish? What makes it difficult?

Part 2: Boundaries

3. Once a relationship is established, there are inevitably boundaries that either exist (socially accepted norms) or that need to be set (personal needs/preferences). What types of boundaries exist in the type of relationship you are thinking about? How might your boundaries, or other people's boundaries, differ from those social norms? How do you go about establishing boundaries that might be different from others' expectations?

4. Have you ever experienced a difference in personal boundaries? How did your idea of relationship boundaries differ from someone else's? Whose were more in line with our social norms? Why do you think you had different ideas of what is acceptable in that relationship and what is not?

Part 3: Problem-Solving

5. What do you do when a relationship goes sour? How do you negotiate a difficult situation with someone you want to maintain a relationship with?

6. How do you know when it is time to call it quits (when the requirements of maintaining a relationships are more harmful than the benefits)?

7. Can you think of a time when you had to solve problems within a relationship? Explain the situation, how you handled it, and reflect on whether or not you feel that was the right decision/way to handle the problem.