ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the intimate alignment between goals and close relationships. It presents a people as means approach to understanding the link between goal pursuit and close relationships. Goal pursuit and close relationships are inextricably intertwined from life's earliest moments throughout adulthood. The chapter why the presence of instrumental others is beneficial in our daily lives. It considers the way people sustain their relationships with others as a way of engaging in means maintenance. People use their social relationships to make individual goal pursuit possible. The chapter reviews the research in support of each of the components of mutual perceived instrumentality. The first proposition of the people as means framework postulates that people evaluate relationship partners according to their perceived instrumentality to their goals. The first two pieces of the mutual instrumentality puzzle have stated people evaluate others according to their instrumentality, and people want to be instrumental to other's goals because they evaluate themselves according to their own instrumentality.
