ABSTRACT
Relationship construction is tricky business. In courtship and friendship alike, the mutuality of goals, intentions, and interpretations is relative, not absolute. When initiating relationships, “we travel across a complex social and interpersonal minefield. Traversing the pitfalls that lie between encountering and relating is rarely straightforward. The opportunities are many, not just for failure but for producing unsolicited responses of anger or fear” (Purcell, Pathé, & Mullen, 2000a, p. 14). Even the most successful relationships emerge from interactions that necessarily involve equivocal messages, ambiguous meanings, and second-guessing. The day-to-day navigation of relationships presents much opportunity for miscommunication, misinterpretation, and mismatching of interpersonal agendas. Such complexities undoubtedly contribute to interpersonal problems and relational conflict (Canary, Cupach, & Messman, 1995). Indeed, the intricacies and difficulties that attend the negotiation of interpersonal relationships engender many instances of obsessive relational intrusion (ORI) and stalking. We agree with Emerson, Ferris, and Gardner (1998, p. 290), who argued much unwanted relational pursuit grows
out of glitches and discontinuities in two very common and normal relationship processes—coming together and forming new relationships on one hand, and dissolving and getting out of existing relationships on the other. In this way the processes and experience of being stalked are intricately linked to normal, everyday practices for establishing, advancing, and ending relationships.
