ABSTRACT
Relationships live in communication. They are made, unmade, and remade in the communicative practices of their participants. The resulting misunderstandings and conflicts only serve to heighten the participants' belief that their relationship is in trouble. The first challenge is to identify some underlying set of characteristics common to all personal relationships. Viewing social relations from the vantage point of social networks is not, however, merely way to link relationships to one another. Assessing change in relationships with single indicators such as satisfaction or attraction is also fraught with problems. Some of these problems are specific to the particular indicator selected. Satisfaction, for example, makes a poor indicator because it bears no necessary connection to movement across the relational life cycle. Commitment is a communicative as well as psychological accomplishment. It is inferred from the way the participants negotiate behavior, exercise power, and set the emotional tone of their relationship. Managing uncertainty requires considerably more than the mechanistic acquisition of information.
