ABSTRACT
One of the greatest obstacles to the development of a systematic body of knowledge about relationships was relationship scholars’ lack of common understanding of what a relationship is. As we have discussed, advancement of knowledge about human relationships is dependent on contributions from many different disciplines in the social, behavioral, biological, and health sciences. Multidisciplinary fields are often slow to take coherent shape because each contributing discipline tends to be interested only in certain phenomena—and, in the case of relationships, only in certain phenomena within certain types of relationships. Moreover, each discipline attacks those phenomena from the perspective of its traditional theories and concepts, using its own terminology and methods. As a consequence, new multidisciplinary fields often experience communication problems. Relationship science was no different. Relationship scholars soon recognized that the term “relationship” meant different things to different people, both across and within disciplines, and that little progress could be made until they reached agreement on the meaning of the term.
