Rhetoric and its alternatives as bases for examination of intimate communication

Abstract

“Interpersonal communication” is an abstraction that includes too much. Intimate communication between friends and lovers represents a special case of exchanged discourse that has had little attention devoted to it. Both behaviorists and humanistic psychologists have attempted such study but their work has resulted in a mythology which is counter‐productive. A study of 511 intimate relationships demonstrates some particular consistencies which appear to represent intimacy as a type of rhetorical situation. Examining such relationships by using a set of rhetorical heuristics appears to be functionally productive in theory‐building and application.