Interpersonal communication, or one-to-one communication, is necessary for you to function in society. It helps you connect with others and develop empathy, and it contributes to your mental and physical health.

Emotional intelligence is an important part of interpersonal communication. It is made up of being aware of your feelings, managing your emotions, motivating yourself, recognizing emotions in others, and handling relationships.

All relationships begin with attraction. Although the basis of attraction might vary greatly from one relationship to another, you probably are most attracted to people with whom you have similarities and frequent contact. Sometimes you might form a relationship because you see something you can gain from it. To form a relationship, you need proximity--frequent contact with the other person.

The motives for seeking out interpersonal relationships are pleasure, affection (warm emotional attachments with others), inclusion (involvement with others), escape, relaxation, and control (getting others to do as you want them to or being able to make choices in your life).

Relationships with others are governed by the roles you are expected to play. Roles that reflect the structure of society are more rigidly defined than roles you establish with friends. Much of the communication you have in relationships depends on the role you are playing.

First contacts with others begin with small talk. An important part of small talk is asking questions because doing so helps you discover common ground with others.

Bids and the bidding process are the glue that holds relationships together. Bids can be questions, gestures, looks, or touches; and responses to bids are positive or negative answers to somebody's request for emotional connection. We discuss your ability to bid and respond to bids, how common the bidding process is, whether or not bidding has anything to do with relationship conflict, how relationships develop, the importance of the bidding process, and how to encourage bids.

Owned messages are acknowledgments of subjectivity by message senders through the use of first-person singular terms. Their value is that they provoke less interpersonal defensiveness than you-messages; thus, they not only assist the bidding process but encourage it as well because of the likely decrease in conflict and the protection of an environment in which bids and responses to bids can take place.

If you want a relationship to grow beyond superficiality, you must engage in self-disclosure. Self-disclosure is the process of communicating oneself to another person, telling another who you are and what you are feeling. Self-disclosure can be understood through the Johari Window, which has four panes: open, blind, hidden, and unknown. As a relationship develops and disclosure increases, the open pane gets larger.

Much of your interpersonal communication occurs within your family. A family is two or more individuals who are joined together at a particular point in time through the biological or sociological means of genetics, marriage, or adoption. In systems theory, a family is a dynamic group of people who shift interrelationships often but are still bound by rules. The foundation of a family is usually a couple. Intimacy within couples requires spontaneity, self-disclosure, motivation, interdependence, and tension and balance (or relational dialectics).

Relational dialectics is the dynamic interplay between unified oppositions--the conflicts that occur naturally in relationships that must be faced by couples. There are numerous potential internal and external factors that reveal the tensions couples must deal with, and there are eight ways for facing the dilemmas: denial, disorientation, spiraling alteration, segmentation, balance, integration, recalibration, and reaffirmation. Reaffirmation involves active recognition by both partners that the tensions exist and must be faced in a positive, genuine, mutually supportive, and open manner.

Communication between parents and children takes two forms: support messages and control messages. In their relationships with children, mothers are more effective if they are proactive rather than reactive (reacting to). Most adolescents communicate more with their mothers and see them as more sympathetic than their fathers.

Because divorce is common in America, many children are part of stepfamilies. Typical problems in stepfamilies include forming a relationship with a stepparent, finding time to spend with the biological parent, and dealing with a lack of institutionalized rules and roles.

Quality communication in a family seems to have four components: openness, confirmation, rules for interaction, and adaptability. There are some things that are better avoided in family communication. Generally, sex, if it is discussed at all, will be talked about more often with same-sex siblings rather than with parents.