Assignment 5: Option 1

The summer before I got to Cornell I was a camp counselor. At this camp I met a girl (one of my fellow counselors). I will refer to her as AA. We started going out and continued the relationship through the summer. When I got to Cornell, we tried to keep the relationship going even though she was at school in California. We would talk over AIM and call each other as much as possible. Unfortunately, she did not have a cell phone, which made things very difficult. Talking to her over AIM was much different from being home in that at home in addition to talking to her online I saw her almost every day at work. Since I did not see her at school, I would waste large amounts of time talking with her about nothing and it eventually made other aspects of my life suffer. It was like a poisson on my social life and academics. We started to grow apart rapidly and decided to call it off during thanksgiving break of freshman year.

Proximity was a large issue in our relationship. When we were together we saw each other every day. When we went to school our intersection frequency decreased and was limited to when we were online. Because she did not have a cell phone I did not talk to her on the phone very often and our conversations were almost completely limited to online. This was a large and rapid change from what we had during the summer. Without the real life proximity problems arose.

AA and I had a lot in common. Our personalities were very similar. We had the same taste in movies and music and we always had something to talk about. This common ground is what originally brought us together. Over AIM it is hard to keep a conversation going if the two people do not have anything in common. Even after we broke up we continued to talk. I am still good friends with AA. It was mutual when we broke it off so there were no hard feelings on either side and now that we are talking when we want to talk rather than talking just to talk every day, our conversations are usually a lot longer and more meaningful.

While McKenna’s relationship facilitation factors explained what brought us together, Wallace’s attraction factors explain what split us up. Although we had common ground, the relationship could not survive the lack of real life proximity.