Although I never knew any of them personally, their creativities are immortalized in the things that they wrote, the people they influenced, and the actions that we still embrace the consequences of. As Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, "Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present." I pray that I will one day leave a dent on the eternal timeline by doing the greatest of all things: love. That is, through my love of teaching, learning new things, and helping others. Let this dissertation be the signifier of that signified endeavor.

Interpersonal communication is a conglomeration of many approaches and disciplines coming together to understand relationships. It grew from interactions among scholars from different disciplines and has evolved to become a family of approaches with shared predispositions to understand how people talk and relate to each other orally, nonverbally, and, more recently, electronically. Relationship research is often divided according to the life span of a relationship: its initiation, maintenance, and dissolution.

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