CAPS#6 Sarah Nelson

     

Cozad, Nebraska image from townmapusa.com

     Entering into college, I picked a random roommate when I signed up for housing at Abel Hall. Despite the horror stories of “the roommate from hell” I decided that a random roommate might foster a friendship, or at the very least, a few funny stories down the line. When I walked back into my room Thursday after a long day of sorority recruitment, my new, random roommate Claire met me. Claire was from a small, rural town in Nebraska called Cozad, and I knew I had a very different experience from her, as I was from Omaha. We hit it off instantly, bonding over differing experiences. One night I remember staying up asking her all kinds of questions about her high school, father’s occupation as a farmer, and working with cattle. I was amazed that she had helped birth a cow!  She, in turn, asked about my experience at an all-girls school. Our experience definitely helped break down stereotypes and expand our horizons. Probably the most difficult thing about our relationship was our differences in how we spent our time. I was more of an extrovert, while she was more of an introvert, and that affected how we interacted.

            Researcher Leslie Baxter and others have established many types of dialectical ways that people from different backgrounds interact. One of those that Claire and I utilized while we were roommates was differences-similarities dialect. We did follow the similarities principal, being more apt to open up to each other through out similarities, (Martin and Nakayama, 398). Although we came from vastly different upbringings between rural and urban, we kind of looked alike, had the same taste in television and music, and felt the same way about school. This is what allowed our friendship to thrive.  We used the similarities to get to know each other on the surface before we dove into the differences.

We understand our friendship is both
static and dynamic as our lives change.

            Another dialectic that describes more of where we are now is the static-dynamic   Claire and I are still close friends, but over the past two years, our friendship has adapted to dynamics in our personal and contextual lives.  After my freshman year, I moved out of Abel and into my sorority house. She was not Greek, and had to adapt to me talking about it more because those were the people I hung out with.  She ended up changing her major and transferring to Bryan Medical Center. I had to adapt to asking her questions about healthcare field related questions. Although we no longer shared a room, or even a campus for that matter, we still maintain a friendship knowing that it is static despite the changes in our lives. 

dialectic.

            Although my freshman roommate and I have not lived together for nearly two years, the way we established our friendship allows us to still catch-up once and awhile despite the differences in our lives. Looking at the dialectics behind our friendship shows me how it was successful and it is good things to keep in mind when interacting with others. 

References

 Martin, J.N., & Nakayama, T.K. (2013). Intercultural communication in contexts (6th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw Hill.