When Harry Met Sall

Interpersonal Communication ‘When Harry Met Sally’ is a romantic comedy set from the mid 1970’s to the mid-to-late 1980’s. From the beginning the film seemed like the perfect example from Mark Knapp’s 10 stages of relational development. There was a plethora of talking and Harry was quite witty while Sally was very sweet and up-beat. As a personal opinion, at first the film seemed to be slightly boring plot-wise – a man and a woman meet to travel a ways to the city?

Sounds like the perfect situation to ‘fall in love’ in and have a happily ever-after. Though, as more of the movie was watched, it became more interesting and less of an assignment requirement. In relation to Harry and Sally’s relationship regarding Mark Knapp’s 10 stages of relational development, they jump around from following the path with initiating and experimenting in the beginning of the film while they were driving to New York, to initiating to terminating right away after their second encounter at the airport.

After both characters find themselves apart from their wife and boyfriend respectively, they crashed into each other at a bookstore and skipped right back into the experimenting stage, where they spoke to each other about friendship and having dinner. After initiating their friendship they began to grow closer, stepping up to the intensifying stage – where they spend a lot of time with each other and where Harry confides in Sally about the girls he takes out for dinner and Sally in the odd dream or two she occasionally has – where no one would know she had unless they were told.

Soon enough they casually went on to the intensifying stage as they spent the most of their time together than with their respective best friends (which they unwittingly got them into a relationship with each-other), and as it happens, Sally one night calls Harry crying about her ex-boyfriend getting married to a woman he had just met, the two main characters in the film intensify their relationship and relieve their desires.

After that, they both freak out and jump, once again, to the terminating stage and end up avoiding each other for a good length of time. Self-disclosure played an intensely heavy role in the development of their relationship when Harry finally begins to attempt to speak to Sally once more after they both terminated their relationship. While the earlier attempts at self-disclosure (Harry telling Sally he was not ready to date again, etc. ), this makes a particular impact on their relationship when he tells Sally how much she means to him.

Identifying the terms was easy enough throughout the entire film – initiating the relationship when they met through a mutual good friend of theirs, experimenting as they spoke to each other about different topics during their trip to New York. Terminating their relationship was especially easy to identify – Sally was always particularly happy to terminate their relationship during the times that they seemed to grow apart (she also did not particularly enjoy his presence when they had just met).

Identifying the Intensifying stage was easy enough when they met for the third time and they began to speak more without openly insulting each other and began to spend more time with each other and do certain domestic things with each other. This film, over-all, was actually very entertaining and humourous. The interaction between both Harry and Sally had me laughing more than once over the duration of the film and it had clear visuals of two people bonding and forming a friendship, and eventually a relationship, from the beginning to practically the end.