Personal relationships are, like speaking more generally, culturally situated processes.
In forming, conducting, and dissolving their personal relationships, people draw upon shared premises about personhood, relationships and communication to formulate lines of action toward others, and interpret others' actions. Membership in a community, like relational partnership, is accomplished through recognizing in comprehensible, valued ways of speaking. Both membership and relationships are nonetheless contested and negotiated. People deploy shared symbolic resources to pursue social ends that deny or resist the configurations of meaning most highly valued in a community, as well as seeking legitimation within that symbolic system. York University, England, May 1999.