‘When Harry Met Sally’ is the story of two people on a planned trip which becomes the starting point for a lifelong relationship. In the movie, when the two characters meet for the first time, they do not form a good impression of each other. When Sally sees Harry kissing his girlfriend without minding the environment around them, she perceives him to be a stupid, carefree, and unfaithful person. The initial impression that she forms on him is accentuated when she thinks that he was making sexual advances towards her. When both the characters start having conversation in the course of their journey from Chicago to New York, Sally keeps resisting Harry’s talk related to sexual matters. Upon this Harry forms an impression on Sally to be a conservative, close-minded, and arrogant person who does not respect the feelings and opinions of others. The main reason for the false impressions that both the characters develop on each other is the gaps that people might have at the time of experimenting in their interaction with each other (Knapp and Vangelisti 34). Since people do not know about each other at the initiating stage of the interaction process, they tend to jump quickly into conclusions on each other. Since both Harry and Sally did not know each other well before they start their journey, it creates temporary gap in their interaction process, which would not be filled adequately for a long time after the initial interaction.
The impressions that the two characters of the film develop on each other were mostly the result of their past experiences, values, beliefs, and attitudes. Harry has a carefree attitude about life and relationships. He believed that they could be no friendship between a male and female without the idea of sex crossing their mind. Harry’s belief was that relationships were considered to be casual affairs that didn’t merit any serious attention. On the contrary, Sally believed relationships to be serious issues that have much bearing on the life of an individual. She believed that a thin line should be drawn between friendship and sex. Sally’s past sexual relationships, which did not involve any of her close friends made her believe that friendship and sex should always be separated. The problem of forming a wrong impression between the two characters of the film was the result of the misconception that people have regarding the consistency of thoughts that two people can have regarding each other (Knapp and Vangelisti 8). The assumption of consistency of opinions can seriously impact the relationship between two persons. The values and beliefs held by two persons vary widely as the family and environment in which they grow would be completely different. A wrong assumption of consistency of values and beliefs can adversely affecting the relationship between two persons during the initial stages of the relationship development process. Sally quickly gets angry when Harry says that she was attractive and thinks that he was making sexual advances on her. On the other hand, Harry’s past experiences and values make him believe in such casual pep talk.
When Harry and Sally meet after their initial encounters both of them were facing problems with the relationships. While Sally was ditched by her boy-friend after a long affair, Harry’s wife decides to marry another man. Both of them meet in a bookstore and become intimate friends. Their experiences with their ex-partners make them understand the positive aspects on each other. Harry and Sally try to introduce their friends Jess and Marie in the hope that each of them could fall into a relationship with the other. However, when Jess and Marie start dating each other, Harry and Sally find themselves alone. Their loneliness makes them move closer to each other and their relationship starts to be characterized by high levels of intensity (Knapp and Vangelisti 3). High levels of intensity in the relationship between Harry and Sally make each other to understand each other well and finally getting married.
As both Harry and Sally did not have a good impression on each other, they develop much distrust on each other. Distrust on each other creates much uncertainty on each other. In order to reduce the uncertainty on each other, they followed uncertainty reduction strategies of nonverbal warmth and self-disclosure. When the two characters meet after their past relationships were in jeopardy, Harry and Sally comfort each other by adopting the strategy of the nonverbal warmth. By showing nonverbal warmth towards each other, they make the other persons realize his/her true personality. Disclosure regarding the true nature of their past relationships also helps in reducing the uncertainty between them. These two uncertainty reduction strategies adopted by the two characters in the movie help them to dispel the initial wrong impression on each other and move closer for a life-time closer relationship.
References
Knapp, Mark and Vangelisti, Anita. Interpersonal Communication and Human Relationships. Allyn and Bacon, 2008. Print.
