What Makes Our Relationships Meaningful, Satisfying, or Fulfilling?
Answers from Social Scientists and the Wisdom of Ordinary People
- Marriage, Family & Relationships
- Publisher: Wipf and Stock
- Published: 2025
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Publisher's Description
This book features a unique research project: it spans fifty years. It seeks to replicate in 2025 findings from research in 1975 asking this question: What makes our relationships meaningful, satisfying, or fulfilling? Look for answers from the expertise of social scientists and the wisdom of ordinary people. The original research centers on four relational qualities: communication openness, being oneself, interpersonal security and warmth, and personal support and growth. The new research replicates three of these qualities and identifies ten themes, seven of which are new: communication, being oneself, and growth along with connection, mutuality, enjoyment, time, work, presence, and transcendence. A follow-up research project discovers that ordinary people's relationships as a whole are meaningful, satisfying, fulfilling, and quite healthy overall. In fact, they have significance, value, and importance; they bring enjoyment, pleasure, or contentment; and they thrive and flourish. Perhaps most astonishingly, in their personal relationships, they do well on all four qualities and ten themes, including practical ways each quality and theme is expressed. Within the book, readers will also find thought-provoking quotations, vignettes, reflections, and case studies drawn from responses of family members, friends, and colleagues.
Endorsements (2)
“Once again, Tom Kirkpatrick has offered us a practical guide in cultivating one of the most important aspects of our lives. He maintains that having positive relationships across the span of life leads to deep inner peace and fulfillment, noting as well that without them we are less likely to have a meaningful life. He provides a profound description of these qualities. By cultivating positive relationships, we do find that they give us enjoyment and pleasure and empower us to thrive and flourish. As always, Tom Kirkpatrick has done the research in the social sciences on which to base this most important book, drawing as well upon the teachings of Jesus.”
“This is a thought-provoking book full of clear and simple wisdom. There is solid academic research as well as ordinary people honestly responding to the question in the title. I valued the research over time, the individual vignettes, and the practical applications listed at the close of each chapter. I gained much new insight and appreciation from encountering this work.”
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