Romantic Relationships and Traditional Media

The widespread adoption of social media, mobile phones, and online dating apps has drawn more attention toward the importance of media technologies in romantic relationships. However, most observed relational functions and effects of digital media are not novel. Rather, they have been documented previously with traditional media such as books, letters, radio, newspapers, recorded music, television, and the telephone. Romantic relational phenomena manifest across both traditional and digital media due to similar affordances. This chapter provides an overview of research on traditional media across relational processes (mate seeking, relationship initiation, relationship escalation, relationship maintenance, relationship disruption, and relationship dissolution), identifying key social affordances, and introducing relevant theories. We discuss how people use media in relationships, how media consumption affects our relationships, and how people foster relationships with media characters (i.e., parasocial relationships).