Long Distance Relationship Partners\u27 Relationship Maintenance Behavior and Relationship Uncertainty Reduction

Social networking sites have become popular communication tools to make connections and maintain interpersonal relationships, especially for long-disance romantic relationship. Given the popularity of this new communicative platform, this study aims at updating their pattern in terms of their benefits in maintenance romantic relationships among college students. 133 students were recruited to assess their maintenance behaviors through their uses of computer-mediated communication and some traditional communicative channels as well as their uncertainty level. This results reveal that long-distance romantic relationship partners use computer-mediated communication tools such as texting, direct messaging, Snapchat, and others more frequently than partners in geographically close relationships. In addition, this study finds that relationship maintenance performed on social media sites and face-to-face associate with relationship uncertainty. This study offers a new way to look at social networking sites as the maintenance behaviors for long-distance romantic relationship partners by comparing these new channels with the face-to-face maintenance communication. Such comparisons draw a bigger picture of how the long-distance romantic relationship maintenance operates in this digital age