Romantic Discourse: A Study on the Persuasive, Refusal, and Acceptance Strategies in Romantic Confessions

The study examines romantic confession as an interactive and co-constructed process of persuasion between romantic confessor and confessee. Specifically, we explore on a micro level the persuasive, refusal, and acceptance strategies devised by confessor and confessee to achieve communicative purposes. Furthermore, the study investigates on a macro level the discourse structure of romantic confession to demonstrate further the effects of conversational interaction and co-construction between romantic confessor and confessee. It is the goal of the current study to provide new insights on the important role language plays in romantic relationships and suggest the establishment of Romantic Discourse as a field of study in linguistics research. Persuasion, a topic of study that can be traced back to its classical tradition in Greek philology, has long been recognized as the essence of rhetoric and is found to lie at the heart of communication (Burke, 1969; Hartelius and Browning, 2008). In the context of romantic confession, the confessor’s intention and goal of communication are to persuade his/her romantic interest into establishing a relationship with him/her. And as for the confessee, the objective is to either reject or accept the persuasion initiated by the confessor. Thus, romantic confession can also be viewed as a form of deliberate persuasive communication in which the interlocutors adopt verbal and nonverbal strategies to influence each other’s views and behaviors. As romantic confession is a collaborative and co-constructed discourse between confessor and confessee, the present study analyzes and examines the data both qualitatively and quantitatively with concepts drawn from Conversation Analysis (CA) and communication studies to probe into the conversational interaction between interlocutors in the process of romantic persuasion. Based on the twenty-hour discourse data collected from the popular reality dating TV show, Perfect Dating, we propose models of persuasive, refusal, and acceptance strategies, in which communicative strategies are categorized into (1) reward-based strategies, (2) punishment-based strategies, (3) altruism-based strategies, and (4) rationale-based strategies to represent and discuss the patterns of strategy use in the context of romantic confession. We find that interlocutors in our data prefer using rationally or emotionally appealing strategies such as reward-based or rationale-based strategies to persuade, reject, or accept in romantic confessions. Our study also develops a general structure of romantic confession to further reveal the characteristics of the conversational romantic confession discourse. To be more specific, four stages are identified in the discourse of romantic confession: (1) setting the scene, (2) making impressions & confessing feelings, (3) discussion & negotiation, and (4) coming to a decision. The roles of the interlocutors are found to shift between these stages and each of these stages serves different purposes in the discourse of romantic confession. Through proposing models of persuasive, refusal, and acceptance strategies to study romantic confession on a micro level as well as developing the general structure of romantic confession discourse on a macro level, our study aims to illustrate the context-specific characteristics in romantic confession. In addition, by providing insightful analyses and findings in our study, we seek to demonstrate the crucial role language plays in the development of romantic relationships. It is our goal to direct attention to the discourse between (potential) romantic partners in the field of linguistics and propose the importance for a line of research to contribute to the study of romantic discourse.