The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how humans experience relationships with machines such as love and sex dolls and robots. This study places a particular emphasis on in-depth, rich, and holistic understanding of people’s lived experiences in the context of human-machine relationships and draws on human-machine communication scholarship by examining media evocation perspectives, the role of illusions, and the topic of care. Therefore, this study uses a funneled serial interview design employing three waves of semi-structured interviews (N = 47) with 29 love and sex doll owners and users. Utilizing a phronetic iterative qualitative data analysis approach coupled with metaphor analysis, the findings of this study reveal how participants experience dolls as evocative objects and quasi-others. Moreover, the findings illustrate how participants actively construct and (re)negotiate authenticity in their human-machine relationships, driven by a cyclical process between doll characteristics (agency and presence) and doll owner characteristics (imagination and identity extension) that results in an illusion of being cared for. This study extends previous scholarship by: 1) showcasing a new type of mute machines, namely humanoid mute relational machines; 2) adding empirical evidence to the largely theoretical work on dolls and doll owners; 3) adding empirical evidence to and extending media evocation perspectives by illustrating the suitability of participant metaphors for understanding machines’ evocative nature; and 4) proposing an integrative model of care and illusions that lays the foundation for a new relational interaction illusion model to be examined in future research. This study also discusses practical implications for doll owners, the public, and doll developers.

This dissertation focuses on better understanding friendship dissolution. Participants (N= 358) who recalled a friendship that had ended completed a questionnaire that measured characteristics of the friendship prior to dissolution (satisfaction, commitment/investment, and quality of alternatives), reasons for friendship dissolution, emotional responses to friendship dissolution, dissolution behaviors, and post-dissolution social media connection. Those who were in friendships characterized by high commitment/investment and had high quality alternatives tended to attribute the friendship ending due to their partner committing a transgression and/or internal struggles within the friendship. This may be due to highly committed friendships tending to be stable until there are problems and alternatives are seen as appealing. Participants reported experiencing more negative and positive emotion if the friendship ended due to a partner’s transgression or internal struggles. They also reported more negative emotion if the friendship had been satisfying and committed, and more positive emotion if the friendship had been less satisfying and they had high quality alternatives. Four dissolution behaviors were investigated in this dissertation, and each was associated with different profiles of emotional responses and causes of dissolution. The mutual fade out was associated with the friendship ending due to external factors; being ghosted by a friend was associated with feeling negative emotions and the friendship ending due to external factors; ghosting a friend was associated with positive emotions and the friendship ending due to a partner transgression; and open confrontation was associated with the friendship ending due to a partner transgression and/or internal struggles. Finally, results showed that people were less likely to be connected on social media if the friendship had ended due to internal struggles and if they had either been ghosted or had ghosted their friend as a means to end the friendship. Those who reported that their friendship had ended due to external factors through means of the mutual fade out, on the other hand, were more likely to still be connected on social media. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the friendship dissolution process.