Preparing for Marriage

Hello Readers!

     This week was a very interesting and eye opening week of learning! As you can tell from the title, this week we learned about preparing for marriage. The world sure has changed what dating, courting, engagement, and marriage means. Lets just jump right in!
Let me first pose a question: What do people do these days to prepare for marriage? There are many answers which vary from culture to culture. I will just list a few. Cohabitation, Dating, hooking-up, Courtship. Just think to yourself for a moment what each of these things mean to you.
Dating has changed from going out and doing activities to being a couple. Not long ago dating was based around getting to know people through doing planned activities together, and just having good wholesome fun. But today, dating has a whole new definition. Now days, if someone is dating, it means they are exclusive and are probably sleeping with each other. So it is a pretty night and day difference. But due to this new definition of dating, it has thrown off the stages in a relationship and kind of mushed them all together. What are these stages you might ask? They are as follows: Dating, Courtship, Engagement, Marriage.
Nowadays, people have started sliding through these stages instead of moving purposely through each stage. Each stage should be defined and know between the two people. Dating is as we have already covered, just two people, who are not exclusive, having a good time on a date that is planned, paid for, and they are paired off purposefully. I say that because group dates count just as well as single dates, as long as it meets those three guidelines. After dating comes courtship. Courtship is, in my opinion, a lost part of these stages. Now people just "date" until maybe one day marriage is brought up and boom, they are somehow engaged. Courtship is the part most would consider dating in today's world. This is when you have talked about marriage and you both feel that it could be a possibility in your future, so you then start dating exclusively to get to know each other better (meet families, etc.). The most important thing to remember is to Define The Relationship (DTR). Many people make fun of DTR's, but they are a necessity in a relationship. If you both are on the same page then you both know what to expect, and what you want out of the relationship. But you need to move from stage to stage purposefully together.
After courtship comes engagement. This hasn't been as effected as dating and courtship, but it still has been effected in some ways. It is becoming less common to have a formal proposal of marriage. There are many who just casually bring up marriage, and if they are in mutual agreement, just decide they are engaged. But the formal proposal is an important part. If something is formal, then it is more likely you will be more committed to that engagement. You are also moving purposefully to the next stage instead of just sluggishly sliding into it.
The last step, as you know, is marriage. although the concept of marriage is still the same, I feel that it isn't as meaningful as it once was. It might be a cause of lazily sliding through the stages, or people are just more self centered these days. Either way, your work isn't done once you are married. Many people stop going on dates once they are married because they see dating as a "finding the right one" activity, when really, as we have learned, it is a "get to know you" activity. So keep dating once you are married! There is always more you can learn about your spouse. Even for those that have been married for years can learn new things about their spouse.
     Well, I hope you were able to learn something today. Even if you are already married, you can at least come away with going on more dates. I promise you you wont regret it. Have a good week!

Gender and Family Life

Hello readers!

     This week there was some very interesting things I learned. It is very apparent that there are differences between males and females. Sometimes these differences drive a wedge between us instead of helping us to work together better. I know myself that sometimes I have no idea what goes through a girls head. We could be talking about food and then next thing I know they are upset over something that has no relation to food. It confuses me, but this week we learned why we as men and women struggle to understand each other sometimes.

Nature v.s. Nurture is a debate that has been going on for a long time, and it will probably continue for a long time. Now, I'm not telling you what to think in the matter, but I am going to share some things that the majority of men and women tend to do and feel. This chart below is a way I have compared the two different styles of behavior in most men and women. I will give a summary of what they mean below.

Female	Male
Relationship Oriented	Spatial Orientation
People	Things
Emotionally expressive	Action oriented
Personal Communication	Task based communication

 Relationship Oriented vs Spatial Oriented: Females are generally more open and social than men are. This is because most women's brains are wired this way. Men are much more likely to want their own space. 

People Oriented vs Object Oriented: Women, like you may have gathered by the previous topics, are people oriented. Even from a young age, little girls love to play with dolls and pretend to take care of them as if they were living people. Now not to say that young boys don not do this too, but males are more likely to play with toy cars or sticks that look like guns.

Emotionally Expressive vs Action Oriented: I feel that it is well known that women are more emotional than men. Many would argue that it is because males are told their whole lives to "suck it up" or to "rub some dirt on it." While this may play into it, women's brains are just wired to be more emotional compared to men's. There was a study done where little girls and little boys were put behind some glass with their mom on the other side. A majority of the girls saw their mom on the other side and realized they could not get to her, so they immediately fell to the floor sobbing. The little boys, on the other hand, tried to get through the glass for a while before they broke into tears. Males are wired to try something before drawing conclusions while women draw conclusions before they try it.

Personal Communication vs Task Based Communication: Now what might be even more well know about women is that they love to talk ,and especially to their other girl friends. This is because (you guessed it) they are wired to be social butterflies. Women bond and make friends effectively just by talking to someone face to face. Men on the other hand bond and make friends most effectively while they are working alongside someone, or working to complete a similar goal. This is also why women take things so personally, because their communication is based to be received and delivered in a personal way. 

Some other things you might find interesting also have to do with the brain. Men have more grey matter in their brains, which means that they can focus very well on single tasks. This is why many men are good at coming home from work and refocusing on home life, leaving all work at work. This could also contribute to why a lot of men are forgetful and/or don't hear the best. If they are distracted by something, then everything else is tuned out for the most part. Women have more white matter in their brains, which means that they are better at making connections between tasks. Women have up to 5 times more connection tissue between the emotional part of the brain and the verbal part of the brain than men do. This is why they express their emotions more than men. This video i have attached covers some of these thoughts I have shared from a different point of view. It is also pretty entertaining.

A Tale of Two Brains

Thanks for reading!

Social Class & Cultural Diversity

Hello There!!

     This week was an interesting one. Not a whole lot of statistics to share, but I have some interesting thoughts, as well as some interesting ideas I observed in class this week.

      This week we ran a simulation based on a study done on the cost it takes for immigrants (illegal in this case) to come to the US. (The study we based this off of) The costs we covered weren't just about money and possessions, but family life as well.

      In class we had volunteers come up to represent everyone in the study (mom, dad, grandma, etc.). Then we established the background. The father was a welder in Mexico. He was making decent money, which was enough for his family to have a comfortable living. The mother could stay home with the kids, and the kids were in school and had a good social life. But the mother and father want more for their children. They want them to get a better education, and to learn English. So they decide to move to the US. The father had to save up four thousand dollars to pay off the coyotes (border smugglers) to get him across the boarder, and all he could bring with him was what he could carry. But in the end, he makes it to the US.

     In the meantime, his family back in Mexico has some serious life changes come their way. The mother now has to start working full time, so she is no longer with her kids all day every day. Her sixteen year old son now has to be the man in the family. He no longer has time to finish school, but he now ha to start working as well. And the thirteen year old daughter? You guessed it! She is working with mom earning money too. So their whole family dynamic changed.

     So the father and his wife figured it would take about six to twelve months for him to make enough money for his family to follow him to the US, but he can not find a good paying job because he is an illegal immigrant. Since he can not raise enough money fast enough it ends up taking three years for the family to be able to get there. By the time the family gets there, the son is nineteen, the daughter is 16, and they all feel distanced from the father. The son feels distanced because he was the father figure in the family for so long that he has grown up and does not feel that he needs his dad anymore. The daughter is distanced from the father because she spent so much time with her mother raising money. And the mother is distanced just because of being the breadwinner for so long.

     Not only has the family dynamic changed, but now the children are thrown into a new culture and a new language to learn. Their children will now suffer until they can figure out the language and find work that will accept them. And any hope for continuing education is almost zero due to those language barriers.

     Families that lose their father change dramatically. People might not think they change too much, but they change a lot. The same goes for losing a mother. The father and the mother both play very important roles in the family, and when it is disrupted it can change the whole family dynamic.

     Thanks for reading! Sorry if this one wasn't the most interesting or intriguing, but it will be better in the future. Thanks!

Family Dynamics & Theories

Hello Everyone!

As the title suggests we learned about family dynamics and Theories this week in class. There are some very interesting things that we covered, so let's jump right into it!Theories are "set(s) of logically related propositions that explain some phenomenon" (Lauer and Lauer, P. 20) We learned about 4 theories that can occur in a family, I'll talk a bit about them.

• Conflict Theory:
• Conflict theory proposes that in all relationships there are inequalities. It varies widely from relationship to relationship, but people aren't actually completely equal. If you think about various relationships, you can probably pick out some where one spouse seems to have power over the other. they have the final say in every decision. Or, maybe you know a family (or have experience) who goes to one parent and gets rejected, and then goes to another and gets a yes. Both of these could be considered conflict theory. It's not inherently bad to be unequal in different ways, sometimes someone has a better strength in a certain area. It only gets bad when the influence get overwhelming and/or abusive.
• Exchange Theory:
• Exchange theory involves people not wanting the cost of the relationship to outweigh the rewards in the relationship. This theory proposes that if you are "exchange theory minded" then you will do everything you can to get as much out of your relationship, but also not give as much back in return. Maybe you make your spouse do the dishes after every meal by themselves. Or maybe you are the one stuck folding the laundry every day even though your significant other clearly has plenty of time to help. You are likely to not be too happy, and if you take this theory to the extreme you might break things off if things don not improve. I hope no one jumps to the end like that, but instead talks it over with their significant other calmly instead of exploding.
• Symbolic Interaction Theory:
• Symbolic interaction theory has to do with people's actions. What a person does is sometimes more symbolic than factual. For example, Hugs. Hugs are a very simple gesture, but they are also so very complex. Think about all the different hugs there are. There are side hugs, bro hugs, hugs of comfort, romantic hugs, the list could go on forever. Well, because hugs are so simple, yet so complex, they are misread all the time. A guy might just want to help comfort a girl during a stressful time, but she might see it as him trying to make a move on her. In another example, you might try to do a chore your spouse usually does to be nice, but they might take it the wrong way and think you did it because they were being lazy. 
• Systems Theory:
• Systems theory is an interesting one. It proposes that every family acts as a system, and that every relationship inside the family is a sub-system. Then, these Systems always have rules and every system has sub-systems, such as Father-son, Mother-daughter, Sibling-sibling. These rules that the system has can be kind of funny. Did you ever have unwritten rules in your family, or do you currently? Think about what they are. Do you all do the dishes right after dinner? Do you kneel or sit as a family when you pray? Are there certain things that you do not bring up around certain family members? It seems like families have this unspoken language. You can just give each other "the look" and know exactly what and what not to do and say. 

All of these theories are really fun to think about and contemplate. I challenge you to think about them and see if you can see some similar characteristics in your family. Thanks for reading! Have a great week!