Family Relations

 In my last blog post, I had talked about dating and building a strong relationship with someone else. In this post, I'm going to talk about the transition from dating into marriage.      I believe I mentioned this last time, but lots of people are scared of commitment. The number of people cohabiting instead of getting married is rapidly increasing. In class today, my professor said how in Idaho, it's easier to get out of a marriage than it would be a housing contract. Now staying on the idea of contract, what is the difference between a contract and a covenant? A Contract is a legally settled agreement, while a covenant is more of a spiritual agreement. A covenant is a two-way promise, a pledge. To think of marriage as a covenant rather than a contract makes it mean so much more. We want to keep our covenants with each other and with God. Often times our partner can come up short. They can frustrate or hurt us in ways, but just try and remember the promises we've m...

 Marriage is a beautiful thing. Millions upon Millions of families have started through marriage. There is a step before marriage though, and that would be dating! You have to date and get to know the love of your life before they become that.      In class, I heard a statistic that disturbed me a bit about dating. Between College Students, on average, people go on dates once and have three hookups in a year. Firstly, that stat is just disgusting, and secondly, it shows that dating is on the downfall. A common way of getting to know people nowadays is "hanging out." People hangout instead of going on a date. Hanging out typically includes a group of people, and it makes it harder to really connect with one person. There's nothing wrong with asking somebody on a date, but so many people are scared of it. Some reasons people don't go on dates is that they don't want to lead somebody on, fear of rejection, and people think there is an expectation of commitment before...

 There are many things in a family that can have an influence on a family and the individuals within. One big influence is Gender. For example, Boys and Girls have different things that they're more inclined to be like. Traits that girls are typically more inclined to have can include being more nurturing, listeners, empathetic, and more in tune with their own emotions as well as others. Boys' traits can include being more protective, responsible, and aggressive. These specific traits have their pros and cons. We read an article in preparation for one of our classes for Family Relations, and it was talking about how girls are more likely to be negatively influenced by the use of Social Media. When you look over their traits I listed, it can make sense. Social Media isn't the best thing to spend hours and hours on. There are lots of toxic or just not uplifting things that are posted that we'll spend our time looking at. So when typical girl traits are being good listener...

 In preparation for my Family Relations class this week, we had to watch a few videos. One in particular stuck out to me. It was a bunch of clips of people being shown a picture of somebody who looked a bit run down and they were asked their thoughts on it. I think every person in the video said he looked to be in the low to middle class. Then some people proceeded and were making fun and laughing at his appearance. Later on in the same video, some people were talking about how they wouldn't be caught dead in certain types of vehicles and certain types of clothing. Now, why does any of this matter? In recent times, society has been pushing for a perfectly equal civilization, but those same people don't see others as equals. Most of us don't even realize that we're judging and looking down on others. This is where Social Class comes in. For the most part, people are typically Middle class; not super-rich, but not poor either. We as people tend to naturally look down on o...

 In my Family Relations class today, my Professor brought something up that intrigued me. He showed us a video of a big Rube Goldberg that was an advertisement for Honda. That wasn't the important part, but afterwards, he explained how family systems can be like Rube Goldberg machines. Every single piece matters, and if one piece or part fails, so does the whole mechanism. So when you relate this to families, every member of the family has a role. The parents are typically the leaders. They raise us, teach us life skills, and help us to become the best person we could possibly be before we're out living on our own. A few other roles/classifications can include things like troublemaker, peacemaker, Class-clown, or reliable one.  I have seen examples of this in my own family.       My oldest brother took the role of Troublemaker in his Childhood. He got in trouble in the most creative ways you could think of. He had countless detentions in school, and he's in...