Family Stages

A concept I found interesting this week is the typical life cycle of families with childre. This 7 stage cycle was clearly defined step by step in our book. The book acknowledged that not every stage would be followed by every family, but that this was a generalized cycle. Seeing the cycle written in Figure 12.2 put life in a new perspective for me and made it appear extremely short and compact. In reality, however, each stage does ideally last for a good amount of time. I feel like one of the most difficult stages for a couple would be Stage 6, or the postlaunching of children. This stage seems hard, because after having a long life of watching and helping your children grow, it all ends. They leave home and I could imagine that would be a very startling transition for a couple. Returning to a relationship where the couple is once again the primary unit could be odd at first. However, maybe it would just take a little time to get back into the old rhythm, and a couple would begin to enjoy more freedom with less responsibilities. I know that after seeing this cycle, if I plan to have kids I would want to have them spread out over years, in order to prolong the cycle and keep Stage 6 as far away as possible.

Marriage

The definition of marriage has evolved greatly over the years. While it once was considered something to be help sacred and kept no matter what, nowadays it is looser and less restricting. People marry for love more often than for obligation now, and if that love runs out people have accepted that it is ok to go find a new happiness elsewhere. This can be seen in the increasing rates of divorce and then second marriages after divorce. Over the next fifty years, I see these numbers staying the same, because people have come to terms with the fact that no one’s perfect but we all deserve happiness in our lives. If a relationship that began with love is now bringing frustration or sadness, it has become okay to leave the sadness in search of a new happiness, and I don’t see people developing a diversion to searching for happiness. A more significant change in marriage that I see happening hopefully sooner than in 50 years is the widespread acceptance and acknowledgment of same sex marriage. Not civil union, not partnership- nothing short of true, pure, equal marriage that heterosexual couples have had access to since the dawn of time. I believe our values and culture is changing, slowly but surely, and soon will no longer see any justice in denying this right to our peers. Hopefully we will all see that this is just an extension of our developing search for lifelong happiness.

Definition of Family

I believe family should be defined as a group of people who care for each other and make commitments to stay loyal and supportive. They need not be related or married, but could be families of friends based on different circumstances. Family members should help each other when there are problems and always be supportive of one another. They should not feel obligated to do anything, but should want to be with each other. Family members should trust one another and not do anything to betray that trust. I believe the total marriage relationship described in this chapter best fits this description. Removing the married aspect, it applies to all types of families I described. Family members should have separate interests and activities, yet look forward to being with each other. Devitalized and conflict-habituated relationships strongly does not fit. A family should like each other and should not stay together only because they are obligated.

Love and Commitment

In one of my first relationships, I experienced love without commitment. While I and the guy I was seeing both experienced love, only I wanted commitment. As a result, we didn’t last long, because I wanted more from him than he was willing to give at the time. Relationships that I can think of where there is commitment but not love might be one between a waning couple. Although I can’t think of a time I’ve been in a relationship like that, I can imagine it would come when a couple has been together for a long time and is therefore committed, but does not want to admit that the love they once had is now gone. In the first type of relationship, there could be a negative impact on the person who wanted commitment from the person who didn’t want to give it. However, if both people wanted love with no commitment, I think it could be a fun but not serious relationship. A relationship like the second might be a hard one to be in and have a negative impact on both people. While they have invested so much time and energy and are still so committed, it is hard to recognize that love might be gone and it’s even harder to walk away from the relationship. I don’t think either type of relationship is positive, and one should work on having a romantic relationship with equal parts commitment and love.

Online Deceit

I agree that online there is a greater potential to be deceitful and to be fooled or lied to. I do not believe this is ethical. Online communication should be treated no differently that personal face to face communication. The only difference is that online makes it easier to speak to people far away that we wouldn’t have been able to meet otherwise. Although deception is likely in either kind of interaction, it is slightly easier and doesn’t feel as wrong when it’s done online, and therefore I believe it is more likely online. Face to face, people can deceive by lying, skewing information, omitting important facts. Online, all of this can be done too, but the extent of the lies is much greater. You can’t lie about you gender, hair color, or height face to face, but online you can create yourself to be any person you want. Although not ethical, it is easily and often done, either with the intention of deceit or because the person is insecure of their true traits.

Styles of Loving

One concept I found interesting this week was the different styles of loving. I had no idea that there were different types of loving, let alone six distinct types. When I was reading them, I was with my boyfriend, and we tried to determine what our specific type of loving is. I think our relationship is strongly storge. We began as friends and slowly built a romantic relationship that turned into love. We both have common goals in life of being successful in our jobs, moving away from our hometown, and someday building a family. We also have the same religious and moral values, seeing as we met through our church. We do have occasional crazy fights however, which is slightly in the eros style of loving. Also, we tend to have playful and fun periods, which lean slightly ludus. It was very interesting to try to figure out our loving type, and to learn that we can and do have parts of multiple types. Also, knowing that our loving type is not permanent is a nice thing to know, that maybe in the future we will be more eros or ludus than we currently are, because nothing is set in stone.

Development of Friendship

A concept I found interesting this week was the set of stages of the development of friendship. The little diagram the book included was very helpful for remembering the stages. I can relate each stage to a friendship I had in high school. Our role-limited interaction began when we accidentally met through other friends. I became best friends with two girls, and these two girls were a part of a five girl group of friends that had known each other since elementary school. As a result, those two girls brought me to hang out with their group, and I met this one girl, let’s call her T. As I hung out with that group, we moved to step two, friendly relations, trying to see if we could develop a better friendship. T and I began moving towards friendship by hanging out outside of the group, or talking in the hallways and at lunch. We began to consider each other friends, and moved to step four, or nascent friendship. We stabilized our friendship by creating rules and establishing trust. We hung out a lot one-on-one outside of school too. A few years later, however, our friendship began to wane. She had very different ideas and opinions that severely clashed with mine, and she did not allow us to have differing personalities. There was a time where all communication was extremely defensive- and now it doesn’t exist at all.

Friendship Page

The Friendship Page was a very interesting site that I didn’t know existed. It seems to be a very useful place to go in order to get advice about challenges within friendships. The issues raised in the forum reflect all of the challenges to friendship discussed in this chapter. There are posts about how to keep in contact with a friend that is moving, as well as people asking about how to reconnect with a friend who has personally changed into a completely new person. There are also posts about friends who have competing demands, where one friend has gotten a new boyfriend and focuses all of her attention on him while her best friend is upset that she never hangs out anymore. I didn’t read any in regards to diverse communication styles, but there was one about sexual attraction. A man developed feelings for his coworker, while both of them were married, which really confused him. The difference between the book and the forum, however, is that while the book states the problems and examples, the forums involve real life situations which can be much more complicated and sticky than the book could ever describe. The forum is also great because of the opportunity for discussion and interaction, as well as personable help with a specific problem rather than just reading a “most likely” solution in a book.

Best Friends

I have been best friends with Rachel for 9 years now. We have made all of the investments imaginable. We have spent a ton of time together, especially during the summers when we both go back home, we make efforts to talk about our thoughts and feelings, and we spend energy doing things together. Over the 9 years we build and communicate acceptance by learning and recognizing each other’s flaws and coming to the realization that they’re just a part of us. For example, she has a very different mindset about some things, and that caused problems for us early on when I got upset because she couldn’t do things my way. Now, I’ve accepted those traits of hers, and she’s accepted mine. We build and communicate trust over the years by keeping numerous secrets and being able to depend on one another for help no matter what. We build and communicate closeness through late night talks and always showing that we care about each other. The dynamics of our friendship could definitely be seen as consistent with those identified by researchers as discussed in this chapter.