First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage, Then Comes...

        Okay so I missed class Friday so I missed out on the discussion, but it was on having babies… And I missed class to go and see my brand new niece! Little Rylie Renee Lovelace was born Wednesday February 20^th. And she is just a doll! So I talked to my sister  and my mom (because she is out here from Georgia to see Rylie) about some of the things that were in our readings about having a child and that is kind of what I am going to put into here today. But I want to start with the topics from earlier this week.. We’ve been talking about the adjustments you make after you get married. We first brought back some of the trends on how less people are getting married especially due to cohabitation, but I’ve kind of already talked about that so I’m not going to really focus on that today. So of course, if you are not cohabitating, when you do move in together there are going to be some challenges. Most of the things we talked about in class can be alleviated through dating, but there are still always going to be some. A few of the things that were brought up in the class discussion were; how you do the finances, like having separate accounts or a joint account, who is going to handle the money, and there are a lot more bills that you don’t realize and that can cause stress on you both.  How much time you are going to spend with the extended family on each side, and even the time spent with each other- you might be used to spending a ton of time together through dating but when you are married it is going to be a whole lot more time. And are you going to take vacations away from each other, or do you want to spend every moment that you can with each other? One big one, that in my opinion can start to be figured out through dating, but not completely taken away is resolving conflict. You have to learn how to compromise and learn to disagree. There are going to be disagreements and you have to learn how to handle them, do you like to sit and talk about it or do you like to go walk to off and then when you’re cooled off come back and talk, or calm down and then not need to talk? If one of you is a talker and one of you has to walk it off, are you both okay with that? Do you never go to bed angry, or sleep it off til you have a clear mind? Like I said, if you really know the person you’re marrying you should have a pretty good idea about how they handle differences but there will be some differences and you are still learning. And then the last one I’m going to mention is just the little quirks of living with someone, like if they leave their towel on the bed and you hang it up right away, or do they squeeze the toothpaste and you roll it? I mean I dunno cause I’m not married… But I think yea there are some things that you have to get used to, but that’s part of life and if you love them, so what? You can get used to those things for them and work through them for each other. J

                Okay and then comes the BABY!!! And I did not really agree with the powerpoint that we read on having babies… But then-again, I’ve never been married and had a baby.. But I talked to my mom and my sister and got their opinion and I think that some people might have this opinion on having babies, but I don’t think that it is the opinion that everyone has. So what the powerpoint was saying was that some of the challenges of having babies were was that your marital happiness was at its peak when you got married and with every kid it goes down. It said that sometimes the intimacy levels in the marriage will go down, husbands will feel like left out and wives will feel like the husbands don’t care. I feel like, yes kids are hard work but they can also be one of the happiest things that happen in your lives.  They can bring so much joy to your life together.  Talking to my mom especially, she said that we were the greatest thing that ever happened to her.  And seeing my sister and brother-in-law and how much joy little Rylie has brought them so far, I think you just have to make the choice to be happy like with anything else.  Plus, look how stinkin ADORABLE she is!!! J  

Gotta love LOVE :)

We’ve been talking about love! Perfect timing too with Valentine’s Day this week. And I had the best Valentines J Well actually I had two… And they are both far away from me, but both two of my favorite boys, Elder Ian Smith and my favorite brother Bradley. Hehe And those handsome boys in the pictures are them. :)

        Okay so talking about love.. there are four types of love; eros, agape, storge, and philia. Eros is the passionate, sexual love that is driven by emotions. Agape is love that is independent of one’s feelings for another. Storge is the love between a parent and a child. And lastly, the love between friends is philia. All throughout your life you will experience each of these types of love with different people. When you get in a serious relationship with the person you are going to marry, you should experience all four types of love. Of course there should be the passionate love, but there needs to be more than that. Before you are ready to be in a relationship with someone and ready to grow with someone you must be independent. You must be able to love yourself and be confident in yourself. Then and only then can you fully love someone else. The love you have for your spouse is not going to be the same as the love you have for your parents, but there needs to be the caring nature. If your spouse is really sick and the only love you have for them is passionate, you are not going to want to spend the night with them while they are throwing up in the bathroom. That is where storge love comes in. And you always hear people say, “I want to marry my best friend”. And that is so true. It is so important! You really do need to marry your best friend; you need to have that best friend love for your spouse.  

                Yupp that’s all I got for now. And now I’m gonna go cause I’m heading down to Utah for my cousin’s wedding.. Speaking of love! Haha J

Happy late Valentine’s Day! Hope it was great! 

Dating

      So today I had a little surprise :) So I have a missionary, he has been faithfully serving in Long Beach, California for the past year and a half. (Which means he comes home to me in six and a half months!!) But I got my weekly letter on Saturday so I was not expecting a letter for another week, well me and my roommate Jami went to check the mail just for the heck of it today and guess who got a letter!! I'm not supposed to open it til Valentines Day, which is in three days, but he opened his Christmas present early, so I opened my Valentines letter early. Hehe :) He's such a sweetie! He wrote me scriptures that reminded him of me.  I love getting surprises like that! He's the best!!  
     Okay so that doesn't entirely relate to what we talked about today... But it made my day so I had to share :) We talked about dating. Again, I’m going to pull from my other family class. I think I will probably be doing that for the rest of the semester.. But dating! Okay, so we talked about a few different aspects of dating. Did you know that, we tend to like people that live or work near us, and I forget the statistic but like around one-third (I think) of people marry people that live within a few blocks of their house. Why is that? Well, it used to be because there wasn’t the means to meet as many people that lived further away, but also the saying “opposites attract” is actually false. We tend to go for people that are similar to ourselves. We find that we can relate to them better, of course they have to have some differences, especially things that will make our weaknesses become strengths, but if we are complete opposites then we will not have any common ground to begin to relate.

                I love BYUI because people actually date here! I think it is a lost thing in my town in Georgia, but not just there, dating is becoming a lost thing around the world. People are hanging out, not dating. In order to be a date it must pass the three P’s- planned, paid for, and paired off. (Which if you are familiar with the Proclamation to the World, you will recognize that those are similar to the three P’s of a man’s duty.. Preside, Provide, and Protect…  Fun fact..) When you are young and in high school, hanging out is totally fine! You do not have to go on these paired off dates, in fact group dates are better! But when you get to the college age you need to start getting out of the hanging out stage and get into the dating stage.  Even still, they can and should be group dates, just have some single dates to know if you can be alone with the person.

                What are the purposes of dating? We date of course to find our future eternal companion, but we should not be looking for that on our first dates. We should date lots of people and lots of different types of people to learn what kinds of people and the traits of people that we like and want to be with. We also date for recreation, companionship, status attainment, socialization, and intimacy (or as Brother Williams calls it in-ta-my-mate). But intimacy just means sharing something with someone, being with someone, it does not mean sex necessarily.

                Dating is not just about selecting a partner, it is about learning yourself, and then learning and growing together. Dating is an important and exciting step in life. And I’m really excited to be at that time in my life!! J

Okayy!! Have a great week!!

Peace and blessing. 

Gender Roles

Such a great weekend so far! Friday went on a blind double date with my best friend of 11 years and it was a blast! We ate dinner and went bowling! And then had a sleepover with my amazing roomies. And then today I went on a group date with a real cutie J we went sledding and then to Shake Out. It was super fun! I love this school and am so grateful to be here! So I’m actually taking two family classes this semester, this family relations class and then The Family. This week in both classes we have been talking about gender roles, so my post for this week I am going to talk about what I learned from this class and then pull a little from my other class. I think the topic of gender roles is really important. One of the most important things to start this topic off is by saying how our gender did not happen by chance; we are what we are by chance. There are specific characteristics and roles given to men and women that occurred before we came to this earth. I think it is important to remember this because it is not our choice and by going against our roles it is going against our divine nature. Man and woman are created equal, but that does not mean identical. Our roles are different but equal.  I think while we each have our roles, the man as the provider, protector and priesthood holders; while the woman is the nurturer and caregiver, we are here to help each other gain eternal salvation and each of our roles is equally important and necessary.

                One of the things that we talked about in class was that some research says that the reason that boys and girls act differently is due to sexist parenting. It said that parents need to treat their sons more like their daughters and nurture them more. This is just not true! We are different and supposed to be! There was a quote in one of my classes, I don’t remember which one, but it was something like “if we both thought the same, there wouldn’t be a need for both of us.” I think this can be applied to gender roles. If we were the same, there wouldn’t be a need for both males and females. But God created both, so obviously there is a need.  Plus, it’s more fun! Haha

                Last thing I wanna say.. we had a reading that I really liked and I wanted to mention it. It was about the role of siblings, specifically sisters. It talked about how important the role of siblings is in growing up. This study said that having a sister “protects them from feeling lonely, unloved, guilty, self-conscience, and fearful”.  And while major fighting between siblings is not the best thing, the little sibling squabbles is actually a good thing because it teaches us to make up and regain control of our emotions. SO that said… I just wanna say my little brother is lucky to have three AWESOME big sisters! Haha :P

Have a great week!  J

Cultures

I freaking love snow. Just saying. I went sledding today for the first time and it was SO much fun!! :)

        Okay so this past week we've been talking about different cultures and diversity. I’m not going to give all the facts about that though, because something really stuck out to me and I really just want to make that as my point this weekend. It is important to learn about other cultures and become familiar with them, but there are some things that we need to be cautious about when we do. Sometimes after learning a lot about a culture people can become narrow minded and start to not see the individuals just see the culture. We have to be careful about stereotypes. I’m sure everyone has been the victim of a stereotype at some point in their life, weather it was for their race, culture, religion, or whatever else it was for. We all know that it is not a good feeling to be seen as a group rather than an individual person. When we learn about different cultures it can help to get a basic understanding of maybe the background of a person, just do not lose sight of who they are and their individual traits.

And I’ll step off the soapbox now.. I just really liked that angle of the conversation. I think it is important and want to make sure to get it out there. :)

Happy Saturday! Have a great week!  

Theories

It's Friday!!! Yay! I'm so excited for the weekend! So something we learned about in class that I had never heard about before was theories. In this class we learn about researching families. When we look at families we use different theories to help guide the research. The concept of theory is stressed because when dealing with researching things like families, you have to be careful with stating facts because all families and situations are different. There are four theories we look at when talking about family relations. Systems theory, exchange theory, symbolic interaction theory, and conflict theory.

                The first is systems theory, which al other theories fall under the general heading, but when specifically applied to family relations this theory asserts that the intimate group must be analyzed as a whole. Basically it means that everyone in the family has a role that is for the benefit of the whole family not them individually.

                The next theory is the exchange theory. The concept of this theory is the idea of “you owe me”. It is the attempt to keep your costs, which could be time, money, emotional energy etc., lower than your rewards. If this is not happening then you would avoid the person or end the relationship.

                The next  theory is the symbolic interaction theory. This is a theory that people are defined by their interaction experiences. One of the important concepts of this idea is the definition of the situation,  when we define a situation as real it has real consequences.

                The last theory is conflict theory. This theory is the idea that all societies are characterized by inequality, conflict, and change as groups in the society struggle.

                These theories are one way people look at family relationships. Like I said before, families are so unique and have their own situations so in my opinion they are one of the hardest things to put facts on. But by using these theories, this is one way we can try to learn more about the functions and habits of families in general.  

Have a great weekend!! 

-Ashley