Relationships

I really enjoyed getting to discuss what we all have come to appreciate about one another during our last group. Despite two of our group members being absent we had a great discussion about love and how we’ve all grown so much just from reading the chapters in our books. Reading the chapter created an epiphany for most of us in terms of how we view love and our relationships.

I wasn’t really sure what to make of the online article that we had to read this week. I believe in monogamy, however, reading the article and the gender differences I didn’t really agree with what it was saying. But then I had to stop and think that perhaps the reason that I feel differently about things is because I haven’t taken a rating scale to see how feminine I am according to that and then see if my feelings would differ from there.

As for the relationship chapter in the book, it was overwhelmingly filled with really great information. It covered so many different types and aspects of relationships it was hard to focus and keep track of all of the pertinent information that it was sharing. I felt it was really interesting about how it says that if you have bad relationships with your parents this can cause you problems in all of your relationships. I have a very strained relationship with my mother and it definitely has caused me issues outside of just my relationship with her. Then I also thought about how it said that you learn how to show your anger from your family and that was very interesting and accurate. My favorite part of the whole chapter was probably the part on page 208 where it talked about that you can only rebut what someone else has said in an argument if you first restate their feelings and opinion accurately. So frequently I feel like I have to repeat myself in arguments because the other persons response either has nothing to do with what I’m trying to say or is so inaccurately based off of some small portion of what I said that it’s not even valid. I even asked my baby daddy (for lack of a better way to refer to him) if he would read the love and relationship chapters from the book so that we could discuss them and potentially proceed in improving how we deal with each other based off of the information we’ll have gained from reading the book.

Then this chapter also had the section on gay, lesbian, bisexual relationships and how difficult they are for those people whom lead these lifestyles. I thought it was really interesting that it said that some therapists still think of homosexuality as a disorder. I had known that it used to be in DSM as a disorder, but I guess I just figured that we’ve progressed far enough that people would’ve acknowledged by now that its not a disorder. I guess I think of psychology and the clinicians that study psychology as progressive so that people would be up on the current times and beliefs and yet this clearly isn’t the case as pointed out by our text. I’ve had a lot of gay/lesbian friends over the years and I just don’t understand why people feel so negatively about them. I guess I’m just a very open and accepting person and that’s why I don’t see an issue with someone choosing to love whomever they want. I guess I don’t understand what threat it poses and/or to whom it poses that threat to?

References:

Corey, G. & Corey, M. S. (2010). Relationships. In Brooks/Cole (9^th edition), I Never Knew I Had a Choice (192-224). Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole, Cengage Learning.

Schmookler, T. & Bursik, K. (2007). The value of monogamy in emerging adulthood: A gendered perspective. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships