How do you view dates versus dating? For me dates are going out and doing anything from hikes, picnics, seeing a movie or going out to dinner and dancing. Dating is taking the opportunity to get to know people and get involved with others around you. Some people, like a lot of people I went to school with, think that one time hanging out at someones house watching television is a date and after that 'date' they are exclusively dating and that was the pattern they followed. Dating, for me, is seeing someone exclusively and seriously considering them as a potential life companion. If you were to consider dating someone exclusively why would you do it? Do you have lots of similar interests and values? Do you deem the same things important? Don't you think you should? Why did you start liking them initially? Was it mostly physical attraction? Don't get me wrong I will definitely do a double take at those tall,dark, handsome, boys with brown eyes...those are my favorite; but is that our main motivation for wanting to date someone? What happens when you are old and looks fade? Unless you are lucky enough to get one of those people that still look fantastic even as they get older (George Clooney!), but even then, what will you do with all your time together? What do you value in a relationship and and are you willing to sacrifice and compromise for your significant other? In my opinion, in order to make a relationship work, you will have to start thinking about the other person before you think of yourself. Isn't it important to be selfless in a relationship? Wouldn't that be right up there good communication? Isn't that what you would want out of a relationship?

Boys and Girls

                 
                So today my roommate and I had our friend Saul (who is a male) over for a bit, and we really had the opportunity to see the difference between males and females. He told us when he was having issues with his roommates he would come right out and say it and if that didn't work then he would escalate things by doing what was bugging him on a bigger scale back to them, which is a little ridiculous in my opinion! Then again when we have trouble with our roommates we simply don't say anything to each other and let things fester a bit, brilliant I know. Why are boys so willing to say whatever they want without worrying about the consequences and girls always consider what everyone else is thinking and feeling and how they might respond to something? It is a little frustrating!

Are all cultures valid?

This week we spoke a bit about culture validity.According to Culture Relativism, yes. Cultural relativism is the view that all beliefs, customs, and ethics are relative to the individual within his own social context. In other words, “right” and “wrong” are culture-specific; what is considered moral in one society may be considered immoral in another, and, since no universal standard of morality exists, no one has the right to judge another society’s customs, right? Even if they believe in self-mutilation or eating cats or human sacrifice or other strange, or in our culture bad, things? 
 They are allowed to do those things because of their culture and we don't believe in interfering or stopping someone from practicing what they believe. While we cannot and should not tell other people how to live, we can share with them what we believe.  When it comes to culture we tend to see things only our way and vice versa.  While we may think that what the other is doing is crazy and makes no sense.. they may see the way we do things to be even crazier. I don't believe that there is a temporal way to answer this question, spiritually though we know differently. We will all be held to the same standard in the last days. 

Family Rules

             
                I am pretty sure everybody has at least one strange family rule, whether it is spoken or unspoken.  In my family we had to ask our mom if we could go out for a sleep over or a movie so she could "think about it" ( I'm pretty sure she had her mind made up probably before the question was even done being asked.) We could NOT ask our dad because if we hassled him enough we could almost always get a 'Yes.'   One of my friends parents had to  kiss her mom every night and say they loved her even if they were mad, she said she never said they had to do it but they knew that they did. Think when you would go to a friends house how different things are. At one friends house it was my friends responsibility to cook dinner for her brother and mother and clean up afterwards every night. At another friends house it was the rule that they had to wait for their mother to get home before they would have dinner and often wouldn't start to make dinner until she was home; this often resulted in very late dinners. These spoken and unspoken rules make a family unique.  Through our family we learn what is acceptable and unacceptable social behavior, our habits, how we interact with others and our traditions.