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Slap (chop) of relationship reality

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This semester marks the end of my official re-entry back into life as a professor. This is basically a perfect summary of what it was like.

But as I head into the holiday season, here are my personal 2013 professor lessons learned:

a) You can get people jazzed about learning when you actually give a shit about what you’re teaching. And these two things are absolutely intertwined.

b) My students listened to me (at least) some of the time – while they weren’t effing around on Facebook or online shopping (seriously, they didn’t even try to hide it from me when they knew I was standing at the back of the room and had a perfect line on their laptops….wtf?!). Most of the time I didn’t hear crickets when I asked questions. Probs cuz their participation was heavily weighted.

And they heard me – as the quotes below show. Now….the fact that they listened to me is both kinda crazy (I’m considered the ‘authority’ simply cuz I stand behind a podium) and horrifying (how I present at topic can legit effect what these students really think about some of this stuff).

Seriously? Who gave me this kind of power?

c) Challenging people to confront their values about sex, relationships, love, and life is a really f’ing sweet teaching gig. Let’s do it all over again in January, shall we?

Here are some of the more poignant responses from my students from my third year Interpersonal Relationships psychology course…

Question: How has this course made you think differently about interpersonal relationships?

(PS – this was the BEST question ever. What a great way to gauge what they actually “heard” in class, you know…in between the tweeting, texting, creeping, and other non-class related activities they were busy doing)

Personally, this course was a slap of reality to my life.

It makes me realize how crazy I am.

Casual sex is good and now is a good time for it because you will never be surrounded by so many people outside of university.

I now know that if I like someone and they are already with someone else, I have an 50% chance that I can successfully poach that person from their partner.

Love may not be all we think it is (totally understand this now).

Casual sex is okay!

I’m more cynical about relationships.

I have begun to understand that love is real, in that is has an evolutionary basis. Prior to this course, I had seen it as a bullshit hallmark invention. Demonstrating that love shows commitment which fosters relationships make it more relevant in my view.

:)

Those GGG tips didn’t hurt either   (FYI – GGG: Being good, giving, and game in the bedroom)

I hold more value to the evolutionary … read more

For the lovers…

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So this semester I had to give not one, but two, lectures on love. Like all good procrastinators, I avoided it as long as I could and then was left with no option but to sink my teeth into it. And it was actually pretty cool once I got into it.

Turns out…..we don’t know that much about love. Given the massive body of literature on relationships, you’d think we’d have tackled this and laid it to bed long ago.

So because I’ve got a serious hankering for anything evolutionary psych these days, obviously I totally dig Helen Fisher’s theory of love. She breaks it down like so. There are 3 brain systems that evolved for mating/love. If you have 18 minutes, watch this

1. Sex drive – this brain system provides the motivation to actually get out there and find a partner, typically motivated by sexual gratification

2. Romantic love – this brain system allows you to focus your attention on one person, typically feelings of elation (obsession develop shortly thereafter), which lead to feeling of commitment – important because…

3. Attachment – commitment needs to be engaged if you are going to settle down and have any chance in hell of raising children successfully

But what’s super cool about love from an evolutionary perspective is that it’s an “honest signal” – meaning, it’s pretty hard to legitimately fake being in love. Now the thinking here is that men should fall in love quicker to show women that they are in it for the long haul (or at least not just in it to hit it an’ quit it). And love is costly! I’m not talking about buying your lover a fancy dinner. I’m talking about essentially announcing to the world that you have committed to someone else (going Facebook official, anyone?) – this is reproductively costly shit, yo.

So these researchers set out to see how love is experienced by men and women. I shared the following study with my class cuz a) it’s evolutionary and b) had some cool findings re gender.

The researchers surveyed 375 community participants (159 women, 119 men) about their number of loves, if they had ever fallen in “love at first sight,” who fell in love with who (for their most recent love), and whether or not they had every loved someone who didn’t love them back.

So generally no difference in who is more likely to fall in love with the other person first – men 27%, women 32%. And men and women report having been in love an equal number of times – men 4.44, women 4.57.

But men were more likely to report having fallen in love at first sight (.67 times) vs women (.40). This was a significant … read more