Family Relations Blog

  This week I have been learning a lot about sexual intimacy , and learning about the health and unhealthy ways of marital sexual intimacy. This week I was able to read an article called Characteristics of Healthy and Unhealthy Sexuality in Marriage. In this article Laura Brotherson talks about characteristics of healthy and unhealthy sexuality.  Some characteristics to healthy sexuality are accepting, embracing and comfortable with one's body parts. In order to share your body with someone else, you have to love yourself first. The unhealthy characteristic that goes with the first one is being ashamed, uncomfortable, and critical of your body or the other person's body. Many women and men feel pressured to change features about themselves because of their partner. That is not how God created us. He created us to love our bodies and to share them with each other. Another healthy characteristic talked about is affection for it’s own sake instead of affection as a precursor for...

  This week I have been learning about integrating your life when you get married. It’s amazing because I am about to get married myself on April 30th so it’s so good for me to learn all of this now so that way when we get married we both have tools to help us.  This week I learned that people tend to plan for weddings but in the process, they don’t plan their marriage. I have loved planning all the things for my fiancé and I’s wedding, but we both haven’t lost sight that the wedding is one day but our marriage is forever. We continually still talk about what our goals are and even talk about raising kids together. The more you know about your partner and the more you can see them in different environments, the better it will be for your marriage. If you see bad habits or tendencies it’s good to discuss them now rather than thinking your partner won’t be like that or will change when you get married. Women tend to go into marriages thinking that things will change. When things...

      Our world is so different from the world even our parents lived in. One aspect that is different is dating. My parents' version of dating is a lot different than ours. Dating was encouraged way more back then than it is now. My dad would and my teacher told me that they went on dates all the time with different women. This doesn’t mean they kissed all these women but it means that the date was planned, paid for, and that the couples were paired off. This is called assortive dating. This is replaced in our time with hanging out. Now, many young people just get a group of friends together and hang out. In our generation, it is also frowned upon to date multiple people because you are seen as a player. The world wants you to be committed to one person at all times, and this is also what the church believes but only when you are married. The church encourages assortive dating so that men and women can see what characteristics they like in different people.  This...

     In class this week we talked about male/female typical behaviors. Women are typically more nurturing, cooperative, better at communicating, sensitive to emotions, emotionally expressive, relative oriented, and women are detail oriented. Men are more active/combative, competitive, spatial oriented, aggressive, myopic, and men are more of risk takers.  While looking at videos of children these behaviors became prominent. Little girls tended to be more nurturing and caring to their dolls. While boys liked to crash their toys and play fight with them. My teacher observed this in his own kids. His little daughter saw her brothers playing with toy trucks, so she wanted to play with one too. When they gave her a truck, they saw that she had wrapped the truck in a blanket and was putting it to sleep. They saw the opposite of this when they gave their son a Barbie to play with. The little boy bent the doll at the waist and started playing with the doll like it was a t...