Ruminations and Reflections of a Marriage and Family Studies Major

 Hey everyone! It's been a while since I've written one of these. I missed a week so I guess that means I have a lot I can talk about. These past few weeks we've really focused on dating, courtship, and engagement.  This topic is a pretty interesting one for me, since I'm at about that age where these things are (hopefully) right around the corner. Most people my age (at least those around me) are concerned with this topic. Our discussions these past few weeks have proven to be very enlightening for me, since it helped me realize my previous assumptions about dating, courtship and engagement were wrong and that is a better way. I always think that things that encourage me to flip my way of thinking on its head are very interesting, especially when those around me typically have the same ideas as I do.  In recent times, we have strayed from a more intentional approach to dating, courtship, engagement and marriage to a more casual, sliding approach, where the boundaries b...

      Hello everyone! Another week has gone by and thus I return with what will hopefully be an entertaining and informative blog post! This week we touched on the topic of gender and gender typical behaviors. That can typically be a fairly touchy topic for some (and I personally hope to avoid that to some degree today), but I think its also a topic that is fairly popular in this day and age. Well, let's get right into it!     We started our discussion in class this week by thinking of some typical gender traits for both males and females. Some typical things showed up on our list, like "aggressive" and "competitive" for males and "nurturing" and "emotionally expressive" for females. There were lots of other traits we came up with for each of course, but hopefully you get the idea. These traits are fairly general in nature (hence why we call them "typical" traits), and depending on our culture, we may associate other things to be ty...