Dating🥳🥳🥳

 For this weeks blog I want to talk about dating! This is a popular subject up here at BYU - Idaho. Sometimes it feels like everyone around you is dating. Part of our faith is being part of an eternal family and creating those families in this life. Part of creating those families is marriage and in order to get married you have to find the right person. But to find the right person one must get to know others and spend quality time with them. In my post today I will be talking about functions and patterns of dating. I will also discuss other aspects of dating. 

One of the first sections of our text book for Family Relations is titled “What Attracts?”. this section discusses what it is that makes people attracted to their partner. The very most important factor i dating is physical appearance. The other similar factor is intelligence/ education, and being similar. The top two are attractiveness and similar ness. Those two things make sense to me because often couple look like they are “in a each other’s league”. And when we are able to be with someone with the same level of attraction our self esteem goes up! And then when we share the same attitudes and values we feel at home and as if we can be our true selves around that person. 

One other pattern of dating is “Finding people to date”. This is probably the most difficult part of the process, at leas for me it is. For college students it is almost always  another student. If there are so many students, why is it so difficult? With today’s technology a lot of dating is happening through internet apps or internet websites. According to the reading men look for attractiveness and women try to find “financial security”.

Some functions of dating include: Recreation, Intimacy and Companionship, Mate selection, status attainment, and socialization. Couples need recreation in order to fun. In fact we need it whether we are single or not. Sometimes half of the fun in dating is being able get out. People definitely date just for the fun, and that is okay. But the Older you get the more likely you are to want something serious. Once you kind of grow out of the fun stage you move on to intimacy and companionship. This is where our emotional needs start to want a companion. Eventually these become the primary reassigns of dating. Next is mate selection. This is what it says it is. We look at a selection of people and we see who we would could create a stable life with. It is as simple as that. One thing conflict theorists have noticed in human relationships is that we often are looking for status attainment. Here is the part of the book that kind of took me for a uprise. It took me for a surprise because I knew it was true once I read it. In dating we are often looking for someone with the same status attainment or better. Weird? Right? But also true. The last function is socialization. This is how we learn how to function in different groups. And how we learn to get along with the opposite sex. That is ultimately what dating is. One big social setting that exists to interact with one another. 

Identifying some of these functions during my studies this week definitely gave me some food for thought. The most surprising for me was status attainment and mate selection. Mate selection makes us seem like creatures and status attainment makes us feel like attention hogs. I guess both greatly describe the dating human. What surprised you the most as you read? To you have troubles finding people to date? If so what are your tips? I don’t know everything so I still have a lot of questions. Writing this blog is giving me so much to learn and to share. I hope this has been a decent post. Have a good day!