Dating

 Hello everyone!

This week I learned a lot about dating. This is a topic that a few years ago I would have thought was weird to spend two days in a lecture class learning about. But with more experience with dating and life in general, I have found that learning more about dating can be very beneficial. Dating in my mind is a way to have fun, learn more about yourself and others and ultimately prepare for marriage. Marriage is something that I want and I see dating as a stepping stone to marriage in my life. I understand that many people view dating very differently today. Some people aren't looking to get married and date for a variety of reasons that would be contrary to what I understand dating to be. I learned a few interesting things about dating this week that I would like to share.

I first learned more about something called the RAM model for dating. This model stands for the Relationship Attachment Model.   There are five categories that this model represents which include: know, trust, rely, commit, and touch. These five main categories can be at various different levels when someone is in a relationship. What the creator of this model recognized was that often people tend to have high levels of commitment, and touch while not knowing a person very well. Or some relationships could have someone who trusted and relied on their partner but had low levels of commitment. We can see a variety of levels for each category in relationships that aren't necessarily what the research author suggests is most ideal in a relationship. He recommends that the "know" category should be higher than the trust, trust should be higher than the rely, rely is higher than the commit, and commit is higher than the touch category. This all makes a lot of sense to me. I have had experiences where some categories have been higher than others and the pattern of these categories did not follow the ideal pattern. I can see now that there were problems with those relationships and I understand that I can change those things in the future. 

I also learned that there are three major things that we should be doing while we are dating and getting to know someone more. These three things included togetherness, talk, and time. Togetherness includes having many shared experiences. In fact, my professor suggested having 50 new shared experiences with someone within a year. I really believe that this would be beneficial to try new things with someone that you are dating to be able to see them and yourself in situations. The talking suggestion includes mutual self-disclosure. With togetherness, the two people should share and express their thoughts and feelings with each other. It is very important that both partners are sharing and not just one throughout the progression of the relationship. The last section that was recommended was taking time with that person. Specifically, it suggests that it takes 3 months to just begin to get to know someone else. Dating experiences for everyone are different when considering the amount of time before getting married but I understood that the courtship and engagement should be more than 3 months to be able to really understand and get to know the other person.

Every person is different, and everyone's experiences with dating can be different as well. We should however understand that there are suggestions that can help make our romantic and platonic relationships with others last. I for one would like to work on maintaining good boundaries with all the categories that I learned from the RAM model. I also found the other three suggestions for getting to know someone to be very useful. I hope that you also found these things to be beneficial and that you consider altering things in your current or future relationships if needed.