Thursday, June 18, 2009

on deciding whom to marry

today i took my psychology of gender final. it was a group final so we only got one question wrong. i'd highly recommend the byu salt lake center during spring/summer. it's casual and a heckuva lot easier than anything i took in provo. just sayin.

today i also learned that it is NEtsui, not neTSUi. one of the women in my class is japanese and in the last month i have come to realize that my nihongo is getting really terrible. i need to do some serious refreshing.

anyway, i am going somewhere here. just be patient with me. so in my psych of gender class there were five students, all women, and all married except me. this meant that everytime i went to class i got lots of advice on what type of person to marry. note: i do not normally tell people how i actually feel about my getting married unless specifically asked. and no one in the class ever asked me. so tons of advice. these other four women-plus the teacher so five-were all incredibly different types of people and they come from very different walks of life. they had differing opinions on almost everything we discussed in class. and yet they always seemed to agree when giving me advice on whom to marry.

i'm not going to put all the advice on here nor can i even remember it all, but the most common piece of advice they gave me (meaning it came up the most number of times) was to marry someone who will cook for you. i find this quite interesting. of course i don't think that this advice is really as simple as it seems. cooking is obviously an outward expression of something much deeper. frankly i don't know any guy my age who wouldn't cook for a girl. but i think this is my classmates' very point. fifteen years down the road, when he goes to work each day and you stay home and do all the mom sort of stuff, will you still be married to someone who cooks for you?

and of course by 'cooks for you' i don't just mean cooks for you. and of course people change, so is there really any actual way to tell whether he'll still cook for you in so many years? maybe not. i don't really know. but the study of gender is really a study of motivation. that's really what psychology is after all. and i think the biggest lesson i learned from this class is to look more carefully at people's motivations. when you're dating, why does he cook for you? i can think of five reasons off the top of my head and if i took the time i'm sure i could think of a dozen more. i'm not going to tell you what i think is the right reason, although i'm sure some of you can figure that one out on your own. i'm just going to pass on my classmates' advice: marry someone who cooks for you. for the right reason.

1 comment:

Sophie said...

Done and done. I can't remember the last time I cooked dinner...oh, wait. It was when Sarah came over and we had pasta carbonara. Ask her how long ago that was.

Ben also does the laundry, cleans the cat box, and does the dishes. I am looking more and more lazy. He's an exceptional husband, but with that said, I can't believe the things that amaze people about their husbands/boyfriends. One person the other day was excited that her boyfriend emptied the dishwasher. Wow.