Tag Archives: relationships

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Misunderstanding “I Love You”

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There’s a show on MTV that I catch sometimes. It’s called Friendzone. I don’t know why I watch it when it’s on. It’s half an hour of grueling emotional heartbreak and I never follow it all the way through to the conclusion.

The show follows a new couple of people every episode. These people have best friends of the opposite sex and have always felt something more for said best friends. The show is formulaic. It starts with the protagonist asking their best friend/crush to help them get ready for a “blind date.” The best friend/crush helps out. They go to the location of the “blind date” and then the protagonist reveals his or her feelings for the best friend/crush. It’s grueling.

The show bothers me for a couple of reasons. First, out of all of the contestants from this whole genre of MTV dating-type shows, I feel like I can actually identify with these people. These people are my friends, my peers. These are the people I give advice to when they tell me they have feelings for another one of our friends. I know them.

Second, it makes the assumption that we have no control over love. Love, though, is not an adjective. Sometimes, it is a noun, yes. But most of the time, it is a verb. It’s something we do, not something that does us. The hopeless, star-crossed lovers are a fiction. And that’s not upsetting or cynical. It’s just true. Sometimes you like someone more than that person likes you, and that sucks, but there is no reason to believe that because your feelings are so strong, you and that person are supposed to be together.

Third, it presupposes the only way to show love for someone is romantically. There was a 13th-century Persian mystic poet known as Rumi. He was pretty cool. He was doing things that the romantics and the transcendentalists would do almost 600 years later. One of his greatest works, Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi (or The Works of Shams of Tabriz), was written for his friend and master Shams. When you read the poetry contained in the work, you feel Rumi’s love for Shams. The idea that a love for a friend can be spiritual and transcendental, mystical and inexplicable is pretty cool. We don’t have to be having sex with a person or moving toward having sex with a person to be profoundly altered by another human being. I have a couple of close friends who are girls. And we routinely tell each other that we love each other. And it doesn’t mean that we want to sleep with each other. It means that we know each other, support each other, believe in one another.

So after a thirty-minute show on MTV, I am sad. I am sad because these people don’t know that romantic relationships aren’t the end-all be-all of all human relationships and development. It is just one facet of a very complicated awesome web of people.

Have you ever crushed on your best friend?

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Dating Charity

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One day this summer, I had the desire to go on a date. Since I wasn’t dating anyone and since I didn’t really want to invite any of the girls I knew to a date-type activity for fear of starting something I didn’t want, I decided to take myself on a date.

Taking yourself on a date isn’t nearly as sad as it sounds. It’s actually quite fun. There are a lot of benefits. First, everything is a lot cheaper. Second, you don’t have to give yourself as much time to get places. You never have to wait on a late date. Third, you don’t have to compromise: you get to go to the restaurant you want to go to, and you get to see the movie you want to see. Fourth, there is absolutely no stress involved.

On this specific date, I decided, though, that I wanted to do something kind of special. Buying a ticket for one person to a movie is most definitely the lamest part about taking yourself on a date. And so I came up with this brilliant idea where I would buy a second ticket, leave it at the front desk, and then if someone else came alone, they could have it. I thought it was a really cute thing.

I was wrong.

When I explained to the cashier what I wanted to do, she was not amused. She didn’t even crack a smile, which is fine. She didn’t have to be amused by it. But then she was unsure whether or not she was allowed to do something like that. She had to call a manager, and it turned into this big hullabaloo. So I told her to forget it and bought my ticket and enjoyed the movie by myself.

Everything seemed really wrong about this experience. I was buying an extra ticket! Why wouldn’t I be allowed to do something like that?

I was listening to a podcast from Rob Bell the other day. He was talking about this book called The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. The book studies the relationship between the wealth of a region and its health. They found some interesting things. The first thing they did was divided a lot of regions up by income into fifths. And then they compared the top twenty percent to the lowest twenty percent. In America, the top twenty percent makes more than nine times the lowest twenty percent. That’s almost the highest disparity in the world – second only to Singapore.

Anyway, Wilkinson and Pickett found that the greater the income gap, the less healthy (both in disease and in crime) that group of people were. So America is one of the least healthy countries in the world. And it’s not just the poor who are unhealthy. It’s everyone. The rich of America are much more unhealthy than the rich of Japan – a much more equal country.

I started thinking about this in light of all of the Occupy demonstrations. It’s hard to fathom that 1% of Americans own almost a majority of the wealth. That still leaves 99% that aren’t getting that wealth. It’s hard to conceptualize 1% helping 99%. But then I realized. The story from The Spirit Level says that things would get better if the top 20% helped the bottom 20%. And that’s really easy. And then I had an idea.

What if each person from the top 20% matched up with just one person from the bottom 20% and provided for that person as well? Instead of celebrities doing all of this charity work, all they would have to do is take care of one other person. And big things would happen. Crime would go down. Health would go up. Life expectancy would go up. Education would increase. Divorce and unplanned pregnancy would decrease. The economy would improve. It would be unreal.

I don’t know how to pressure the top 20% to do something like this or how to get the bottom 20% to agree to it and so I realize it’s probably just a fantasy.

But it seems kind of silly that it’s easier to donate five dollars to some random charity group than it is to pay for a stranger’s movie ticket.

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5:1 Says that KIPP Journey has Relationships Figured Out

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Two days ago, I wrote a post about visiting KIPP Journey in Columbus. In that time, it has become the most popular post on this site. Which is pretty cool. And it’s doubly cool because I didn’t even include everything that blew me away about the school.

In every classroom, there was a blue poster on the wall. All it said was “5:1.” As the day progressed, my peers and I routinely whispered about it. What did it mean? Why should a simple ratio have such a prominent place in the classroom?

We got our answer when we had the opportunity to sit down with Dustin Wood, the School Director and OU alum (Go Bobcats!).  He said 5:1 is a ratio that comes from psychologist, John Gottman’s study of marriages. Gottman found he could predict the success of marriages with 90% accuracy based on the ratio of the number of positive remarks said on a daily basis to the number of negative remarks said on a daily basis. If a relationship stayed around 5:1, it was probably going to succeed.

Wood and the teachers at KIPP Journey have started using the ratio as a way of ensuring the success of their students. When Wood does teacher evaluations, he records how many positive and negative remarks a teacher makes. The goal is to keep everyone above 5:1.

Observe any class at KIPP Journey, and it becomes exceedingly obvious that all of the teachers are constantly thinking about this ratio. They are like parents. They constantly hand out “I love you”s and terms of endearment and encouragement to their students. Even failures are repackaged as successes.

In one class, student had bell work. The teacher used two different students’ work as examples. One of them didn’t get full credit on the problem, though. But he had done something really great to deserve the first point, and so he was applauded for what he had done correctly instead of chastised for what he had done wrong.

I am convinced that interactions like these make all the difference.

I made a comment the other day that I wish the whole world was run like a KIPP school. The more I learn about the program, the more I am convinced that a wish like that could change everything. What if we made a conscious effort to follow the 5:1 ratio in everything we did? What would that look like?