Dating & marriage
•Developing as a person means also developing as a seksual
being.
•Adolescents’ physical maturation fosters a seksual
dimension to their emerging identity.
•Seksual expression varies dramatically with time and
culture.
•Teenagers often ask:
–How can I show physical affection to someone?
–Are my seksual feelings normal?
–Are my partner and I emotionally ready for a seksual
relationship?
•The values you learn from your family, religious teachings,
personal experiences, and friends may influence your thinking about questions
involving physical intimacy.
•It is good to think about these questions and gather more
information before making decisions that can affect you for the rest of your
life.
–Seks during the teen years is often unprotected, leading to
risks of pregnancy and seksually transmitted infections (STIs).
•The teenage years are a time when most young people begin
to experience feelings of physical attraction.
–Have you ever had a “crush” on someone?
•These feelings of intense attraction to another person are
called infatuation.
•These normal, healthy feelings of infatuation that you have
as a teenager may develop into close attachments later in your adult life.
•Dating is typically the way people get to know others to
whom they are attracted.
–Dating often grows out of group activities that include
both boys and girls (social interactions).
•Evolutionary psychologists use the concept of natural
selection to explain that humans’ natural yearnings are the reproduction of
their genes.
•Women most often send their genes into the future by
pairing wisely, men by pairing widely (Buss, 1995).
•Seksual motivation:
•Seks is a normal part of life. Seksual motivation is
nature’s way of making people procreate, thus enabling our species’ survival.
•When two people feel attracted, they hardly stop to think
of themselves as guided by their genes.
–The pleasure we take in eating is nature’s inventive method
of getting our body nourishment.
–The pleasure of seks is our genes’ way of preserving and
spreading themselves.
•The physiology of seks:
•Seksual arousal results from an interplay of internal &
external stimuli.
•Seks hormones influence seksual behaviour (Women: estrogen;
men: testosterone).
–How do internal and external stimuli contribute to seksual
arousal?
•External stimuli:
–Many studies confirm that men become aroused when they see,
hear, or read erotic material.
•Internal stimuli:
–The brain is our greatest seks organ. The stimuli inside our
heads—our imagination—can influence seksual arousal and desire.
–We become seksually aroused not only by memories of prior seksual
activities but also by our fantasies.
•We express the direction of our seksual interest in our seksual
orientation.
•Seksual orientation: It refers to our enduring seksual
attraction toward members of our own seks (homoseksual orientation) or the
other seks (heteroseksual orientation).
–Cultures vary in their attitudes toward homoseksuality.
–Whether a culture condemns or accepts homoseksuality,
heteroseksuality prevails and homoseksuality survives.
–LGBT?
•Seksual attractiveness:
•What do heteroseksual men and women find attractive in the
other seks?
–Men rank physical attractiveness as more important, and
women rank earning capacity higher (Buss, 2000).
–Men in 37 cultures, from Australia to Zambia judge women as
more attractive if they have a youthful appearance (Buss, 1994).
•Evolutionary psychologists say men are drawn to healthy,
fertile-appearing women—women with smooth skin and a youthful shape, suggesting
many childbearing years to come.
–They believe such women stand a better chance of sending
their genes into the future.
–Regardless of cultural variations, men everywhere feel most
attracted to women whose waists are roughly a third narrower than their hips—a
sign of future fertility (Singh, 1993).
•Coca-cola type?
•Women feel attracted to healthy-looking men, but especially
to those who seem mature, dominant, bold, and affluent (Singh, 1995).
–Evolutionary psychologists say these attributes reflect a
capacity to support and protect (Buss, 2000; Geary, 1998).
•Women prefer mates with the potential for long-term mating
and investment in their joint offspring (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000).
•They prefer stick-around dads over likely run-away dads.
•Long-term mates contribute protection and support, which
give their offspring greater survival prospects.
•For men, there are tradeoffs between seeking to distribute
one’s genes widely and being willing to co-parent.
•But evolutionary psychologists say nature selects
behaviours that increase the likelihood of sending one’s genes into the future.
•Gender differences in seksuality:
•Who thinks more about seks, masturbates more often,
initiates more seks, and sacrifices more to gain seks?
–The answers are men, men, men, men, and men (Baumeister,
Catanese, & Vohs, 2001).
•Men are more likely than women to initiate seksual activity
(Segall et al.,1990).
•Why do marriages fail?
•Gottman (2000; 2003) analysed videotapes of couple’s social
interactions and physiological responses over 14 years.
1.One or both partners spend time criticizing the other.
2.One or both partners become too defensive when their fault
is realized.
3.One or both partners show contempt to the other.
4.One or both partners show stonewalling (i.e., unwilling to
talk about the problem).
–In happy marriages, couples learn to manage criticism,
defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling.
•Other problems in marriage:
•Money: Challenges with money may pose a big problem for
couples.
•Children: Children bring another potential source of
marriage problems.
•Daily stress: Daily stressors may pose marriage problems.
•Other problems in marriage:
•Poor communication: Perhaps the biggest predictor of
marriage problems is poor communication, or negative communication that belies
damaging attitudes and dynamics within the relationship.
•Bad habits: Sometimes couples experience marriage problems
that could be solved if the two could notice their habits and change them.
•Other problems in marriage:
•Low seksual satisfaction: It may perhaps be the greatest
threat to a marriage.
–Studies show that compatibility, shared interests and
backgrounds increase the likelihood of a successful marriage.
–Compatibility is the ability to exist in harmony with
another person.
–Do you and your partner have similar interests and
educational backgrounds? Do you share religious beliefs, ethnic heritage, and
cultural values?.