Interpersonal Com Blog #8

Last class we finished up the Date Me exercise and did some small group work activities. Have you ever had an experience that even after it’s conclusion you are dumb founded by how it ended? That’s how I feel about the Date Me exercise. I’m not sure it was unpleasant as much as it was a kinda shocking experience. It was a bit awkward having to say out loud what you’d want to find in your ideal someone because I’ve never been asked to do that before. Though it was awkward, it wasn’t until the guys started shooting their mouths off that I truly felt uncomfortable. I know I’ve always been more sensitive and I shouldn’t have taken their words at full value, but what they said rubbed me the wrong way. I wasn’t the only girl who felt like that either. (All the girls talked together as we left that day.) As the guys added more and more things to the board without any hesitation, my self conscious level went threw the roof and all I wanted to do was crawl into a hole to avoid their eye sight. I was looking at the list and asking myself of how much on that list would I ever actually be able to fit into? Do all guys really think how our class’ guys feel? Probably not… but it still showed me a side to them that made me leery of what the outside world’s expectations are. You could really tell how we were all brought up to fit into our little boxes of gender roles. Boxes that are only big enough to move and talk in certain ways. If you break your box, the world crushes you with it’s full force of disapproval. When the guys were talking not everything they said was “bad.” They were just being honest like my professor asked so I would never fault any of them. As you can guess the parts that bothered me weren’t the parts about never wanting to go to farms or apple picking. (In fact, that part was pretty funny considering my mom drags my dad to things like that every once in awhile.) No, it was what they said about not wanting their women to have “sloppy bodies” and that they “had to look good in a swim suit.” Oh, and let’s not forget my favorite, “has to look good with makeup as well as without.” Plus they had to “eat clean” and “not be picky”, which basically means eating all the things THEY approve of. I hope a lot of those guys as well as us girls understand that though we said our idealized versions of how we would like someone that we date to be. In reality, you may meet your soul mate and they may only have not even 5% of what was on your list. We have to be willing to bend on our expectations and realize we are dealing with real people here... So after the Date Me exercise we split off into small groups and had a series of tasks to do with our group. In order to complete all the the tasks, you guessed it, we all had to work together. (These are called subordinate goals.) I think my group had problems when we did our first group presentation, but the small group tasks went surprisingly well. Each one of us was able to provide something that benefitted the group as a whole! Justin and Erik came up with the idea of squeezing each other’s shoulders for the counting task. I built the card house because I had steady hands, and my group helped give me the cards or replace ones if they had fallen. Allie and Justin took charge for the cheese pieces game and we all helped out when we could. For the photo game we all made a game plan together and ran as fast as we could to get everything! We were running through piles of leaves and through grass etc. (The people at the front desk of the library looked so confused as we ran past to go out, and another group ran in after us.) I had never played the headbands game or the Mad Gab either. My brain doesn’t work when it comes to playing Mad Gab. Good thing was, my group and I failed together and were laughing our butts off the whole time. (Justin did totally guess one right and we were all freaking out. Yay accomplishments!) Headbands was fun because we all had to rely on each other and could act silly as a group. It was definitely an interesting class day. I hope the bonding stuff will help us for when we do our next presentation!!