Can I get the door for you, sir?

That was a video of a super funny social norm violation/prank that makes me cry with laughter every time. This is a record of me breaking a social norm for my social psych class. Nobody was hurt during this experiment. Except maybe my pride.

At first, it was hard for me to come up with a social norm that I felt sort of comfortable doing and then I realized I tend to break a lot of social norms when it comes to dating and gender roles. As we have discussed in class, there are many norms when it comes to dating and common courtesy in regard to gender. I decided to break a few very common norms while on a date with a guy I didn’t know very well. Chivalry is not dead, folks.

It was a pretty typical situation: we met at Gold’s Gym, he asked me to dinner, I said sure and we planned it for the next day. I decided then that I was going to be the most chivalrous girl he had ever asked out. This would mean opening doors for him, offering my jacket when he was cold, paying for the meal, making sure he was comfortable in every way, and, if the date goes well, maybe make a move. Because I'm sooooo  smooth and charming you know. Needless to say, it was an interesting ride.

It started out well. I don’t have a car so he had to pick me up but I made sure to quickly walk around to the driver’s side to open his door for him. Luckily he had to tie his shoe or something so I made there before him... He didn’t say anything as I did this but gave me a funny look, like "why the hell are you opening the driver's door?". When we were both in the car, he thanked me for opening his door in a bemused sort of way and that was the end of the matter.

When we arrived at Chili’s for dinner, I opened the door for him there too. Once again, he gave me a funny look but didn’t say anything about the incident. This portion of the date was really quite boring as far as my social experiment was concerned. We sat down, and did the normal I’m-on-date-with-someone-I-don’t-know-well question routine (where are you from, what do you do for fun, blah blah blah). I didn’t tell him I was a psychology major just in case he caught on to the fact I was basically doing an experiment on him. While we were talking, he mentioned how cold it was since we were sitting by a window. I offered him my jacket and he laughed since there was no way it would possibly fit him. It was worth a shot.

The date really got interesting when it came time to pay for our meal. The waitress came by with the check and set it on his side of the table. I, being the chivalrous man, had to "assume" it was my job to pay for the meal and I had to be quick about it. So, using my cat-like reflexes, I lunged across the table, spilling my water in the process, and grabbed the check. He had no idea what was going on since he was more concerned about the water going all over the table and his lap... My social norm violation quickly became a table manners violation more than anything else. 

It was at this point, as he was sopping up water and I was trying to get my wallet out that I first started to have doubts about what I was doing. Up until this point, I thought it was hilarious and I couldn’t wait to keep going with it even though he was not having any dramatic reactions to my actions. To be fair, he probably just thought I was weird. But in all honesty, I thought he was kind of nice and I sort felt like I was lying to him even though I do open doors for guys quite often and I do typically offer to pay on a date. The difference was this time, I was making a complete fool out of myself and I didn’t offer to pay, I just assumed I would.

At any rate, I put my VISA in the book without him noticing and the waitress took it when she dropped off some paper towels to clean up the mess. It was then that he realized what had happened and started questioning me. It went something like this:

            Him: Wait… did she just take the check?

Me: yeah

            Him: but I didn’t put anything in there…

            Me: I know, I did.

            Him: what? You paid for dinner?

            Me: yeah…

            Him: ….why? *said with a suspicious and somewhat annoyed look on his face*

Me: I just thought it would be nice… you know… I have money… I wanted to eat dinner         with you….

Him: oh? Well I have money too. Did you think I couldn’t pay? Or that I expected you to pay? *even more annoyed look on his face*

            Me: no! not at all. I just figured I’d take it, you know?

Him: no I don’t know (laughs). I kinda feel a little un-masculine now to be honest. And what’s the deal with you and doors? Who opens the door for the driver? That’s just weird…

Being the “psychologist” that I am, we explored what it meant to be “un-masculine” and how he felt about that. Turns out, he perceived me as having a strong personality anyway and, coupled with less-than-normal actions, he was very taken aback and unsure of who had asked who out. This didn’t really surprise me, but I was surprised that he thought I had a strong personality because most people describe me as kind of mellow. Maybe I was playing a role? Or maybe I was just so giddy about this social experiment I over compensated. Whatever the reason, it was enough to actually confuse him and make him feel a little bad so I figured I’d spill the beans. 

I figured telling him what I was up to would not impress him at all and I prepared for the worst... The worst being no second date (which I didn't expect anyway) and an awkward silence for the rest of the night. Neither of which is really all that bad but I really didn't want to hurt his feelings. I have a kind heart... just not kind enough not to play jokes on people. Anyway, I said I was really sorry I acted so weird and paid for dinner and made him feel bad but I was trying to violate a social norm for a class. I was quite surprised by his response: he busted out laughing and asked where the camera was. Like that TV show, Candid Camera. When I informed him there wasn’t one he asked me if spilling water was part of the assignment too. I should have said yes to that one. I did tell him, however, that I do do some of this stuff normally and that he probably shouldn’t think all my “weirdness” came from a class assignment. The rest of the night passed uneventfully, besides the constant flow of jokes he made about how I was a man.

Let the record show that, overall, this was a decent date and we have gone a few dates since. My romantic life was not totally ruined by the violation of these norms. 

Caution! The moving sidewalk is about to end. Please watch your step.

I love airports and I love flying. In fact, I'm in an airport right now!

Everything about airports to me just seems magical. Maybe it's because I had never flown until I was 17 and had been dying to for years so I had already decided flying is awesome. Or, as my one of my dear friends puts it, I "see the beauty in everything even when said thing is certainly not beautiful...like airports". This friend also doesn't thing this gift is always a good thing. Or maybe it's because the airport is like a symbol of freedom for me... when I finally flew away to go to college.

But I digress. The point is I love everything about flying. It's exhilerating. Turbulence? Heck yes! Weird seat-mates who talk to you about their lives? My favorite! Seriously. I've had some pretty weird seat mates. Here's  a list of some of my favorites:

 --A pilot from Nigeria, flying to his next shift. We talked about the economy and how to make millions of dollars by manipulating stocks. I learned so much and was very curious as to how he knew such things... At any rate, he gave me his number and still texts me whenever he's in Salt Lake to see if I want to hook up. Like legitimately hook up, not just hang out. I think he has a girl in every city.

--A business major who convinced me to trade my chapstick for a pack of gum which he insists is the best "make-out gum" because of its fresh but sweet flavor. It's Orbit sweet mint in case you were wondering.

--An extremely unhappy child and her mother who literally was going to scream the whole plane ride until I took out my ukulele and played her to sleep. Not sure the other passengers appreciated it, but it made my experience a whole lot better.

--A guy approximately the age of my father who needed advice on his marriage... as if I could actually advice on such issues (this happens to me a lot though... I'll post something about it sometime). From there we proceeded to talk about art and music from the Romantic period as well as the influence of the television show Glee (I will definitely post my ideas about that too).

Aside from the people on planes, the view is always amazing. I remember my first time flying... It was a really rainy, cold morning, but as we went through the clouds, I literally started crying. I had never seen anything so beautiful... At that moment I could not understand why anyone would want to live on the ground. Sometimes I still don't. Yes, Auree, I still cry when I see really pretty clouds. Shut up.

The airport is fun too. You get to people watch, laugh at the ridiculously high prices in the weird little shops, consider buying one of those neck pillows but then decide against it, debate buying some overpriced food, run on the moving walkways and listen to the lady-voice that tells you to watch your step, avoid the Delta SkyMiles people, look at the art (like in the Detroit airport, there's this magical tunnel under ground that has all these colors and plays music... it really does exist! And it has an awesome fountain!), and sometimes you get to feed birds. Airporting is like a game to me where the universe is giving me mini quests to complete so I'll win coins or an extra life or something. For example...

This one time, I was walking around the airport when I was accosted by a SkyMiles guy! I was just going to ignore him but I realized I had nothing better to do than see what he had to say. And he was offering one of those neck pillows as some sort of reward. Goal: get the neck pillow at any cost. Challenge accepted. I proceeded to excessively flirt with SkyMiles guy in order to get the pillow without signing up for whatever he wanted me to sign up for. It became clear however, that no matter how many times I said "you have beautiful eyes" he would not relinquish the pillow until I signed up for his stupid SkyMiles card thing. I had no choice so I entered a bunch of crappy information into the computer and hoped for the best. And he gave me the neck pillow! I was overjoyed until I accidentally left it in the waiting area for my plane and the pillow was no more...

Or this other time when I fed a group of sparrows some of my trail mix. Goal: become friends with the birds so they'll sit on your finger. Challenge accepted. While I was tossing a trail of peanuts to move the birds closer to me, an airport employee came up behind me and asked what I was doing... It turns out, he'd been trying to get rid of the birds for some time and he did not appreciate me giving them food. At all. When he left, I put a stockpile of peanuts in the corner for them just in case they were being starved out of their homes. While I did not complete my mission, I feel I contributed to a cause.

These are only a few of my airport experiences, and I wish I had more time to write, but I have to board a plane. Go figure. I'm hoping I end up sitting next to the scholarly looking guy with funky hair, who's been staring at his phone very strangely for the last half hour. Or the lady who's been talking to her mom about how how she payed way too much for her manicure and it doesn't even look that good. Or the family where the dad is trying to convince his four-year-old that it's 2 in the morning so he would go to sleep. Or the guy who literally sprinted over here even though our plane doesn't leave for another half hour.

Oh airports how I love you.

I want to marry George Bailey

"What is it you want, Mary? What do you want? You want the moon? Just say the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pul it down. Hey. That’s a pretty good idea. I’ll give you the moon, Mary… Then you can swallow it, and it’ll dissolve, see… and the moonbeams would shoot out of your fingers and your toes and the ends of your hair… am I talking too much?"

No, George Bailey... you never talk to much. Just keep saying absolutely beautiful things, and any girl would fall in love with you.

Love again

Perhaps not to be is to be without your being,
without your going, that cuts noon light
like a blue flower, without your passing
later through fog and stones,
without the torch you lift in your hand
that others may not see as golden,
that perhaps no one believed blossomed
the glowing origin of the rose,
without, in the end, your being, your coming
suddenly, inspiringly, to know my life,
blaze of the rose-tree, wheat of the breeze:
and it follows that I am, because you are:
it follows from ‘you are’, that I am, and we:
and, because of love, you will, I will,
We will, come to be.

-Pablo Neruda

I've had a lot of trouble writing this post. As promised, I've been putting together the interviews I did. However, this has proved to be a problem as I don't want to lose the integrity or personality of the interviews but at the same time I have to keep them confidential. But I also didn't want to over-interpret them and just talk about what I think. So I've decided to paraphrase some pretty insightful things my guinea pigs, i mean interviewees, said. I hope I don't misrepresent their ideas, and hopefully someone will find them as interesting as I did. Here's some lovin!

"Falling in love is…exciting but it’s not really love at first. I think people make stuff up at first… fantasize. We fall in love with the idea of a person, not the actual person. Most the time, you don’t even know the person and yet they affect you so much emotionally. It’s all in your head, making things up." 

"The types of love are not different categories but a continuum... or simultenaity. "falling in love" or infatuation is not really different from "true love" because it is one of the same whole. You can't have true love without some infatuation and true love grows from kinds of infatuation. we just choose to continue with it."

"Friendship is always first and fundamental in love. If you can't be friends, how can you really love them? If you can't be truly open with them and to them, how do you love them?"

"This one time I tried to kiss her but she didn’t want to. I told her I’d wait however long it took for her to kiss me. And that’s when I realized, crap, I’m in love with this girl. I would have waited for her for anything"

"people stay together because they put the other person before themselves. culture, human nature – we’re brought up to think love is the ultimate thing but really the other person is the ultimate thing. I struggle with that… society’s ideas make me crazy for someone for no reason. It makes real love harder because we’re searching for the wrong thing."

"I don’t know if I’ve ever been in love. I’ve never had the chance"

"It's a give and take. Kind of like work: if you work really hard on something, you love it. Work hard on your relationships and you will love them. Like... you're beautiful because I love you, not I love you because you're beautiful"

"Checklists of qualities you're looking for in a partner are stupid. Give everyone a chance. Even if you think you know what you like, you probably don't. People are very malleable."

"Love is a choice. It's commitment. Arranged marriages are such a good idea!  They immediately require commitment, which is something we are not very eager to give..."

"Maybe inherently we have sets of qualities we look for but they dont explicitely play a role in my experiences. I don't know everything. I don't know who i'm going to fall in love with or when or how but i know it happens. I want to be open to that and open to other people and not limit myself to people who only share my interests. "

"At first, I said I love you because I was caught up in the excitement and in him. The point I really realized I loved him was when I wanted to change my life for him. I was looking to change schools and realized I would change almost anything for him."

"You can tell other people are in love by the way they look at each other and what they do together. Like a couple walking, holding hands and actually looking at each other and talking to each other, doing mundane things together.. like a team."

"I'm not really sure what love is... But I know what I've experienced. That's enough for me"

Love: part one in an infinite series!

Something tells me that as soon as I start writing about love, I'm never going to stop. So here's to the possibility of my blog turning into one long drawn out rant about love 

Love.... One of my very favorite things to talk about and least favorite things to experience. Just kidding. Sort of. But really, why would I ever want to be in love if I can study it safely from afar? 

Just kiddddddddddding.

But there is something to say about that statement as far as love in concerned in psychological studies. The thing is, psychology has as an attitude of disengaged, objectiveness that ultimately will never result in a comprehensive understanding of human nature. I could talk forever about this too, but let’s stay on topic.

Most studies on love, however, while being scientific and revealing several important factors in understanding love, seem to be missing a large part of the experience of love; They focus on the “why” and “how” of love, rather than the experience itself. What makes people fall in love? What qualities are necessary for the feeling of love to occur? Several studies suggest the feeling of love is a product of biology; we feel love so we can pass our genes to the next generation. Others suggest love can be induced through arousal, or through gazing into another’s eyes for a period of time (this is actually a super funny study). Love has specific qualities and rules like equity and reciprocity and self-disclosure.  But is that what we experience? And is that how we understand and live love in our day to day lives? I say no. So as the budding qualitative  researcher that I am, I interviewed some people!

I interviewed five individuals about their experiences with romantic love in whatever way they chose to define it. The point was to illicit each individual’s story of what being in love meant to them and how they came to that conclusion as well as see what role the research on love played into that experience. From there, I was surprised by many of the answers and explanations I received, as they did not fit what I expected nor did they always fit the explanations of love we often read and studied. Instead, they encompassed many meanings and progressions of the same word in remarkably different but similar ways, none of which were static or permanent. Could it be that people’s experiences and what they mean and relationships between individuals are all important in understanding love?

Don’t be silly… that is not objective at all. Or measurable!  What kind of science is that?

Answer: A better one! Or at least one that fills in the gaping holes.

In my experience, what love is has never been easy to pinpoint or reduce. Though I agree many of these concepts (like equity, disclosure, and friendship) are important in understanding love, I have never experienced love as a simply biological effect or an effect of my environment. My experience with love comes from values I’ve chosen to endorse and situations I’ve lived through. It’s easy to see how the other people I interviewed had value systems as well and assumed agency in their experiences. It is only through my experiences that I can explain what love means to me and how I know I was in love; to describe it in scientific terms would not be difficult but would also not capture the meaning of my experience. So why would psychology choose to ignore experience?

As it happens with most psychological areas of research, I think we try too hard to extract, reduce, objectify and manipulate the experience of love to figure out, once and for all, what it is. And yet, this approach ultimately ignores the meaning of the experience and assumes the best way to find the “is” of love is to take it apart and reduce it to a checklist of qualities and rules. On one hand we have the theories and should’s and ought’s of love, and on the other, we have the experience with all its flaws, biases and meanings that are put aside in search of some inherent “truth” that may or may not be there. We are told what love is supposed to do and be by various professionals, the media, and psychology, but I believe our experiences transcend these; they capture the reality of love better than any study that claims to be an objective. Perhaps finding the “truth” of love cannot be found by digging for underlying patterns, but lies in the meanings and contexts in which it is created. This is not to say that the research done is irrelevant or wrong but, maybe, we can better understand love by not seeking to extract it from where it happens….

Next post, I’ll talk about what people I interviewed have to say about love. In the mean time, read some poetry by Pablo Neruda (almost literally the God of love) and Us: Americans Talk About Love by John Bowe. 

How a hot ice skater did not fall in love with me

Last winter, I took an ice skating class. For only having skated a dozen times in my life, I was pretty good. Sure, the only way I could stop was to run into the wall or simply let the speed decrease on its own by taking a lap, but if you needed someone to skate really fast around the rink and didn't care if she ever stopped then I was definitely your girl. Ok, so maybe I wasn't that good. But, I was good at never falling. I think I fell once that whole semester.

At first glance, this may seem like a really good thing. Not falling is a good thing right? Who likes to fall on hard, cold ice and get your pants all wet from ice shavings and risk embarrassment from falling again when you try to push yourself up the wrong way? Especially when you could get really hurt...  If you don't fall, that means you're better than all the suckers who do fall! At least that's what I tried to tell myself.

Being idealistic, conscientious, and extremely competitive with myself, I had a vision entering the class that I was going to be able to do jumps and spins and those axle things by the end of it. I would work so hard and I was going to be so cool. And every time we would have some ice skating activity, I would show everyone up. And then a hot ice skating guy would fall in love with me and we would skate to "My Heart Will Go On" from Titanic and live happily ever after and have ice skating children and live in Alaska and...

This did not happen. Why? Because I'm afraid of falling. So afraid, in fact, that I could hardly do anything. It wasn't like I had never before fallen either. I fell plenty of times and none of those experiences were terrible or life-threatening or embarrassing or otherwise decapacitating. And yet, while trying the simplest of jumps, I was terrified. It was a constant battle to get myself to try new things which often presented itself in a look of deep concern on my face that my instructors took to mean that I was sick or something. Needless to say, I did not get much better. And no guys fell in love with me. At least, not because my stellar ice skating ability.

The problem with the fear of falling, besides no ice skaters falling in love with me, is that it is directly in opposition to being bold. What do I mean by that? Olympic skaters. I think we all can agree that Olympic ice skaters do incredible things. Yet often, we forget what it took to get there. They have fallen literally thousands of times. Some of them get seriously injured. They have experienced much worse falls than any average person. And yet, they are greater than any average person and achieve something beautiful, that is not often reached. Being bold is taking risks. Being bold is stepping out of your comfort zone. Being bold is acknowledging and embracing the potential of falling.  Being bold is to accept your vulnerabilities and show them to the world. Being bold is not being safe, but putting everything on the line in pursuit of something greater than yourself.

Being afraid is to shut oneself away and forever give up the potential of creating the most beautiful of experiences.

I think the best people have also been the worst. They have experienced both sides of the board: the most terrible of falls and the most perfect successes. The highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Falling is not always a bad thing. Sometimes it is only through falling that we can reach something greater. I could easily be wrong, but as a person who chronically fears falling in almost every aspect of life, I know playing it safe does not work. Allowing myself to step out of my comfort zone and to persevere even when I know the result could be the worst experience of my life, can result in the most beautiful and most remembered experiences... even after terrible falls. Being bold can apply to any part of your life. Being bold is telling someone you love them when you don't know if they feel the same way. Being bold, is applying for that job you've always wanted even though it doesn't pay as much. Being bold is saying you're sorry and admitting you were wrong. Being bold is trying something new. Being bold is defying norms for something you believe in. Being bold is working hard even though the end result may not be what you want. Being bold is facing what you are most afraid of. Being bold is trying.

This is an imperfect philosophy, but I really think the best artists, inventors, athletes, lovers, givers, chefs, etc etc etc, got that way because they are bold or took a chance in life that may have ended in tragedy rather than success. That is not to say that every person who is bold will end up the best in the world. But I am saying, or at least trying to say, by being bold, you have the opportunity to live to be something greater. And that's what I want: to be greater than I am now.

I also want to be this girl.