Please find this post at: https://clairekampdush.com/2018/03/19/active-learning-activity-perfect-partners-and-the-suffocation-of-marriage/

I have been really busy with life, and work, and lots of other things, so it has been over a year since I have posted! I thought I would share a fun active learning exercise that I do with my family development students related to intimate relationships. Thanks to Kale Monk for some of the inspiration behind this two-part activity.

One thing I want to teach my students is to keep their expectations for their partners in check. One person cannot be our best friend, best lover, biggest source of perfect social support, accountability partner for our goals, etcetera. That is too much pressure to put on any one person! To make this point, I have my students do two in-class activities (on different days) that I tie together. Note I do these activities with a freshman/sophomore level gen-ed class of about 55 students (and I have an online version that I use for an online class of about 200 students).

Class 1: The Perfect Partner

On the first day, in a module of the course called “love and romantic relationships” I have them do a supplemental reading from Aziz Ansari’s book Modern Romance. Here is a quote from the chapter called Choices and Options:

“. . . we live in a culture that tells us we want and deserve the best, and now we have the technology to get it. Think about the overwhelming popularity of websites that are dedicated to our pursuit of the best things available. Yelp for restaurants. TripAdvisor for travel. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic for movies. A few decades ago, if I wanted to research vanilla ice cream, what would I have even done? Cold-approach chubby guys and then slowly steer the convo toward ice cream to get their take? No, thanks. Nowadays the Internet is my chubby friend. It is the whole world’s chubby friend. If this mentality has so pervaded our decision making, then it stands to reason that it is also affecting our search for a romantic partner, especially if it’s going to be long-term.”

Ansari, Aziz; Klinenberg, Eric. Modern Romance (Kindle Locations 1521-1528). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

No pressure here!

After having an in-class discussion about an assignment related to the chapter, I have them consider how much time they spend researching a purchase or where to go to dinner. Then, I ask “Do we take this “best of” mentality into our relationships?”
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