Romantic Relationships

Al Gore, having invented online dating, has changed the dynamics of budding relationships forever. What did humans do before they had the safety of a digital firewall and the ability to Photoshop away 20 years from their profile pictures? I remember the day where you had to call a girl's home phone and pray her dad didn't pick up first. Now day's you don't even have to ask a father's permission to marry his daughter, but back then you had win her father's approval just so he'd hand her the phone just so you could ask her is if she was still mad at you about the joke you told during gym.

When I went to college, they told me that the western concept of romantic relationships was relatively new. There have been many different variables throughout history that have influenced the dynamic of relationship. They have been cultural, economical, sociological, religious, political, level of health...ical, you name it. Romance, in literature, has been around for centuries. The deep human desire for love and chivalry was there, but there was also a conflicting desire to keep the blood line in tact. As this clip explains. (The accents in this clip are a bit thick)

I feel rather privileged that my relationship was not forged out of a trade for farm land or a deal to strengthen family ties. I wonder how relationships will continue to evolve. Our digitized society has shaped how we approach romantic relationships in a unprecedented way. If you prefer face to face contact more than texting, you may get left behind. People you work with, that you thought about dating, may already know a lot about you from Facebook. Your online profile now serves as a sort of relationship resume, if you like the wrong political party, or worse, the TV show, you don't even have a chance to lie about it on a first date.

This brings me to a point I have made several times on the podcast. I love wife!

We had a short courtship, and we were both young, according to modern day standards, but we both had long laundry lists of love and our personalities, goals, and many other aspects matched up so miraculously and mathematically, that we really had no choice. I would write it all out in the form of first order differential equations and walk you through all the variables to prove that it was meant to be, but I don't want to bore you. I will say, the lightning in a bottle moment for me was a date where she caught me accidentally feeding her lasagna off a dirty plate, and she still stayed for dessert... Now that I think of it, maybe she just really really likes ice cream. However, the kicker was, we both agreed that the best seasons of the Simpsons were the ones with Conan as a staff writer, and when ever we have a fight we just pop in a Simpsons dvd.

Fast forward four years and we are still going strong, in fact we have grown so confident in our relationship that we have toned down our PDA in vacation photos considerably!