Thursday 22 March 2012

Wash It Like It's Hot

Continuing from yesterday's topic, I was at a men's health seminar at work and he asked what's the one thing that's guaranteed to get your wife hot. Nobody offered an answer, and he replied, "An oven." Then he added a washing machine, lawnmower, making the bed in the morning. Someone said that it's known as "choreplay". I did a Google search and found Chore-play: Motive your man. The basic idea being that you reward your husband for doing chores with sexual favours as a way to motivate him to do more around the house. This is one of the comments that stuck out for me:

 According to "Men are From Mars" writer, John Grey (and personal testimony from myself and friends) Women work on a "pre-pay" system, while men work on a "post-pay" system. Have you ever felt like you do SO much for him and he just doesn't seem to give as much back? That's because he thinks your "paying him" for something he's already done! He doesn't know what he did - but it must have been good because just look at how great you're treating him!

I am not sure whether that is true or not, but I guess if you can see that applying to yourself, then maybe you should try to pay more attention to how you are treating your partner. This isn't limited to chores, I think it is good to find out what is and isn't important to your partner. That doesn't mean you ask them to give you a list of what is important, and you just promise to do those things. Firstly, who carries a list of all the things that are important to them. Secondly, that list is likely to change, as things that are important to you right now, might not be of the same importance tomorrow, or in a few month's time. Lastly, and this is the important one, if you need to be told what to do, then it means you don't care enough.

You could argue that you do care, because you are willing to do all the things on the list, but the difference is that you are doing those things because you were told to, not because you realised they needed to be done of your own volition. It seems like a strange concept, and nitpicky, but I guess it's a bit like playing HoN. You can have someone watch over your shoulder, and tell you exactly what to do, but if you really think about it, the person watching over you is really playing, and you are just an input device (and probably a bad one at that). However, if you learned how to play, learned the mechanics, item builds and strategies, then it would be you playing.

That being said, a game like HoN is a very hard game to pick up with no prior experience. I've tried to keep this as gender neutral as possible, but it's a lot like the complaint that women don't come with instruction manuals. While guys may not know how to "operate" us, I don't think it's entirely their fault if they get it wrong. Good software is intuitive, and anything that doesn't make sense right away should have a tooltip or guide on what to do with it - and that should also apply to us.

I think that MrMan5.5 and I are currently in stage 4 (comfortable), and while things aren't always perfect (we've moved into stage 5 a couple of times lately), I think we have a good thing going. We both have our own hobbies and we are no longer at that stage where we feel we have to share everything (like when you are in the honeymoon stage, and are perfectly happy to see that chick-flick, or sit around watching your partner play a game). But we still have things that we do together, and most nights before we go to sleep, we talk, and laugh, and that's the time I feel like we are reinforcing our relationship. (Though I think I'm letting the team down, because I spend a lot of nights gaming until right before I need to be in bed.)

The last time we went to stage 5, I was really angry at MrMan5.5, because I felt like he wasn't doing nearly as much as I was. I didn't want to be a nagger though, so I kept quiet about it (sound familiar?). But then I'd get so mad that I'd start becoming really cold to him. I'd eventually tell him one of the things that made me angry, but not all of them, so it wouldn't be long before the whole cycle repeated itself. And like in the video from yesterday, things that normally wouldn't bother me would start to bother me because I was already so angry.

So even though it was a men's health seminar, I think the presenter said something that applies to both genders. "Anger is for violence. When you are angry, your heart starts beating faster, to prepare your body to fight (or flee), and that is not the best time for rational thought."

I do recognize that in myself, which is why I prefer to withdraw into myself when I'm angry, because I need time to cool off, and let rational thought return. But you don't always have that luxury. The presenter suggests making both  hands into fists and then taking a deep breath, and opening the fists as you say, "Stuff it!"

The next part is to realise that it takes two to tango. Whoever isn't angry might feel like they did nothing wrong, but if that were true, then why is the other person angry? It might be one of those irrational why-can't-you-read-my-mind angers, but that is a sign that there is a breakdown in communication. I got really angry that MrMan5.5 didn't put dirty dishes in the sink, and so he'd end up with a bunch on his desk. I decided that when I was washing the dishes, I wouldn't pick up his bowls and just wash everything else instead. He never took the hint, and so I got even more angry, which was the wrong thing to do. I told him to put them in the sink, and now he does.

Tuesday 20 March 2012

Strangers

Albert told me to watch this video (Strangers, again: 16m 20s):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSdELZxEnHY

For those who don't want to/can't watch it, he talks about how he was with a girl, and everything was amazing, but after a while it died off. He said there are 7 stages in a relationship.

Stage 1: Meeting (2:33)
When you first meet each other (in this case, bumped into each other while running). The great thing about this part is that you never know when getting to stage 1 with someone will lead to moving to stage 2.

Stage 2: The Chase (3:37)
He says it's usually considered the best part. It's when you can't stop thinking about the other person. You secretly keep checking their Facebook/G+/Twitter, you are excited to see that they're online, you stay up later than you really should talking to them, and somehow you manage to spend hours talking with each other. Yet when you are with them, you feel nervous and excited.

Stage 3: The Honeymoon (4:24)
When everything is perfect. You're happy to do anything, but you want to do it together.

Stage 4: Comfortable (5:01)
When you're comfortable being yourself around each other. When you can start to say no to that movie that, in all honesty, you don't want to watch. When you stop thinking of new and exciting things to do together, and are just happy doing whatever you want to do, and sometimes what you want to do and what your partner wants to do overlaps, so you do it together.

As he said in the video, this isn't always bad, but can lead to being taken for granted. Which leads to...

Stage 5: Tolerance (6:27)
You argue with each other, or you make passive-aggressive statements to try to avoid arguments, but that just turns into a delayed argument.

Stage 6: Downhill (8:27)
Being together isn't fun anymore, but you stay together because you're together, and you don't quite want to give up on it just yet.

Stage 7: Breaking Up (9:19)
The end.

He says the next stage is going back to how you were at the start.... strangers.


I think that most long term relationships will fluctuate between steps 4 and 5. That might sound like a bad thing, but I think it's good. For steps 2 and 3, (usually) a lot of effort is going into the relationship. Sure, it's fun at the time, but imagine having to do that for the rest of your life. Think of that episode of the Simpsons where Apu showers his wife with presents in the lead up to Valentine's Day. I don't think anyone could do that every day.

I remember a conversation I had with Lucy a while ago. Sex and the City movie spoilers ahead: We were watching the first SatC movie, and we got to the point where Miranda was arguging with Steve about how he slept with someone while they were separated. He said that he wasn't happy with the fact that they never had sex anymore. I think the movie was portraying Steve as the bad guy, but Lucy said that part of the fault was Miranda's. Why couldn't she just suck it up and have sex with him just to make him happy? The lack of sex was obviously a problem for him, so if she really wanted to save the relationship, why didn't she do it instead of getting angry at him and making him want to leave her even more?

I think that's what stops stage 5 from becoming stage 6 - whether one person in the relationship is prepared to take one for the team, and I guess that's why it's called "Tolerance". And what pushes a relationship into stage 6 is when one person feels like they have been the bigger person too many times, and they just can't bring themselves to do it anymore. Even if the other person suddenly realises what a jerk they've been and decides to put in some effort, it's too late. They might suck it up this one time, but that's not enough compared to the number of times the other person has had to do it.

(As a side note, I think that proposing or having a kid can help move the slider back towards stage 4, but there are really only so many times you can do that, and if you really have to resort to that, maybe you should be thinking about whether there is really something wrong in your relationship.)

Getting late, so to be continued tomorrow.... if I remember what I was going to say.

Monday 19 March 2012

Engagement Party Idea: Engagement LAN

So MrMan5.5 and I were tossing up the idea of having EngagementLAN - a LAN instead of an engagement party. We've come up with a few ideas, but I want to bounce them off people here in case they can think of a solution to some of our problems.

First, I want to say that the size of our families means our wedding will probably be huge with family alone. So we've decided not to invite friends to the wedding, and instead the engagement party will be for those who we would have liked to invite to the wedding, but they aren't family. But considering it's a LAN, that means we have to limit the number of people we're inviting. So when the time comes and you do not get an invite, don't feel like we don't love you and you weren't important to us. You just weren't as important as the limited number of people we could invite. =P (But more likely, the reason is because I do not consider you enough of a gamer to enjoy yourself at EngagementLAN, I'm thinking of doing maybe just a dinner with friends who I would have liked to invite, but didn't fit that criterion.)

So the first problem is venue. Ideally, we'd hire a hall, but that can be expensive, especially if we're adding food and alcohol to the cost. The other idea was to just hire a large house for a weekend instead and some tables and chairs, though I'm not sure about the cost of that either. We've dismissed the idea of just hiring a LAN cafe out for a day, because their computers are generally pretty poor, and even if we were allowed to bring our own peripherals, they usually don't allow food or drinks from outside, and I don't think people will survive on potato chips and Coke.

The next part is an idea Graham and I came up with - bride vs groom. So the people at the LAN can sign up to either represent me or MrMan5.5. We'd have competitions throughout the night and the winners will contribute points towards whoever they chose. At the end of the LAN, the loser (read: MrMan5.5) will have to suffer a punishment. There are a few things we are unsure about with this idea.

How do we go about team balance? It will probably be hard to balance based on skill, as that is subjective, and I doubt anyone could really give an honest appraisal of their own skill (for instance, Vinnie underrates himself by a lot, and a certain person from SEE thinks he is much better than he really is). There might also be a problem with more people being on one side than the other. Add to that the fact that people will probably want to play with their friends (e.g. I don't see Nem and George being split up at all). I guess we can have people pre-register which game they'd like to play in, and which side they want to play for, and if we need to move people around, we can contact them beforehand to see if they're OK with it. 

The last problem is games. Here are the games we've come up with so far:
- Team Fortress 2
- Goldeneye: Source
- DotA (maybe HoN if we have access to the Internet)
- Starcraft 2 (if we have access to the Internet)
- Super Smash Bros. Melee/Brawl
- Mario Kart
- Pictionary
- Blazblue
- Armagetron
- Band Hero/Singstar
- QWOP?

There's probably a bunch of things we haven't thought of, all we have at the moment are these rough ideas and a guest list. Please give us feedback/ideas!