The Found and Unfoud Rules Friends With Benefits

Having friends with benefits is increasingly common, and in 2007 60% of college students identified they that they were in or at one point experienced a ‘Friends With Benefits’ (FWB) type relationship. And of those 60%, 81% believed that it was possible to have a successful FWB style relationship. However, 67% of the people who never experienced a relationship felt that a successful FWB wasn’t possible.

In a recent Cosmo article, they issued the ’10 Rules of Being Friends With Benefits’. Many of the rules aligned with Bisson and Levine’s 2007 Study. The first rule read ‘DO think twice about hooking up with your neighbor’ which aligned with the study’s findings that 16% would never participate in a FWB due to moral reasons, as the article addresses the awkwardness, and shame of seeing your neighbor. Rule 3 ‘DO proceed with caution if you meet someone new’ aligns with the study finding people found a FWB who was previously a friend is favorable because you can have sex with a trusted partner. Rule 8 ‘DO protect yourself’ also aligns with the trusted partner issue. Rule 2 ‘DON’T convince yourself it’s more serous then it really is’ also agrees with the ‘catching feelings, fear found in the study.

However, some rules in the article brings new ideas and focuses to Friends With Benefits. Rule 4 ‘DON’T encourage friends and family to hang out with your FWB’ is a new focus on the dynamic of this relationship. This is a topic that wasn’t touched or found by the study but definitely an issue. The idea that you would want to keep your FWB somewhat if not completely private to avoid judgment from people thinking you’re sleeping around is a big factor in maintaining FWB. Rule 9 ‘DO be smart on social media’ also addresses a new factor to FWBs. This retouches the idea that your own moral convictions may allow you to have a FWB but many other people and society aren’t exactly open to FWB’s.

Article found here: http://www.glamour.com/sex-love-life/2012/10/10-rules-of-being-friends-with-benefits/6

FWB done right

No commitment, sex when you want it, sex with a trusted person, safe and convenient. It make you wonder what could possibly have all these characteristics and actual be real. Friends with benefits is the answer. When you are in a FWB relationship you are living a pretty good life, especially if you are living the life od a college student. You have so much work to do, you may not feel like you have time to commit to an actual relationship. You are already under so much stress with school work you don't want to add to the stress with a relationship. You may just want a person that you can just have sex with and be completely platonic. Which is exactly what you can get out of a FWB relationship. Now this kind of relationship isn't for everybody. Like some people like being in a relationship. Some people who get into FWB relationships cant handle it because they allow feelings to get involved and that's when things begin to get complicated. Someone may not feel the same way then feelings end up hurt and it begins to complicate the friendship.

These relationships where friends have sex are expected to fail because a person always catches feelings. So I found an article (http://www.thedatereport.com/dating/advice/how-to-do-friends-with-benefits-the-right-way/) that gives tips on how to have an successful friends with benefits relationship. A few tips were to remember that you are friends first, to be upfront about any feelings you may begin to develop so they don't get to strong, practice safe sex (a must), be open and courteous, just because you sleep together doesn't mean you aren't still friends. The one I liked the most was don't sleep over, which makes perfect sense because after sex you may feel vulnerable so to have that comforting cuddle could make a person think this is more that just sex. Breakfast in the morning after a sleep over is definitely out of the boundaries of a FWB relationship. Follow these tips and hopefully the next FWB you are in will be a good one.

Errors in Perception

Do you fairly judge on your behavior? What about others’? People tend to be generous about them while they use stricter standard to the others. This is called the Fundamental Attribution Error.  People are likely to overestimate internal attribution of others. For example, if someone cuts in front of you in line, your immediate reaction is, "This person is a complete jerk!" (Sherman, 2014.) When explaining other people’s negative behaviors, we are biased and link those behaviors to negative personalities. While people regard others’ bad behaviors as bad nature or lacking manners, they also underestimate external attributions. It could be an emergency situation; maybe he got a call that his wife is about to give a birth. We often do not acknowledge the external excuses of others.

Interesting fact that social psychologists have found is we rarely make the fundamental attribution error to ourselves. We find a way out by finding other excuses instead. For instance, when we do not do well on the test, we usually blame the test, “the questions were tricky and confusing”, or the professor, “She doesn’t know how to teach”. This concept is called Errors of Self-serving bias where individuals attribute positive dealings to their own character and negative dealings to external factors (Wengrzyn) . We are nice to ourselves and, instead of blaming ourselves for not studying enough, find many other excused that caused bad result.

Fundamental Attribution Error sometimes makes us to take thing personally. This describes the everyday experience of encountering people who don’t treat you just right, as the royalty you implicitly believe you are. (Sherman, 2014) Maybe it was just a bad day for him when he ignored your “Good Morning.” You don’t have to relate that bad feeling to his disrespectful personality. As Sherman said, most people are good and decent, subject to the same difficulties in life as you are. Therefore reacting too sensitively to these kinds of situations won’t be helpful to both your mental health and relationships you have. Instead of seeing others with strict standards, give them a break and excuse as much as you give to yourself. Probably being aware of fundamental attribution error will improve a trust in relationships and make higher quality communication.

It is also important to recognize that we are nice to ourselves and deny our own faults. Self-serving bias is happened to protect our ego because it is easy to just blame other factors instead of looking back what we have done wrong. However, this attitude is not helpful when we need to improve and learn. Because we don’t judge ourselves objectively, we loose a chance to grow up from our mistakes. Though it is hard to face our fault and admit it, the best way to not repeat that mistake is taking time for self-reflection. According to the Huffington Post Article, Self-Serving Bias: Why Some Leaders Don't Learn From Their Mistakes, from a motivational perspective, the best way to handle a failure is to look honestly at how your own actions contributed to the outcome, emphasizing what you can change so that your performance improves from now on.
 When I look back my middle school and high school report card seasons after the exam week, I always had self-serving biased for the subject I didn’t do well. When my mom asked why I didn’t do well on it, I told her that the teacher was so mean and gave us tricky questions, or it was generally hard test that most of my classmate didn’t do well. Then my mom would ask, “so nobody got an A on this test?” Of course then I would use the fundamental attribution error to explain that, “Well… Very few got an A… But that was just because they were lucky! They just guessed the answer and got it right!!” It is always hard to give a credit for someone who did better than me because I get so jealous. However from this class I learned it wasn’t only me how was generous to myself and strict to others. Though it is tough criticize ourselves and clap on others successes, trying to see others and ourselves with objective views will help us to improve ourselves and build stronger relationships.  

Social Meditation

"She's engaged?! How is she engaged! We graduated together and she's ENGAGED?! I don't understand how that's possible. *scrolls down* Wait, is that his kid? He has a kid... I had a piece of bread for breakfast and he is responsible for a tiny little human's life???"

I'm not usually one to stress out over not having my life together, because after all I'm only nineteen. But when I was sitting with my friend between classes listening to her as she scrolled through her Facebook feed it really got me thinking about the less obvious effects of online friendships. 

I’ll be the first one to say that I could care less about half of the people I’m “friends” with on Facebook, as bad as that sounds. But, when you’re like me and you graduate high school with 700 people in your class alone, it’s hard to maintain friendships with more than just a few people when you go off to college.  But that’s the thing about social media today - it’s a lot easier to keep up with people without actually having to talk to them, and for some people that seems to cause serious problems.

In Lindsay Lavine’s article, she brings these problems to light.  Facebook is a place where people go to showcase only the best moments of their lives. Oh, you got a promotion? Need to go update that status! On an expensive vacation at a five star resort? Need to publicize it with a picture! – Obviously you want to be happy for them, but it’s also hard to not compare yourself, and your life, to what all of your “friends” are showcasing online.  The important thing to remember however, is that the things we don't see online are the same things we would never post about ourselves: family drama, problems at work, insecurities, etc. And these are the same things that all of these “perfect” people we see online are going through too.

One of the most important things to remember when you’re scrolling through your newsfeed seeing pictures and posts about how awesome people’s lives are is that everyone is at a different place in their life as well.  It’s not fair to go online and compare your Chapter One to somebody else’s Chapter Twenty. What we need to do instead of comparing ourselves with others is refocus this energy to ourselves, and what matters to us, rather than what we’re not doing in regards to what someone else is.

The Infamous Breakup Txt

There are many ways to end a relationship through using some form of CMC, but why exactly would one want to, or not want to use CMC as a method of breaking up? For those who disagree with breaking up via technology, they might say that it is a less personal way to end the relationship. It can also be viewed as disrespectful because it is not exactly the traditional FtF method. Some would say that FtF requires more effort and meaning. According to Kiri Blakeley in her piece "10 Times It's Ok To Dump Someone over Txt Message" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/12/text-breakup-_n_4922063.html the Coupon Company Voucher Cloud surveyed couples and found out that 56% have experienced breaking up digitally, and that 25% of their breakups were achieved through txt messaging. Also that 20% broke up via social media. So this has become popular in today's world where it might not have been an option in the past.

Even though breaking up is always a hard thing to do, sometimes doing it with eliminating the FtF factor might make things easier for both parties. For an example in most cases that the relationship ended on a bad note, such as cheating, beating, or stealing the best method would most likely be through CMC, or police. As well as if the person is to far away and there just is no other route then digitally. Another reason why it might be easier to break-up through txting is because maybe a person understands that their relationship is not healthy and wants to breakup, but they don't want to see their partner in pain FtF so that would then stop him/her from wanting to do it. Where as if they send a txt or do it through social media, they can avoid they're (ex)partner's sorrow.

Breaking up through social media can also be a bad thing. As we know almost anyone's social media can be viewed by countless people. It could be embarrassing to someone maybe if perhaps they said how they were treated badly, or shared embarrassing secrets by posting them on their news feed to possibly hurt the other party.

Breaking up via technology with out a doubt has its advantages and is advantages. It can make it easier for one, but can also bring along a bad rep.

It's Fast, Conveinent, and Cheap and It's Called a CMC Relathionship.

It seems that in today’s day and as we move more and more into a technological society, things that we used to do online are not as weird and now may even be the norm. Such as online dating. People use to think that online dating was wrong and talked down to you if you even thought about doing it. Dating in person used to be so much fun. Now people are so busy, or too lazy, or to shy too get up and get out. Now everyone is online trying to find a sex buddy and occasionally a long lasting relationship. It also seems like CMC relationships are a lot more intriguing and spicy. People just feel better about themselves and are more comfortable getting a date online. People are more attracted to one another online than face to face. Even though we heard all the reasons why in class, I still don’t understand it, but hey if the faceless unknown person makes you happy, more power to you. The studies that we learned about in class, talked about how relationships that develop online tend to be more meaningful and last longer. In most CMC relationships one can have confidence in knowing that judgment of their outer look will be reserved and that their soon to be partner will see more of what is on the inside.

The Social Penetration Theory helps explain how people in CMC relationships interact with one another. It also explains how self-disclosure gets deeper and deeper the longer a relationship goes. Another name for this theory is called “The Onion Model.” This model tells us that the thing needed most in any relationship is disclosure. Self-disclosure includes revealing basic information and revealing personal or private information. The more comfortable you get with your partner the more breadth and depth you go into. Starting with the outermost layer of the onion you get the public self. This is your height, gender, or weight. These are traits that people can see. But, with some CMC relationships truthful self-disclosure is most of the times taken over by selective self-presentation. We may lie about what we look like or even post pictures from years ago. The next layer is personality and these are things that we do not mind sharing when we first meet someone. However, online we may still choose to only tell people what we want them to think about us. The deepest layer of the onion is the core. This is where the deepest secrets are and this is the most hidden part about us. We usually save this layer for our closest relationships. Online you may be able to reach this layer in three days if you give it some effort. People disclose more about themselves more quickly and this helps build that intimacy between the two people on each side of the computer screen, but it works best when both parties participate. I easily found this blog called, “Introduction to Communication: Social Penetration Theory” further explains The Onion Model. http://pencil-pushing.blogspot.com/2012/04/week-8-social-penetration-theory.html This blog goes a little more in depth and includes more stages. First is the orientation stage: small talks to create good first impressions. Second is the exploratory effective stage: this where we start revealing ourselves and our feelings toward moderate topics and obtain a casual friendship. Next is the affective stage: this is where we really start to talk about private and personal matters and it is an equivalent to a romantic relationship. After that is the stable stage: the relationship stabilizes. Lastly is the depenetration stage: this is the least desirable stage because deeper self-disclosure happens here. Id like to reiterate that in a real face-to-face relationship this process can take years, but if you are someone that has no time to waste and aren’t getting any younger, which is all of us, then you can go online and sign up for free today. It will take about two weeks and only cost about $20 dollars a year plus tax. You can’t beat a deal like that.

Men and Women: Just Friends?

With all the recent talk in class about relationships and dating, you have to mention the relationship between a man and a woman who are “just friends”. The relationship between a man and a woman is a complicated one, especially when there is sexual tension; and the idea of whether men and women can be “just friends” is something that’s so prevalent and comes up for debate so often that we see it all throughout popular culture.

This article, by Adrian Ward, details just how complicated this relationship between the two genders is when it comes to platonic friendships. The article focused on specifically how men and women who were friends view one another. They found that most of the miscommunication between the two was due to different views on the potential for something romantic in opposite-sex friendships. And this ties into one of the challenges of cross-sex friendships we discussed in class: sexual challenge. This challenge deals with the sexual tension between friends through miscommunication or complete lack of communication over the topic. Men in general were more attracted to their female friend counterparts than vice versa; and as simply stated by the article: “men consistently overestimated the level of attraction felt by their female friends and women consistently underestimated the level of attraction felt by their male friends.” And this relates to the emotional bond challenge. Men who are in cross-sex friendships attribute their emotional bonds more closely to a romantic vein than women and incorrectly attribute these feelings.

Another challenge is the public presentation challenge noted in this other article by Dr. Dylan Selterman.  This only adds to the miscommunication of cross-sex friendships due to false outward perceptions by others about the friendship. When others see the friendships, they can mistakenly assume they are in a relationship and causes problems: the male is more likely to see this as enforcing his belief of reciprocal feelings from his female friend while she denies anything, which can understandably result in confusion.

But through all these difficulties with cross-sex friendships, those that have them are ultimately in the end better off than those who don’t. Selterman states that opposite-sex friendships provide insight into the mind of the opposite sex that same-sex friendships cannot. You can learn so much more about the opposite sex by being friends with them and their complementary viewpoints. Not only that, opposite-sex friendships broaden horizons for networking and romantic partners compared to those who only have same-sex acquaintances.

So, opposite-sex friendships, even though challenging to maintain and confusing to understand, is worth it if the work is put into it. It’s not impossible for men and women to “just be friends” and can be an important friendship in your life. And who knows, maybe it can turn into something more than that.