Calling Doctor Love, The Love Doctor

What is it that is ailing you my beautiful babies; has your bellyaching maybe something to do with parts of your body other than the stomach? Well, if you’re worrying about matters of the heart, like love sickness or the relationship grip es, then sit back and let the Love Doctor try to help.

If it burns when you pee, however, you need to see a real doctor pretty soon. Yeah, that was a V.D. joke.

After sifting through all of my in depth research that I gathered in my one hour of sitting at a folding table in front of the library and asking people questions borrowed from a speed dating questionnaire, I have come to the conclusion that there are basically two schools of thought which people follow in matters of relationships.

The first, simultaneously less optimistic and more optimistic, school thinks of relationships as something that closely resembles the law of diminishing marginal utility as applied to the market place.

You can think of the law of diminishing marginal utility as meaning: you absolutely need water to stay alive, but water is something that falls from the sky regularly so we’re not worried much about satisfying our water needs. And diamonds don’t fall from the sky regularly, so they are much more valuable economically.

So, we have people that think like this and are biding their time searching for the relationship equivalent of a diamond. Their preoccupation is in finding a relationship that more than just satisfies the wants they have, but is unique and rare. They are holding out to meet the perfect person for them.

One of the students interviewed put it best by saying, “The most valuable thing anyone can give to someone is themselves; anybody would want to get the best deal on that value.”

We can all agree it would be very disappointing to spend a good chunk of your time just to get worked over by a cheesy salesperson pushing a lemon. It’d be like being eight years old and seeing an advertisement saying the Power Rangers are going to be making a special visit a few towns away and going there just to see a bunch of jerks in paper mache heads; a waste of time.

One thing that I noticed from the interviews was that there generally was a correlation between age and the idea of preference in relationships. Outwardly there seems to be more of a trend for the most recent generations to be waiting for Mr. or Mrs. Right.

Many of the campus’s young adults that have only had one or two relationships, lasting a few months at most, say that they think of marriage or starting relationships at least once a day. Though, most of them said that it was hard meeting people that they could be interested in.

The people in the other school of thought just want to have somebody to be friends with, a companion. The reasoning behind this is that if you’d be married to someone for hundreds of years, you’d want a person you can get along with and can be truthful to. Everything else would just work out from there.

They first want a person that they can act naturally around. Maybe they see it as the primary need of a relationship, like how your body needs water and food and little else to survive.

Also, students interviewed said that they want a family and the stability that comes with it. One student I interviewed said, “I want to get my hands dirty and create a place where I belong, rather than simply waiting to find some place.”

The students that stopped by our table had fairly similar answers to our questions with only a few differences of opinions, but every single person that I interviewed agreed that the most important quality in a partner is honesty. So, that’s probably important.

My professional opinion, as both a very poor journalist and mediocre doctor of love, is that being in relationships is kind of like playing the board game Risk. You can either fortify Australia and try to powerhouse your way to world domination, or you can try to form alliances with other players to accomplish similar goals.

If you’d like to play Risk with Blane, shoot an email to Pweb@yccd.edu.