Tag: tastes

Defining Teenage Relationships

I got into my first ever romantic relationship at the ripe old age of twenty six. By then I had already got into the “settling down mode” (you might remember i was already in the arranged scissors market before that) and so essentially I was looking for a long-term settlement. I was essentially looking for “someone who’ll need me, someone who’ll feed me when i’m sixty four” and fortunately things have worked out well and I’m due to get married sometime later this year.

Looking at people around me – friends, cousins, friends’ cousins and cousins’ friends, I realize that people get into this “relationship industry” fairly young. You have people who are barely out of middle school who have “boyfriends” and “girlfriends”. Actually there’s nothing new in this phenomenon. I remember wanting to have a girlfriend when I was twelve years old. That it took fourteen years to find one is another matter. However, the point is I’ve forgotten. I’ve forgotten what I’d’ve imagined regarding my possible romantic life back then. I’ve grown so old now that I don’t remember at all why I wanted a girlfriend when I was younger.

Possible reasons I can think of:

  • It’s cool to be in a relationship. Its cool to have someone proclaim you as their significant other. It elevates your social status, makes you a more confident person and generally improves your outlook towards life.
  • It is good to have one person with whom you spend a lot of time. It is good to have one person with whom you share everything and who knows more about you than anyone else. It is good to have that one person who you know will always be there with you, beside you, through times happy and sad, and it helps that if you get addicted to each other you have the option of living together for life. Hence you want to get into a relationship.
  • You have a default partner for every activity that you want to do. There is one person with apprximately similar tastes whom you can bug to acccompany you in whatever you want to do. This way you never end up not doing something just because you couldn’t find someone to do it with
  • Economically it helps since in places such as clubs, discos, concerts, etc. couples get favoured treatment in terms of entry etc. I suppose this won’t be the major reason for getting into a relationship for anyone
  • It shows you as a responsible person who is able to think for himself/herself at a young age; who is able to make potentially life-changing decisions early

Anything else you can think of? On a related note, what do teenage couples do? How do they spend time with each other? If you get into a relationship in your twenties you can start planning for a shared future, etc. But what do you do when you’re still young?

The Film Game

So today I was introduced to this “hangout game” called Film Aata (the Film Game). The rules of this game are fairly simple. Through a slightly complicated process, you pick a random letter in the alphabet. Everyone is given a certain amount of time (we played with five minutes), and in that time you need to write down as many films as possible whose names start with that letter.

It’s a fairly simple and fun (though can’t be played for too long or too often given that the number of letters in the alphabet) but what makes it interesting is the scoring system. You get points for each UNIQUE movie whose name that you have written. So basically if you’ve written down the name of a movie which at least one other person has written down, you get no points for it. So apart from knowing the names of lots of movies you need to know movies that others don’t know (and it’s useful to have a resource such as IMDB handy).

So basically correlation matters! If there is one other player in the group who has similar tastes as yours, you are bound to get screwed. For example, the two people with whom I was playing this game today are sisters, so there was a major overlap in the names of the movies that they knew, which meant that on a relative scale I performed better than I would have considering the length of my total list.

I found the game extremely interesting! Now, here is a modification that would make the game more interesting. Put a cap on the total number of movie names that a player can write, all other rules staying the same. Currently, with no limits, you will end up writing names of all movies that you can think of. There is no strategy per se involved in the game. It’s more a test of memory.

However, once we put a cap, that brings in an element of strategy to the game. Now you will need to pick and choose the movies whose names you want to put down – to choose the movies that you know other people won’t know. And in case the cap is really low, then to pick and choose the movies whose names you know others won’t write. Insane game theory scope are there!

This also makes the game more repeatable – you can play it more often with different sets of people, and each time you’ll be trying to read the minds of different people and that will make things fun. With the same set of people, you can play with different caps, giving a new strategy each time.

It’s a simple game. A kids’ game. Something that might appear to be all too simplistic on the face of it, but this simplicity allows easy innovation, and that can make the game extremely fun!