Hokum, Bunkum, and Twaddle - The Love Matrix
Dakila Briones, MBA1 dbriones@umich.edu
Issue date: 2/9/04 Section: Student Life
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Love is a rip in time and space, like a wormhole. People, quite literally, fall, stumble, or simply find themselves in this anomaly called love. A physicist buddy of mine proposed this hypothesis during one of our drunken binges on Beale Street in Memphis, and I imagined him collecting energy and particle readings all over the bar to determine exactly where the sweet spot is. O.K., so I was pretty gone.
As a topic for less than lucid discussions, nothing quite beats a heart-to-heart on True Love, and in an effort to help you, dear reader, in holding up your end of the conversation when you are in no shape to come up with clever ad-libs, I have outlined a framework you can speak from below.
The Love MatrixTM (branding is always a good thing):
TLM considers that all romantic relationships have two basic components: Friendship and Passion. The Friendship component is the measure of how much you like and trust someone and how much you enjoy being in this person's company. And the Passion component is the measure of, well, you know.
There are four categories in this framework and a rarefied region where Love happens:
Bunnies. Relationships among people who would be incapable of holding an hour-long conversation with their partners, unless, of course, they were talking about, well, you know. These are, for example, the flings that you have while you're in between relationships or while the love of your life is seeing someone else.
Do I know you? Relationships that are either new and undefined or have been demoted from the other quadrants. For complete strangers, this is a getting-to-know stage, but for partners of many years, being in this quadrant usually means estrangement and potential dissolution.
Buddies. Relationships among people who hang out and "do nothing" with each other. High trust and like levels are everything in this area.
"It" was a mistake. Relationships that invoke the famous line, "Relationship George and independent George can't coexist". The worlds of Bunnies and Buddies are mutually exclusive and cannot (and indeed) must not collide!
As a topic for less than lucid discussions, nothing quite beats a heart-to-heart on True Love, and in an effort to help you, dear reader, in holding up your end of the conversation when you are in no shape to come up with clever ad-libs, I have outlined a framework you can speak from below.
The Love MatrixTM (branding is always a good thing):
TLM considers that all romantic relationships have two basic components: Friendship and Passion. The Friendship component is the measure of how much you like and trust someone and how much you enjoy being in this person's company. And the Passion component is the measure of, well, you know.
There are four categories in this framework and a rarefied region where Love happens:
Bunnies. Relationships among people who would be incapable of holding an hour-long conversation with their partners, unless, of course, they were talking about, well, you know. These are, for example, the flings that you have while you're in between relationships or while the love of your life is seeing someone else.
Do I know you? Relationships that are either new and undefined or have been demoted from the other quadrants. For complete strangers, this is a getting-to-know stage, but for partners of many years, being in this quadrant usually means estrangement and potential dissolution.
Buddies. Relationships among people who hang out and "do nothing" with each other. High trust and like levels are everything in this area.
"It" was a mistake. Relationships that invoke the famous line, "Relationship George and independent George can't coexist". The worlds of Bunnies and Buddies are mutually exclusive and cannot (and indeed) must not collide!
