EDS UI Article No. 1: February

From Moonlight to La La Land, Yummy to Cardigan, Joker to Avengers, romance stories are always somewhere within the lore of our entertainment and almost any art forms. We’re instinctively attracted to the idea of having unconditionally loving, forever caring, and indubitably loyal relationships. We can relate ourselves to heartbreaks and struggles of finding, establishing, and keeping those relationships.

Discussions regarding love are highly personal, yet universal. Pondering upon love is ultimately about learning how one feels and how we achieve happiness.

And debate is one of the best mediums to philosophize and reason anything about love and relationships. Many debaters find relationship motions really approachable. The reason is quite obvious; everyone either has an experience or has heard of others’ experiences, which provides us some level of ability to give reasons and relatable examples. But just like any headings in debate, the approach to relationship motions should not just rely on case per case, individual, personal, specific scenarios, but also translate it to a bigger scale; how society thinks. The answer relies on other important contexts, such as society norms, religions, generational differences, etc.

In my limited experience, I have learned that research on this matter can be just as important and useful as spending hours on US Politics, Arab spring, or the International Banking system. Especially because it’s likely that you’ll often get the heading due to its constant relevance to society and its problems.

APPROACHING THE HEADER Just like everything else in debate, there’s no one exact rule on how to approach any headings/motions. I think having the adaptability to adjust to different wordings and context provided is a good skill to set a starting point of approaching the motion. Using what we know to further explore the urgencies, likelihoods, and possibilities can do wonders to our speech. You might first analyze the feeling of individuals in different contexts/scenarios, the reason why such feelings can occur, why different expectancies of relationships are normalized, and the good or bad it might cause.

Luckily, love and relationships are based on feelings, which everyone has, and that means you can always get most answers by asking none other than yourself.

For example, in the motion THR the popular narrative that family love should be unconditional, team Proposition can start by asking “why do we regret it?”, the answer, you might find, by asking “how is family love supposed to be?”, “why was it expected to be unconditional?”, or “what is the bad impact of expecting unconditional love?”. Maybe the answer for team Proposition is family love’s narrative should be conditional because each member of the family has their own responsibilities they need to fulfill, for example the parents have to provide a healthy and secure environment for their children, the kids then need to also respect the parents by keeping family honor.

You might then argue that the popular narrative of unconditional love completely disregards these obligations and provides no accountability for every member of the family. You can even further say that this is wrong, because the basis of any relationship is trust and responsibility thus the lack of accountability is unfair, and exactly because family is generally the closest relationship anyone will have, we need to put extra accountability in fulfilling the responsibilities.

You might say that from a child's personal view, having to constantly love your parents despite the shortcomings is burdensome because society and your parents might somehow punish you for being ungrateful or asking too much. All these are barebone argument possibilities and should be developed even more. The point is, these basic questions can be a possible departure point of your train of thoughts, just by asking yourself and how you might feel.

Other than preference or value judgement debates, one might encounter policy debate that somewhat relates to relationships. Two examples I had encountered are THW Ban Superheroes in falling in love and THBT governments should proactively promote singlehood. In the first motion, you might find your arguments when asking “why is it so bad that they fall in love?” and answer that by asking “how do humans/superheroes act when they fall in love?” and say as team proposition that love can make someone irrational, and superheroes just have too much power at hand which risks people's safety. Or as team opposition you can say that this is bad because you would further discriminate superheroes (cough cough X-Men lore), and love is actually needed for motivation.

For the second motion you might say that it’s justified to promote singlehood, because the basis of looking and having a significant other is socially constructed and people don’t exactly need it because having such relationship is just like any proper relationship. And the government should do it considering how overpopulation is a massive and urgent worldwide issue. Again, these are barebone possible arguments that should be accompanied with basic debate structures and explanations, such as setups.

CONTEXTS AND ARGUMENTS TO PREPARE Here are several tidbits of information you might find useful as contexts in running arguments.

1. RELIGION, CULTURAL NORMS Remember that in a society, nothing exists within a vacuum. And that means we can’t forget the things influencing society the most. Please do question and fact check the statements here.· Religious teachings about children should always respect parents are generally more known rather than the opposite, although parents' responsibility also exists in it.

Religious teachings tend to support marriage and highly discourage divorce. It sets marriage as one of life’s checkpoints/goals, which supports the narrative of long lasting marriage as a norm.· Some teachings support poligamy. Although some polygamous marriage are consensual, much of them are not. Even, the validity of such consents are debatable.

Existing norms can influence anyone, either by shaping mindset or by community pressure.

Examples of this: underage marriage, pragmatic marriage, fear of having divorce.

2. HOOKUPS, LONG/SHORT-TERM RELATIONSHIPS Hookups aren’t exactly new to human civilization, but the emergence of hookup apps and social media definitely made changes on its form. Moreover, there’s no doubt that recently there’s been a rise of hookup culture. And thus one question rises; “is love/relationship supposed to be loyal and long lasting?”

This has created motions such as THR Hookup culture. Possible reasons why hookup culture exist/ why people opt into hookup: More recent generations tend to see marriage or long term relationships as a hassle, just too many things to consider with too many risks, such as commitment, financial and social burden. This is especially true because the rise of property price makes it hard for younger generations to own a house.

Sexual needs still exist.

An escape from inability to find a significant other Opposition to hookup culture.

A poor practice of hookup culture can breed more cases of rape, possibly promoting rape culture.

Hookup culture undermines the role of feelings/emotions in relationships, even though feelings will always exist. This could possibly mean the happiness you get from hookup won’t be as optimal or even harmful because hookup partners only see each other as a sexual object

the takeaway Love is a complex idea, but yet, there’s still science in it. Science that involves society, relationships, contemporary norms, and struggles of an era. The topic is generally fun due to how personal it is. We’re not just constructing arguments to get speaker scores, we’re discovering ourselves and others to challenge norms and seek happiness however we might find it.

This article is not in any way perfect and should not be used as a rigid guide. There are lack of explanations and possibly factually wrong statements due to my shortcomings and limited capability. I am open to any inputs and I encourage anyone that reads to do their own research. Thank you for reading this far, and may all of you be loved.

References: https://everydayfeminism.com/2016/02/hook-up-culture-issexist/ https://globalnews.ca/news/3377712/is-monogamy-arealistic-relationship-ideal/