Daily Dose of English 67
Relationships
Daily Dose of English 67
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about relationships. The word relationships. but first I want to just check and see that my audio is okay. I had to make a few changes, sort of, I didn't want to, but I ended up having to make some changes and I think I might've broken something. And so this audio might be different. I apologize if it is very different to you, but hopefully it's still listenable and doesn't hurt your ears in some way. So without further ado, which means let's get on with it. Let's start talking about what we're going to talk about. I have here the word relationships because that's a very interesting and deep word in a with a lot of very different meanings. And so I thought it would make an interesting episode and because I saw a comment about it on one of the past episodes and thought it would make for a good idea. So Relationships. There's a lot of ways that this word gets used. There's the, what I think is the most common use, which is a romantic relationship between two people. So if you have a girlfriend or a boyfriend, then you are probably in a relationship with them, and that's what we would call it. And so for example, somebody who does not want to find a boyfriend or girlfriend, they might say, oh, I'm not looking for a relationship right now. And the word to me has always been a bit odd because it also has a very literal definition of the relationship between two things, how two things connect in really whatever way. And so you can say that you have a, what kind of relationship you have with your phone, for example, that's a person with a thing, or your relationship to English learning. A lot of people grow up with bad relationships to English learning because they have to take it in school. Maybe you had to take many years of English classes in school and you might have not liked them or even hated them. That's relatively common. And so you might have grown up or when you were younger had a bad relationship with English, but now it's gotten a little bit better and you really enjoy these podcasts and you share them with all of your friends and say that Ben's Daily Dose of English is the best English podcast there is. Wink wink. Two things like can also have a relationship if they're not like people. So for example, I often think of like elements in like science or chemistry. You can talk about like the relationship between whatever metals or things like that. You can talk about the relationship between two other whatever constants or laws in physics the relationship between motion and weight or speed and weight like I don't really know science words that well to be honest but you can relate to things like that and relate is sort of the verb of connecting two things by the way And so pretty much everything in the world has a relationship with each other, with one another, which is a little bit weird to think about, but like, it is technically true in a way. Everything is related and connected in a broad sense of like chemistry and physics, but we don't actually talk about it that way, unless you're trying to be, sound very smart in a room. It's like everything is connected, man. It's all related, which you could do. I'm not going to judge. But the more common uses, like I said, are for two people that are in a romantic relationship, but then also just in two people and how they connect to each other. So, for example, you might have a relationship with your parents or with your siblings or with your grandma or whoever in your life, your boss even, your co-workers, and you can talk about that relationship. and those are more common right obviously because everybody in the world has many relationships with other humans and potentially one maybe more depending on what kind of person they are like romantic relationships at a time and so you have a lot more people that you connect with in some way And that definition of the word relationship is very interesting to me because I don't think that very many people think about their relationship to other people that aren't their significant other. Significant other is another way to say boyfriend, girlfriend, or whoever else is in your life that is potentially you're living with or married to or whatever that might be. And significant other is a good way to clarify sort of what their relationship is to you. Because occasionally we do use words like boyfriend and girlfriend to be like a friend who is a boy or a friend who is a girl. You might have heard people refer to going out with their girlfriends. In the United States, typically women will say that. It's pretty rare for a man to say that they're going out with their boyfriends. But if a woman says, I'm going to go out with my girlfriends tonight, that means that they're going to go out with their friends who are girls to do something. And wait, how did I get onto this topic? Oh, the word significant other. And significant other refers to that the other person in the relationship who is significant. So they're very important to you or to your life in some way. And so it's a really clear word on that sort of thing. But I was talking about the relationships between you and other people in your life that aren't your significant other. So for example, your parents, your siblings, like I said, maybe your children. And those are relationships that we deal with in a more... not obligatory way. And so that means that like we have to deal with them in some way, right? You kind of have to have a relationship with your parents or your siblings, unless you don't talk to them or they are no longer alive, but you will have a relationship with pretty much all those people. And so it's worth thinking about and understanding your relationship a little bit better. a lot of people end up with problems with their family or their parents or whoever because they don't think about it as a relationship that can be improved or talked about and and thought about in general. And so if you have a family member or person close to you in your life that you don't really think about as having a relationship with you that you would like to be better, I would recommend thinking about how to improve it. And a little tip is that you can actually look up relationship tips for couples, like for people, for like somebody's wife or their husband or boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever. You can look up tips for those people and then just ignore the things that are too like couple-y. Ignore the parts about kissing or sex or marriage or whatever, and focus on the parts that are more about connecting with the person. Because that can work really, really well with really anybody, since we're all people at the end of the day. It's also good to think about your relationship to the other things in your life because your relationship to the world around you defines who you are and what you do. Your relationship with the internet, with your phone, with food, with exercise, with sleep. All of these things are are real relationships. They're not just like a connection between, like I said, speed and, or velocity and force. No, velocity and density. That's, I think those are connected. Those have a direct relationship, but that doesn't change. That's a static relationship that we've studied and we know about. However, your relationship to, like for example, sleep can change. You can improve how you think about and sleep in general. And how you think about sleep and how you sleep. It's also, it's a verb and a noun, annoyingly. And a thing that you can do. And so if you struggle with kind of anything in your life, or maybe you don't even know that you struggle with it, but you sometimes feel worried about it or stressed out about it especially, try to examine your relationship with that thing and see what potentially you could change. Because sleep isn't going to change. It is a static thing that just exists. but you can change how you have your relationship to it. Are you upset by it? Are you stressed out by it? Do you, no, excuse me, I just had dinner. I kind of forgot what I was saying, but yeah, anyway, I think that you get my idea. Focus on your relationships between people and the other things in your life. And I think that you will find that a lot of things become a lot easier and less stressful when you are able to focus on improving your relationship with various things. However, that's been a whole episode. I've talked to you about relationships for about 10 minutes, so I'm gonna call it here for today. I hope that you enjoyed this episode and maybe learned a few words here and there, or a little tip or a new concept. Let me know down in the comments what you enjoyed, and I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. Bye-bye.
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