Monday, March 17, 2014

PSY317-Weekly Movie Review

When a Man Loves a Woman.
When a Man Loves a Woman depicts the story on the family facing alcoholism in their family members. The movie started with the beginning of how Michael, the airline pilot met and started a romantic relationship with Alice. The movie proceeds continue to start showing Alice's signs of issues in dealing with alcoholism, the lack of self control on emotions and behavior after being drunk. Until the problem went even serious where she began to even hurt her daughter and herself, Michael discussed with Alice and decided to send her to clinic for rehab to overcome the alcoholism issue. Then, the story continues to talk about the how the issues arised in the movie after the returning and recovered Alice to the family and how was the reactions of the family and Michael, her husband. There were few highlights that I specifically focused in the movie.

Emotional validation
The movie highlighted the importance of the need of being accepted and validated for our emotions and feelings. Sometimes when we are the state of bad mood, sadness, anger and grief, what we need was not a solution to overcome these emotion but someone to accept and listen to us.  We all have the need for someone to be able to accept and validate for who we are including our feelings and thoughts. The movie portrayed the importance of emotion validation in a love relationship. Michael was the example in the movie where he was constantly trying to be the problem solver, the fixer to help his wife which is genuinely a way of showing his love towards his wife. However, Michael's behavior of constantly trying to help his wife overcoming the problem neglected the importance of recognizing the reasons behinds of Alice's feelings an thoughts causing Alice begin to feel herself as worthless and unaccepted by her husband. The only need that Alice wanted in the whole process was only to be listened and accepted by her husband, Michael instead of trying to solve the problem.

The role of effective communication in maintaining relationship
The importance of communication was one of the highlights I focused in the movie between Alice and Michael. Communication is important in maintaining relationship to be able to effectively convey messages of their thoughts so that mistakes and misunderstanding are understand and able to overcome it. In the movie, there were few instances of misunderstanding in the relationship that could have been overcome earlier if Michael and Alice actually communicate to each other more effectively on the issues that arises from their behaviors. Alice could have actually told her husband, Michael the actual need in their relationship which is someone to listen to her, accept her and support her. Michael as the loving husband if was able to know and understand the need of his wife, Alice I believed he would perform and communicate with Alice to avoid more conflicts and arguments in the movie.

Gender differences in relationships

Gender differences were also one of the highlights of the movie that I focused.  In the movie, we can see that Alice and Michael portrayed the different need of each gender where females would more likely tend to have their feelings and thoughts shared through listening from their loved ones while Michael as the typical males in relationship which tend to be the problem solver, the one who attempt solve and fix the problem that is faced by their loved ones. Recognizing the gender differences in their need in a relationship definitely is important which will be able to further help in maintaining relationship.

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