HPL Living English Lessons: Romantic Relationships

Welcome to Living English at the Houston Public Library, a 25-lesson language learning program that focuses on how you work, play, and interact with others in your everyday life. Hello, I'm Ryan Boden from the Houston Public Library. Welcome to Living English at HPL. Today, we're going to be talking about romantic relationships. So, let's dive right in. First, we're going to talk about dating. Dating is when you are seeing someone romantically, right? We also call this going out with someone. You might hear that, right? But before you're dating, you might be single, which is to be just one person, not in a relationship. So, you see that guy over there sitting, staring out at the sea by himself, right? He is single. But you might not want to be single anymore, and you might want to ask someone out. This is when you ask someone if they would like to go on a date with you or to be romantically involved with you, all right? So, this guy right here is asking this woman out, asking her to go on a date with him. Also, when you're dating, you might be in a long-distance relationship. These are hard. A long-distance relationship is when you are dating someone in a different place than you. So, in the picture, you see we have somebody on the East Coast in New York dating somebody on the West Coast, right, in California. So, that's a long-distance relationship. That can be difficult. There's also a term called blind date. Now, to be blind means not to be able to see, right? To be unable to see. So, on a blind date, it's when you do not see the person before you go on a date with them. Sometimes this is arranged by a friend or family member. You might be set up with them, right? So, that's a blind date. Okay, let's keep going. Relationships. So, some relationships are casual, right? This is informal. So, this is a relationship where you just want to spend time with someone. It is not serious. You are just someone you'd like to spend time with. They make you happy, right? So, you might go out to dinner or do other activities. Casual relationship. A serious relationship. This is when you might move in together, right? Spending a lot of time together. You only want to be with that particular person. And if your relationship is serious, you might fall in love. This is a feeling of affection or care, right? Love. I don't have to explain that to you if you've ever felt it, but love. Certainly, not all relationships have people who are in love, but that is a great thing. That's a great part of some relationships. And then we have sex or sexual intercourse, right? I'm not going to get too much into this, and I want you to know that not all relationships have sex and not all sex occurs in relationships, and that's an important thing to remember. So, couples. People who are dating, people who are together. They might be called a boyfriend and a girlfriend, right? So, this is before you're married, when you are seeing someone. These can be casual or they can be more serious, but boyfriend being the male and girlfriend being the female right over there. Boyfriend and girlfriend. You also might have a spouse, right? This is the non-gendered way of saying husband or wife or partner, right? So, a spouse is your husband or wife, okay? Partner is more informal. Some people who are in a serious dating relationship might refer to their boyfriend or girlfriend as a partner. You might refer to the person you're engaged to as a partner, or you refer to your spouse as a partner, right? So, that's probably more informal way of talking about being in a relationship as a couple. All right. So, you might want to get married, right? Which can be, it's legal and it's religious or ceremonial as well. But before that happens, you might want to propose. This is when you ask someone to marry you. It's a very traditional way of doing that, would be to get down on one knee and give a person a ring, which you see over there. That gentleman is proposing to that lady right there. If she says yes, you will be engaged, right? When you are engaged, that means you are planning to be married, right? You are planning to be married like these folks up here. He looks pretty happy about it. And then the person you are engaged to is your fiance, which is not an English word, but it is used quite a bit in American English, right? So, we use the word fiance to describe the person we are engaged to. And then finally, after being engaged to your fiance, you will get married, right? You will get married. It's important to note that marriage isn't the same for everyone, that we do have arranged marriages, right? This is common in some cultures to have arranged marriages where your family might choose your partner for you, right? We also have same-sex marriages, right? We don't need a husband and a wife. We could have a husband and a husband or a wife and a wife, right? That is also very common. So, I just wanted to make you aware of that. Now for some bad news. Separation, right? When people become separated, when they split apart. This can happen for a lot of reasons. Someone might cheat or have what we call an affair. That's when they become romantically involved with someone outside of the relationship. That can be very bad. You might break up. Break up is what we usually use to describe the split or separation for a dating couple. So, boyfriends and girlfriends can break up. Even engaged couples can break up. But divorce is something that we use for a married couple. When a married couple separates, legally we would call that a divorce, all right? We call that a divorce when a married couple splits. Now, if you break up or you get divorced or separated, you will now have an ex. Ex just means former as a prefix that we put on some of these words. So, for example, you will have an ex-husband if you get divorced or an ex-wife if you get divorced. If you break up, you'll have an ex-boyfriend or an ex-girlfriend like these folks are about to have, all right? So, I hope that doesn't happen to you. I just wanted to make you aware of that. Okay, so let's just practice very quickly with some of the vocab terms that we learned. On the side there, we have a word bank. We have marriage, propose, dating, engaged, ask out, and single. I would like you to put these in the correct order. In what order would these most likely appear, all right? Go and pause the video and try that on your own, okay? All right, how do we do? Let's check it out. Well, first, you're probably going to be single, right? You're going to be single at first like that lonely gentleman that we saw. Then, you're going to ask someone out. You'll begin dating. You might propose if you fall in love with them. Then, you'll be engaged. And then, finally, marriage, right? Now, I'm not going to tell you how long you have to spend in any of these things, but certainly, that's a pretty good order, I think. All right, if you didn't get it, go back and try again. Check out those vocab terms. But now, we're going to move on to gerunds. Very exciting. So, what is a gerund? A gerund is a verb. It ends in ing or ing that is used as a noun, all right? So, we use a verb as a noun. I'm going to explain that in just a moment, but these can be a subject, a complement, or an object. So, let's use the word to speak first, the verb to speak. When we use it as speaking, it becomes a gerund. So, speaking is a good way to practice English. It's the subject there because speaking is a thing that I am doing. It's not just an action. When I say speaking is a good way to practice English, that is a thing that I could do to practice. My videos include speaking, right? So, obviously, I have to speak. That would be the verb there. But speaking, that's going to be a thing. And then, I enjoy speaking in English. Now, we can do this with all kinds of verbs, right? So, if we look at these verbs down here, to date, that would be dating, right? Or to break up would be breaking up. To see would be seeing. And to learn, like learning gerunds, would be learning gerunds, right? Okay. So, I hope you have that because we're going to practice it right now. We have some of the infinitive forms of the verb up here. We have to ask, to divorce, to fall, to propose, to date, and to break. These two we already saw on the last slide, which is good. That'll help. I would like you to put the proper gerund in the blank here, all right? I would like you to turn these into gerunds and put the appropriate gerund in the appropriate sentence. Take a moment and try that for yourself. All right. How'd we do? I really enjoyed the blind date, so I'm asking her out again. That's great. So, they went on a blind date and now he is going to ask her out again. He is asking her out again. Two, he bought the engagement ring and is proposing tonight. So, the ring comes first, then you go and you propose. At least that's how it worked for me. They have been separated for a while, but she is finally divorcing him. It's very sad. To divorce becomes divorcing. Four, breaking up is hard to do, but sometimes it is necessary. Not all relationships were meant to last, I suppose. Five, they have been dating for a while, but it is very casual. All right. And then finally, number six, sometimes two people cannot help falling in love. Isn't that great? All right. Well, that's all I have today. Thank you so much for joining us. I hope to see you back here soon.