The now-infamous line making its way into everything including pop songs by Nelly Furtado, popped into my head: I guess chivalry isn’t dead after all.

The classic ideas of chivalry involve knights on white horses and fair maidens, with a rich history that dates back to the medieval years, when orders of knights were established, cemented by guidelines and rules that helped them to lead virtuous, dutiful and respectful lives as men of honor and integrity.

Translated to pop culture and the romantic comedy centuries later, we have come to associate the term with dating and what is considered either polite or correct behavior between the sexes. Common images came to include men pulling out chairs or putting their coats over puddles after a rain storm.

I asked myself, what is chivalry today? Is it being well-mannered and dutiful? Do people really believe it is dead?

I wondered if those practices had just been deemed out of fashion or if it was an issue of gender. Were there no more knights or simply no more damsels in distress?

Interestingly enough, Merriam-Webster still associates the word with knights and chivalrous behavior related to the military.

It is no secret we are shaped by the people around us, and when it comes to relationships, we know who we turn to to both vent and gain advice. After a while, we learn who would have simply thanked the boy holding the door for me, noting his act, and who wouldn’t have thought twice about it.

I was raised to be an independent-minded and goal-oriented individual. My parents taught my sister and me the importance of being courteous and polite, cemented by a call to uphold the golden rule after nine years of parochial education. In true father-daughter fashion, my father taught me the only man I could ever truly rely on was him, and to make my own way, so I would never be dependent on a partner.

Since then, I held my fair share of doors, pulled out chairs and split the check on dates.

When I called my father Sunday night, he explained chivalry shouldn’t die — and people will always keep it going — but that each of the individuals in the relationship should be respected for their independence. Don’t smother, but treating a woman well never goes out of style.

Sitting in my house in East Lansing, I began to have this conversation with two of my roommates, Sarah Nelson, a microbiology senior, and Morgan Lucke, an environmental sciences and management senior.

The two found the use of the term “chivalry” and it being assigned certain behaviors to be passé.

“I think that it is an old tradition that doesn’t really apply anymore,” Lucke said. “Gender equality has gotten better.”

“I just think that the concept is kind of weird just because I think that people should just show general respect to one another,” Nelson said.

In the end, they introduced me to the word that became the theme of this brief examination into chivalry: balance. Examples included alternating when picking up the cost of a date and simply not overthinking or associating a gender with everyday courtesies.

In my discussions with Nelson and Lucke, and later a friend of theirs who joined in, I was directed to Christian Schultz, a psychology junior formerly enlisted in the U.S. Army, with a unique take on the idea.

The girls sent me to Schultz because of their memories of him as the proper gentleman. What I found was someone with a more complex take on the idea, and more specifically, what it meant when others associated it with him.

Schultz described himself as someone who sees the dichotomy associated with the term chivalry today, which is both the military definition (duty, honor, loyalty to nation, etc.) and the side related to love and relationships. When it came to the love side, he too thought equality and balance were most important.

What struck my attention was his aversion to being associated as someone who is chivalrous in relationships. He just saw it as being polite.

“In my world, there shouldn’t be any gender stereotypes for any behavior,” Schultz said. “Acceptance changes over generations, so me and my mate would have this system where we just do our own thing.”

Schultz also brought about a new way to examine chivalry over time, and that was to examine who bore the responsibility as caretaker and who was provider. He explained how some gender will always be associated with chivalry as in the beginning it was men as knights, whereas in later centuries, proper behavior for women as dutiful wives was laid out in more detail, but that each situation should be examined individually.

“I encourage people to critically self-reflect on the idea of withholding judgement until you have the proper facts or the proper knowledge, which can apply just with outlining what the term ‘chivalry’ means to outlining your definition of the word ‘love,’” he said.

Will he continue to be a well-mannered gentleman? Of course. Just don’t put him on a billboard for it.

When my research and conversations led me to Chelsea Gladney, a Lyman Briggs environmental biology and zoology sophomore and co-chair of Women’s Council, she uttered the line that we writers love, the one that sums it up just right providing both insight and information in one quick, verbal jolt.

“I wouldn’t want to date a guy who didn’t think I could open the door,” Gladney said.

When I mentioned the word “chivalry,” she said the first thing that came to her mind was a nice guy. But for her, the practice has changed for the simple fact that the dating dynamic itself has changed.

“I think that boys are still taught that you’re supposed to be nice to girls,” Gladney said. “I think dating has become different and that chivalry has changed. It’s not the same as it was for our grandparents. It’s not abnormal for a girl to ask a guy out on a date now.”

Again, I was brought back to the idea of the balance. Based on both past relationships and other experiences, Gladney said she finds the balance in relationships to be more empowering for both people involved, when both take care of each other.

“I don’t think it should die,” she said. “I think people should acknowledge that it comes from both men and women now.”

She raised an interesting point, that levels of chivalric behavior fit our current circumstances as well as our core beliefs. College is a time when both men and women are often faced with challenging financial situations and high stress, she said, so demanding one person always pick up the tab just isn’t practical.

So maybe when it comes to dating, we have to be more considerate before setting our expectations too high.

I find the conclusion I came to to be that chivalry is not dead, it is just in a different package. It no longer is, nor needs to be confined to a gender or setting, rather what was once considered proper form is now common courtesy.

By seeing how a sampling of people viewed the word and thinking on their responses, I think that calling something an act of chivalry just puts too much weight on everyday encounters.

Lucke summed it up best by addressing my initial example: “Whoever is first to the door should open the door.”