Can someone tell me why is this happening? I have created a social networking website using Ruby on Rails. This is my first time programming with RoR. I have a model named "Friendship" which contains an attribute "blocked" to indicate whether the user has blocked another user. When I run the following in IRB - friendship = u.friendships.where(:friend_id => 22).first IRB gives me - Friendship Load (0.6ms) SELECT `friendships`.* FROM `friendships` WHERE `friendships`.`user_id` = 17 AND `friendships`.`friend_id` = 22 LIMIT 1 => #<Friendship id: 33, user_id: 17, friend_id: 22, created_at: "2012-04-07 10:29:49", updated_at: "2012-04-07 10:29:49", blocked: 1> As u can see, the "blocked" attribute has value '1'. But when I run the following 1.9.2-p290 :030 > friendship.blocked => nil - it says, the value of blocked is 'nil' and not '1'. Why is this happening? This could be a very silly mistake but I am new to RoR, so kindly help me! I initially didn't include the accessor method for 'blocked'.. I tried that, and still its giving the same result.. Following is the Friendship model.. class Friendship < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :friend, :class_name => "User" validates_uniqueness_of :friend_id , :scope => :user_id attr_accessor :blocked attr_accessible :blocked end Here is the schema of the table: 1.9.2-p290 :009 > friendship.class => Friendship(id: integer, user_id: integer, friend_id: integer, created_at: datetime, updated_at: datetime, blocked: integer)