Category: couples

Why most of us lean to the right when we kiss

Your brain is an organ of two halves – the left side and the right side. And there are many brain functions, such as language skills or which hand you write with, which are organised mostly in one side of the brain or the other.

Simple behavioural tests have now allowed us to see how this organisation is revealed through biases in how we see and interact with the world – and each other – often without us being aware of it.

Examining how people perceive a diagram of variously orientated lines and angles provided clues that people typically have a subconscious bias for seeing things set out in clockwise orientations.

We then realised that this might also be related to a number of physical instincts that people have, such as which way they turn their heads. After looking at recent research in visual psychophysics and visual neuroscience, we saw various perceptual and behavioral phenomena in which humans can have a directional bias.

Many of these turning behaviours are seen early in life. For example, infants have an initial bias for turning the head to the right (and consequently extending the left arm outward to compensate for that movement).

Some previous research found that such an instinctive turn to the right extends to adulthood – when an adult kisses another on the lips, their heads tend to automatically lean to the right. But is this an extension of the bias that humans are born with, or do people simply learn to kiss that way?

Why most of us lean to the right when we kiss

Women Absorb And Retain DNA From Every Man They Have Sex With, Study Shows

The study, which discovered the startling information by accident, was originally trying to determine if women who have been pregnant with a son might be more predisposed to certain neurological diseases that occur more frequently in males.

But as the scientists picked apart the female brain, the study began to veer wildly off course. As it turns out, the female brain is even more mysterious than we previously thought.

The study found that female brains often harbor “male microchimerism”, or in other words, the presence of male DNA that originated from another individual, and are genetically distinct from the cells that make up the rest of the woman.

According to the study: “63% of the females (37 of 59) tested harbored male microchimerism in the brain. Male microchimerism was present in multiple brain regions.”

Women Absorb And Retain DNA From Every Man They Have Sex With, Study Shows

China’s Mistress-Dispellers | The New Yorker

Yu Ruojian was pleased to learn that his target ran a sex shop. Someone who worked in retail would be used to talking to strangers, and it would be easy, posing as a customer in such an intimate store, to bring the conversation around to personal matters. In March last year, he visited the store, in Wuxi, a city about seventy miles from Shanghai, where he lives. He told the proprietor, a gregarious woman in her forties whom I’ll call Wang, that he was looking for herbal remedies to help a friend whose marital relations were hampered by shyness. They chatted for half an hour before exchanging contact details. “I’ll be back to pester you soon enough,” Yu said as he left. “You’d better!” Wang responded, unaware that she’d walked into the first in a series of carefully laid traps.

A month earlier, Yu had heard from a woman in her fifties, the wife of a factory manager in Wuxi, who explained that her husband was having an affair with Wang. She had tolerated it for years, but now she’d found that he had spent more than two hundred thousand yuan—thirty thousand dollars—on her, savings that should have been going toward their old age and a house for their son.

China’s Mistress-Dispellers | The New Yorker

What Makes a Parent? – The New Yorker

The next day, Wednesday, a shipping company collected Hamilton’s belongings. She had what she thought would be her final photo shoot in New York: a portrait of Emma Forbes, a British TV presenter, for Hello! Gunn later sent her pictures of Abush having fun at the beach.

At one o’clock on Thursday, Hamilton was at home cleaning, expecting to leave for Fire Island in the evening, when she got a call from a woman who introduced herself as Nancy Chemtob. A New York family and matrimonial lawyer, Chemtob founded her own firm in her twenties; in the two and a half decades since, she has represented such clients as Bobby Flay, Star Jones, and Diandra Douglas, the ex-wife of Michael Douglas, in divorce proceedings. Her style is amused and unsentimental, and she has a strong Long Island accent. (Today, when Hamilton and Chemtob refer to each other, they use inexpert, mocking approximations of the other’s accent.)

Chemtob told Hamilton that she represented Kelly Gunn. Hamilton only half-registered what came next. Chemtob recalls telling Hamilton that Gunn had just asked a New York court to recognize her as one of Abush’s parents and award her joint legal and physical custody. As an interim measure, Gunn was seeking a restraining order that would stop Hamilton from taking him out of the country. Chemtob told Hamilton that, at 2:30 p.m., she must appear before a matrimonial judge on Centre Street. She should bring Abush’s American and British passports.

What Makes a Parent? – The New Yorker

What becomes of the brokenhearted when they are ‘catfished’ online?

There was a period in my life when I watched a lot of Catfish. Signed off work, I’d lie on the sofa mid-afternoon and watch people lie from their sofas in the American midwest. It’s an MTV reality show following the trails of suspicious lovers. Someone calls the presenter, Nev, and says: “The girl I’m in love with, maybe she doesn’t exist.” Nev performs some science on their text messages, does a Google image search, drives a while and ends up in a dusty suburb crippled by the closure of an abattoir, on the doorstep of a hoaxer, a teenage boy half delighted finally to be noticed.

There have been five series, each with up to 20 episodes, with another series premiering this week. So that’s 100 hearts broken online right there, with 20 more about to air; 100 people who have fallen in love with strangers they’ve only spoken to in emojis, who would totally visit but have a disorder that makes them melt in daylight, who have broken webcams, or Nokia 3210s, or another perfectly valid reason for not being real. It’s not just on TV. It’s happening across the world, every day, right now.

The Guardian

The affair that saved our marriage

If any couple can be credited with pulling their marriage back from the brink, it’s surely Tal and Samara Araim. After 16 years and with two children together, Tal embarked on an all-consuming affair with one of Samara’s closest friends. It lasted two years, until Samara’s “oh-my-God moment” when suddenly, from nowhere, she knew. They separated immediately and didn’t speak for months. Samara wiped Tal’s number from her phone, changed her name on her email account and all communication was through lawyers. All the divorce papers were signed except one.

Fast-forward four years and here they are on a sofa talking openly, easily, lightly – and laughing a lot. Their journey has been so revelatory that Tal has not only written a book in an effort to share all he has learned, but also turned their former family home in Surbiton, south-west London, into a therapy centre, Compass4Couples. Downstairs is a lecture space that hosts free seminars and workshops. Upstairs, qualified counsellors provide individual therapy.

Tal is a man on a mission – his vision is a kind of “relationship gym”, not for couples in crisis but for those who are ticking along. “We have hospitals where you go when you’ve had a heart attack and gyms where you go to stay healthy,” he says. “With marriage, we only have the hospitals – we look for help when it’s almost too late. If Samara and I had gone somewhere like this at the beginning, the whole thing might never have happened – because, honestly, when I look at our ‘issues’, they weren’t that major.”

The Guardian

Murder by Poison

In early-nineteenth-century England, a good way to get rid of your husband was arsenic. A medical examiner usually couldn’t tell whether the poison was involved, because the symptoms—diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal pain—are much like those of other disorders. Nor could he necessarily place you at the murder scene. The dying typically took hours. Also, you could administer the poison gradually, a little bit every day. In the mid-century, arsenic poisoning was commonly the resort of women. (In 1851, the House of Lords tried to pass a law forbidding women to buy arsenic.) But unpleasant husbands were not the only people you might want to eliminate. During this period of feverish social mobility, a young person might be waiting impatiently for an inheritance, and there was Uncle Ted, sitting on all that money and meanwhile bossing you around, toying with your hopes. In such cases, male poisoners presumably outnumbered females.

The New Yorker

CASUAL SEX: EVERYONE IS DOING IT

Zhana Vrangalova had hit a problem. On a blustery day in early spring, sitting in a small coffee shop near the campus of New York University, where she is an adjunct professor of psychology, she was unable to load onto her laptop the Web site that we had met to discuss. This was not a technical malfunction on her end; rather, the site had been blocked. Vrangalova, who is thirty-four, with a dynamic face framed by thick-rimmed glasses, has spent the past decade researching human sexuality, and, in particular, the kinds of sexual encounters that occur outside the norms of committed relationships. The Web site she started in 2014, casualsexproject.com, began as a small endeavor fuelled by personal referrals, but has since grown to approximately five thousand visitors a day, most of whom arrive at the site through organic Internet searches or referrals through articles and social media. To date, there have been some twenty-two hundred submissions, about evenly split between genders, each detailing the kinds of habits that, when spelled out, can occasionally alert Internet security filters. The Web site was designed to open up the discussion of one-night stands and other less-than-traditional sexual behaviors. What makes us engage in casual sex? Do we enjoy it? Does it benefit us in any way—or, perhaps, might it harm us? And who, exactly, is “us,” anyway?

New Yorker

The Secret Life of America’s Greatest Swinger

Say you’re a guy who’d like some other guy to bed your wife. No? Well, it happens. And when it does, Dave’s the sort of man you call. He’s a demure doctor from a quiet neighborhood. But thanks to some rare talents and ubiquitous technologies, he’s also a star in the bedrooms of others—and a helpful guide to the joyful, lusty life of the truly modern hedonist.

….

In an era when the Internet and hookup apps customized to every taste are unleashing sexuality in unprecedented ways, Dave usually needs a few hours just to juggle the weekend’s many possibilities. He is in his early 40s, a soft-spoken primary-care doctor, a tall and muscular black man with tattoos and a disarmingly boyish face—all of which has made him particularly sought-after in this wealthy part of Phoenix.

GQ

Why we never really get over that first love

If you spend enough time reading advice columns, you notice a pattern. In the stream of sorrows and quandaries and relationship angst, one word bubbles up again and again. First. My first love. My first time. My first ever. And unlike all the relationships that came after, with this one, the past can’t seem to stay in the past.

Because long after it ends, our first love maintains some power over us. A haunting, bittersweet hold on our psyches, pulling us back to what was and what can never be again. Unless . . . ?

But why? Why should this one lodge in our brains any differently than the others, even when the others were longer, better, more right? They just weren’t quite as intense as the first.

 

Washington Post