Category: relationships

Every successful relationship is successful for the same exact reasons — Quartz

Hey, guess what? I got married two weeks ago. And like most people, I asked some of the older and wiser folks around me for a couple quick words of advice from their own marriages to make sure my wife and I didn’t shit the (same) bed. I think most newlyweds do this, especially after a few cocktails from the open bar they just paid way too much money for.

But, of course, not being satisfied with just a few wise words, I had to take it a step further.

See, I have access to hundreds of thousands of smart, amazing people through my site. So why not consult them? Why not ask them for their best relationship/marriage advice? Why not synthesize all of their wisdom and experience into something straightforward and immediately applicable to any relationship, no matter who you are?

Why not crowdsource THE ULTIMATE RELATIONSHIP GUIDE TO END ALL RELATIONSHIP GUIDES™ from the sea of smart and savvy partners and lovers here?

Every successful relationship is successful for the same exact reasons — Quartz

How your sense of humor affects relationship quality

It should come as no surprise that we tend to look for a sense of humor in our romantic partners. The trouble is, we all find different things funny—or not funny. New research in the Journal of Research in Personality quantifies exactly how our particular blend of humor affects our relationships. The bottom line? You’ll do better if you can take a joke.

The study looked at three different approaches to humor: gelotophobia (entirely unrelated to a deep-seated fear of gelato; instead, this is the fear of being laughed at), gelotophilia (the joy of being laughed at), and katagelasticism (the joy of laughing at others). People can have mixtures of these qualities in varying degrees, but some people mostly enjoy being laughed at, mostly enjoy laughing at others, or mostly hate being laughed at.

How your sense of humor affects relationship quality

Research finds that open relationships aren’t more sexually satisfying than monogamy

Sex is a big part of most romances, whether a marriage or a more experimental union. A recent survey of Europeans shows that people in the most sexually liberated partnerships aren’t having the best time. Monogamous couples reported that they were the most sexually satisfied of all the groups in a large, representative survey conducted in March 2017.

Among the 1,885 people who said they were in monogamous relationships, 82% reported that they were broadly satisfied with their sex life. That compared to 80% of people in a marriage, civil union or other legal partnership, while 71% of people in open or polyamorous relationships said they were fulfilled.

Research finds that open relationships aren’t more sexually satisfying than monogamy — Quartz

Do narcissists mean to hurt their partners? – Business Insider

If you are in a relationship with a narcissist, you will have been through a roller-coaster of ups and downs.

At the beginning, everything would have been wonderful. You might have even thought you’d found your soul mate. But after a while, things started to go sour.

This is because after a few weeks, months, or even years, the narcissist will no longer see any value in you. As soon as they realise you are a real human being, and thus flawed, they struggle to see the use of you any more. They’ll start blaming you for things, shouting at you, or even break up with you, leaving you to try and work out what went wrong.

But for many reasons, it is hard to answer the question: “Do narcissists mean to hurt people?”

Do narcissists mean to hurt their partners? – Business Insider

The changing reasons why women cheat on their husbands – CNN

One of the more interesting facts in Esther Perel’s new book, State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, comes near the beginning.

Since 1990, notes the psychoanalyst and writer, the rate of married women who report they’ve been unfaithful has increased by 40 percent, while the rate among men has remained the same.

More women than ever are cheating, she tells us, or are willing to admit that they are cheating — and while Perel spends much of her book examining the psychological meaning, motivation, and impact of these affairs, she offers little insight into the significance of the rise itself.

So what exactly is happening inside marriages to shift the numbers? What has changed about monogamy or family life in the past 27 years to account for the closing gap? And why have so many women begun to feel entitled to the kind of behavior long accepted (albeit disapprovingly) as a male prerogative?

The changing reasons why women cheat on their husbands – CNN

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

Daddies, “Dates,” and the Girlfriend Experience: Welcome to the New Prostitution Economy

A growing number of young people are selling their bodies online to pay student loans, make the rent, or afford designer labels. Is it just an unorthodox way to make ends meet or a new kind of exploitation?

…

“The girlfriend experience” is the term women in the sex trade use for a service involving more than just sex. “They want the perfect girlfriend—in their eyes,” says Miranda, the young woman at our table.* “She’s well groomed, cultured, classy, able to converse about anything—but not bringing into it any of her real-world problems or feelings.”

Vanity Fair