Showing posts with label relationship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label relationship. Show all posts
Monday 22 May 2023
Wednesday 16 November 2022
Friday 25 March 2022
Wednesday 28 July 2021
Thursday 20 May 2021
Sunday 28 January 2018
IF A WOMAN HAS THESE 14 QUALITIES NEVER LET HER GO, Do you agree?
VALENTINA RESETARITS, GISELA WOLF in The Independent
People in long term relationships will someday get to the point where they need to ask themselves: Is this really the person I want to spend the rest of my life with? Is the woman by my side really the one?
Scientists all over the world are researching the extremely complicated issues surrounding love and relationships and they have spent thousands of hours trying to figure out how people fit together and what qualities they need to bring into a relationship to make it a happy and lasting one.
We have compiled the most important and interesting results of these studies. If the woman by your side has these 14 qualities and behaviours, you know you have found the one.
1. She is smarter than you
When you are looking for a partner for life, make sure that she is smart. Ideally, she should be smarter than you. And science agrees. Lawrence Whalley, professor emeritus of the University of Aberdeen has been researching dementia for a long time and he found that a smart woman can protect you from dementia later in life. His advice: “The thing a boy is never told he needs to do if he wants to live a longer life — but what he should do — is marry an intelligent woman. There is no better buffer than intelligence.”
The idea is that a smart partner never stops challenging you intellectually, which helps you keep your mental faculties keen forever.
2. She is honest
Everyone makes mistakes and bad decisions sometimes. This makes it even more important to have someone who can get you back on track and tell you when you are wrong. Studies show that men want to have an honest partner by their side when they look for a long term committed relationship. If you have found a woman like that, never let her go again.
3. She has a positive outlook
Is your girlfriend the type of person who always sees the glass as half full? Could you sometimes even accuse her of naïve optimism? Then you might have found the woman of your dreams. Because look at it this way: Negative people are toxic and bad for our health in the long run.
This is because we tend to take on the negativity of people we spend the most time with. This was shown in a research paper by the psychologist Elaine Hatfield. And this internalized negativity can lead to increased heart rate, it impedes our digestion and lowers our concentration.
4. She compromises
Life can’t always be a bed of roses and at some point in your relationship, you and your partner will disagree. It’s completely normal and even inevitable. But the relationship can only work if both partners are willing to compromise.
Psychologists of the UCLA have accompanied 172 married couples for 11 years and came to a simple conclusion: “It’s easy to be committed to your relationship when it’s going well,” said senior study author Thomas Bradbury. “As a relationship changes, however, shouldn’t you say at some point something like, ‘I’m committed to this relationship, but it’s not going very well — I need to have some resolve, make some sacrifices and take the steps I need to take to keep this relationship moving forward.”
The scientists say that those willing to take the steps and make the sacrifices will have a long and happy marriage.
5. She laughs at your jokes
Of course we always want someone by our side who actually laughs at our jokes. In 2006 a study by psychologists of Westfield State University suggested that having a partner who thinks they are funny is more important for men than for women. If you have already found a woman you can laugh with, make sure to take good care of her.
6. She has an open heart
Having a partner who shines in the public spotlight and can easily make herself heard in a group makes life a lot easier.
A study by the University of Westminster suggests that people who are open hearted and share personal information are seen as especially attractive. The authors of the study even say that this quality is so important that people will judge the physical appearance of open hearted people as more handsome or beautiful.
7. She supports your goals and pursues her own
For a long time scientists tried to prove that men prefer to marry weak women. In her book “Why smart men marry smart women”, Christine C. Whelan thoroughly debunks this myth and proves with statistics that successful, well educated and high earning women do not marry less often than others.
And remember the advantages: A strong woman by your side will motivate you and won’t be dependent on you. You don’t need to worry about her and she won’t need your constant validation.
A weak person often tends to forget his or her own goals. These people don’t just prioritise the goals of their partners, they tend to co-opt them completely. This has been shown by a study of the University of British Columbia. You need a healthy combination of personal goals and goals you pursue together.
8. She has a good relationship with her parents
If you want to know what your partner will be like in 30 years, look at their parents. If you want to know how they will treat you in 30 years, look at how they treat their parents now.
Researchers of the University of Alberta questioned 2970 people of all ages and saw a clear correlation between the relationship to the parents in their teen years and their love life later on.
But this doesn’t mean that her relationship with her parents always needs to be perfect. “Understanding your contribution to the relationship with your parents would be important to recognising any tendency to replicate behaviour - positive or negative - in an intimate relationship,” author Matt Johnson writes. The only way to learn how to do better in other relationships is to be aware of those behaviour.
9. She is kind
Science says that the keys to a long and happy relationship are kindness and generosity. Psychologist John Gottmann of the University of Washington started his research on married couples over four decades ago.
He identified two kinds of couples: Masters and Disasters. The disasters, you guessed it, break it off in the first six years of the relationship. But the masters stay together for a long time and always have this one thing in common: “They are scanning social environment for things they can appreciate and say thank you for. They are building this culture of respect and appreciation very purposefully,” he said in an interview with The Atlantic.
10. She remains calm in fights and calms you down too
Fights are an inevitability of all relationships. Never disagreeing is not a sign of a stable relationship. But the important thing is how you deal with disagreements and how you make up again after.
Researchers of the University of California Berkeley and Northwest University have accompanied 80 couples for 13 years and they found out that a relationship will last the longest if the woman can calm herself during a fight and transfer those emotions to the man. The effect is not the same if the man is the one to calm down first.
11. She does foolish things with you
Have you found a woman who does not hold it against you if you stayed out too long partying? In most cases because she was at the party with you? Then never let her go again.
A long term study of the University of Michigan with 4864 married individuals showed that the happiest couples where those who drank alcohol together. Of course this doesn’t mean that alcoholics are happier partners. “It could be that couples that do more leisure time activities together have better marital quality,” says Kira Birditt, author of the study.
12. She has a life of her own
Having your own space and privacy is even more important for your relationship than a good sex life. This has been shown by a long term study of the University of Michigan. “When individuals have their own friends, their own set of interests, when they are able to define themselves not by their spouse or relationship, that makes them happier and less bored,” Terry Orbuch, author of the study, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
13. She accepts your flaws
Too many relationships only seem to consist of one partner criticizing the other. Their ugly pants, their bad jokes, their annoying habit of chewing too loudly, you get the picture.
If you have found a woman who can just accept you, you should consider yourself lucky. “An optimistic approach will rub off on you and attract you to others who are seeing the world as half full,” psychologist Terry Orbuch said in her column for The Huffington Post.
14. She does not bear grudges
If you found a woman who can forgive others, you will have her by your side for a long time. A study by researchers of the Luther College, the Duke University, and the Harvard Divinity School showed that people who can unconditionally forgive others live longer lives.
But perhaps more importantly: Forgiveness is the foundation of a healthy relationship. People are not perfect and neither are you. There will be times when you inadvertently do something that hurts your partner. And then you will need her to be able to forgive you.
If you have found a woman who has some or all of these qualities, treat her well and never let her go. Your life will be better for having her.
People in long term relationships will someday get to the point where they need to ask themselves: Is this really the person I want to spend the rest of my life with? Is the woman by my side really the one?
Scientists all over the world are researching the extremely complicated issues surrounding love and relationships and they have spent thousands of hours trying to figure out how people fit together and what qualities they need to bring into a relationship to make it a happy and lasting one.
We have compiled the most important and interesting results of these studies. If the woman by your side has these 14 qualities and behaviours, you know you have found the one.
1. She is smarter than you
When you are looking for a partner for life, make sure that she is smart. Ideally, she should be smarter than you. And science agrees. Lawrence Whalley, professor emeritus of the University of Aberdeen has been researching dementia for a long time and he found that a smart woman can protect you from dementia later in life. His advice: “The thing a boy is never told he needs to do if he wants to live a longer life — but what he should do — is marry an intelligent woman. There is no better buffer than intelligence.”
The idea is that a smart partner never stops challenging you intellectually, which helps you keep your mental faculties keen forever.
2. She is honest
Everyone makes mistakes and bad decisions sometimes. This makes it even more important to have someone who can get you back on track and tell you when you are wrong. Studies show that men want to have an honest partner by their side when they look for a long term committed relationship. If you have found a woman like that, never let her go again.
3. She has a positive outlook
Is your girlfriend the type of person who always sees the glass as half full? Could you sometimes even accuse her of naïve optimism? Then you might have found the woman of your dreams. Because look at it this way: Negative people are toxic and bad for our health in the long run.
This is because we tend to take on the negativity of people we spend the most time with. This was shown in a research paper by the psychologist Elaine Hatfield. And this internalized negativity can lead to increased heart rate, it impedes our digestion and lowers our concentration.
4. She compromises
Life can’t always be a bed of roses and at some point in your relationship, you and your partner will disagree. It’s completely normal and even inevitable. But the relationship can only work if both partners are willing to compromise.
Psychologists of the UCLA have accompanied 172 married couples for 11 years and came to a simple conclusion: “It’s easy to be committed to your relationship when it’s going well,” said senior study author Thomas Bradbury. “As a relationship changes, however, shouldn’t you say at some point something like, ‘I’m committed to this relationship, but it’s not going very well — I need to have some resolve, make some sacrifices and take the steps I need to take to keep this relationship moving forward.”
The scientists say that those willing to take the steps and make the sacrifices will have a long and happy marriage.
5. She laughs at your jokes
Of course we always want someone by our side who actually laughs at our jokes. In 2006 a study by psychologists of Westfield State University suggested that having a partner who thinks they are funny is more important for men than for women. If you have already found a woman you can laugh with, make sure to take good care of her.
6. She has an open heart
Having a partner who shines in the public spotlight and can easily make herself heard in a group makes life a lot easier.
A study by the University of Westminster suggests that people who are open hearted and share personal information are seen as especially attractive. The authors of the study even say that this quality is so important that people will judge the physical appearance of open hearted people as more handsome or beautiful.
7. She supports your goals and pursues her own
For a long time scientists tried to prove that men prefer to marry weak women. In her book “Why smart men marry smart women”, Christine C. Whelan thoroughly debunks this myth and proves with statistics that successful, well educated and high earning women do not marry less often than others.
And remember the advantages: A strong woman by your side will motivate you and won’t be dependent on you. You don’t need to worry about her and she won’t need your constant validation.
A weak person often tends to forget his or her own goals. These people don’t just prioritise the goals of their partners, they tend to co-opt them completely. This has been shown by a study of the University of British Columbia. You need a healthy combination of personal goals and goals you pursue together.
8. She has a good relationship with her parents
If you want to know what your partner will be like in 30 years, look at their parents. If you want to know how they will treat you in 30 years, look at how they treat their parents now.
Researchers of the University of Alberta questioned 2970 people of all ages and saw a clear correlation between the relationship to the parents in their teen years and their love life later on.
But this doesn’t mean that her relationship with her parents always needs to be perfect. “Understanding your contribution to the relationship with your parents would be important to recognising any tendency to replicate behaviour - positive or negative - in an intimate relationship,” author Matt Johnson writes. The only way to learn how to do better in other relationships is to be aware of those behaviour.
9. She is kind
Science says that the keys to a long and happy relationship are kindness and generosity. Psychologist John Gottmann of the University of Washington started his research on married couples over four decades ago.
He identified two kinds of couples: Masters and Disasters. The disasters, you guessed it, break it off in the first six years of the relationship. But the masters stay together for a long time and always have this one thing in common: “They are scanning social environment for things they can appreciate and say thank you for. They are building this culture of respect and appreciation very purposefully,” he said in an interview with The Atlantic.
10. She remains calm in fights and calms you down too
Fights are an inevitability of all relationships. Never disagreeing is not a sign of a stable relationship. But the important thing is how you deal with disagreements and how you make up again after.
Researchers of the University of California Berkeley and Northwest University have accompanied 80 couples for 13 years and they found out that a relationship will last the longest if the woman can calm herself during a fight and transfer those emotions to the man. The effect is not the same if the man is the one to calm down first.
11. She does foolish things with you
Have you found a woman who does not hold it against you if you stayed out too long partying? In most cases because she was at the party with you? Then never let her go again.
A long term study of the University of Michigan with 4864 married individuals showed that the happiest couples where those who drank alcohol together. Of course this doesn’t mean that alcoholics are happier partners. “It could be that couples that do more leisure time activities together have better marital quality,” says Kira Birditt, author of the study.
12. She has a life of her own
Having your own space and privacy is even more important for your relationship than a good sex life. This has been shown by a long term study of the University of Michigan. “When individuals have their own friends, their own set of interests, when they are able to define themselves not by their spouse or relationship, that makes them happier and less bored,” Terry Orbuch, author of the study, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
13. She accepts your flaws
Too many relationships only seem to consist of one partner criticizing the other. Their ugly pants, their bad jokes, their annoying habit of chewing too loudly, you get the picture.
If you have found a woman who can just accept you, you should consider yourself lucky. “An optimistic approach will rub off on you and attract you to others who are seeing the world as half full,” psychologist Terry Orbuch said in her column for The Huffington Post.
14. She does not bear grudges
If you found a woman who can forgive others, you will have her by your side for a long time. A study by researchers of the Luther College, the Duke University, and the Harvard Divinity School showed that people who can unconditionally forgive others live longer lives.
But perhaps more importantly: Forgiveness is the foundation of a healthy relationship. People are not perfect and neither are you. There will be times when you inadvertently do something that hurts your partner. And then you will need her to be able to forgive you.
If you have found a woman who has some or all of these qualities, treat her well and never let her go. Your life will be better for having her.
"IF A MAN HAS THESE 9 QUALITIES NEVER LET HIM GO" Do you agree?
Rachel Hosie in The Independent
That said, with scientists having spent decades trying to work out the key to why we fall in love, there are certain things you should look for in a potential suitor which suggest you may have found a keeper.
With the advent of dating apps meaning another love interest is never more than a right swipe away, it can be hard to commit.
So if you're wondering whether to settle down with your current partner, it might be worth taking a step back and asking yourself whether he ticks the boxes below.
If he doesn’t, that doesn’t mean he isn’t the one for you. But if he does, you’ve likely got a pretty good egg on your hands.
1. He’s smart
While some of us are naturally brainier than others, a new study from the Hanken School of Economics in Finland suggests that the smarter the man, the less likely he is to be unfaithful. According to the research, more intelligent men are more likely to get married and stay married.
So if you’re worried your boyfriend might be too brainy for you, a) don’t be intimidated because intelligence isn’t everything, and b) know that you may have a guy who’s more likely to be faithful on your hands.
2. He makes you laugh
Finding someone you can have a laugh with is crucial - even if everyone else rolls their eyes at his dad jokes, if they crack you up, that’s all that matters.
And a study has shown that men are more likely to have “mating success” if they have a GSOH.
3. He actively supports your career
A study found that husbands were a deciding factor in two-thirds of women’s decisions to quit their jobs, often because they thought it was their duty to bring up their children.
Even when the women in the study described their husbands as supportive, they also revealed that the men refused to change their own work schedules or offer to help more with looking after children.
4. He makes as much effort with your friends and family as you do with his
It’s not uncommon for a woman to end up giving up her own social life to slot into her new man’s. But it’s rare that a man does the same once entering a relationship.
In fact, a recent study found that young men get more satisfaction out of their bromances than their romantic relationships with women. While this is clearly ludicrous, maintaining your friendships is important. So make sure you’re with a man who not only wants you to make time to see your friends but also makes an effort to get to know them too.
5. He’s emotionally intelligent
If stereotypes are to be believed, it is women who are always desperate to talk about feelings and never men who fall hard. Whilst this definitely isn’t true, it’s important each person in a relationship has a certain level of emotional intelligence.
Studies suggest that women are better at taking the opinions and views of their partner into consideration than men, which is essential for a healthy relationship.
6. He respects your opinions and listens to what you have to say
Being closed-minded isn’t a trait that’s exclusive to a particular gender, but if a man is convinced he’s always right and will never consider your argument, it’s not a good sign.
If a man rejects his female partner’s influence, it may be a sign that he has power issues, according to Dr John Gottman, author of The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.
7. He’s willing to put the work in
A study from the University of Texas found that the most successful relationships weren’t down to compatibility, but rather making the relationship work. “My research shows that there is no difference in the objective compatibility between those couples who are unhappy and those who are happy,” study author Dr. Ted Hudson said.
So if you or your partner is always looking for the next best thing rather than committing to make your relationship last, it may not bode well.
8. He celebrates your achievements
Whether it’s deadlifting your bodyweight or learning enough German for a trip to Oktoberfest, it’s important to have a partner who celebrates your achievements.
But this isn’t just to make you feel great - a study published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that couples who did so were more satisfied with their relationships than those who reacted negatively or were indifferent.
9. He shares your values
Having a similar outlook in life could be crucial to a successful relationship, according to a study. The more alike your personalities are, the more likely you are to approach problems in the same way.
You and your partner will share similar approaches to everything from socialising to working if your priorities are the same, and this is likely to lead to a greater level of respect for one another.
Of course, if your partner doesn’t have all the above qualities that doesn’t mean you should necessarily dump him immediately - we all look for different things in a partner and a relationship, after all.
But if he does tick all these boxes, he could be one to hold on to.
There are certain traits that the majority of heterosexual women look for in a man: kindness, GSOH, an understanding that the fight for gender equality is very much still ongoing.
But other aspects of your personality could be a deal-breaker for one woman and simultaneously the reason another falls in love with you.
Beauty of all kinds really is in the eye of the beholder, and human uniqueness is what makes the search for ‘the one’ all the more interesting (and difficult).
But other aspects of your personality could be a deal-breaker for one woman and simultaneously the reason another falls in love with you.
Beauty of all kinds really is in the eye of the beholder, and human uniqueness is what makes the search for ‘the one’ all the more interesting (and difficult).
That said, with scientists having spent decades trying to work out the key to why we fall in love, there are certain things you should look for in a potential suitor which suggest you may have found a keeper.
With the advent of dating apps meaning another love interest is never more than a right swipe away, it can be hard to commit.
So if you're wondering whether to settle down with your current partner, it might be worth taking a step back and asking yourself whether he ticks the boxes below.
If he doesn’t, that doesn’t mean he isn’t the one for you. But if he does, you’ve likely got a pretty good egg on your hands.
1. He’s smart
While some of us are naturally brainier than others, a new study from the Hanken School of Economics in Finland suggests that the smarter the man, the less likely he is to be unfaithful. According to the research, more intelligent men are more likely to get married and stay married.
So if you’re worried your boyfriend might be too brainy for you, a) don’t be intimidated because intelligence isn’t everything, and b) know that you may have a guy who’s more likely to be faithful on your hands.
2. He makes you laugh
Finding someone you can have a laugh with is crucial - even if everyone else rolls their eyes at his dad jokes, if they crack you up, that’s all that matters.
And a study has shown that men are more likely to have “mating success” if they have a GSOH.
3. He actively supports your career
A study found that husbands were a deciding factor in two-thirds of women’s decisions to quit their jobs, often because they thought it was their duty to bring up their children.
Even when the women in the study described their husbands as supportive, they also revealed that the men refused to change their own work schedules or offer to help more with looking after children.
4. He makes as much effort with your friends and family as you do with his
It’s not uncommon for a woman to end up giving up her own social life to slot into her new man’s. But it’s rare that a man does the same once entering a relationship.
In fact, a recent study found that young men get more satisfaction out of their bromances than their romantic relationships with women. While this is clearly ludicrous, maintaining your friendships is important. So make sure you’re with a man who not only wants you to make time to see your friends but also makes an effort to get to know them too.
5. He’s emotionally intelligent
If stereotypes are to be believed, it is women who are always desperate to talk about feelings and never men who fall hard. Whilst this definitely isn’t true, it’s important each person in a relationship has a certain level of emotional intelligence.
Studies suggest that women are better at taking the opinions and views of their partner into consideration than men, which is essential for a healthy relationship.
6. He respects your opinions and listens to what you have to say
Being closed-minded isn’t a trait that’s exclusive to a particular gender, but if a man is convinced he’s always right and will never consider your argument, it’s not a good sign.
If a man rejects his female partner’s influence, it may be a sign that he has power issues, according to Dr John Gottman, author of The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.
7. He’s willing to put the work in
A study from the University of Texas found that the most successful relationships weren’t down to compatibility, but rather making the relationship work. “My research shows that there is no difference in the objective compatibility between those couples who are unhappy and those who are happy,” study author Dr. Ted Hudson said.
So if you or your partner is always looking for the next best thing rather than committing to make your relationship last, it may not bode well.
8. He celebrates your achievements
Whether it’s deadlifting your bodyweight or learning enough German for a trip to Oktoberfest, it’s important to have a partner who celebrates your achievements.
But this isn’t just to make you feel great - a study published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that couples who did so were more satisfied with their relationships than those who reacted negatively or were indifferent.
9. He shares your values
Having a similar outlook in life could be crucial to a successful relationship, according to a study. The more alike your personalities are, the more likely you are to approach problems in the same way.
You and your partner will share similar approaches to everything from socialising to working if your priorities are the same, and this is likely to lead to a greater level of respect for one another.
Of course, if your partner doesn’t have all the above qualities that doesn’t mean you should necessarily dump him immediately - we all look for different things in a partner and a relationship, after all.
But if he does tick all these boxes, he could be one to hold on to.
Is single the new black?
Sreemoyee Piu Kundu in The Hindu
Last evening, I went out with my college friend to a popular coffee shop in Kolkata, crowded with young lovers bedecked in the colours of Saraswati Puja, a festival that heralds the beginning of spring.
At the table beside us sat a couple who looked like typical millennials — they constantly clicked indulgent selfies, pouted non-stop, uploaded everything online immediately, with the boy checking and declaring the number of Likes triumphantly by thumping on the table.
‘Young love… wait till they are married and saddled with kids, pets, maids, homework and in-laws,’ my friend smirked.
Feminist type
‘We’ll be told we are eavesdropping, bad manners,’ I winked. My friend was about to say something when the girl at the table, who wore a purple sari and backless choli, raised her voice.
We stole a fleeting glance.
‘Let me tell you straight… I have no interest in being married. I am extremely independent, love my job, enjoy solo travel, I can’t give up my flat… and anyway, I am… umm… commitment phobic…’ She made a face and pushed away the boy’s left hand.
Was there a ring in there?
My friend and I exchanged looks.
‘Dude,’ the boy sniggered, taking back his arm defensively, adding almost under his breath, ‘You don’t want to grow into a sexless spinster, living alone with a bunch of cats in a cold, lonely apartment at 40.’
I’d just turned 40 in December, on the 14th. The last word stuck to me, more than the rest of his bhavishyawani.
I waited for the girl’s response.
‘Besides, I don’t think you are commitment phobic, you’ve had a string of flings, haven’t you?’ the boy clicked his tongue, resuming sheepishly, ‘I would say you are nothing but a bloody feminist.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ the girl retorted in a shrill octave.
The boy asked for the bill.
‘Nothing,’ he shrugged his shoulders.
‘No, tell me,’ the girl met his eyes.
‘It means that you hate men… that you think you are better and can survive alone. It means that you are too opinionated and have a foot-in-mouth disease. It means you want multiple partners, and maybe you are a lesbian. It means you have jholawala, nari morcha type principles… it means you are lonely, lousy and lost…’
* * * *
Single women reportedly constitute 21% of India’s female population, being close to 73 million in number. These include unmarried, divorced, separated and widowed women. Between 2001 and 2011, there was an almost 40% increase in their numbers. Media reports say that the Women and Child Development ministry under Maneka Gandhi is slated to revise policy for the first time since 2001 to address the concerns around being single and female, which include social isolation and difficulties in accessing even ordinary services. .
There’s been a huge growth in this demographic, and ministry officials have said that government policy must prepare for this evolution by empowering single women through skills development and economic incentives.
The policy revision also aims to address concerns related to widows and universal health benefits for all women. And yet, a little over a year ago, and despite the social relevance of the subject, when I actually discussed the idea of a non-fiction book on single women in my circle of single women friends, I sensed a reluctance to talk freely about what being single really meant in India.
Some of them, 40-plus, shyly confessed that they’ve just created their nth profile on a matrimonial site, but made me swear I would not tell anyone else lest they be laughed at. Others clandestinely admitted to flings with married or younger men.
They spoke of serious struggles with basic life issues such as getting a flat on rent or being taken seriously as a start-up entrepreneur or getting a business loan or even getting an abortion (statistics collated by Mumbai’s International Institute for Population Sciences claim that 76% of the women who come for first-time abortions are single).
They confessed to a gnawing sense of loneliness, the looming anxiety about the onset of old age, health issues, of losing parents, siblings and friends over time, of personal security, of being elderly and alone.
I started introspecting on my own single life. When did I begin to realise it wasn’t so much a choice as a culmination of circumstances that I must eventually get used to and learn to adapt to, despite the occasional speed-breaks. That being single wasn’t only about relationship-centric fears.
It also covered physical and mental health, living with parents vis-a-vis alone in another city, the nauseating, never-ending pressure of marriage, the need for sex (a friend insists on calling it ‘internal servicing’), the desire to birth one’s own children, coupled with a general all-consuming pressure to conform to the larger majority, the statistic that sells — married people — who seem to be swallowing you up and swarming in population, be it virtually or really.
* * * *
‘Get her uterus removed,’ the gynaecologist declared. It was three years ago and I was at one of Delhi’s prestigious hospitals. She was the third gynaec I was consulting. I kept going back to her every Wednesday at 4 p.m., waiting on the claustrophobic ground floor, complaining of how my menstrual pain had gotten severe in the last few cycles, even unbearable. My mother accompanied me on most occasions, vouching for me, a lingering sadness in her ageing eyes. Perhaps she was just as fragile. In ways that we could never show each other.
‘But she’s so young, only in her 30s?’ my mother stuttered, protesting, as if against a looming death warrant. The doctor was busy talking with the nurse about a woman in labour. Not very interested in the ones who didn’t qualify in her estimation. Those like me who kept coming back — same complaint, same pain, same marital status.
“Why don’t you find her a husband soon? With her history… first Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome… now endometriosis…and, of course, her weight… is she interested in having a baby anyway?” I pushed my chair back impatiently, fighting back tears.
‘Shall we try Ananda Bazaar? They have a ‘Cosmopolitan’ section… more your type,’ Ma had whispered on our way back, as I looked away.
Beleaguered. Belittled. Barren?
* * * *
Nita Mathur (name changed on request) was born in a conservative Uttar Pradesh family, and grew up watching her mother ostracised for not bearing a son. I met the 34-year-old HR professional in an upscale South Delhi café a month before her marriage, which had been arranged by a family astrologer. Nita was preparing to return to Kanpur, her hometown. ‘I grew up with a gnawing guilt that I was born a girl… I wanted to get out of Kanpur at any cost. I battled with my father and uncles to come to Delhi to get an MBA degree,” she told me.
Like a virgin
For Nita, living alone in a Delhi PG meant life on her own terms, earning her way. She started dating, had sex. “It was, strangely, a way to get back at the closeted patriarchy I had been forced to deal with as a girl,” she said.
But her single status and living alone was a stigma for her parents, who wanted Nita married, and her sisters after her. They pressurised her, using tears and threats. “My mother always cried on the phone, warning me that life as a single woman, though seemingly attractive, would return to haunt me later. She told me my behaviour would affect my sisters’ lives….”
Nita finally agreed to marry. And since she could not tell anyone that she was sexually active, she decided to have a hymen reconstruction surgery. “It was the first question my to-be groom asked when we were granted half an hour alone.” Nita spent ₹60,000 on the half-hour procedure.
In an April 2015 report in indiatimes.com, Dr. Anup Dhir, a cosmetologist from Apollo Hospital, said, ‘There’s been an increase of 20-30% in these surgeries annually. The majority of women who opt for this surgery are in the 20 to 30 age group.’
* * * *
I went to visit a single friend in her 40s who lives in a plush apartment complex in Thane. As my rented car entered the imposing iron gates, a lady security officer asked which apartment I was visiting. When I told her my friend’s name and flat number, she smirked: ‘Oh, the madam who lives by herself? Akeli? Not married?’
In the course of my interviews with 3,000 single urban women across India whose voices are integral to breaking the stigmatised silence around singlehood, I came across Shikha Makan, whose documentary Bachelor Girls is on the same subject.
Shikha spoke of being in the advertising industry, of keeping late hours. “From the first day, we felt uncomfortable. The watchman stared at us, as if he wanted to find out what we were up to.” Once, when she returned home at 2 a.m., a male colleague escorted her home. But when they reached the gate, the watchman stopped them and called the society chairman who accused Shikha of running a brothel. He threatened to throw her out.
“I called my father, who gave him a piece of his mind, and we continued to stay there. But we felt extremely uncomfortable. Then, the harassment started; someone would ring our bell at 3 a.m. or write nasty stuff on the walls. We decided to leave.”
* * * *
Ruchhita Kazaria, 35 and single, born to a Marwari family, started her own advertising agency, Arcee Enterprises, in 2004. She has since faced backlash for trying to conduct business without the backing of a husband’s surname or the validation of a male partner. Running her own company for the past 12 years has led to Ruchhita believing that “women in general, unfortunately, are still predominantly perceived as designers, back-office assistants, PR coordinators, anything but the founder-owner of a business entity.”
Sans arm candy
“In October 2014, a friend asked if I was “secretly” dating someone, probably finding it difficult to digest that a single woman could head a company minus a male counterpart and socialise sans arm candy,” she wrote to me. Within 15 minutes, the friend had sought to enrol Ruchhita with couples and groups that participated in swapping, threesomes and orgies, encouraging her to be a part of this ‘discreet’ group, to ‘hang loose’.
With single women, it’s their sexuality that’s always at the forefront of social exchanges, not their minds or talents.
* * * *
‘What did you say?’ the girl at the next table squeals, her eyes glinting.
The boy’s chest heaves as she shoves in the returned change into his shirt pocket.
‘I am a feminist,’ I say, suddenly, protectively.
Then before the boy can say something, I add, ‘and I am single, 40. So?’
The girl pushes her chair back.
‘I’m Payal,’ she swallows hard.
‘I’m Riya, 54, divorced, two kids, that’s my son,’ the lady sitting behind them walks over to the girl’s table.
‘Amio single, feminist, war widow,’ says another woman who has just walked in. ‘Can I have your table please after you leave? Bad knees!’
The boy looks genuinely puzzled.
‘I hate cats. But I love sex,’ my friend pipes up.
We burst out laughing.
‘Single, huh?’ the boy barks.
‘No, but my husband is away on work in another city, so maybe, umm, okay, just feminist,’ she grits her teeth.
Five of us then make a curious semi-circle. Standing around the girl, who wraps her hands around her shoulders.
We watch him stomp off and leave. The girl looks at me. I hold my friend’s hand. The older lady touches my back. The woman waiting for the table clumsily clicks a selfie.
And just like that, in the middle of an ordinary, noisy restaurant, we become the same. A statistic. A story.
Last evening, I went out with my college friend to a popular coffee shop in Kolkata, crowded with young lovers bedecked in the colours of Saraswati Puja, a festival that heralds the beginning of spring.
At the table beside us sat a couple who looked like typical millennials — they constantly clicked indulgent selfies, pouted non-stop, uploaded everything online immediately, with the boy checking and declaring the number of Likes triumphantly by thumping on the table.
‘Young love… wait till they are married and saddled with kids, pets, maids, homework and in-laws,’ my friend smirked.
Feminist type
‘We’ll be told we are eavesdropping, bad manners,’ I winked. My friend was about to say something when the girl at the table, who wore a purple sari and backless choli, raised her voice.
We stole a fleeting glance.
‘Let me tell you straight… I have no interest in being married. I am extremely independent, love my job, enjoy solo travel, I can’t give up my flat… and anyway, I am… umm… commitment phobic…’ She made a face and pushed away the boy’s left hand.
Was there a ring in there?
My friend and I exchanged looks.
‘Dude,’ the boy sniggered, taking back his arm defensively, adding almost under his breath, ‘You don’t want to grow into a sexless spinster, living alone with a bunch of cats in a cold, lonely apartment at 40.’
I’d just turned 40 in December, on the 14th. The last word stuck to me, more than the rest of his bhavishyawani.
I waited for the girl’s response.
‘Besides, I don’t think you are commitment phobic, you’ve had a string of flings, haven’t you?’ the boy clicked his tongue, resuming sheepishly, ‘I would say you are nothing but a bloody feminist.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ the girl retorted in a shrill octave.
The boy asked for the bill.
‘Nothing,’ he shrugged his shoulders.
‘No, tell me,’ the girl met his eyes.
‘It means that you hate men… that you think you are better and can survive alone. It means that you are too opinionated and have a foot-in-mouth disease. It means you want multiple partners, and maybe you are a lesbian. It means you have jholawala, nari morcha type principles… it means you are lonely, lousy and lost…’
* * * *
Single women reportedly constitute 21% of India’s female population, being close to 73 million in number. These include unmarried, divorced, separated and widowed women. Between 2001 and 2011, there was an almost 40% increase in their numbers. Media reports say that the Women and Child Development ministry under Maneka Gandhi is slated to revise policy for the first time since 2001 to address the concerns around being single and female, which include social isolation and difficulties in accessing even ordinary services. .
There’s been a huge growth in this demographic, and ministry officials have said that government policy must prepare for this evolution by empowering single women through skills development and economic incentives.
The policy revision also aims to address concerns related to widows and universal health benefits for all women. And yet, a little over a year ago, and despite the social relevance of the subject, when I actually discussed the idea of a non-fiction book on single women in my circle of single women friends, I sensed a reluctance to talk freely about what being single really meant in India.
Some of them, 40-plus, shyly confessed that they’ve just created their nth profile on a matrimonial site, but made me swear I would not tell anyone else lest they be laughed at. Others clandestinely admitted to flings with married or younger men.
They spoke of serious struggles with basic life issues such as getting a flat on rent or being taken seriously as a start-up entrepreneur or getting a business loan or even getting an abortion (statistics collated by Mumbai’s International Institute for Population Sciences claim that 76% of the women who come for first-time abortions are single).
They confessed to a gnawing sense of loneliness, the looming anxiety about the onset of old age, health issues, of losing parents, siblings and friends over time, of personal security, of being elderly and alone.
I started introspecting on my own single life. When did I begin to realise it wasn’t so much a choice as a culmination of circumstances that I must eventually get used to and learn to adapt to, despite the occasional speed-breaks. That being single wasn’t only about relationship-centric fears.
It also covered physical and mental health, living with parents vis-a-vis alone in another city, the nauseating, never-ending pressure of marriage, the need for sex (a friend insists on calling it ‘internal servicing’), the desire to birth one’s own children, coupled with a general all-consuming pressure to conform to the larger majority, the statistic that sells — married people — who seem to be swallowing you up and swarming in population, be it virtually or really.
* * * *
‘Get her uterus removed,’ the gynaecologist declared. It was three years ago and I was at one of Delhi’s prestigious hospitals. She was the third gynaec I was consulting. I kept going back to her every Wednesday at 4 p.m., waiting on the claustrophobic ground floor, complaining of how my menstrual pain had gotten severe in the last few cycles, even unbearable. My mother accompanied me on most occasions, vouching for me, a lingering sadness in her ageing eyes. Perhaps she was just as fragile. In ways that we could never show each other.
‘But she’s so young, only in her 30s?’ my mother stuttered, protesting, as if against a looming death warrant. The doctor was busy talking with the nurse about a woman in labour. Not very interested in the ones who didn’t qualify in her estimation. Those like me who kept coming back — same complaint, same pain, same marital status.
“Why don’t you find her a husband soon? With her history… first Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome… now endometriosis…and, of course, her weight… is she interested in having a baby anyway?” I pushed my chair back impatiently, fighting back tears.
‘Shall we try Ananda Bazaar? They have a ‘Cosmopolitan’ section… more your type,’ Ma had whispered on our way back, as I looked away.
Beleaguered. Belittled. Barren?
* * * *
Nita Mathur (name changed on request) was born in a conservative Uttar Pradesh family, and grew up watching her mother ostracised for not bearing a son. I met the 34-year-old HR professional in an upscale South Delhi café a month before her marriage, which had been arranged by a family astrologer. Nita was preparing to return to Kanpur, her hometown. ‘I grew up with a gnawing guilt that I was born a girl… I wanted to get out of Kanpur at any cost. I battled with my father and uncles to come to Delhi to get an MBA degree,” she told me.
Like a virgin
For Nita, living alone in a Delhi PG meant life on her own terms, earning her way. She started dating, had sex. “It was, strangely, a way to get back at the closeted patriarchy I had been forced to deal with as a girl,” she said.
But her single status and living alone was a stigma for her parents, who wanted Nita married, and her sisters after her. They pressurised her, using tears and threats. “My mother always cried on the phone, warning me that life as a single woman, though seemingly attractive, would return to haunt me later. She told me my behaviour would affect my sisters’ lives….”
Nita finally agreed to marry. And since she could not tell anyone that she was sexually active, she decided to have a hymen reconstruction surgery. “It was the first question my to-be groom asked when we were granted half an hour alone.” Nita spent ₹60,000 on the half-hour procedure.
In an April 2015 report in indiatimes.com, Dr. Anup Dhir, a cosmetologist from Apollo Hospital, said, ‘There’s been an increase of 20-30% in these surgeries annually. The majority of women who opt for this surgery are in the 20 to 30 age group.’
* * * *
I went to visit a single friend in her 40s who lives in a plush apartment complex in Thane. As my rented car entered the imposing iron gates, a lady security officer asked which apartment I was visiting. When I told her my friend’s name and flat number, she smirked: ‘Oh, the madam who lives by herself? Akeli? Not married?’
In the course of my interviews with 3,000 single urban women across India whose voices are integral to breaking the stigmatised silence around singlehood, I came across Shikha Makan, whose documentary Bachelor Girls is on the same subject.
Shikha spoke of being in the advertising industry, of keeping late hours. “From the first day, we felt uncomfortable. The watchman stared at us, as if he wanted to find out what we were up to.” Once, when she returned home at 2 a.m., a male colleague escorted her home. But when they reached the gate, the watchman stopped them and called the society chairman who accused Shikha of running a brothel. He threatened to throw her out.
“I called my father, who gave him a piece of his mind, and we continued to stay there. But we felt extremely uncomfortable. Then, the harassment started; someone would ring our bell at 3 a.m. or write nasty stuff on the walls. We decided to leave.”
* * * *
Ruchhita Kazaria, 35 and single, born to a Marwari family, started her own advertising agency, Arcee Enterprises, in 2004. She has since faced backlash for trying to conduct business without the backing of a husband’s surname or the validation of a male partner. Running her own company for the past 12 years has led to Ruchhita believing that “women in general, unfortunately, are still predominantly perceived as designers, back-office assistants, PR coordinators, anything but the founder-owner of a business entity.”
Sans arm candy
“In October 2014, a friend asked if I was “secretly” dating someone, probably finding it difficult to digest that a single woman could head a company minus a male counterpart and socialise sans arm candy,” she wrote to me. Within 15 minutes, the friend had sought to enrol Ruchhita with couples and groups that participated in swapping, threesomes and orgies, encouraging her to be a part of this ‘discreet’ group, to ‘hang loose’.
With single women, it’s their sexuality that’s always at the forefront of social exchanges, not their minds or talents.
* * * *
‘What did you say?’ the girl at the next table squeals, her eyes glinting.
The boy’s chest heaves as she shoves in the returned change into his shirt pocket.
‘I am a feminist,’ I say, suddenly, protectively.
Then before the boy can say something, I add, ‘and I am single, 40. So?’
The girl pushes her chair back.
‘I’m Payal,’ she swallows hard.
‘I’m Riya, 54, divorced, two kids, that’s my son,’ the lady sitting behind them walks over to the girl’s table.
‘Amio single, feminist, war widow,’ says another woman who has just walked in. ‘Can I have your table please after you leave? Bad knees!’
The boy looks genuinely puzzled.
‘I hate cats. But I love sex,’ my friend pipes up.
We burst out laughing.
‘Single, huh?’ the boy barks.
‘No, but my husband is away on work in another city, so maybe, umm, okay, just feminist,’ she grits her teeth.
Five of us then make a curious semi-circle. Standing around the girl, who wraps her hands around her shoulders.
We watch him stomp off and leave. The girl looks at me. I hold my friend’s hand. The older lady touches my back. The woman waiting for the table clumsily clicks a selfie.
And just like that, in the middle of an ordinary, noisy restaurant, we become the same. A statistic. A story.
Sunday 21 January 2018
Is sex the answer to your relationship woes?
Amelia Hill in The Guardian
How does it make you feel when your partner is cold and distant? Or when they’re critical and prickly? Does it make you want to rip their clothes off, order in a vat of whipped cream and install a chandelier to swing from?
No? Well there’s your problem – according, at least, to Michele Weiner-Davis, the marriage-guidance counsellor whose Ted talk explaining her unconventional advice to warring couples has been viewed almost 3.5 million times online.
Her advice couldn’t be simpler: shag. Do it even if you don’t want to, do it especially if you don’t want to and, most important of all, do it frequently whether you want to or not. To make it even clearer, she’s borrowed one of the most famous advertising slogans of recent times: Just Do It. “Your partner will be grateful, happier and therefore nicer, too,” she explains from her clinic in Colorado. “It’s a win-win situation for both of you!”
Weiner-Davis’s self-confessed “zealotry” for marriage has its roots in the moment her mother blew her teenage world apart by announcing that her seemingly perfect marriage had been a sham for its 23-year duration. She was 16 at the time, and says she wasn’t the only one who didn’t recover from the bombshell: her mother never remarried and her two sons rarely speak to her.
If couples put the work in, they can fall back in love
The experience, says Weiner-Davis – who states that her greatest achievement is her own 40-year marriage – was transformative. She became a staunch believer in the fact that most divorces can be prevented; that the relief of a post-divorce life is temporary but the pain of divorce is permanent; and that if couples put enough work into staying together, they can fall back in love and live happily ever after.
Over the years, Weiner-Davis has honed her message. She’s now stripped it back to what she believes is the essence of a successful marriage. Gone is any therapeutic consideration of a couple’s history; of their emotional travails; of cause and consequence. Now she is entirely one-track minded: no matter how appalling the state of a marriage, she believes that kind, generous and frequent sex can bring it back from the teetering edge of collapse.
Her realisation was hard-won. “For decades, I was in the trenches with warring couples,” she says. “But there were times when I was not too effective. I realised that there was a pattern to the times I’d failed. There was always one spouse desperately hoping for more touch and because that was not happening, they were not investing themselves in the relationship in other ways.”
Weiner-Davis stopped focussing on the couples’ difficulties from an emotional angle and addressed them exclusively as sexual problems. that when the so-called “low-desire” partner – who is, she is at pains to emphasise, just as likely to be a man or a woman – was encouraged to have sex they didn’t particularly want, not only did they end up enjoying themselves but the high-desire partner became a much nicer person to be around.
There is always one spouse desperately hoping for more touch
“I heard the same story from my clients so often that I did some research,” she said, “and found several different sex researchers who confirmed what I was finding: that for millions of people, they have to be physically stimulated before they feel desire.”
Armed with this new theory, Weiner-Davis began encouraging her low-desire clients to be receptive to the sexual advances of their high-desire spouse, even if they weren’t feeling up for it. “I found that unless there was something a lot more complicated going on,” she insists, “there were usually substantial relationship benefits to making love with your high-desire partner.”
She rejects any suggestion that she’s advocating a sexually subservient, anti-feminist, “lie back and think of England” approach. , she says this is the embodiment of female empowerment.
“It’s not just telling women to spread their legs,” she insists. “This is not just about sex. For a high-desire spouse, sex isn’t usually about the orgasm: it’s about someone wanting to feel that their partner desires and wants them. I’m hoping that women will feel empowered that they are getting their own needs met through understanding their partner.”
No still means no, she says. “But it helps to not just say no. Instead, explain why you don’t want to make love, suggest a later date and ask whether there’s something you can do for your spouse right now instead. “But here’s the deal,” she adds: “There had better be a whole more Yes’s or Later’s than No’s because if the No’s win, it leads to the problems I have been talking about.”
Weiner-Davis points out that while it’s commonly accepted that couples should make all their important family decisions together, when it comes to sex, who ever has the lower sex drive makes a unilateral choice for them both. And, just to rub salt in the wound, she adds, the disenfranchised, high-desire one is expected to stay monogamous. No wonder, she says, they get cross.
I mention Weiner-Davis’s theory to some female friends of mine. The overriding response is: “Oh God, not another thing for my To Do list!” Weiner-Davis is quick to condemn this response. “Imagine if, when a woman said she wanted to have more intimate conversations or a date night, her husband said: “It’s just one more thing on my To Do list!” For a high-desire spouse who experiences love through touch instead of quality time, it’s exactly the same impact. I’ve had grown men crying in my office, crying about the sense of rejection they feel from their low-desire wives.”
I then regale her with the experience of a friend whose husband had started his own business which quickly went catastrophically wrong. The family finances were in peril and he couldn’t cope. His wife stepped in. Alongside her own job and while juggling the childcare, she worked late into the night for weeks to stabilise their security. During this time, she was scrupulous in not blaming her husband, either explicitly or implicitly.
With crisis narrowly averted, the stressed and sleep-deprived wife realised her husband was being snippy and sulky. When she asked what was wrong, he exclaimed: “We haven’t had sex for weeks!” Surely, I ask Weiner-Davis, this shows that not all demands for sex should be met with her Just Do It ethos.
Not at all, she says. “This woman knew his ego needed to be protected and tried to do that by not blaming him for his mistakes. But it sounds like the bigger statement for him was: ‘Am I still a man and do you still desire me?’”
But it’s the selfish, uncontrolled behaviour of a spoilt child, I insist. Weiner-Davis doesn’t disagree. “Women often say that they feel they have three children instead of two children and a husband,” she admits. “But the fact that this husband was telling his wife what he was feeling sad about is a really good sign: some people throw in the towel.
Is the deal explicit, I ask, does the low-desire one say: “OK, we’ll make love more often, but then you have to turn your iPhone off every once in a while so we can actually talk”?
Yes and no, Weiner-Davis says. “This isn’t about keeping score. Relationships are not 50:50. They’re 100:100. We have to take responsibility for doing everything that it takes to put the relationship on track – even if you’re not getting the response you want initially. That’s really hard.
“It’s about asking yourself,” she says, “when he or she speaks and acts badly, whether it’s because you have not had sex for four weeks. Is their anger actually about feeling hurt and rejected? If it is, the low-desire spouse needs to be more sexy – even though they will not want to do this. And the other one needs to ask themselves when the last time the couple spent quality time together.”
On the other hand, Weiner-Davis admits there is a limit. “I’d say that after several weeks, if nothing has changed in terms of reciprocity, then the couple do need to sit down and identify what’s missing in their relationship for each of them and what they would like to have.”
Michele Weiner-Davis’s cure for a sex-starved marriage
If you have a low sex drive try to adopt the Nike philosophy – and ‘Just Do It!’, even if you feel neutral towards having sex at that moment.
If you’re the one with a high sex drive, try to discover the way your partner wants to receive love. It’s typically through quality time, words of affirmation, thoughtful, practical acts of caring and material gifts.
If you don’t want sex at a particular moment, explain why and suggest another specific time - and ask whether you can do something else physical at that moment for your partner instead.
If you have a higher sex drive than your partner, try to empathise with them and accept they might never want wild or creative sex, but see the increased level of intercourse as a gift showing their love.
Remember there’s no daily or weekly minimum to ensure a healthy sex life. As a couple you need to work out together what works for you.
How does it make you feel when your partner is cold and distant? Or when they’re critical and prickly? Does it make you want to rip their clothes off, order in a vat of whipped cream and install a chandelier to swing from?
No? Well there’s your problem – according, at least, to Michele Weiner-Davis, the marriage-guidance counsellor whose Ted talk explaining her unconventional advice to warring couples has been viewed almost 3.5 million times online.
Her advice couldn’t be simpler: shag. Do it even if you don’t want to, do it especially if you don’t want to and, most important of all, do it frequently whether you want to or not. To make it even clearer, she’s borrowed one of the most famous advertising slogans of recent times: Just Do It. “Your partner will be grateful, happier and therefore nicer, too,” she explains from her clinic in Colorado. “It’s a win-win situation for both of you!”
Weiner-Davis’s self-confessed “zealotry” for marriage has its roots in the moment her mother blew her teenage world apart by announcing that her seemingly perfect marriage had been a sham for its 23-year duration. She was 16 at the time, and says she wasn’t the only one who didn’t recover from the bombshell: her mother never remarried and her two sons rarely speak to her.
If couples put the work in, they can fall back in love
The experience, says Weiner-Davis – who states that her greatest achievement is her own 40-year marriage – was transformative. She became a staunch believer in the fact that most divorces can be prevented; that the relief of a post-divorce life is temporary but the pain of divorce is permanent; and that if couples put enough work into staying together, they can fall back in love and live happily ever after.
Over the years, Weiner-Davis has honed her message. She’s now stripped it back to what she believes is the essence of a successful marriage. Gone is any therapeutic consideration of a couple’s history; of their emotional travails; of cause and consequence. Now she is entirely one-track minded: no matter how appalling the state of a marriage, she believes that kind, generous and frequent sex can bring it back from the teetering edge of collapse.
Her realisation was hard-won. “For decades, I was in the trenches with warring couples,” she says. “But there were times when I was not too effective. I realised that there was a pattern to the times I’d failed. There was always one spouse desperately hoping for more touch and because that was not happening, they were not investing themselves in the relationship in other ways.”
Weiner-Davis stopped focussing on the couples’ difficulties from an emotional angle and addressed them exclusively as sexual problems. that when the so-called “low-desire” partner – who is, she is at pains to emphasise, just as likely to be a man or a woman – was encouraged to have sex they didn’t particularly want, not only did they end up enjoying themselves but the high-desire partner became a much nicer person to be around.
There is always one spouse desperately hoping for more touch
“I heard the same story from my clients so often that I did some research,” she said, “and found several different sex researchers who confirmed what I was finding: that for millions of people, they have to be physically stimulated before they feel desire.”
Armed with this new theory, Weiner-Davis began encouraging her low-desire clients to be receptive to the sexual advances of their high-desire spouse, even if they weren’t feeling up for it. “I found that unless there was something a lot more complicated going on,” she insists, “there were usually substantial relationship benefits to making love with your high-desire partner.”
She rejects any suggestion that she’s advocating a sexually subservient, anti-feminist, “lie back and think of England” approach. , she says this is the embodiment of female empowerment.
“It’s not just telling women to spread their legs,” she insists. “This is not just about sex. For a high-desire spouse, sex isn’t usually about the orgasm: it’s about someone wanting to feel that their partner desires and wants them. I’m hoping that women will feel empowered that they are getting their own needs met through understanding their partner.”
No still means no, she says. “But it helps to not just say no. Instead, explain why you don’t want to make love, suggest a later date and ask whether there’s something you can do for your spouse right now instead. “But here’s the deal,” she adds: “There had better be a whole more Yes’s or Later’s than No’s because if the No’s win, it leads to the problems I have been talking about.”
Weiner-Davis points out that while it’s commonly accepted that couples should make all their important family decisions together, when it comes to sex, who ever has the lower sex drive makes a unilateral choice for them both. And, just to rub salt in the wound, she adds, the disenfranchised, high-desire one is expected to stay monogamous. No wonder, she says, they get cross.
I mention Weiner-Davis’s theory to some female friends of mine. The overriding response is: “Oh God, not another thing for my To Do list!” Weiner-Davis is quick to condemn this response. “Imagine if, when a woman said she wanted to have more intimate conversations or a date night, her husband said: “It’s just one more thing on my To Do list!” For a high-desire spouse who experiences love through touch instead of quality time, it’s exactly the same impact. I’ve had grown men crying in my office, crying about the sense of rejection they feel from their low-desire wives.”
I then regale her with the experience of a friend whose husband had started his own business which quickly went catastrophically wrong. The family finances were in peril and he couldn’t cope. His wife stepped in. Alongside her own job and while juggling the childcare, she worked late into the night for weeks to stabilise their security. During this time, she was scrupulous in not blaming her husband, either explicitly or implicitly.
With crisis narrowly averted, the stressed and sleep-deprived wife realised her husband was being snippy and sulky. When she asked what was wrong, he exclaimed: “We haven’t had sex for weeks!” Surely, I ask Weiner-Davis, this shows that not all demands for sex should be met with her Just Do It ethos.
Not at all, she says. “This woman knew his ego needed to be protected and tried to do that by not blaming him for his mistakes. But it sounds like the bigger statement for him was: ‘Am I still a man and do you still desire me?’”
But it’s the selfish, uncontrolled behaviour of a spoilt child, I insist. Weiner-Davis doesn’t disagree. “Women often say that they feel they have three children instead of two children and a husband,” she admits. “But the fact that this husband was telling his wife what he was feeling sad about is a really good sign: some people throw in the towel.
Is the deal explicit, I ask, does the low-desire one say: “OK, we’ll make love more often, but then you have to turn your iPhone off every once in a while so we can actually talk”?
Yes and no, Weiner-Davis says. “This isn’t about keeping score. Relationships are not 50:50. They’re 100:100. We have to take responsibility for doing everything that it takes to put the relationship on track – even if you’re not getting the response you want initially. That’s really hard.
“It’s about asking yourself,” she says, “when he or she speaks and acts badly, whether it’s because you have not had sex for four weeks. Is their anger actually about feeling hurt and rejected? If it is, the low-desire spouse needs to be more sexy – even though they will not want to do this. And the other one needs to ask themselves when the last time the couple spent quality time together.”
On the other hand, Weiner-Davis admits there is a limit. “I’d say that after several weeks, if nothing has changed in terms of reciprocity, then the couple do need to sit down and identify what’s missing in their relationship for each of them and what they would like to have.”
Michele Weiner-Davis’s cure for a sex-starved marriage
If you have a low sex drive try to adopt the Nike philosophy – and ‘Just Do It!’, even if you feel neutral towards having sex at that moment.
If you’re the one with a high sex drive, try to discover the way your partner wants to receive love. It’s typically through quality time, words of affirmation, thoughtful, practical acts of caring and material gifts.
If you don’t want sex at a particular moment, explain why and suggest another specific time - and ask whether you can do something else physical at that moment for your partner instead.
If you have a higher sex drive than your partner, try to empathise with them and accept they might never want wild or creative sex, but see the increased level of intercourse as a gift showing their love.
Remember there’s no daily or weekly minimum to ensure a healthy sex life. As a couple you need to work out together what works for you.
Friday 19 May 2017
SUGAR BABIES REVEAL WHY THEY WANT TO FIND A SUGAR DADDY AT ANNUAL EVENT
Kashmira Gander in The Independent
“What if I want to be a trophy wife?” asks a woman in the audience at the Sugar Baby Summit at the plush Ham Yard hotel in central London. Self-confessed sugar baby Clover Pittilla, who is addressing the room at a podium on stage, pauses for a moment and replies “I say do it. Just live your dreams.”
Pittilla is a 21-year-old pharmaceutical student, and one of the speakers at the third Sugar Baby Summit event organised by dating app and website Seeking Arrangement. The app enables sugar daddies, and some mummies, to seek out so-called sugar babies to shower with gifts, cash and luxury experiences. In return, sugar babies knowingly provide a pretty face and good company. Today, both experienced and wannabe sugar babies have paid £150 to learn how to attract high-net-worth-individuals. They’ll put these skills into practice at a party in the evening. The competition is intense, as Seeking Arrangement permits sugar daddies to have four sugar babies at once.
And this complicated world of course has its own vocabulary. The sugar babies are told that vanilla, or conventional, relationships are not what sugar daddies are into. And salt daddies are men who just want attention but don’t want to part with their cash.
To some, the oh-so-romantically named Seeking Arrangement is empowering women and men to be brutally clear about what they want in their relationships. The website and the summit are places where they can find one another and forge, more often than not, relationships with massive age gaps without judgement. It offers privacy for the 40 per cent of sugar daddies and mummies who are married. Sugar babies, meanwhile, find lovers, friends and mentors. Others might argue that Seeking Arrangement users might pretend that the power balance between babies and daddies is equal, but in a world where it lies with the person with the fattest wallet it is therefore, well, creepy as hell.
Stood on stage in a short blue gingham dress and glittery silver stilettos, her long blonde hair swept to one side, Pittilla fits the ultimate stereotype of a sugar baby. She tells the around 70 people in the audience that her sugar daddies have enabled her to travel the world and study without having to resort to eating beans on toast to make her student loan stretch. Her spiel mirrors the adverts on the Seeking Arrangement website, which invite students to sign up and lessen the load of their crippling debt. Students are given further incentive to join with free premium membership.
But the crowd is more varied than one might assume. The (mainly) women here are of all ages, body-types and ethnicities. Some, like Pittilla, are dressed in stunning, hyper-feminine clothes, with towering heels, long hair and spotless makeup. But there are plenty of women in casual clothes that wouldn't be out of place in an office. And one guy with blonde hair dressed in black with a man bun. And they're hanging on Pittilla’s every word. When at one point she scrolls quickly through her presentation slides, one woman shouts “you’re going too fast!” Other panels cover cyber-security, fashion and making a first impression, staying motivated, and how to manage finances.
Clover Pittilla advised shared her tips at the Sugar Baby Summit
First off, Pittilla stresses to the audience that being a sugar baby isn’t sex work and that the men are not paying them. She then reels off bullet points on from her presentation which unintentionally highlight that finding and keeping a sugar daddy is a little complex. Have your own life and don’t put everything aside for a man, but be flexible, she says. Be honest and assertive, but don’t be argumentative. Perhaps hint at what you want and don’t ask for money outright because you’ll seem entitled, and no one likes that. If he doesn’t call you or doesn’t text back, “don’t be argumentative because no one likes that, either”. “Make him feel needed, because guys like to be needed,” she adds.
“He’s paying you,” Pittilla lets slip during her presentation, quickly correcting herself to add “well, no he’s not. He’s definitely not paying you. What he gives are gifts”.
Emma Gammer, a 28-year-old sugar baby who married and divorced a sugar daddy, follows Pittilla's presentation. Gammer advises women to include keywords in their profiles that attract sugar daddies. "Student, model, nurse." Some professionally shot “sexy and sassy” photos to send to potential sugar daddies are also useful, but she urges the audience to avoid men who talk too much about sex and ask for photos but never to meet. Those who flake repeatedly are also a waste of time, she adds. “Some will even go as low as pretending there’s been a family death to avoid meeting you.”
Natalie Wood was given £10,000 by a sugar daddy (Seeking Arrangement)
“I really like this website because you can be honest about what you want. I want someone successful, an older mentor. Someone who doesn't mind spending their money, and enjoys a luxury lifestyle. And if he’s not in London I can go on this website and find him internationally.”
In the end, she hopes to find a man to help her set up a salon and, ultimately, someone to marry. Her friends recommended that she try the website in the first place, and she’d happily do the same, she adds.
Others are more nervous about people knowing that they are at this event, presumably because of the stigma attached to unconventional relationships based around money.
I want someone successful. Someone who doesn't mind spending their money
Natalie Wood, beautician and sugar baby
Donna Summer, a 32-year-old beauty therapist based in Hastings, says she’s nervous about being here today, and hasn’t told her friends or family that she’s using Seeking Arrangement.
“I was very apprehensive before I came here that there would be more beautiful women than me,” she says quietly. “I'm going to the party after this and I'm a bit nervous.” Summer was scared the event would be “dodgy”, but is now happy to seek advice from veteran sugar babies on whether or not she needs to declare the money she is given for tax, and other financial questions.
“I’m getting older I don’t have much time left to find someone, so I thought ‘let’s just take the plunge and do it’. Life’s too short, and you’ll probably end up in some horrible relationship anyway. So why not do this?” she reasons.
One 26-year-old from London, who asks to be identified as Nina Sky, has been using Seeking Arrangement for four years, and forged one two-and-a-half-year relationship, and one which lasted under a year. “I’ve been to many countries, gotten gifts. You name it: bags, pets, furs. Loads of things,” she says.
Sky has always been attracted to older men, and is foremost looking for a “gentleman”. A man who is settled emotionally, financially and mentally. She doesn’t have an age limit, but draws the line at someone with poor hygiene.
“I had a Tinder profile up until recently but I just think this is so much better for me. I’m very direct and I like to know where I stand from the beginning. It just avoids confusion,” she says. But Sky disagrees that she takes a businesslike approach to dating. “It’s not a business. It’s finding a mutually beneficial agreement and if it leads to love, then amazing. But I think you need to know what you want.”
The women add that they are unfazed by people who want to judge them, or accuse them of being gold diggers. And of course the sugar daddies aren’t here to defend themselves against anyone who might accuse them of taking advantage of people. They’re at the party, where the press aren’t allowed.
“I would say to someone who might call me a gold digger that I’m reaching out to find what I want. If I want a better life and to make my life the best, I will,” says Wood. “Maybe they're just jealous of my fantastic lifestyle.” And who said romance is dead?
“What if I want to be a trophy wife?” asks a woman in the audience at the Sugar Baby Summit at the plush Ham Yard hotel in central London. Self-confessed sugar baby Clover Pittilla, who is addressing the room at a podium on stage, pauses for a moment and replies “I say do it. Just live your dreams.”
Pittilla is a 21-year-old pharmaceutical student, and one of the speakers at the third Sugar Baby Summit event organised by dating app and website Seeking Arrangement. The app enables sugar daddies, and some mummies, to seek out so-called sugar babies to shower with gifts, cash and luxury experiences. In return, sugar babies knowingly provide a pretty face and good company. Today, both experienced and wannabe sugar babies have paid £150 to learn how to attract high-net-worth-individuals. They’ll put these skills into practice at a party in the evening. The competition is intense, as Seeking Arrangement permits sugar daddies to have four sugar babies at once.
And this complicated world of course has its own vocabulary. The sugar babies are told that vanilla, or conventional, relationships are not what sugar daddies are into. And salt daddies are men who just want attention but don’t want to part with their cash.
To some, the oh-so-romantically named Seeking Arrangement is empowering women and men to be brutally clear about what they want in their relationships. The website and the summit are places where they can find one another and forge, more often than not, relationships with massive age gaps without judgement. It offers privacy for the 40 per cent of sugar daddies and mummies who are married. Sugar babies, meanwhile, find lovers, friends and mentors. Others might argue that Seeking Arrangement users might pretend that the power balance between babies and daddies is equal, but in a world where it lies with the person with the fattest wallet it is therefore, well, creepy as hell.
Stood on stage in a short blue gingham dress and glittery silver stilettos, her long blonde hair swept to one side, Pittilla fits the ultimate stereotype of a sugar baby. She tells the around 70 people in the audience that her sugar daddies have enabled her to travel the world and study without having to resort to eating beans on toast to make her student loan stretch. Her spiel mirrors the adverts on the Seeking Arrangement website, which invite students to sign up and lessen the load of their crippling debt. Students are given further incentive to join with free premium membership.
But the crowd is more varied than one might assume. The (mainly) women here are of all ages, body-types and ethnicities. Some, like Pittilla, are dressed in stunning, hyper-feminine clothes, with towering heels, long hair and spotless makeup. But there are plenty of women in casual clothes that wouldn't be out of place in an office. And one guy with blonde hair dressed in black with a man bun. And they're hanging on Pittilla’s every word. When at one point she scrolls quickly through her presentation slides, one woman shouts “you’re going too fast!” Other panels cover cyber-security, fashion and making a first impression, staying motivated, and how to manage finances.
Clover Pittilla advised shared her tips at the Sugar Baby Summit
First off, Pittilla stresses to the audience that being a sugar baby isn’t sex work and that the men are not paying them. She then reels off bullet points on from her presentation which unintentionally highlight that finding and keeping a sugar daddy is a little complex. Have your own life and don’t put everything aside for a man, but be flexible, she says. Be honest and assertive, but don’t be argumentative. Perhaps hint at what you want and don’t ask for money outright because you’ll seem entitled, and no one likes that. If he doesn’t call you or doesn’t text back, “don’t be argumentative because no one likes that, either”. “Make him feel needed, because guys like to be needed,” she adds.
“He’s paying you,” Pittilla lets slip during her presentation, quickly correcting herself to add “well, no he’s not. He’s definitely not paying you. What he gives are gifts”.
Emma Gammer, a 28-year-old sugar baby who married and divorced a sugar daddy, follows Pittilla's presentation. Gammer advises women to include keywords in their profiles that attract sugar daddies. "Student, model, nurse." Some professionally shot “sexy and sassy” photos to send to potential sugar daddies are also useful, but she urges the audience to avoid men who talk too much about sex and ask for photos but never to meet. Those who flake repeatedly are also a waste of time, she adds. “Some will even go as low as pretending there’s been a family death to avoid meeting you.”
Doesn’t it all make dating seem a bit cold and businesslike? But that’s the beauty of it, suggests Seeking Arrangement founder Brendon Wade, who thinks he’s nailed the formula for successful relationships. Asked why people should become sugar babies rather than finding a match the conventional way he tells The Independent: “You could do that. You could make numerous mistakes and you could fail that way. I’ve been married and divorced three times. Or you could learn the faster way. A lot of sugar babies are teaching the newbies the sorts of mistakes they have made and what they've found to be the most successful way to finding relationships that they truly enjoy.”
Wade adds that he’s going through a “messy divorce” so he’s using the website himself at the moment. As the founder, he’s the original sugar daddy, he adds.
As a younger man, he was “shy, dateless and incapable of finding a woman” he recalls. His mother told him that if he concentrated on his studies and became successful, women would flock to him.
“But when I was in my thirties I had a Bachelor degree and an MBA and I was still dateless. I tried to solve that and date. I was not successful. I would create profiles on dating apps and write hundreds of message but still had no luck. So I thought 'why not base a concept on my mother's idea?'”
Wade adds that he’s going through a “messy divorce” so he’s using the website himself at the moment. As the founder, he’s the original sugar daddy, he adds.
As a younger man, he was “shy, dateless and incapable of finding a woman” he recalls. His mother told him that if he concentrated on his studies and became successful, women would flock to him.
“But when I was in my thirties I had a Bachelor degree and an MBA and I was still dateless. I tried to solve that and date. I was not successful. I would create profiles on dating apps and write hundreds of message but still had no luck. So I thought 'why not base a concept on my mother's idea?'”
Wade compares using Seeking Arrangement to honing your career skills. “Your career is very important. That’s why you create a CV. But romantic relationships are equally important. But people aren’t using the same goal oriented approach. Most of us beat around the bush, date, and don't specify what we want. We fall in love, and then perhaps months or years later we realise ‘wow this is a mismatch’. What we need is to do is teach people how to date effectively,” he argues. After all, he goes on, in the past parents would set up arranged marriages based on what their child had to offer on paper, so what’s the harm in modernising that approach?
Among the women taking a punt on Ward’s idea is Natalie Wood, a 31-year-old beautician. She has has been using Seeking Arrangement for a few years. One man whom she met on the website flew her to Indonesia to meet him, gave her £10,000 and money for shopping, she says, beaming. Unfortunately, that relationship broke down a few months in because of the man’s circumstances, but he continued to look after her afterwards, she says. At the summit after-party she hopes to pin down some sugar daddies who might otherwise be too busy to meet her.
Among the women taking a punt on Ward’s idea is Natalie Wood, a 31-year-old beautician. She has has been using Seeking Arrangement for a few years. One man whom she met on the website flew her to Indonesia to meet him, gave her £10,000 and money for shopping, she says, beaming. Unfortunately, that relationship broke down a few months in because of the man’s circumstances, but he continued to look after her afterwards, she says. At the summit after-party she hopes to pin down some sugar daddies who might otherwise be too busy to meet her.
Natalie Wood was given £10,000 by a sugar daddy (Seeking Arrangement)
“I really like this website because you can be honest about what you want. I want someone successful, an older mentor. Someone who doesn't mind spending their money, and enjoys a luxury lifestyle. And if he’s not in London I can go on this website and find him internationally.”
In the end, she hopes to find a man to help her set up a salon and, ultimately, someone to marry. Her friends recommended that she try the website in the first place, and she’d happily do the same, she adds.
Others are more nervous about people knowing that they are at this event, presumably because of the stigma attached to unconventional relationships based around money.
I want someone successful. Someone who doesn't mind spending their money
Natalie Wood, beautician and sugar baby
Donna Summer, a 32-year-old beauty therapist based in Hastings, says she’s nervous about being here today, and hasn’t told her friends or family that she’s using Seeking Arrangement.
“I was very apprehensive before I came here that there would be more beautiful women than me,” she says quietly. “I'm going to the party after this and I'm a bit nervous.” Summer was scared the event would be “dodgy”, but is now happy to seek advice from veteran sugar babies on whether or not she needs to declare the money she is given for tax, and other financial questions.
“I’m getting older I don’t have much time left to find someone, so I thought ‘let’s just take the plunge and do it’. Life’s too short, and you’ll probably end up in some horrible relationship anyway. So why not do this?” she reasons.
One 26-year-old from London, who asks to be identified as Nina Sky, has been using Seeking Arrangement for four years, and forged one two-and-a-half-year relationship, and one which lasted under a year. “I’ve been to many countries, gotten gifts. You name it: bags, pets, furs. Loads of things,” she says.
Sky has always been attracted to older men, and is foremost looking for a “gentleman”. A man who is settled emotionally, financially and mentally. She doesn’t have an age limit, but draws the line at someone with poor hygiene.
“I had a Tinder profile up until recently but I just think this is so much better for me. I’m very direct and I like to know where I stand from the beginning. It just avoids confusion,” she says. But Sky disagrees that she takes a businesslike approach to dating. “It’s not a business. It’s finding a mutually beneficial agreement and if it leads to love, then amazing. But I think you need to know what you want.”
The women add that they are unfazed by people who want to judge them, or accuse them of being gold diggers. And of course the sugar daddies aren’t here to defend themselves against anyone who might accuse them of taking advantage of people. They’re at the party, where the press aren’t allowed.
“I would say to someone who might call me a gold digger that I’m reaching out to find what I want. If I want a better life and to make my life the best, I will,” says Wood. “Maybe they're just jealous of my fantastic lifestyle.” And who said romance is dead?
Thursday 22 December 2016
How to fall back in love with your partner, psychologists reveal
Rachel Hosie in The Independent
The saying goes that you can’t help who you fall in love with, and sometimes you just fall out of it too.
But a new study has found that we can in fact control our hearts with our heads more than we thought - psychologists from the University of Missouri-St. Louis and Erasmus University Rotterdam found that it’s possible to wilfully increase or decrease how much you love someone.
It’s called ‘love regulation’.
The researchers studied 40 people, twenty of whom were in a long-term relationship, and the other half having recently come out of one - the average time since the break-up was three months.
Each participant was asked to bring in 30 pictures of their current or ex-partner. First, they were asked how infatuated with and attached to the person they felt and had their brainwaves measured - the researchers particularly looked at the Late Positive Potential (LPP) brainwave, which becomes stronger when we focus on something emotionally relevant.
The participants were then told to look at the pictures and think positive thoughts about their partner, their relationship and their future together, before their brain waves and feelings were measured again.
For a second time, the participants were asked to look at their photos but to think negative thoughts. Their feelings and brain waves were then assessed once again.
The study found that after thinking positive thoughts, people reported feeling much more attached to their partners and their LPP brainwaves were stronger.
In contrast, after focusing on negatives, the participants “down-regulated” their feelings, reporting less attachment and weaker LPP brainwaves.
But can we really control love? “Control implies suppressing it and being king or queen of it,” Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan David told The Wall Street Journal.
So even if we can’t actually control love, we can shape it.
How to fall back in love:
Make small changes - whether that’s hugging your partner before leaving for work in the morning or greeting them warmly when you come back, it can make a difference.
Smile at them - smiling releases the feel-good chemical dopamine and they’ll likely smile back too.
Think positively - focus on the things you like about your partner, imagine happy times in the future and write them down.
Have sex - even if you don’t feel like it, it’s important and studies show that people are more attractive and attracted to their partners after sex.
Don’t sweat the small stuff - try not to resent your partner for failing to take the bins out or leaving pants on the floor, and remember they didn’t do it because they don’t love you.
Try new things together - it’s proven to help couples feel more attracted to each other.
The saying goes that you can’t help who you fall in love with, and sometimes you just fall out of it too.
But a new study has found that we can in fact control our hearts with our heads more than we thought - psychologists from the University of Missouri-St. Louis and Erasmus University Rotterdam found that it’s possible to wilfully increase or decrease how much you love someone.
It’s called ‘love regulation’.
The researchers studied 40 people, twenty of whom were in a long-term relationship, and the other half having recently come out of one - the average time since the break-up was three months.
Each participant was asked to bring in 30 pictures of their current or ex-partner. First, they were asked how infatuated with and attached to the person they felt and had their brainwaves measured - the researchers particularly looked at the Late Positive Potential (LPP) brainwave, which becomes stronger when we focus on something emotionally relevant.
The participants were then told to look at the pictures and think positive thoughts about their partner, their relationship and their future together, before their brain waves and feelings were measured again.
For a second time, the participants were asked to look at their photos but to think negative thoughts. Their feelings and brain waves were then assessed once again.
The study found that after thinking positive thoughts, people reported feeling much more attached to their partners and their LPP brainwaves were stronger.
In contrast, after focusing on negatives, the participants “down-regulated” their feelings, reporting less attachment and weaker LPP brainwaves.
But can we really control love? “Control implies suppressing it and being king or queen of it,” Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan David told The Wall Street Journal.
So even if we can’t actually control love, we can shape it.
How to fall back in love:
Make small changes - whether that’s hugging your partner before leaving for work in the morning or greeting them warmly when you come back, it can make a difference.
Smile at them - smiling releases the feel-good chemical dopamine and they’ll likely smile back too.
Think positively - focus on the things you like about your partner, imagine happy times in the future and write them down.
Have sex - even if you don’t feel like it, it’s important and studies show that people are more attractive and attracted to their partners after sex.
Don’t sweat the small stuff - try not to resent your partner for failing to take the bins out or leaving pants on the floor, and remember they didn’t do it because they don’t love you.
Try new things together - it’s proven to help couples feel more attracted to each other.
Ask questions - just like you probably did when you first met, ask each other about your hopes and dreams again.
Thursday 15 December 2016
Monday 2 May 2016
Do we want our children taught by humans or algorithms?
Zoe Williams in The Guardian
Her government “introduced the phonics check for six-year-olds, and 100,000 more young people are able to read better as a result,” she told the BBC when she first became education secretary, and she has been trotting out the same nonsense ever since. No amount of disagreement from professionals in the field dents her faith or alters her rhetoric. Indeed, since the Michael Gove era, teachers have been treated as recalcitrant by definition, motivated by sloth, their years of experience reframed not as wisdom but as burnout. When they object to a policy, that merely proves what a sorely needed challenge it poses to their cushy lives. When they shout “rubbish” in a conference hall, it is yet more evidence of what a dangerous bunch of trots they are.
On Tuesday, parents enter the fray, with a school boycott organised by Let Our Kids Be Kids, to protest against “unnecessary testing and a curriculum that limits enjoyment and real understanding”. Some have been galvanised by the bizarre and unnecessary sight of their children in distress, others by solidarity with the teachers – who inconveniently continue to command a great deal of respect among people who actually meet with them – and others who can’t join in the boycott because of minor administrative details such as having to go to work, but have signed the petition. It is the beginning of a new activism – muscular, cooperative and agile because it has to be.
The boycott is in protest against ‘unnecessary testing and a curriculum that limits enjoyment and real understanding’. Photograph: Barry Batchelor/PA
If the only problem is that it causes anxiety to a load of pampered under-10s, shouldn’t they just suck it up? Isn’t that the best way to learn what the world is like? The framing of this debate is precisely wrong. No serious educationalist thinks that the way to drive up standards among children is to make tests more frequent and more exacting. Nor does anybody of any expertise really believe that teachers need to be incentivised by results. It is an incredibly tough, demanding, indifferently remunerated job, which nobody would do except as a vocation. It is not for the profession or the parents to explain what the tests are doing to the kids; it is for the education secretary to explain what these tests are for.
By coincidence, at the end of last week, Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, was in London to hand in a petition to Pearson, the education company and provider of curriculums and test delivery. The petition protested against two perceived issues: concerns about over-testing in US schools and alleged profiteering in the global south. The trajectory in US education, from universal public provision with local accountability to mass outsourcing and centralised control, is strikingly similar to what has happened here. It begins with the creation of a failure narrative, “that both the Democrats and the Republican bought into, which is, the sky is falling, the sky is falling, the sky is falling”, Weingarten told me. That creates the rationale for testing, since, without data, you can’t tell whether you’re improving. Those tests are consequential: the results can be used to fire teachers, close down schools, hold pupils back a year. All the most profound decisions in education can suddenly be made by an algorithm, with no human judgment necessary.
Simultaneously, says Weingarten, Charter schools were introduced, originally – like academies – “as part of a bigger public school system where you could incubate ideas”, but very soon remodelled as a way to supplant rather than supplement the existing system. “And in between all of this, you started seeing the marketisation and the monetisation.” Until things can be counted, there isn’t much scope to create a market.
I was never fully convinced that academisation and hyper-testing were undertaken to create the market conditions for privatisation down the line; I thought it more plausible that the testing was merely a politician’s wheeze to create data out of humans that could then be stuffed into manifestos to persuade other humans that the policies were going in the right direction. Yet the parallels between the US and England are insistent – it has become impossible to ignore the idea that our government is mimicking theirs for a reason.
Whether all this is a prelude to privatisation or a PR stunt for a chaotic government doesn’t actually matter in the medium term: to put seven-year-olds under intolerable pressure for either of those ends would be equally abhorrent. In the long term, the mutation of schools into joyless exam factories won’t be halted by resistance alone, we also need to make a proper account of what education is for.
As Weingarten describes, “We have to help kids build relationships. We have to address their life skills, so they can negotiate the world. We have to help kids build resilience. We have to help kids learn how to problem-solve, how to think, how to engage. So tell me, how are any of these things tested on a standardised test?” That’s a test question for the tin-eared secretary of state herself.
Parents ‘have been galvanised by the … sight of their children in distress’ over the tests. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA
It is incredibly hard for a headteacher to shout “rubbish” in a crowded hall while an authority figure is speaking. It is like asking a lung specialist to smoke a cigarette. Yet that’s what happened when Nicky Morgan addressed the National Association of Head Teachers conference yesterday. They objected partly to her programme of turning all schools into academies by 2020 and partly to her luminously daft insistence that “testing”, “improving” and “educating” are interchangeable words.
It is incredibly hard for a headteacher to shout “rubbish” in a crowded hall while an authority figure is speaking. It is like asking a lung specialist to smoke a cigarette. Yet that’s what happened when Nicky Morgan addressed the National Association of Head Teachers conference yesterday. They objected partly to her programme of turning all schools into academies by 2020 and partly to her luminously daft insistence that “testing”, “improving” and “educating” are interchangeable words.
Her government “introduced the phonics check for six-year-olds, and 100,000 more young people are able to read better as a result,” she told the BBC when she first became education secretary, and she has been trotting out the same nonsense ever since. No amount of disagreement from professionals in the field dents her faith or alters her rhetoric. Indeed, since the Michael Gove era, teachers have been treated as recalcitrant by definition, motivated by sloth, their years of experience reframed not as wisdom but as burnout. When they object to a policy, that merely proves what a sorely needed challenge it poses to their cushy lives. When they shout “rubbish” in a conference hall, it is yet more evidence of what a dangerous bunch of trots they are.
On Tuesday, parents enter the fray, with a school boycott organised by Let Our Kids Be Kids, to protest against “unnecessary testing and a curriculum that limits enjoyment and real understanding”. Some have been galvanised by the bizarre and unnecessary sight of their children in distress, others by solidarity with the teachers – who inconveniently continue to command a great deal of respect among people who actually meet with them – and others who can’t join in the boycott because of minor administrative details such as having to go to work, but have signed the petition. It is the beginning of a new activism – muscular, cooperative and agile because it has to be.
The boycott is in protest against ‘unnecessary testing and a curriculum that limits enjoyment and real understanding’. Photograph: Barry Batchelor/PA
If the only problem is that it causes anxiety to a load of pampered under-10s, shouldn’t they just suck it up? Isn’t that the best way to learn what the world is like? The framing of this debate is precisely wrong. No serious educationalist thinks that the way to drive up standards among children is to make tests more frequent and more exacting. Nor does anybody of any expertise really believe that teachers need to be incentivised by results. It is an incredibly tough, demanding, indifferently remunerated job, which nobody would do except as a vocation. It is not for the profession or the parents to explain what the tests are doing to the kids; it is for the education secretary to explain what these tests are for.
By coincidence, at the end of last week, Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, was in London to hand in a petition to Pearson, the education company and provider of curriculums and test delivery. The petition protested against two perceived issues: concerns about over-testing in US schools and alleged profiteering in the global south. The trajectory in US education, from universal public provision with local accountability to mass outsourcing and centralised control, is strikingly similar to what has happened here. It begins with the creation of a failure narrative, “that both the Democrats and the Republican bought into, which is, the sky is falling, the sky is falling, the sky is falling”, Weingarten told me. That creates the rationale for testing, since, without data, you can’t tell whether you’re improving. Those tests are consequential: the results can be used to fire teachers, close down schools, hold pupils back a year. All the most profound decisions in education can suddenly be made by an algorithm, with no human judgment necessary.
Simultaneously, says Weingarten, Charter schools were introduced, originally – like academies – “as part of a bigger public school system where you could incubate ideas”, but very soon remodelled as a way to supplant rather than supplement the existing system. “And in between all of this, you started seeing the marketisation and the monetisation.” Until things can be counted, there isn’t much scope to create a market.
I was never fully convinced that academisation and hyper-testing were undertaken to create the market conditions for privatisation down the line; I thought it more plausible that the testing was merely a politician’s wheeze to create data out of humans that could then be stuffed into manifestos to persuade other humans that the policies were going in the right direction. Yet the parallels between the US and England are insistent – it has become impossible to ignore the idea that our government is mimicking theirs for a reason.
Whether all this is a prelude to privatisation or a PR stunt for a chaotic government doesn’t actually matter in the medium term: to put seven-year-olds under intolerable pressure for either of those ends would be equally abhorrent. In the long term, the mutation of schools into joyless exam factories won’t be halted by resistance alone, we also need to make a proper account of what education is for.
As Weingarten describes, “We have to help kids build relationships. We have to address their life skills, so they can negotiate the world. We have to help kids build resilience. We have to help kids learn how to problem-solve, how to think, how to engage. So tell me, how are any of these things tested on a standardised test?” That’s a test question for the tin-eared secretary of state herself.
Monday 14 March 2016
Sunday 6 March 2016
How can we know ourself?
Questioner: How can
we know ourselves?
Jiddu
Krishnamurti: You know your face because you have often looked at it reflected
in the mirror. Now, there is a mirror in which you
can see yourself entirely - not your face, but all that you think, all that you
feel, your motives, your appetites, your urges and fears. That mirror is the
mirror of relationship: the relationship between you and your parents, between
you and your teachers, between you and the river, the trees, the earth, between
you and your thoughts. Relationship is a mirror in which you can see yourself,
not as you would wish to be, but as you are. I may wish, when looking in an
ordinary mirror, that it would show me to be beautiful, but that does not
happen because the mirror reflects my face exactly as it is and I cannot
deceive myself. Similarly, I can see myself exactly as I am in the mirror of my
relationship with others. I can observe how I talk to people: most politely to
those who I think can give me something, and rudely or contemptuously to those
who cannot. I am attentive to those I am afraid of. I get up when important
people come in, but when the servant enters I pay no attention. So, by
observing myself in relationship, I have found out how falsely I respect
people, have I not? And I can also discover myself as I am in my relationship
with the trees and the birds, with ideas and books.
You may have all the
academic degrees in the world, but if you don't know yourself you are a most
stupid person. To know oneself is the very purpose of all education. Without
self-knowledge,merely to gather facts or take notes so that you can pass
examinations is a stupid way of existence. You may be able to quote the Bhagavad
Gita, the Upanishads, the Koran and the Bible, but unless you know yourself you
are like a parrot repeating words. Whereas, the moment you begin to know
yourself, however little, there is already set going an extraordinary process
of creativeness. It is a discovery to suddenly see yourself as you actually
are: greedy, quarrelsome, angry, envious, stupid. To see the fact without
trying to alter it, just to see exactly what you are is an astonishing
revelation. From there you can go deeper and deeper, infinitely, because there
is no end to self-knowledge.
Through
self-knowledge you begin to find out what is God, what is truth, what is that
state which is timeless. Your teacher may pass on to you the knowledge which he
received from his teacher, and you may do well in your examinations, get a
degree and all the rest of it; but, without knowing yourself as you know your
own face in the mirror, all other knowledge has very little meaning. Learned
people who don't know themselves are really unintelligent; they don't know what
thinking is, what life is. That is why it is important for the educator to be
educated in the true sense of the word, which means that he must know the
workings of his own mind and heart, see himself exactly as he is in the mirror
of relationship. Self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom. in self-knowledge
is the whole universe; it embraces all the struggles of humanity.Tuesday 17 March 2015
She took a year off from her marriage to sleep with strangers. What could go wrong? The Wild Oats Project Review
Carlos Lozada in
The Independent
Get ready for “The
Wild Oats Project”. And not just the book. Get ready for “The Wild Oats
Project” phenomenon — the debates, the think pieces, the imitators and probably
the movie. Get ready for orgasmic meditation and the Three Rules. Get ready for
“My Clitoris Deals Solely in Truth” T-shirts.
Robin Rinaldi, a
magazine journalist living in San Francisco by
way of Scranton , Pa.
“I refuse to go to
my grave with no children and only four lovers,” she declares. “If I can’t have
one, I must have the other.”
If you’re wondering
why that is the relevant trade-off, stop overthinking this. “The Wild Oats
Project” is the year-long tale of how a self-described “good girl” in her early
40s moves out, posts a personal ad “seeking single men age 35-50 to help me
explore my sexuality,” sleeps with roughly a dozen friends and strangers, and
joins a sex commune, all from Monday to Friday, only to rejoin Scott on
weekends so they can, you know, work on their marriage.
The arrangement is
unorthodox enough to succeed as a story, and in Rinaldi’s telling it unfolds as
a sexual-awakening romp wrapped in a female-empowerment narrative, a sort of
Fifty Shades of Eat, Pray, Love. “I wanted to tell him to f— me hard but I
couldn’t get the words out of my mouth” is a typical Rinaldi dilemma. At the
same time, she constantly searches for “feminine energy” or her “feminine core”
or for a “spiritual practice guided by the feminine.
But more than
empowering or arousing, this story is depressing. Rinaldi just seems lost.
Still sorting through the psychological debris of an abusive childhood, she
latches on to whatever guru or beliefs she encounters, and imagines fulfillment
with each new guy. She still rushes to Scott whenever things gets scary (a car
accident, an angry text message), yet deliberately strains their union beyond
recovery. “At any cost” are the operative words of the subtitle.
Robin and Scott
agree to three rules — “no serious involvements, no unsafe sex, no sleeping
with mutual friends” — that both go on to break. He finds a steady girlfriend,
while Robin violates two rules right away. “In truth, I was sick of protecting
things,” she writes about going condom-free with a colleague at a conference.
“I wanted the joy of being overcome.”
The men and women
she hooks up with — some whose names Rinaldi has changed, others too fleeting
to merit aliases — all blur into a new-age, Bay Area cliche. Everyone is a
healer, or a mystic, or a doctoral student in feminist or Eastern spirituality.
They’re all verging on enlightenment, sensing mutual energy, getting copious
action to the sounds of tribal drums. The project peaks when she moves into
OneTaste, an urban commune where “expert researchers” methodically stroke rows
of bare women for 15 minutes at a time in orgasmic meditation sessions (“OM ” to those in the know). “Everyone here was
passionate,” Rinaldi writes. “Everyone had abandoned convention.”
Rinaldi holds
little back, detailing her body’s reactions along the way. At first she is
upset that she can’t feel pleasure as quickly as other women, but she finally
decides she’s glad that her “surrender didn’t happen easily, that it lay buried
and tethered to the realities of each relationship.” Her clitoris, although
“moody,” was also “an astute barometer. . . . It dealt solely in truth.”
And truth often
comes in tacky dialogue. “Your breasts are amazing,” one of her younger
partners tells her. “You should have seen them in my twenties,” Rinaldi boasts.
His comeback: “You’re cocky. I dig that.” (Fade to dirty talk.) When they do it
again months later, he thanks her in the morning. “Something happens when I’m
with you,” he says. “I feel healed.” I’m sure that’s exactly what he feels.
Rinaldi can’t seem
to decide why she’s doing all this. The project is her “rebellion.” Or “a
search for fresh, viable sperm.” Or a “bargaining chip.” Or “an elaborate
attempt to dismantle the chains of love.” Or just a “quasi-adolescent quest for
god knows what.”
If exasperation
could give you orgasms, this book would leave me a deeply satisfied reader.
One of her oldest
friends calls her out. “How is sleeping with a lot of guys going to make you
feel better about not having kids?” she asks. Rinaldi’s answer: “Sleeping with
a lot of guys is going to make me feel better on my deathbed. I’m going to feel
like I lived, like I didn’t spend my life in a box. If I had kids and grandkids
around my deathbed, I wouldn’t need that. Kids are proof that you’ve lived.”
It’s a bleak and disheartening rationale, as though women’s lives can achieve
meaning only through motherhood or sex.
For all her preoccupation
with feminine energy, Rinaldi seems conflicted over feminism. “I would die a
feminist,” she writes of her collegiate activism, “but I was long overdue for
some fun.” Later, she pictures women’s studies scholars judging her submission
fantasies, and frets over “those Afghan women hidden under their burqas” who
could be “beaten or even killed right now for doing what I was so casually
doing.” But when she finds a sexual connection with a woman who backs away
because of “emotional issues,” Rinaldi channels her inner alpha male: “I was
drawn to her body but shrunk back when she expressed unfettered feeling. . . .
It only took sleeping with one woman to help me understand the behavior of
nearly every man I’d ever known.”
When the year runs
out, Rinaldi returns to Scott, even though she soon starts an affair with a
project flame. She’s no longer so upset about the vasectomy, regarding it as a
sign that Scott can stand up for himself (though it may also mean she now cares
less about him, period). No shock that post-project, their chemistry is off,
and when Rinaldi makes a casual reference to their time apart, Scott finally
explodes. “Do you know how many nights I cried myself to sleep when you moved
out!?” he asks. “Do you care about anyone’s feelings but your own!?” She was
“too stunned to reply.” But the fate of this marriage, revealed in the final
pages, is anything but stunning.
“These are the sins
against my husband,” Rinaldi recounts. “Abdicating responsibility, failing to
empathize with him, cheating and lying.” After blaming him for so long, “in the
end, I was the one who needed to ask forgiveness.”
In a rare moment of
heartbreaking subtlety, the book’s dedication page simply says “For Ruby,” the
name Rinaldi had imagined for a baby girl. Except, “there is no baby,” she
writes at the end. “Instead there is the book you hold in your hands.”
And that is a
frustrating book, with awkward prose, a perplexing protagonist and too many
eye-rolling moments. Yet it is also a book I see launching book-club conversations
and plenty of pillow talk — not just about sex and marriage, but about the
price and possibility of self-reinvention. You don’t have to write a great work
to cause a great stir.
Does Rinaldi
reinvent herself? She survives the aftershocks and even seems to discover some
happiness, however fragile she knows it to be. So maybe she needed this after
all. Or maybe sometimes “empowerment” is just another word for self-absorption.
Sunday 8 February 2015
Depression, suicide and the fragility of the strong, silent male
Yvonne Roberts in The Guardian
On Thursday, the bruised and tearful face of former footballer and chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association, Clarke Carlisle, 35, appeared on the front page of the Sun. He was released from psychiatric hospital two weeks ago. In a clip on the paper’s website, he appears so raw and vulnerable that to watch it provokes thoughts of a modern-day version of Bedlam with us as Hogarthian gawpers treating the mentally fragile as entertainment.
The paper’s headline read: “I leapt in front of a lorry hoping to die.” Carlisle, a father of three, has suffered from depression for 18 months. He explained that the end of his career, the curtailment of his contract as a TV sports pundit and a struggle with alcohol led to financial problems. He felt the lack of “a sense of worth and value in life”.
He said strangers would comment: “Didn’t you used to be Clarke Carlisle?”, as if, once off the television screen and football pitch, he had passed into no-man’s-land. Throwing himself in front of a lorry became the “perfect answer”. Carlisle survived, unlike 12 men who will kill themselves today, as 12 do every day, in England and Wales.
Just before his death, the psychiatrist Anthony Clare wrote a thoughtful book, On Men: Masculinity in Crisis. He concluded with a plea to men to place “a greater value on love, family and personal relationships and less on power, possessions and achievement… to find meaning and fulfilment”.
Except that redefining what it means to be a man in contemporary society isn’t a job for men alone. It’s a dynamic process of cultural and social change that repeatedly judders to a halt. And it will continue to be impeded for a variety of reasons (better the stereotype you know) and as long as some women hold fast to a hierarchy of need.
This is the kind of thinking that says: if male fragility is addressed, women’s requirements are marginalised. Men can hog resources, but the two requirements are interlocked. Until male violence can be defused, for instance, the refugees will continue to overflow.
In the main, support for Carlisle’s honesty has been strong, as it has been for Nick Baber, 48, chief operating officer at KPMG, who last week said he would pretend he had flu during severe depression. He has called for more senior executives to speak out. But then what? As Dr Margaret McCartney explains in The Patient Paradox, the severely depressed are too ill to make plans to end their life. When a patient is beginning to recover, suicide becomes an option, particularly if they are male. Thoreau wrote: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Talk to parents from Papyrus, the charity that campaigns to prevent young suicide, and again and again they say they had no idea that their sons were depressed, let alone suicidal. Their sons, they felt, had so much to live for.
According to the charity, Campaign Against Living Miserably (Calm), men account for more than three-quarters of all suicides in England and Wales, 4,590 deaths – the single biggest cause of death among males under 50. Three out of four had no contact with mental health professionals. As the Men’s Health Forum constantly points out, men are reluctant to go their GP and fail to identify their own symptoms of depression. When Carlisle’s wife, Gemma, was diagnosed with postnatal depression, he advised her to “get a grip”; then he took Goldberg’s depression test and recognised his own symptoms. They include lack of energy, sadness, negativity and self-destructiveness. A survey by Calm revealed that 69% of men said they preferred to deal with problems themselves, 56% didn’t want to burden others. “The traditional strong silent response to adversity is increasingly failing to protect men from themselves,” said Jane Powell, Calm’s chief executive.
Last year, the charity issued a much-needed four-point charter to encourage change for the better. It includes a shift in thinking about the needs of males in schools, work and public services and a fuller range of expression of masculinity in the media and advertising. Too often, still, while depression in women is wrongly viewed as an inevitable part of being female, it’s precisely this alleged association with female fragility that underscores the notion that the male sufferer is less of a man; he has a weakness, not an illness best kept secret. So, as the suicide rate has risen, the taboos and social “norms” stay in place.
Change, however, is possible. Last month, a new policy on suicide prevention was launched, the Stop Suicide pledge. It is based on the work of Dr Ed Coffey in Detroit that enrols as many members of the public as possible with the aim of ending the stigma and the secrecy. In four years, the suicide rate dropped 75%.
The UK “zero suicide” pilots ask the whole community to look out for each other, recognise warning signs and offer help, not exclusion. The pledge, with a badge, is, “I’d ask”. (Although what you ask is trickier. “Is everything OK?” is bound to get a positive response in a well-trained man.)
The New Economics Foundation says the five foundation stones of wellbeing are: connect, be active, take notice, keep learning and give. The female sphere, even when it involves working 10 hours a day as well as mothering and acting as a carer, has all those aspects woven into it (and paradoxically at extremes can be the cause of female depression and breakdown). The male stereotypes of protector, provider, toughie and top dog shoves wellbeing well down the list.
Kurt Cobain, desperately in need of help for years, in his poignant suicide note to Boddah, his imaginary childhood friend, quoted a Neil Young song: “… better to burn out than fade away…” The tragedy for too many men is that society doesn’t yet allow them to let down their guard so they can value and enjoy the infinity of choices that lie between those two extremes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)