Archives For relationships
How can I tell if my marriage is in trouble, and what can I do to prevent breakup?
Sue Johnson identifies warning signs in a marriage and what you can do to prevent issues from destroying your relationship.
Special Report: The Science of Falling and Staying in Love
About half of first marriages fail in the U.S., as do two thirds of second marriages and three quarters of third marriages. We fail in large part because we enter into relationships with poor skills for maintaining them and highly unrealistic expectations.
In the Jan/Feb 2010 issue of Scientific American MIND Dr. Robert Epstein discusses how science can help you fall in love and stay there.
Download: full PDF article
related: Smart Marriages resources
Does iPhone Have an App for That?!
Link: study: A lonely heart may lead to actual heart damage.
A new study has linked feeling forlorn to a nearly 80 percent increase in the risk of heart disease—but only in women. People feel lonely when they don’t have a sense of connectedness with their friends and families, experts say. “Loneliness is related to how fulfilled we feel in our relationships,” said Brooke Aggarwal, a researcher in preventive cardiology at Columbia University Medical Center/New York-Presbyterian Hospital. “We experience feelings of loneliness when we feel that what we’re getting from our relationships falls short of what we expect.”
Link: Are memories of past hurt are necessary for health and wellbeing?
Memories of past hurt are necessary for health and wellbeing. They keep us safe in the present and future, by activating an automatic defense system…the function of emotionally painful memories is the same as the physically painful. Recalling betrayal is likely to make you more cautious about whom you trust; remembering the pain of past failures will usually motivate more learning, effort, and attention in future enterprise. (via Steven Stosny)
Link: Are you well endowed?
via Scott Stanley: The Endowment Effect is psychological effect discovered by research psychologists and behavioral economists. It reflects the now well-proven fact that people place a greater value on a thing they already own than they would if they did not own that thing and had to buy it…There are some tricky implications for romantic relationships here. For example, for the average pretty good to great marriage, the Endowment Effect helps you stick to their commitment when times are a bit tougher because you so highly value what you already have. And you should, because you’ve invested a lot and what you invested would result in a lot of loss if you don’t stick. If you are married, have built a life together, have children, and all sorts of other things, you are, so to speak, very well endowed. On the other hand, what if you are dating and trying to find the right person to spend your life with? This Endowment Effect also means that you can easily get too settled with a current partner who’s not really a good long-term fit, and not move on when maybe you should.
The Web Site Story: A Broadway Social Networking Musical!
via our friends at College Humor.
Oh, how relationships have changed.
Enjoy!
Link: Lessons in love – from Dad
via Micah Toub: I’m coming around to thinking my father isn’t a complete failure in relationships. This isn’t an easy idea to embrace given his two divorces and series of between-marriage girlfriends that didn’t work out (including that one who busted into our house during my summer vacation and scattered his torn-up love letters on the carpet). But now that I’m older, and have gone through my own series of relationships, including one divorce, I’m looking back and thinking I may have judged my father too harshly. And I wonder, can I learn lessons from his mistakes without taking the avoid-becoming-those-things-I-abhor-in-him-at-all-costs attitude? According to Geraldine Piorkowski, a clinical psychologist and author of Adult Children of Divorce: Confused Love Seekers , we can indeed shoot ourselves in the foot if we overreact to the qualities we think make our dads bad at love. “Negative models are often extreme,” Dr. Piorkowski says. “So, for example, if your father used to be a very angry man, you’ll tend to blame yourself for even normal anger. You limit your repertoire, whereas the healthy individual has a wide range of responses.” Dr. Piorkowski says a person in that kind of situation may try to be a “superkind Superman,” but instead end up being an emotionally two-dimensional “robot.”
Link: Nesties – Who are they and why does it matter?
NEW YORK The Knot Inc. has identified a demographic subset of women who are going through a series of intense, mega-life-changes in a compressed period of time. The digital media company, best known for its core wedding-centric site TheKnot.com, recently conducted a study in conjunction with global research firm OTX. The result was the classification of this marketing-friendly group dubbed “Nesties” — 25-to-32-year-old women who are getting engaged, planning weddings, shopping for houses and preparing to have kids — essentially planning for the next 20 years of their lives during a tight three- to four-year window. Knot CEO David Liu said that when TheKnot.com launched in 1999, the average age for a bride was 24. Today, it’s 27-plus. “When you get married at 24, you are not necessarily thinking about a baby. When you get married at 27, that biological clock is suddenly ticking. It’s causing some interesting overlap.” As a result of delayed marriage, many couples make big lifestage jumps in a non-traditional order, such as first buying a home, then starting a family, and then getting married. “There is this weird almost social shift where these lifestages are not as sequential as in the past,” said Liu. “It’s now one big soup.”
