Category: Dating & Relationships

  • Scary Information – Should I be posting this?

    Some psychologists have figured out that women have more orgasms with wealthier men. For female readers of this blog, my net worth at the moment is $1.4 billion. I wonder: does sexual excitability result from the perception that a male partner is wealthy or  from the prolonged  enjoyment of an affluent lifestyle? An affluent person…

  • Martha Nussbaum: Intimacy is not a fusion but a conversation

    Here’s a great mp3 by Martha Nussbaum on desire, passions and Hellenistic philosophy.  An excerpt from the transcript (same link): Interviewer: There’s an Epicurean doctrine regarding death which finds perhaps its fullest exposition in Latin in the work of Lucretius. It goes like this, ‘It is irrational to fear that which we will not experience,…

  • Male Poaching, Psychology of Breakups and Shoe-Buying

    Melissa Burkley on male poaching: (PDF) What were the main results? Single women were more interested in the man when he was described as attached (90% interested) than when he was described as single (59%). Men showed no difference in interest between a single and attached woman. Why are single women more interested in men…

  • Depressing Marriage, Depressing Life

    Amanda Fortini on the perils of realizing romantic love in marriage: As with most Americans, my own ideas about love were formed not only by books — “Jane Eyre” and “Pride and Prejudice,” “Emma” and “Wuthering Heights,” yes, as well as the incestuous “Flowers in the Attic” series, “The Thorn Birds,” and the Andrew Greeley…

  • Wierd Dating Openers

    Pick Up Artists (PUA) have a fetish about opening lines—although the most polished usually prefer the simplest opening line –which is, “Hi.” (note: these two links are mildly NSFW mainly because of profanity and explicit sexual language). Some openers are in fact hilarious. Here are two: “Hi, my name is Thursday. I thought you were…

  • Are men good for anything?

    Roy Baumeister on Is there anything good about men? Recent research using DNA analysis answered this question about two years ago. Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. I think this difference is the single most underappreciated fact about gender. To get that kind of difference, you had to have…

  • Dating Tips from the Pros (but not from me!)

    Sometimes I read sites with dating tips. I always find them fascinating.  One subtext of these male-centered sites is that it is ok for a man to hook up with strangers once in a while. It’s a necessary part of growing up (so the argument goes).   Once you lose your naiveté about romance and detach…

  • Lowered fertility rates

    Kay S. Hymowitz on Fertility rates and Carrie Bradshaw: Demographers get really excited about shifts like these, but in case you don’t get what the big deal is, consider: in 1960, 70 percent of American 25-year-old women were married with children; in 2000, only 25 percent of them were. In 1970, just 7.4 percent of…

  • When is public lewdness not lewd? Answer: when it’s police entrapment

    I don’t normally care about sex scandals with US Senators, but the Larry Craig incident reminded me of an incident that happened to a friend. Larry Craig, for those of you who don’t know or care, was a Republican Senator who was trapped by an undercover policeman in a airport bathroom. His crime was tapping…

  • Go, Mantras!

    After looking through dating profiles at match.com, I have decided I just hate gratuitious exclamations of fidelity to some sort of athletic team. So, I’m supposed to be impressed that a)you follow a sport and b)have some kind of preference about which multimillion dollar sports franchise you prefer? Hey, maybe sports…just isn’t that important? Henceforth,…

  • Dodos on Marriage

    Jeffrey Meyers on Married Life and the Artist: All writers need solitude. But celibacy often means loneliness, and a tranquil marriage can be dull. Many authors seem to thrive on personal conflict, which stimulates their work. Their lives show that the intense egoism essential to creativity was frequently fatal to marriage. For geniuses, the best…