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Strollerderby
When my girl was younger, she and my husband spent a lot of time playing Barbies together. I thought it was sweet that he did this and felt she was a lucky girl to have such a devoted papa. My mother-in-law, however, felt differently. After observing several hours of Barbie-playing during one of her visits, she warned my husband that he was crossing the line from parent to friend and this was not a good thing.
I still think playing Barbies with her was a wonderful bonding experience for both of them, but I do get what she was worrying about. We all want to have close relationships with our children, but there is such a thing as too close. And according to child and adolescent psychologist Dr. Jennifer Hartstein, parents who treat their kids as equals and buddy around with them as if they were pals are swimming in “dangerous waters.” Continue reading »
The counselor at my child’s school recently hosted a lunch for all the girls in the 3rd grade. She used the opportunity to talk to the kids about their social lives. Specifically, she warned them of the pitfalls of forming cliques and encouraged them to avoid pairing off into groups.
Her attitude toward exclusive friendships is one that is being echoed around the country. Worried about the bullying and the social ostracizing that can sometimes result when kids pair off, teachers and other professionals who work with children are trying to discourage relationships that exclude others. Continue reading »
The announcement that Al and Tipper Gore are splitting up after 40 years rocked the news media. They’ve reminded all of us that no one knows what’s happening inside a marriage except the people living it.
What’s the secret to lasting happiness in marriage? Only you and the person you’re married to can answer that question. The experts on the topic are no better at spotting troubled marriages than the bartender you pour your troubles out to. Which is to say, not good at all.
In a scientific study mentioned in the New York Times this week, pastors, marriage counselors and relationship experts were shown videos of couples talking and fighting. They had to guess which couples later divorced. They got it wrong as often as they got it right.
So you can’t tell by watching people interact with their spouses. What about a peek under the hood? Can brain scans tell us what makes a lasting marriage tick?
Having a baby is exhausting. At the end of the day, you and your partner probably can’t wait to crawl into bed…and sleep. Doing anything else between the sheets fades to a distant memory, something fun some other incarnation of you used to enjoy. Sound familiar?
MomLogic offers up some tips to help tired moms hate sex less. This short article contains some of the most depressing love advice I have ever read. As one mom who read it over my shoulder said, “That makes me never want to have sex again. And that’s not right.” Continue reading »
Love and marriage. Sinatra said they go together like a horse and carriage. But horses, by nature, are wild animals. It’s only when we break them of their free spirit that they’re willing to hitch themselves. Is the same true of us humans? Do we really want to be hitched?
The Gore breakup has inspired Americans to really examine the nature of love and marriage. People wonder, “If they can’t last, who can?” I think the question, in their case, is not so much whether or not their relationship could have lasted. They seem like a perfectly lovely couple who made a decision not to last. We may have to get comfortable with the idea of Mom and Dad or Grandpa and Grandma splitting up, because divorce experts say Baby Boomers opting for late-stage separations will be on the rise in the upcoming years. Continue reading »
This morning I had the pleasure of speaking to Dr. Helen Fisher, the famed biological anthropologist who, among numerous achievements, is known for creating the personality test on Chemistry.com. She’s a swingin’ 65-year-old who just joined the site herself, and she offered me lots of advice and insight about love and dating. Match.com and Chemistry.com are offering one lucky single person out there a free 6-month subscription to either site! Click continue reading to find out how to enter.
Carolyn Castiglia: I took the Chemistry.com personality test this morning, and it turns out I’m an explorer. I saw there are four different personality types, explorers, directors, negotiators and builders: do you think there are certain types that work better together?
Helen Fisher: The bottom line is, we are a combination of all of them. I studied 28,000 people on the dating site Chemistry.com. I watched who went out with who, and who they said that they had good dates with. As it turns out, explorers gravitate toward other explorers. These people are curious, they’re creative, they’re novelty-seeking, they’re risk taking, they’re spontaneous, they’re energetic, they tend to be very generous, they’re often quite liberal and they want somebody to get off the couch at midnight and go sailing with them in the dark. Whereas the builder, who’s very traditional, more cautious, loyal, conscientious, meticulous, follows the rules and schedules, likes plans, they want somebody like themselves. But the other two types, the director and the negotiator, they go for their opposite. What I think is going on there is that may have evolved to pool very different resources. The director, they’re good at math and engineering, but they don’t have great people skills and verbal skills, and they gravitate to the negotiator who does have very good people skills and verbal skills. People will often ask, “Do opposites attract, or do similarities attract?” Bottom line is, it depends on who you are.
Now, there are basically two parts of personality: character, which is everything you grew up to believe and do and think and say, and temperament, which are all your characteristics that come out of your biology. And that test is measuring your temperament.
CC: Unfortunately, my first husband, he had no character and lots of temper. So that’s why that didn’t work.
HF: (Laughs) Well, I’m glad you left him!
CC: I wanted to read you what I put on my Chemistry.com profile. As a single mother, I’m not sure where to begin.
HF: I just joined Chemistry.com myself about three weeks ago. Read me your profile.
CC: “I’m a comedian, writer and single mother (hey now!) looking for someone to have some good times with who is maybe also interested at some point if things go well in being a grown up and having a family. Such sexy first date material.”
HF: You’re a comedian? Very important.
CC: I think so, too. And this is a question a friend of mine wanted me to ask you. If you’re a strong, independent woman, do you need to do certain things to make yourself seem more attractive to men?
HF: No, because I think a great many men like a strong, independent woman. We are not in the age of men wanting to care for a wilting violet. In fact there’s new data, since 2000, that shows that men are more interested in commitment than women are, and that men are more interested in a woman who’s their age, their level of education and their level of economic power. So I wouldn’t try to hide being a strong woman. I think that we don’t really understand men. Men fall in love faster than women do, they have more intimate conversations with their partners, men are more likely to kill themselves when a relationship is over, men are more likely to remarry. So, men are nice things. They’re not scared of a strong woman. They had strong mothers and strong sisters. I think these days men really want a life partner who can go the road with them instead of having to be the major bread winner or the man of the house.
Now, when you say comedian, people are looking for the details. Do you do stand-up improv in downtown speakeasies? What kind of comedian? What kind of writer? Do you write novels or are you a journalist? Comedian and writer is good, but it’s nowhere near enough. Also, do you want to tell them you’re a single mother? It’s not mandatory. That’s the sort of thing you could tell them later if you want to. But in a lot of cultures, men want a woman who has already had children, because it shows that she’s fertile and that she’s compassionate. So it’s not a…
CC: A dealbreaker.
HF: But you don’t need to say “single” mother. Single mother has sort of a negative ring to it. You could just say mother of a 4-year-old daughter. What do you mean by “good times with?” Because that’s very generic. Skip the walk on the beach, the wine by the fire, skip the cozy Sunday morning with the tea, what kind of good times do you really want? Do you like bike riding in Ireland? Do you want somebody who will skip rope in the dark in Central Park? The kind of profile that gets attention is the kind that’s details, details, details. Tell them what you really do want.
CC: Yeah, that’s a genius idea, huh?
HF: (Laughs) You’re being too modest and too shy!
CC: I think coming off of a divorce and having a daughter and being only 33, I feel like most of the men that are my age don’t have half the life experience I have and so I think I’m concerned about the disconnect there.
HF: Well, every time a woman’s had a child, a man’s had a child, too. So, there’s a lot of men in their 20′s and 30′s who’ve also had a child. I wouldn’t be too down on the boys and think that they can’t cope with that. The ones that want children and want family are gonna be pleased that you are interested in that. A man with real personality is looking for personality in his partner.
CC: Interesting. In your TED talk, you talked about the pain and withdrawal people go through after a breakup, and a lot of single mothers have had pretty bad breakups, I think it’s safe to say. Do you have any advice about how to move on without bringing those types of things into future relationships?
HF: For one, I think you’ve got to break some bad habits about men. There are nice men out there. There’s a lot of men out there – at every age – and they’re looking for love just the way women are. One thing that might be helpful is to create an aphorism. The aphorism that I use is, “I love being myself with a lovely man of my own.” What you do with an aphorism is you say it as if it’s already happened. You don’t say, “I want to find a lovely man,” you say, “I love being myself” – which gives you some self-confidence – “with a lovely man of my own.” The only really important word in that sentence is lovely. What do I mean by lovely man? It could be very different from what you mean by a lovely man of your own. You want a guy who wants a family or children, I want an older man who’s got enough money to go traveling with me and likes poetry. So I would create and aphorism that gives you self-confidence, and I would repeat that aphorism to myself to build myself up.
Then the conversation turned to online dating itself. Is it best to follow “The Rules” and play hard to get? Continue reading to see what Dr. Fisher thinks. Continue reading »
While some might insist that the proliferation of social networking sites, email and text messaging have allowed us all to have closer connections with more people than ever before, is it possible that just the opposite is true? Could all this technological interaction actually be turning our kids into a generation of anti-social creatures who someday might not even know how to have a real face-to-face relationship with another human being?
Psychologists and other experts say that might very well be the case. What’s happening might more accurately be described as anti-social networking and is perhaps changing the nature of childhood friendships forever. Continue reading »
Lori Garcia 
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
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