What it takes to get what you want — whatever that is

It must be something in the air that is provoking Huffington Post to air a series of articles on love, marriage and sex. I found no fewer than three of them in my RSS feeds on a single afternoon. Beginning with “10 Unwritten Rules for Summer Love” and passing through “The Key to a Half Century of Marriage,” they end with “Honey, I Want to Sleep With Other People.” It’s quite a ride.

‘Summer Love’, it seems, is best in The Hamptons, though we are assured the rules “are universal and apply not only to the handful of semi-rarefied beach towns along the East End but anywhere where the mercury soars, strappy sandals are de rigueur and the whirring of nocturnal creatures sends pulses racing.” Here are a few of my favorites:

HAMPTONS UNWRITTEN RULE #24: Getting some is good; getting some in a house on the beach is better. [. . .] RULE #31: You may be “the one”…but probably not “the only one.” [. . .] RULE #40: Since temptation abounds, resisting it is (usually) futile. [. . .] RULE #42: August is prime time for getting bitten on the ass–and not only by mosquitoes.

If, like me, you’re way too old for such summer pastimes, you might like instead to muse on “. . . an American story of love and family ballasted by unified values, enriching adventure and engaged citizenship” with “the secret to keeping a marriage solid and fulfilling over the long haul of life . . .” in The Key to a Half Century of Marriage.

It turns out there are several keys:

My parents’ recipe for the pot au feu of a successful marriage is: a shared curiosity about the world, a shared inherent sense of justice and a shared delight in the social whirl of good friends and interesting people.

That sounds pretty good to me, but I’ve only been married for 33 years.

Last, but my no means least, comes a distinctly modern approach to relationships. I can imagine it would be pretty tough to tell your nearest and dearest that you have it in mind to spread yourself around a little more, but I’m sure it happens and Jenny Block obviously isn’t one to duck a challenge when it comes to handing out advice.

For such a minefield of a topic, what she says has something of the same excitement and inherent sexiness as handing out information on making an investment or deciding on a new car: make sure you know what you really want (Helpful questions suggested); do your homework via books and websites (No suggestions this time. Either I’ve lead a sheltered life and everyone else knows where these are or you’re expect to use Google as usual); then choose a time when you’re both feeling calm and happy to break the news (I suppose you’d best not start from any point other than zero animosity).

And in case you’re wondering by now whether all this advice is merely theorizing, Jenny is adds a reassuring finale:

Beyond that, all I can tell you is how it worked for me. My husband and I talked ad nauseam for months about how we felt and how it would work and whether it was a good idea and when we would attempt it and how would we do it. But the truth is this – we didn’t really know what would happen until we tried. All we knew was that we loved and trusted each other enough to give it a shot.

And if none of these topics cover what you need this summer, I guess you could always go back to Google. Just don’t ask me to do the research for you.

Technorati Tags: relationships, advice, relationship advice, love and marriage, getting what you want from a relationship, advice columnists

The importance of an ability to notice when someone isn’t saying what they mean

Detecting social cues from words and tone of voice is essential for successful dealings with others. It seems researchers are finally starting to understand the mechanism that lets us do this.

That’s the message from this article in The New York Times (“The Science of Sarcasm (Not That You Care)”). Researchers see sarcasm as evidence of the mental skill to figure out what others are thinking, even if they say the opposite. Now Dr. Kate Rankin, a neuropsychologist and assistant professor in the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco, has found that the appreciation of humor and language that is not literal — irony, sarcasm, puns and jokes — requires the right hemisphere of the brain, not the left. Continued

Can trust really be quantified?

In a provocative piece for Harvard Business Review’s blog area, John Baldoni asks whether there is a way to find out just how trustworthy a business leader (or anyone else in a leadership position) might be (“How Trustworthy Are You?”).

His question is provoked by a new book called The Trusted Advisor by David Maister, Charles M. Green and Rob Galford. One of those authors, Charles Green, has now gone a step further by presenting an online self assessment that measures an individual’s “Trust Quotient.” Continued

Is being authentic and sincere always such a good thing?

One of the mantra’s of self-help gurus today is a constant emphasis on authenticity and sincerity: being yourself, whoever that may be, rather than putting on an act. It’s interesting to hear a slightly different point of view — that ‘excessive’ sincerity can become a license for all kind of unpleasant behavior and may need to be tempered with the a kind of artificial, ritualized way of interaction to allow for some kind of stability.

That’s the suggestion from a new book called Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity reviewed by Genevieve Maitland Hudson wriitng in The Guardian’s ‘Comment is free’ section “The value of insincerity”).

She writes:

. . . ritual should be understood as a space in which the inevitable imperfections, difficulties and differences of life are left behind for an “as if” world where regulation and peace are momentarily possible. Ritual does not ignore the difficulties of life as it really is; on the contrary, it accepts these difficulties, and indeed it is only necessary because of these difficulties.

So for instance, when we say “please” and “thank you” we may be acting ritually rather than sincerely. We don’t always mean it but that doesn’t matter. We don’t have to mean it. The point is that we are acting “as if” a world in which we were always properly polite to one another could exist. We are creating a common social space in which we treat one another respectfully regardless of how we are really feeling at any particular point in time.

Continued

It seems the latest workplace fad in the U.S. is for “consensual romance agreements”

According to The Globe and Mail (Canada), ” companies are asking employees to sign a ‘love contract’ at the start of an office relationship. . . The agreement aims to protect a company from a potential sexual harassment lawsuit while also laying down the law regarding public displays of affection and favoritism, both of which are proscribed. At the core of the agreement is an acknowledgment by both parties that they are entering into a consensual relationship.” (”Canoodling co-workers: Sign on the dotted line”)

According to James McDonald, managing partner of the Irvine, Calif. office of employment law firm Fisher & Phillips:

“In the U.S. there have been greater numbers of sexual harassment lawsuits resulting from workplace romances. Employers are also seeing more relationships develop between employees because they spend so much time in physical proximity, or are constantly text messaging, e-mailing and instant messaging one another.”

Continued

Are you a control freak without recognizing it?

Here’s something we would all do well to think about deeply: to what extent are we making ourselves and other people wretched through our constant efforts to control them? That’s the intriguing question posed by psychiatrist William Glasser, author of Choice Theory: A New Psychology of Personal Freedom (HarperCollins, 1999).

Given the nature of the “sins” he lists (punishing, complaining, blaming, threatening, nagging, criticizing, and bribing), it seems to me that they apply equally to managers and organizations. People don’t just use them in their private lives, often without even realizing what they are doing; bosses rely on them, as do corporations, to “motivate” workers and keep them in line. Continued

Here’s an interesting finding from the land of “motherhood and apple pie.” It seems, if you believe this survey, that American mothers are taking the idea of “you can have it all” into the most intimate areas of their lives.

According to an article by Colleen Dealy and Taylor Baldwin (“Sex And The American Mom: 1 In 3 Report Getting Action On The Side”) one third of married women with children who responded to a survey admitted to having an affair. Worse still for both the moralists and those of a sentimental attitude towards the All-American Mom, 77% of the respondents said they want more sex.

As a society, it seems as though we’ve become less judgmental about affairs in general. Maybe we’ve realized how hard marriage is and have simply gotten more realistic. But, maybe the scope of the issue is bigger, and what’s happening is that we’re in the midst of redefining marriage as we have known it.

Of course, if you look at nature this is hardly surprising. It’s been known for some time that birds and animals frequently raise groups of offspring with multiple fathers; and that it’s the female who tends to seek out sexual encounters outside the pair bond (though neighboring males have to be willing accomplices, of course). Even those creatures who “pair for life” aren’t immune from looking for “something on the side.” In terms of evolution, I guess all variety tends to be helpful at producing the random variations that drive the process — though going too far and breaking up the bond needed to raise offspring successfully would be harmful.

So maybe these enterprising mothers are doing no more than what comes naturally.

Technorati Tags: motherhood, relationships, attitudes to sex, monogamy, having it all