Of course, Wereko-Brobby is not talking about these specific blokes, who I interrogate one by one, but she has a pretty eyebrow-raising insight into how London’s best-paid suits think about love, sex and women, because some of them pay her £200 a month for advice on how to get better results.
The 28-year-old and her small, offline company Social Concierge (socialconcierge.co.uk) match up investment bankers with foreign- exchange traders and insurance brokers with hedge-fund analysts, and have just completed a search for the City’s 10 “most eligible bachelors” (six of whom are in front of me) to improve the quality of men she can offer the ambitious women who subscribe to her agency. She will reveal the full list at a party at the South Place Hotel in Moorgate tomorrow night. It was Social Concierge that created the viral “First Kiss” video that got more than half a million views on YouTube last year.
Wereko-Brobby describes her professional mission as educating the young Masters of the Universe about how to find love in the face of their arrogance, ludicrous expectations and membership of an industry that is generally thought to have recklessly blown up the economy at everyone else’s expense.
“You come across people who are completely out of shape, look like they haven’t slept in days, who are holding on to their City job by the nails. They look like s**t — and yet they ask for women who work out every day, do yoga and are really holistic. It’s ridiculous,” she says, shaking her head.
Wereko-Brobby has hundreds of paying clients in London, about 70 per cent of whom work in finance. She says the women are very exacting about appearance (“way more superficial than the guys — one thing they demand is no one overweight”) and can afford to be because many of them are, as she puts it, “Oxbridge-educated, so beautiful, VPs in investment banks at the age of 27 and also not twats”. The men are more accommodating of clever, successful partners who are “nice looking, but not the models they sleep with”, she says.
Cupid in the City: Nana Wereko-Brobby (Picture: Daniel Hambury)
Fixing love lives in the financial industry is an industry in itself. Giant “introductions agency” Berkeley International has more than a thousand members in the City paying between £10,000 and £50,000 a year for “highly bespoke” services, whereas Grey & Farrar charges £30,000 and offers money back if their clients don’t find love — a commoditising of romance that may explain some of the problems.
Social Concierge has a top annual rate of £6,000, for which its members get a blind date and a chat with Wereko-Brobby each month, at which she grills them on their habits and looks through pictures of their exes to see if they’re lying about not having “a type”.
An amusing factor holding male City workers back is their romantic desire for arty women who live in bohemian garrets but miraculously also enjoy the gauche nightlife of the moneyed, she says. “The guys say they are bored with these City girls, they want someone more creative — a recent guy asked for just artists only, or people into music. But once you set them up with that, it never really works.
“They have this image from the movies of the artist who happens to look beautiful and is really clean, but more often than not they find the ones I present them with too scatty or disorganised.
Everyone wants Mila Kunis — it’s the most common thing I hear. She has the double thing of being stunningly beautiful but also a complete tomboy and a bit kooky.”
The other problem with the banker fantasy is that cool chicks aren’t digging the guys who caused the recession. “I found that I was spending 15 minutes out of our hour consultation convincing potential partners that even though these guys work at a bank, they are great,” says Wereko-Brobby. “I think they are made to feel really unworthy for being bankers in a creative circle, whereas back in the day [those people] would feel really s****y for being the only person who couldn’t pick up the cheque.”
According to Mark Hedley, from whose glossy City mag Square Mile (squaremile.com) young bankers choose their watches and learn the etiquette of staying on a yacht, the reputational issues are pertinent.
“If we’re being honest, City blokes have a bit of a reputation for being smarmy bastards. And a lot of them fall firmly into the ‘arrogant t***’ category,” says Hedley, who has helped in the search for the eligibles and thinks there are enough exceptions to the rule to justify tomorrow’s party to toast the winners. “That said, if you end up dating one of these fellas and he also turns out to be a smarmy bastard, Square Mile accepts no responsibility.”
WHAT MEN WANT
Andrew Wynd, 23
Hedge fund analyst
Former investment banker. Works for a hedge fund. Dresses expensively.
“We have long hours and nights out with clients — which girl would want the constant cancellations? Probably a girl at an investment bank, who understands the requirements of why I’m not available and who wouldn’t be put off by the flamboyance of where I would go on a date.”
Douglas Turnbull, 30
Fund manager
Oxford grad who earns 100k-plus running a Chinese equities fund.
“At my age, I’m one of the few single ones left, but I date quite a lot. When you’re running a fund, it never stops. I imagine whoever I end up with will be quite driven and really fired up about something.”
Sean Mooney, 29
Commodities sales
Everest-climbing, Channel-swimming Canadian catch.
“I wouldn’t be opposed to [dating] a woman working in finance, but it’s not what I’m looking for.”
Henry Adefope, 25
Financial PR
Successful City publicist.
It literally is one-night stands [at the moment]. That’s it. It really is a trophy. I’m attracted to Victoria’s Secret models. Normally they are foreign so it’s a fly-by-night thing.
Dan Pring, 29
Insurer
Public schoolboy — good at rugby and underwriting South American risk.
“I’ve never met up with a Tinder date more than once. The challenge is finding a nice stand-up lady who can meet the parents.”
Tim Power, 26
Hedge fund trader
Smooth New Yorker who is one of the younger vice presidents around .
“I never shy away from [talking about] what I do at work because I have worked very hard to get my job, but I don’t always offer it up.”
source by :http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/looking-for-love-are-these-men-the-city-s-most-eligible-bachelors-9964609.html
Looking for love: are these men the City’s most eligible bachelors?
By Unknown
The dad bod is a new trend and fraternity boys everywhere seem to be rejoicing. Turns out skipping the gym for a few brews last Thursday after class turned out to be in their favor. While we all love a sculpted guy, there is just something about the dad bod that makes boys seem more human, natural, and attractive. Here are a few reasons that girls are crazy about the dad bod:
It doesn't intimidate us.
Few things are worse than taking a picture in a bathing suit, one being taking a picture in a bathing suit with a guy who is crazy fit. We don't want a guy that makes us feel insecure about our body. We are insecure enough as it is. We don't need a perfectly sculpted guy standing next to us to make us feel worse.
We like being the pretty one.
We love people saying "they look cute together." But we still like being the center of attention. We want to look skinny and the bigger the guy, the smaller we feel and the better we look next to you in a picture.
Better cuddling.
No one wants to cuddle with a rock. Or Edward Cullen. The end.
Good eats.
The dad bod says he doesn't meal prep every Sunday night so if you want to go to Taco Tuesday or $4 pitcher Wednesday, he'd be totally down. He's not scared of a cheat meal because he eats just about anything and everything.
You know what you're getting.
Girls tend to picture their future together with their guys early on. Therefore, if he already has the dad bod going on, we can get used to it before we date him, marry him, have three kids. We know what we are getting into when he's got the same exact body type at the age of 22 that he's going to have at 45.
So there you go. A simple break down of why girls everywhere are going nuts over this body type on males. We like it. We love it. We want some more of it. So here's to you dad bods, keep it up. Men, confidently strut that gut on the beach because while you stare at us in our bikinis we will be staring just as hard.
source :http://theodysseyonline.com/clemson/dad-bod/97484
Why Girls Love The Dad Bod
By Unknown
Except, of course, it doesn’t work out that way for most people. The majority of marriages fail, either ending in divorce and separation or devolving into bitterness and dysfunction. Of all the people who get married, only three in ten remain in healthy, happy marriages, as psychologist Ty Tashiro points out in his book The Science of Happily Ever After, which was published earlier this year.
Social scientists first started studying marriages by observing them in action in the 1970s in response to a crisis: Married couples were divorcing at unprecedented rates. Worried about the impact these divorces would have on the children of the broken marriages, psychologists decided to cast their scientific net on couples, bringing them into the lab to observe them and determine what the ingredients of a healthy, lasting relationship were. Was each unhappy family unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy claimed, or did the miserable marriages all share something toxic in common?
"Disaster" couples showed signs of being in fight-or-flight mode in their relationships. Having a conversation sitting next to their spouse was, to their bodies, like facing off with a saber-toothed tiger.
Psychologist John Gottman was one of those researchers. For the past four decades, he has studied thousands of couples in a quest to figure out what makes relationships work. I recently had the chance to interview Gottman and his wife Julie, also a psychologist, in New York City. Together, the renowned experts on marital stability run The Gottman Institute, which is devoted to helping couples build and maintain loving, healthy relationships based on scientific studies.
John Gottman began gathering his most critical findings in 1986, when he set up “The Love Lab” with his colleague Robert Levenson at the University of Washington. Gottman and Levenson brought newlyweds into the lab and watched them interact with each other. With a team of researchers, they hooked the couples up to electrodes and asked the couples to speak about their relationship, like how they met, a major conflict they were facing together, and a positive memory they had. As they spoke, the electrodes measured the subjects' blood flow, heart rates, and how much they sweat they produced. Then the researchers sent the couples home and followed up with them six years later to see if they were still together.
From the data they gathered, Gottman separated the couples into two major groups: the masters and the disasters. The masters were still happily together after six years. The disasters had either broken up or were chronically unhappy in their marriages. When the researchers analyzed the data they gathered on the couples, they saw clear differences between the masters and disasters. The disasters looked calm during the interviews, but their physiology, measured by the electrodes, told a different story. Their heart rates were quick, their sweat glands were active, and their blood flow was fast. Following thousands of couples longitudinally, Gottman found that the more physiologically active the couples were in the lab, the quicker their relationships deteriorated over time.
But what does physiology have to do with anything? The problem was that the disasters showed all the signs of arousal—of being in fight-or-flight mode—in their relationships. Having a conversation sitting next to their spouse was, to their bodies, like facing off with a saber-toothed tiger. Even when they were talking about pleasant or mundane facets of their relationships, they were prepared to attack and be attacked. This sent their heart rates soaring and made them more aggressive toward each other. For example, each member of a couple could be talking about how their days had gone, and a highly aroused husband might say to his wife, “Why don’t you start talking about your day. It won’t take you very long.”
The masters, by contrast, showed low physiological arousal. They felt calm and connected together, which translated into warm and affectionate behavior, even when they fought. It’s not that the masters had, by default, a better physiological make-up than the disasters; it’s that masters had created a climate of trust and intimacy that made both of them more emotionally and thus physically comfortable.
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Stressful Relationships vs. Isolation: The Battle for Our Lives
Gottman wanted to know more about how the masters created that culture of love and intimacy, and how the disasters squashed it. In a follow-up study in 1990, he designed a lab on the University of Washington campus to look like a beautiful bed and breakfast retreat. He invited 130 newlywed couples to spend the day at this retreat and watched them as they did what couples normally do on vacation: cook, clean, listen to music, eat, chat, and hang out. And Gottman made a critical discovery in this study—one that gets at the heart of why some relationships thrive while others languish.
Throughout the day, partners would make requests for connection, what Gottman calls “bids.” For example, say that the husband is a bird enthusiast and notices a goldfinch fly across the yard. He might say to his wife, “Look at that beautiful bird outside!” He’s not just commenting on the bird here: he’s requesting a response from his wife—a sign of interest or support—hoping they’ll connect, however momentarily, over the bird.
The wife now has a choice. She can respond by either “turning toward” or “turning away” from her husband, as Gottman puts it. Though the bird-bid might seem minor and silly, it can actually reveal a lot about the health of the relationship. The husband thought the bird was important enough to bring it up in conversation and the question is whether his wife recognizes and respects that.
People who turned toward their partners in the study responded by engaging the bidder, showing interest and support in the bid. Those who didn’t—those who turned away—would not respond or respond minimally and continue doing whatever they were doing, like watching TV or reading the paper. Sometimes they would respond with overt hostility, saying something like, “Stop interrupting me, I’m reading.”
These bidding interactions had profound effects on marital well-being. Couples who had divorced after a six-year follow up had “turn-toward bids” 33 percent of the time. Only three in ten of their bids for emotional connection were met with intimacy. The couples who were still together after six years had “turn-toward bids” 87 percent of the time. Nine times out of ten, they were meeting their partner’s emotional needs.
* * *
By observing these types of interactions, Gottman can predict with up to 94 percent certainty whether couples—straight or gay, rich or poor, childless or not—will be broken up, together and unhappy, or together and happy several years later. Much of it comes down to the spirit couples bring to the relationship. Do they bring kindness and generosity; or contempt, criticism, and hostility?
“There’s a habit of mind that the masters have,” Gottman explained in an interview, “which is this: 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. Disasters are scanning the social environment for partners’ mistakes.”
Contempt is the number one factor that tears couples apart.
“It’s not just scanning environment,” chimed in Julie Gottman. “It’s scanning the partner for what the partner is doing right or scanning him for what he’s doing wrong and criticizing versus respecting him and expressing appreciation.”
Contempt, they have found, is the number one factor that tears couples apart. People who are focused on criticizing their partners miss a whopping 50 percent of positive things their partners are doing and they see negativity when it’s not there. People who give their partner the cold shoulder—deliberately ignoring the partner or responding minimally—damage the relationship by making their partner feel worthless and invisible, as if they’re not there, not valued. And people who treat their partners with contempt and criticize them not only kill the love in the relationship, but they also kill their partner's ability to fight off viruses and cancers. Being mean is the death knell of relationships.
Kindness, on the other hand, glues couples together. Research independent from theirs has shown that kindness (along with emotional stability) is the most important predictor of satisfaction and stability in a marriage. Kindness makes each partner feel cared for, understood, and validated—feel loved. “My bounty is as boundless as the sea,” says Shakespeare’s Juliet. “My love as deep; the more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite.” That’s how kindness works too: there’s a great deal of evidence showing the more someone receives or witnesses kindness, the more they will be kind themselves, which leads to upward spirals of love and generosity in a relationship.
There are two ways to think about kindness. You can think about it as a fixed trait: either you have it or you don’t. Or you could think of kindness as a muscle. In some people, that muscle is naturally stronger than in others, but it can grow stronger in everyone with exercise. Masters tend to think about kindness as a muscle. They know that they have to exercise it to keep it in shape. They know, in other words, that a good relationship requires sustained hard work.
“If your partner expresses a need,” explained Julie Gottman, “and you are tired, stressed, or distracted, then the generous spirit comes in when a partner makes a bid, and you still turn toward your partner.”
In that moment, the easy response may be to turn away from your partner and focus on your iPad or your book or the television, to mumble “Uh huh” and move on with your life, but neglecting small moments of emotional connection will slowly wear away at your relationship. Neglect creates distance between partners and breeds resentment in the one who is being ignored.
The hardest time to practice kindness is, of course, during a fight—but this is also the most important time to be kind. Letting contempt and aggression spiral out of control during a conflict can inflict irrevocable damage on a relationship.
“Kindness doesn’t mean that we don’t express our anger,” Julie Gottman explained, “but the kindness informs how we choose to express the anger. You can throw spears at your partner. Or you can explain why you’re hurt and angry, and that’s the kinder path.”
John Gottman elaborated on those spears: “Disasters will say things differently in a fight. Disasters will say ‘You’re late. What’s wrong with you? You’re just like your mom.’ Masters will say ‘I feel bad for picking on you about your lateness, and I know it’s not your fault, but it’s really annoying that you’re late again.’”
* * *
For the hundreds of thousands of couples getting married this month—and for the millions of couples currently together, married or not—the lesson from the research is clear: If you want to have a stable, healthy relationship, exercise kindness early and often.
"A lot of times, a partner is trying to do the right thing even if it's executed poorly. So appreciate the intent."
When people think about practicing kindness, they often think about small acts of generosity, like buying each other little gifts or giving one another back rubs every now and then. While those are great examples of generosity, kindness can also be built into the very backbone of a relationship through the way partners interact with each other on a day-to-day basis, whether or not there are back rubs and chocolates involved.
One way to practice kindness is by being generous about your partner’s intentions. From the research of the Gottmans, we know that disasters see negativity in their relationship even when it is not there. An angry wife may assume, for example, that when her husband left the toilet seat up, he was deliberately trying to annoy her. But he may have just absent-mindedly forgotten to put the seat down.
Or say a wife is running late to dinner (again), and the husband assumes that she doesn’t value him enough to show up to their date on time after he took the trouble to make a reservation and leave work early so that they could spend a romantic evening together. But it turns out that the wife was running late because she stopped by a store to pick him up a gift for their special night out. Imagine her joining him for dinner, excited to deliver her gift, only to realize that he’s in a sour mood because he misinterpreted what was motivating her behavior. The ability to interpret your partner’s actions and intentions charitably can soften the sharp edge of conflict.
“Even in relationships where people are frustrated, it’s almost always the case that there are positive things going on and people trying to do the right thing,” psychologist Ty Tashiro told me. “A lot of times, a partner is trying to do the right thing even if it’s executed poorly. So appreciate the intent.”
Another powerful kindness strategy revolves around shared joy. One of the telltale signs of the disaster couples Gottman studied was their inability to connect over each other’s good news. When one person in the relationship shared the good news of, say, a promotion at work with excitement, the other would respond with wooden disinterest by checking his watch or shutting the conversation down with a comment like, “That’s nice.”
We’ve all heard that partners should be there for each other when the going gets rough. But research shows that being there for each other when things go right is actually more important for relationship quality. How someone responds to a partner’s good news can have dramatic consequences for the relationship.
In one study from 2006, psychological researcher Shelly Gable and her colleagues brought young adult couples into the lab to discuss recent positive events from their lives. They psychologists wanted to know how partners would respond to each other’s good news. They found that, in general, couples responded to each other’s good news in four different ways that they called: passive destructive, active destructive, passive constructive, and active constructive.
Let’s say that one partner had recently received the excellent news that she got into medical school. She would say something like “I got into my top choice med school!”
Those who showed genuine interest in their partner's joys were more likely to be together.
If her partner responded in a passive destructive manner, he would ignore the event. For example, he might say something like: “You wouldn’t believe the great news I got yesterday! I won a free t-shirt!”
If her partner responded in a passive constructive way, he would acknowledge the good news, but in a half-hearted, understated way. A typical passive constructive response is saying “That’s great, babe” as he texts his buddy on his phone.
In the third kind of response, active destructive, the partner would diminish the good news his partner just got: “Are you sure you can handle all the studying? And what about the cost? Med school is so expensive!”
Finally, there’s active constructive responding. If her partner responded in this way, he stopped what he was doing and engaged wholeheartedly with her: “That’s great! Congratulations! When did you find out? Did they call you? What classes will you take first semester?”
Among the four response styles, active constructive responding is the kindest. While the other response styles are joy-killers, active constructive responding allows the partner to savor her joy and gives the couple an opportunity to bond over the good news. In the parlance of the Gottmans, active constructive responding is a way of “turning toward” your partners bid (sharing the good news) rather than “turning away” from it.
Active constructive responding is critical for healthy relationships. In the 2006 study, Gable and her colleagues followed up with the couples two months later to see if they were still together. The psychologists found that the only difference between the couples who were together and those who broke up was active constructive responding. Those who showed genuine interest in their partner’s joys were more likely to be together. In an earlier study, Gable found that active constructive responding was also associated with higher relationship quality and more intimacy between partners.
There are many reasons why relationships fail, but if you look at what drives the deterioration of many relationships, it’s often a breakdown of kindness. As the normal stresses of a life together pile up—with children, career, friend, in-laws, and other distractions crowding out the time for romance and intimacy—couples may put less effort into their relationship and let the petty grievances they hold against one another tear them apart. In most marriages, levels of satisfaction drop dramatically within the first few years together. But among couples who not only endure, but live happily together for years and years, the spirit of kindness and generosity guides them forward.
source by:http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/happily-ever-after/372573/
Masters of Love
By Unknown
Is nature or nurture more important in determining a man’s success in his relationships and career?
What physiological and psychological traits present in a man’s younger years predict his chances of living a long, flourishing life?
In 1938, researchers at Harvard’s medical school began a study that aimed to answer these fascinating questions and discover what factors lead to an “optimum” life. The study recruited 268 of the university’s sophomores from the all-male classes of 1939-1944, and set out to examine every aspect of their lives for at least a couple decades. The men selected were healthy in body and mind, and deemed likely to capitalize on their potential and become successful adults. While many of them came from well-off families, some were intelligent students who had been plucked from poor households and given full scholarships.
The study’s participants were signing on for extensive probing into their lives. They were given physicals and thorough psychological evaluations; researchers visited their homes to interview their parents, as well as three generations of relatives; each year the men filled out an exhaustive questionnaire that inquired about numerous aspects of their health, habits, family, political views, career, and marriage; and every 10-15 years, the men were interviewed face-to-face.
This research project, known as the Grant Study, continues today, more than 75 years after its inception. Having been extended numerous times, it has become one of the longest longitudinal studies ever conducted. When George Vaillant, who has been the study’s director for several decades, first started working on the project, he was thirty-two, and the participants were in their fifties; today, Vaillant is pushing eighty, and the men are in their nineties. The participants continue to fill out their annual questionnaires, and Vaillant continues to study their answers.
Nothing quite like the Grant Study has ever been attempted; as Vaillant puts it, this research represents “one of the first vantage points the world has ever had on which to stand and look prospectively at a man’s life from eighteen to ninety.” The mountains of data collected over more than seven decades has become a rich trove for examining what factors present in a man’s younger years best predict whether he will be successful and happy into old age. The study’s researchers have continually sifted through the results and reports in an attempt to ferret out these promising elements. As Vaillant details in The Triumphs of Experience, some of the researchers’ original hypotheses did not pan out, and the job of untangling issues of causation and correlation goes on. Yet several insights have emerged very strongly and prominently from the data, offering brightly marked guideposts to a life well lived.
The Importance of Relationships
To discover what factors predicted a man’s ability to become a successful, well-adjusted adult, Vaillant created a list of ten accomplishments, which included career success and professional prominence, mental and physical health, a good marriage, supportive friendships, closeness to one’s children, the ability to enjoy work, love, and play, and a subjective level of happiness. He called this set of accomplishments the “Decathlon of Flourishing”, and measured the level to which each man in the study had achieved these “events” between the ages 65-80. Vaillant then looked back over the men’s personal histories to figure out what factors present earlier in the men’s lives most predicted their Decathlon score.
When Vaillant crunched the numbers, he discovered no significant relationship between a man’s level of flourishing and his IQ, his body type (mesomorph, ectomorph, endomorph), or the income and education level of his parents.
The factors that did loom large, and collectively predicted all ten Decathlon events, had one thing in common: relationships. This rubric included:
A warm, supportive childhood
A mature “coping style” (being able to roll with the punches, be patient with others, keep a sense of humor in the face of setbacks, delay gratification, etc.)
Overall “soundness” as evaluated during college years (resilient, warm personality, social, not overly sensitive)
Warm adult relationships between the ages of 37-47 (having close friends, maintaining contact with family, being active in social organizations)
Vaillant found that the men who had the best scores in these areas during their youth and mid-life, were the happiest, most successful, and best adjusted in their latter years. This is the finding of the Grant Study that has emerged most prominently: “It was the capacity for intimate relationships that predicted flourishing in all aspects of these men’s lives.”
The powerful effect of intimate relationships can be seen in a variety of factors in a man’s life, including their income levels:
Men with at least one good relationship with a sibling growing up made $51,000 more per year than men who had poor relationships with their siblings, or no siblings at all
Men who grew up in cohesive homes made $66,000 more per year than men from unstable ones
Men with warm mothers took home $87,000 more than those men whose mothers were uncaring
The 58 men with the best scores for warm relationships made almost $150,000 more per year than the 31 men with the worst scores
Remember that these men all entered the workforce with a Harvard education. Also remember that their parents’ socioeconomic status turned out not to be a significant factor in their own future income.
In addition to finding that warm relationships in general had a positive impact on the men’s lives, Vaillant uncovered specific effects that stemmed from a man’s childhood, and from the respective influence of his mother and father.
The Impact of a Man’s Childhood
childhood
“Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love, to put its trust in life.” –Joseph Conrad
In order to gauge the effect of a man’s childhood on his future prospects in life, Vaillant scored the quality of the participants’ upbringing according to these criteria:
Was the home atmosphere warm and stable?
Was the boy’s relationship with his father warm and encouraging, conducive to autonomy, and supportive of initiative and self-esteem?
Was the boy’s relationship with his mother warm and encouraging, conducive to autonomy, and supportive of initiative and self-esteem?
Would the rater have wished to grow up in that home environment?
Was the boy close to at least one sibling?
When the outcomes of the men’s lives were analyzed, and compared to this set of criteria, it became quite clear that “for good or ill, the effects of childhood last a long time.” A warm childhood proved a much stronger predictor of many aspects of a man’s flourishing later in life, including his overall contentment in his late seventies, than either his parent’s social class or his own income. These effects are particularly striking when the men with the warmest childhoods (who were dubbed “the Cherished”) are compared with those in the bottom tenth (who were called “the Loveless”):
The Cherished made 50% more money than the Loveless
The Cherished were 5X more likely to enjoy rich friendships and warm social supports at age seventy
The Loveless were 3.5X more likely to be diagnosed as mentally ill (which includes serious depression, abuse of drugs and alcohol, and need for extended psychiatric care)
The Loveless were 5X more likely to be unusually anxious
The Loveless took more prescription drugs of all kinds, and were twice as likely to seek medical attention for minor physical complaints
A loving, supportive upbringing seemed to both bolster a man’s chances for success in his relationships and career, and inoculate him against future psychological distress.
A Loving Childhood Develops Independence and Resilience
While parenting pundits at various times in our history have worried that a household full of unwavering love and support could turn out a young man who was too coddled and dependent, the Grant Study found that abundant familial love, when coupled with an emphasis on autonomy and initiative, actually produced the most stoical (able to keep a stiff upper lip) and independent men. Such men, Vaillant explains, had learned to be comfortable with their feelings, and “that they could put their trust in life, which gave them courage to go out and face it.” In contrast, the men from the worst childhoods turned out to be the most dependent, and struggled with taking initiative.
This correlation held up even when examined in relation to the traditionally masculine pursuit of attaining military rank. Since the Grant Study began at the outset of WWII, its researchers were naturally interested in tracking which aspects of the men’s physical and psychological make-up would best predict their likelihood of becoming officers during the war. They found that the rank the men had attained at the time of their discharge had no relation to their body type, intelligence, or their parents’ social class. Instead, higher rank was most strongly correlated with a loving childhood, and whether a man had warm relationships with his mother and siblings. “Twenty-four of the twenty-seven men with the warmest childhoods made at least first lieutenant, and four became majors. In contrast, of the thirty men with the worst childhoods, thirteen failed to make first lieutenant, and none became majors.” As Vaillant concludes, “We don’t breed good officers; we don’t even build them on the playing fields of Eton; we raise them in loving homes.”
What Goes Right Matters More Than What Goes Wrong
In studying the powerful impact a man’s childhood has on his prospects for health, happiness, and success, an important corollary was discovered: “it is not any one thing for good or ill—social advantage, abusive parents, physical weakness—that determines the way children adapt to life, but the quality of their total experience.” Basically, what the Grant Study found is that even if a lot of bad things happen during your childhood, if they’re outweighed by the good things, you’ll still turn out okay. So if, say, a man had an absent father but a warm relationship with his mother and siblings, or cold parents, but loving grandparents, his prospects for future flourishing were still good. It was not any one factor, or constellation of factors, Vaillant reports, but the quality of one’s childhood as a whole that mattered most.
This point is driven home by the findings of a study that was done in tandem with the Grant Study. Since the participants in the Grant Study were not a terribly diverse group, in 1940 researchers began to run the Gluek Study alongside it, which included a second cohort of 456 disadvantaged non-delinquent inner-city youths from the Boston area. When the childhoods of the men in this study were examined, it was found that even if the family was poor, the father was on welfare, and the family had numerous other problems, sons who were loved by their mothers, admired their dads, and had good friendships went on to become successful and attain a higher socioeconomic status. This explains why men who grew up in impoverished households, but who go on to flourish anyway, often say things like, “Even though we were poor, we never realized it when we were children, because our parents made our home such a wonderful place.”
Vaillant further found that in both studies, “Even the death of a parent was relatively unimportant predictively by the time the men were fifty; by the time they were eighty, men who had lost parents when young were as mentally and physically healthy as men whose parents had lovingly watched them graduate from high school.”
The Influence of a Mother
mom and sons
Not only did a man’s overall childhood experience greatly impact the rest of his life, but his mother and father each influenced it in a particular way. The Grant Study found that a warm relationship with his mother was significantly associated with a man’s:
effectiveness at work
maximum late-life income
military rank at the end of WWII
inclusion in Who’s Who
IQ in college
Verbal test scores
Class rank in college
Mental competence at age 80
On the flip side of that last point is the fact that “a poor relationship with his mother was very significantly, and very surprisingly, associated with dementia.” Men who lacked a warm relationship with their mothers were 3X more likely to get dementia in their old age.
mom
One of the findings of the study that I personally found most interesting, was that “a mother who could enjoy her son’s initiative and autonomy was a tremendous boon to his future.” Mothers of men who scored highly on the Decathlon of Flourishing admired their sons’ assertiveness, and boasted to researchers that their boys were “fearless to the point of being reckless,” “could fight any kid on the block,” and “is a tyrant in a way that I adore.” In other words, mothers who celebrated their boys’ boyishness bolstered their chances of achieving a successful, mature manhood.
The Influence of a Father
father and sons fishing
The Grant Study also found influences that were associated exclusively with dads. Loving fathers imparted to their sons:
enhanced capacity to play
more enjoyment of vacations
greater likelihood of being able to use humor as a healthy coping mechanism
better adjustment to, and contentment with, life after retirement
less anxiety and fewer physical and mental symptoms under stress in young adulthood
In the negative column, it “was not the men with poor mothering but the ones with poor fathering who were significantly more likely to have poor marriages over their lifetimes.” Men who lacked a positive relationship with their fathers were also “much more likely to call themselves pessimists and to report having trouble letting others get close.”
If there was ever any doubt, fathers matter, a lot: When all is said and done, a man’s relationship with his father very significantly predicted his overall life satisfaction at age 75 — “a variable not even suggestively associated with the maternal relationship.”
The Mysterious Influence of the Maternal Grandfather
When Grant Study researchers examined whether the longevity of a man’s immediate relatives affected his chances of flourishing, they found that the age of death of his mother, father, maternal grandmother, and both paternal grandparents wasn’t associated at all with his Decathlon score. Yet there emerged a “marked and unexpected association between age at death of maternal grandfathers [MGFs] and the mental health of their grandsons”:
The MGFs of men with the highest scores on the Decathlon of Flourishing lived nine years longer than the men with the lowest scores
The MGFs of the men who never saw a psychiatrist lived nine years longer than the men who made the most visits to psychiatrists
The MGFs of the most psychologically healthy men lived 15 years longer than the MGFs of the men who were most depressed
The MGFs of the men with the least anxiety lived 27 years longer than the MGFs of the most anxious men(!)
From these intriguing data points, Vaillant concludes that “long-lived maternal grandfathers predict unusual psychological stability in their grandsons.” Why this would be is still unknown – it may be that a man’s mental health is partly genetic and springs from the MGF.
Men and Marriage
wedding3
A man’s relationships in childhood were not the only ones that affected his life’s outcome. His friendships in mid-life also played a role, as did, of course, the quality of his marriage.
When several decades ago Vaillant evaluated the men according to “Adult Adjustment Outcome determinations” (a kind of earlier version of the Decathlon of Flourishing, from what I gather), he found that:
“all of the fifty-five Best Outcomes had gotten married relatively early and stayed married for most of their adult lives. (And by the time those men were eighty-five, we learned later, only one marriage had ended in divorce.) In contrast, among the seventy-eight Worst Outcomes, five had never married, and by seventy-five years of age, thirty-five (45 percent) of the marriages had ended in divorce. Proportionately three times as many of the Best Adjusted men enjoyed lifelong happy marriages as the Worst.”
The effect of marriage was even starker for the inner-city men of the Glueck Study: “two-thirds of the never-married were in the bottom fifth in overall social relations, 57 percent were in the bottom fifth in income, and 71 percent were classified by the Study raters as mentally ill.”
These results were not too surprising – marriage has been found to correlate to better life outcomes for men in other studies as well. But Vaillant did make a few other findings that were less expected:
Earlier in his career, Vaillant had supposed that divorced men would not fare any better in their second marriages – that their first marriages had failed because of psychological traits and behaviors that would similarly doom future attempts at matrimony. But when he checked in with the men at age eighty-five, 23 of the surviving 27 divorced and remarried men were in happy marriages that had lasted for an average of 30 years. The failure of a first marriage did not mean a man was incapable of succeeding the second time round.
The single most important factor in all the study participants’ divorces was alcoholism – either the men’s or their wives. 57% of the divorces could be traced to it. While the wives were usually open about their husbands’ drinking problems, the husbands were often reluctant to talk about their wives’ alcoholism, and it thus took almost 70 years for this finding to emerge.
While co-dependence is often a dirty word in our culture, spouses’ mutual dependence on each other was associated with happy and healthy marriages.
This dependence deepens with time, as does the happiness of marriages. When the men were ages 20-70 only 18% reported that their marriage had been consistently happy (as opposed to so-so or unhappy) for at least 20 years. (The lowness of this number may partially be a generational thing – the WWII generation had different criteria in choosing a spouse and expectations for the relationship.) But at age eighty-five, 76% said their marriages were happy. In old age, spouses increasingly rely on each other, and with the passing of time we tend to remember only the good and forget the bad. Husbands and wives truly grow more precious to each other as they enter the twilight of their lives.
Overall, the Grant Study showed that a happy marriage is an incredibly positive thing in a man’s life. What then makes for wedded bliss? Vaillant doesn’t delve too much into that question, but holds up what is perhaps the most successful marriage in the study as an example. This couple, who Vaillant calls “the Chipps” (a pseudonym), enjoyed doing various activities — they regularly sailed, took a yearly canoeing trip to Nova Scotia, and walked 3 miles a day together. They always kept a sense of humor about everything. Instead of resorting to passive aggression, husband and wife talked openly talked about their issues and “even conflict was filled with laughter.” By the time this gentleman was 80, “he (and his wife) had been giving their marriage rave reviews for six decades”; “I’ve lived happily ever after,” he gushed to his interviewer. Indeed, as Vaillant looked through his notes on him, he found he had written that Mr. Chipps was “perhaps the happiest man in the study.”
Hope for Those Who Had an Inauspicious Start in Life
hope
In looking over the association between childhood, marriage, and the trajectory of a man’s life, Vaillant concludes that “The majority of the men who flourished found love before thirty, and that was why they flourished.” Whether familial, romantic, or even platonic, men who enjoyed warm relationships in their youth went on to live the fullest, happiest, most successful lives.
Why would this be so? Men who were loved, and learned to love in their younger years, develop positive mental health, resilience, and a capacity for intimacy — qualities that “reflect the process of replacing narcissism with empathy” and lead to greater confidence, autonomy, social and emotional intelligence, and maturity. These traits in turn lead not only to more relationships, but success in other areas (like one’s career). In contrast, men who had bleak childhoods have a harder time forming intimate relationships, are more likely “to be pessimistic and self-doubting,” and are “handicapped later in mastering the assertiveness, initiative, and autonomy that are the foundation of successful adulthood.”
For those readers who enjoyed warm, loving support in their younger years, the above findings have likely been an interesting look at some of the reasons they’ve been able to find a positive path in life. For those who are currently or hope to one day be fathers, it hopefully inspires you to create a warm and nurturing household for your own children.
But for readers whose upbringing left much to be desired, these findings may seem depressing and fatalistic. Yet all hope is not lost. The Grant Study does show that a grim childhood definitely stacks the deck against you – there’s no way around that. But the study also revealed that “people really can change, and people really can grow. Childhood need be neither destiny nor doom.” Some of the participants who had an inauspicious start in life were able to turn their lives around, and go on to flourish in their later years. How did they do it? Vaillant points to “restorative marriages and maturing [psychological] defenses” as “the soil out of which new resilience and post-traumatic growth emerge.”
Marriage as a Healer
wedding2
As we have seen, a warm childhood strongly predicted a man’s score in most of the events in the Decathlon of Flourishing. But not all of them. Vaillant was surprised to find that “bleak childhoods were not always associated with bleak marriages”:
“With the exception of a man’s closeness to his father, childhood environment did not predict stable marriage, and even where a warm paternal relationship was lacking, good marriages could be made—eventually. Indeed, marriage seemed to be a means for making good on a poor childhood. After almost fifty years of following disadvantaged youths, psychologist Emmy Werner noted that ‘the most salient turning points . . . for most of these troubled individuals were meeting a caring friend and marrying an accepting spouse.’”
Vaillant found that the men in the study who hadn’t learned to love, and be loved as a boy, but who went on to flourish against the odds, used marriage as a second chance to figure out the landscape of intimacy. (Having children provided a similar opportunity to open their hearts in a new way.) While Vaillant found that “The most dependent adults came from the most unhappy childhoods,” as mentioned above, mutual dependence can actually be a healthy thing. For these men, it indeed turned out to be quite healing. Ultimately, marriage, “however imperfect, is an opportunity to assuage some of the loneliness of bleak early years.”
What’s even more interesting is that while many folks think that two people with “baggage” will have a tough time making a go at a successful marriage together, Vaillant found that this was not necessarily the case: “It turned out that happy marriages after eighty were not associated either with warm childhoods or with mature defenses in early adulthood—that is, you don’t have to start out ‘all grown up’ to end up solidly married.” Instead, marriage might just be the best “classroom” for learning how to be a mature man.
Mature Defenses
Beyond warm relationships, two of the factors that most strongly predicted a man’s Decathlon score were mature defenses and character traits.
Mature defenses are our “involuntary psychological coping style” – the ways we instinctively respond to and deal with setbacks, frustration, pain, etc. Immature defenses include things like passive aggression, projection, and denial. They seek to put the responsibility for what happens on other people. In contrast, men with mature defenses take ownership of what happens to them, and try to figure out a healthy way to deal with life’s challenges. These healthy coping methods include things like keeping a sense of humor, finding a gratifying alternative when you can’t get what you want, being altruistic, and facing problems with resilience and stoicism. Mature defenses are a huge factor both in rewarding relationships, and success in one’s career; the twelve men with the most mature coping styles made over $200k more a year than the sixteen men with the most immature coping styles.
Vaillant points out that these mature defenses can unfortunately not be developed through willpower alone – your upbringing, environment, and even genetics play a role. But they are at least partially under your control, and can be actively strengthened and developed throughout your life.
Character Traits
There are also several character traits strongly associated with flourishing, and their cultivation is happily within our control to a greater degree.
When Vaillant looked at 26 personality traits the men in the Grant Study had been evaluated on in college, he found that a trait called “Practical, Organized” best predicted their mental health in middle-age. This trait involves, obviously, the ability to organize one’s life, as well as to delay gratification. In a related study, “prudence, forethought, willpower, and perseverance in junior high school were the best predictors of vocational success at age fifty.”
Vaillant uncovered another related trait that correlated with a whopping 8 Decathlon events: “Well Integrated.” Men who were “well integrated” were deemed to be “steady, dependable, thorough, sincere, and trustworthy,” while those who were Incompletely Integrated lacked perseverance and were seen as “erratic, unreliable, sporadic, undependable, ill directed and little organized.” Compared to the Incompletely Integrated, the Well Integrated men:
Were 4X more likely to enjoy a good marriage
Lived, on average, seven years longer
Were significantly more likely to be physically active and cognitively intact in old age
Being Active
cycle
Finally, while body type turned out not to predict a man’s score on the Decathlon of Flourishing, athletic prowess was in fact strongly associated with it. That is, it seems that while the body type a man was born with didn’t affect the trajectory of his life, what he did with that body mattered (remember that Churchill was born an endomorph and fought it every step of the way!). This association between fitness and flourishing may possibly be chalked up to the benefits that physical training provides; staying in shape, as we know, can strengthen our discipline, boost our minds, and impart metaphorical life lessons as to the importance of things like humility and consistency. It is perhaps for this reason that the participants’ performance in a physical test of endurance turned out to be a better predictor of their ability to form successful relationships than even of their health later in life. Exercise makes us better people.
Whatever Your Upbringing, You Can Become the Man You Want to Be
That qualities like organization, discipline, and dependability would so strongly predict flourishing in middle and late life should not be surprising; they are, Vaillant notes, “precisely the traits people need to find ways around failures, and make the most of successes when they come along.” So too they are fortunately qualities that we can develop in ourselves, no matter how much, or how little, training we got in them in our youth. Those who were never taught as a boy the importance of scheduling their time, persevering in the face of setbacks, and developing their trustworthiness will certainly have a tougher row to hoe, but learning these skills is possible at any age.
While it is easiest to pick up new habits before your mid-twenties, when your brain is most pliable, our brains remain plastic and moldable throughout our lives. In fact, the process of myelinization – which increases the efficiency of our neurons – continues up until age 60. During that time, our prefrontal lobes (which function as the practical, organized, CEO of our brains) can become better and better at checking the limbic parts of our brains (which cause us to be unthinkingly impulsive). Thus Vaillant found that the study participants, regardless of their upbringing, could grow over time – could become wiser, more patient, more mature. The more such traits are actively sought, and exercised, the more you can aid and accelerate that process. So start working on your character early if you can, and continue to practice the qualities of mature manhood in every decade of your life. As Vaillant notes, ultimately what the men “did with a loving or bleak childhood had as much to do with future success as the childhood itself.”
Conclusion: Love Is All You Need (Even When You’re a Dude)
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“The recent years of the Grant Study have shown that our lives when we are old are the sum of all of our loves.” –George Vaillant
What leads to a flourishing life has been debated and discussed for centuries. Is it your parents’ social class? It is a career with a high income? Is it the type of body you’re born with?
After decades of studying the scope of men’s lives from ages 18-90, Valliant’s answer is this: “Happiness is love. Full stop.” It’s really a conclusion all of us knew all along, but it helps to be reminded of it, and to see that it is backed up not only by intuition, but by nearly 80 years of research.
Character traits matter too, but even then their real importance is helping us replace a scattered narcissism with the steady maturity that leads to rewarding relationships. Perhaps it sounds cheesy, but we are ultimately here to love, and to be loved. Love leads to our ability to “put our trust in life” and the confidence to tackle our goals. Thus if we fill our lives with warm, rich relationships, all the other good stuff – career success, prestige, adventure – will be sure to follow.
__________
Source:http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/09/02/love-is-all-you-need-insights-from-the-longest-longitudinal-study-on-men-ever-conducted/
vaillant grant study the glueck study the grant study pdf triumphs of experience: the men of the harvard grant study pdf ted talk grant study art of manliness study room godfrey minot camille george vaillant ted talk
By Unknown
Men Who Drive Fast Cars
Researchers in Austria found that women may subconsciously change their perception of a man based on the type of car that he drives. Instinctively, women prefer a dominant and powerful mate and will often associate a man’s character or status with the type of car he chooses. More powerful cars, such as a Mustang or sports car, translate as a more powerful man — a characteristic women subconsciously look for in a mate.
“When we were having babies who were very dependent on us, we couldn’t hunt and take care of ourselves, so we were looking for the man who had the most social status — who was the best hunter — who was going to bring home the biggest chunk of meat for our babies. It’s the same thing today,” explained Dr. Laura Berman, a sex educator and relationship therapist.
Men With Hairy Faces But Smooth Bodies
According to Pavol Prokop, a professor of biology at Trnava University in Slovakia, evolutionarily speaking, hairless men should be preferred in areas (or cultures) that are closer to the equator due to the increased parasitic threat. Interestingly, after a study comparing two countries with differing parasitic threats, Trnava “found no differences in women’s preferences,” with both groups going for men with less body hair. Theories suggest this preference may have come as a way to avoid lice and other parasites, but no one can say for sure.
When it comes to facial hair, studies have shown the more hair, the better. An Australian study found that women prefer men with heavy stubble over clean-shaven men and men with a full beard. Our findings confirm that beardedness affects judgments of male socio-sexual attributes and suggests that an intermediate level of beardedness is most attractive while full-bearded men may be perceived as better fathers who could protect and invest in offspring," explained the researchers, as reported by The Huffington Post.
Men With Deep Breathy Voice Who Holds Off On The Compliments
Women can’t explain it, there’s just something about a deep breathy voice that makes us weak in the knees. According to a British study, women prefer men with deeper voices because it’s subconsciously perceived as a sign of masculinity. The study asked 60 women to rate the sex appeal of 10 male recorded voices, with results showing that the deeper breather voices, which were voices both masculine and tender, win in overall popularity. "These results suggest that what makes the voice attractive are mostly properties that enhance the characteristics already in the averaged voice of the sex," explained the authors, the Daily Mail reported.
What this deep breathy voice says is also important in winning a female’s affection. A separate study found that women are less inclined to speak with men who present themselves as too friendly too fast, taking this as a sign of insincerity. The lead author of the study suggests another reason for this lack of enthusiasm for enthusiastic men: “Women may perceive a responsive man as vulnerable and less dominant,” Gurit Birnbaum told Medical Daily via email.
While women may not like men who initially come off as too nice, a separate study showed that over the long haul, ladies love a man who can make them laugh. Science has found that female brains are more perceptive to positive feelings in response to laughter. Female preference for funny men may stem from this biological difference.
Above All, Tall Men
The stereotype has been recognized across geographic and cultural boundaries. There’s just something about tall men that women find irresistible. Unfortunately, this infatuation with tall men often leads to a denial of shorter men. A 2008 study of 382 college students found that only four percent of women would be in a relationship with someone who was shorter than them, Medical Daily reported. The reasoning for this, according to Dr. Pepper Schwartz, a sociology professor at the University of Washington, is because: “Women’s cultural vision is being feminine, having a man big enough to make her feel protected.” Schwartz added that many women hold this stereotype to a point where it excludes a lot of people they might be interested in otherwise.
source by :http://www.medicaldaily.com/what-type-men-most-women-prefer-according-science-299252
What Type Of Men Most Women Prefer, According To Science
By Unknown
US Vice President Joe Biden reckons Enda Kenny would get 80pc of the vote if he ran for election in America.
It is unclear if Mr Biden's prediction is based on recent polling data, or if the figure includes "don't knows" and "who the hell is Enda Kenny?" responses.
However, the unprecedented surge in support for Kenny will undoubtedly put huge pressure on US Presidential frontrunners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
At a campaign event yesterday, Trump promised to ban St Patrick's Day if voted into power and to also build a wall across the Atlantic to stop US tech firms travelling to Ireland.
Ms Clinton is understood to have told her husband Bill to no longer drink Guinness in public or speak to that "Bertie guy".
If he is to run in the US, it is likely Kenny will put his name on the ballot paper as an Independent, and Fine Gael election strategists were last week poring over the Healy-Rae playbook for guidance.
As ridiculous as all that seems, it is hard to rule anything out as the US Presidential campaign continues to evolve at a worrying speed into a Will Ferrell movie.
Sure, bejaysus, didn't Kenny give his clearest signal to date of his intention to quit Ireland for the US when he told revellers at an Irish Embassy St Patrick's Day event he did not want to go home and face the whinging politicians in Leinster House.
And they do love him Stateside. Both Republican and Democrat politicians scramble for his affections when March 17 rolls around every year. At a breakfast do in Biden's residence, the Vice President told his guests Kenny is the "most popular guy" in Ireland despite losing a significant number of seats in the election.
(The Irish Independent understands Fine Gael strategists are actively seeking to establish the name of the polling company that compiles research for the Vice President.)
In the White House's Oval Office, President Barack Obama told reporters what a great job the acting Taoiseach has done over the last five years.
In remarks he may have lifted from a Fine Gael speechwriter's laptop, Obama warned of "political volatility" stemming from our General Election and spoke of the importance of encouraging investment and boosting jobs.
Republican Speaker of the US House of Representatives Paul Ryan was almost giddy with praise at a lunch he hosted for Kenny.
During the event on Capitol Hill, Ryan and Obama competed, at near nauseating levels, to link themselves to Ireland. Kenny played along.
Obama also used the typically bipartisan event to attack Donald Trump and got a standing ovation from politicians of various hues.
Again, this left many political insiders suggesting Kenny might be the ideal compromise candidate for the presidential race.
Former Speaker John Boehner regaled an American Ireland Fund dinner with stories of his days out golfing with the Taoiseach and even attempted an impression of Kenny. 'Attempted' being the operative word.
And it wasn't just the US politicians who were full of adoration for the Mayo man on his St Patrick's Day visit. Sinn Féin's Mary Lou McDonald and Martin McGuinness were beaming from ear to ear and clapping with gusto during the Fine Gael leader's address at the Irish Embassy's reception in the Willward Hotel. Kenny even joked that he and Mary Lou were like-minded politicians during a speech that will be remembered as the only time an Irish prime minister has said "bejaysus" in public.
Gerry Adams wasn't spotted at the event - and may have been still in a sulk with Mary Lou after she ditched him outside the White House when security wouldn't let him in.
Not long after the reception, Kenny was back on a jet heading for Ireland via Brussels, where he spent St Patrick's Day.
Next week, it's back to government formation talks and Kenny's mind will surely stray to the plaudits of his American contemporaries as he seeks to become ringleader in his own political circus.
If only the Irish public could have been as receptive as the US chattering classes.
Irish Independent
source by:http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/the-most-popular-guy-in-ireland-feels-the-love-in-the-us-34554417.html
'The most popular guy in Ireland' feels the love in the US
By Unknown
Among these 10 writers are a college student, a Hollywood actress, a Montana wife and mother, and a Chicago marketing engineer. They range in age from 18 to over 80. Their stories, excerpted here, provoked compassion, outrage, laughter and tears. More than anything, readers gobbled them up and shared them widely. I am pleased to present them again.
1. “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage,” Amy Sutherland, June 25, 2006. As I wash dishes at the kitchen sink, my husband paces behind me, irritated. “Have you seen my keys?” he snarls, then huffs out a loud sigh and stomps from the room with our dog, Dixie, at his heels, anxious over her favorite human’s upset.
In the past I would have been right behind Dixie. I would have turned off the faucet and joined the hunt while trying to soothe my husband with bromides like, “Don’t worry, they’ll turn up.”
Now, I focus on the wet dish in my hands. I don’t turn around. I don’t say a word. I’m using a technique I learned from a dolphin trainer.
2. “Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear,” Laura Munson, July 31, 2009. “I don’t love you anymore,” my husband said. “I’m not sure I ever did.”
His words came at me like a speeding fist, like a sucker punch, yet somehow in that moment I was able to duck. And once I recovered and composed myself, I managed to say, “I don’t buy it.” Because I didn’t.
Continue reading the main story
He drew back in surprise. Apparently he’d expected me to burst into tears, to rage at him, to threaten him with a custody battle. Or beg him to change his mind.
3. “Good Enough? That’s Great,” Daniel Jones, Jan. 31, 2014. What’s the best way to recalibrate a marriage as the years pass? I wish I had the answer, because clearly millions of us would like to know.
As the editor of the Modern Love column for nearly a decade, I have noticed people wrestling with two questions above all others. From the young: “How do I find love?” And from those wallowing through marital malaise: “How do I get it back?”
Though it’s not really love they want back as much as attention, excitement and passion.
4. “Age Is No Obstacle to Love, or Adventure,” Nora Johnson, Sept. 12, 2013. I used to think that elder love, if it even existed, was confined to rocking chairs or golf carts, that it had to be a dull business because of the physical limitations of age.
Failing memory would make interesting conversation impossible, and old people didn’t seem inclined or able to participate in the lovely stuff of love — sadly, because what better way to get through that wretchedly boring, painful and terrifying period we call our golden years?
5. “Coming Out as a Modern Family,” Maria Bello, Nov. 29, 2013. I have never understood the distinction of “primary” partner. Does that imply we have secondary and tertiary partners, too? Can my primary partner be my sister or child or best friend, or does it have to be someone I am having sex with? I have two friends who are sisters who have lived together for 15 years and raised a daughter. Are they not partners because they don’t have sex? And many married couples I know haven’t had sex for years. Are they any less partners?
6. “Sometimes, It’s Not You,” Sara Eckel, Sept. 23, 2011. Did we find love because we grew up, got real and worked through our issues? No. We just found the right guys. We found men who love us even though we’re still cranky and neurotic, haven’t got our careers together, and sometimes talk too loudly, drink too much and swear at the television news. We have gray hairs and unfashionable clothes and bad attitudes. They love us, anyway.
7. “Truly, Madly, Guiltily,” Ayelet Waldman, March 27, 2005. I am the only woman in Mommy and Me who seems to be, well, getting any. This could fill me with smug well-being. I could sit in the room and gloat over my wonderful marriage.
But I don’t. I am far too busy worrying about what’s wrong with me. Why, of all the women in the room, am I the only one who has not made the erotic transition a good mother is supposed to make? Why am I the only one incapable of placing her children at the center of her passionate universe?
8. “The Race Grows Sweeter Near Its Final Lap,” Eve Pell, Jan. 24, 2013. Old love is different. In our 70s and 80s, we had been through enough of life’s ups and downs to know who we were, and we had learned to compromise. We knew something about death because we had seen loved ones die. The finish line was drawing closer. Why not have one last blossoming of the heart?
I was no longer so pretty, but I was not so neurotic, either. I had survived loss and mistakes and ill-considered decisions; if this relationship failed, I’d survive that too.
9. “Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define,” Marguerite Fields (College Essay Contest Winner), May 4, 2008. When my friends and I started having a conversation about the nature of monogamy, I thought I knew something about monogamy. Because, despite the fleeting nature of most of my encounters, and despite my own role in their short duration, I think what I have been seeking in some form from all of these men is permanence.
Sometimes I don’t like them, or am scared of them, and a lot of times I’m just bored by them. But my fear or dislike or boredom never seems to diminish my underlying desire for a guy to stay, or at least to say he is going to stay, for a very long time.
10. “Somewhere Inside, a Path to Empathy,” David Finch, May 17, 2009. “I don’t know when things got bad,” Kristen said, wiping away tears. “I feel like I’ve lost you and I don’t know what will bring you back.”
In reality she hadn’t lost me. She’d found me. The facade of semi-normalcy I’d struggled to maintain was falling away, revealing the person I’d been since childhood. I didn’t even know what was wrong with me, though my wife, a speech pathologist who works with autistic children, had her suspicions. Even so, it would be another two years before she would put all the pieces together and attach a name to what was ruining our marriage: Asperger’s syndrome.
source by :http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/style/the-10-best-modern-love-columns-ever.html?_r=0
Best Modern Love
By Unknown
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