Category Archives: Relationships

"When you find yourself hating someone (who did not directly hurt you) with blinding rage, know for certain that it is not the person you hate at all, but rather something about them that threatens your identity.  Find that thing.  This single piece of advice can turn your life around, I guarantee it."

— The Last Psychiatrist, on a post called The Rape Tunnel

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"According to a widely accepted model, intimacy begins when one person expresses revealing feelings, builds when the listener responds with support and empathy and is achieved when the discloser hears these things and feels understood, validated and cared for."

— Elizabeth Weil, in her 8,000 NYT magazine piece on her quest to improve her marriage.

Nora Roberts has sold 400 million copies of her 189 romance novels in print. “She regularly outsells Clancy, Grisham, and King combined,” according to the San Francisco Panorama, “Romance boasts $1.5 billion in sales; 55 percent of all paperbacks; one out of four books sold; 60 million readers in the U.S. alone.” Incredible statistics.

Think of the women reading these steamy novels. What kinds of notions about romance are they absorbing? Are they developing wildly unrealistic ideas about relationships? Should men be worried about how romance novels can hurt relationships just as women worry about how pornography hurts relationships (or doesn’t)?

Robin Hanson asks why there is “so much more effort to regulate porn than romance novels.”

Should men have the option to select “Does not read romance novels” as an option when searching for women on Match.com? Would women want the same for pornography consumption when searching for men?

A friend, in an email about idiosyncrasies, writes to me:

You get stressed out about not sleeping enough and give me secondhand anxiety. You always try to fit in just one more email before leaving for a meeting. You get hungry at the oddest times and must eat immediately. But I also weirdly like these things about you.

Amy Batchelor once told me something very wise about relationships: the key to liking someone over the long run is loving and appreciating their quirks. What someone else may find annoying, you must find endearing.

A good litmus test for when a relationship is coming un-done is when you start to be annoyed by the other person’s long-running idiosyncrasies.

Recently, as I walked to meet a good friend for lunch in New York, I noticed myself feeling unusually relaxed and peaceful. About halfway into our lunch my friend said, "You know, you seem more relaxed than usual." He read my body language well.

It is an observation that draws upon a historical data set, as "relaxed" is a relative term. It made sense: I've known him for seven years. I do not have many close friends who I have known for more than 4-5 years.

Later the next night, at a burrito place, he mentioned I always order steak or pork when I select a meat option in restaurants. This is true. I ate so much chicken growing up that I never order it as my meat of choice. Meanwhile, I noticed he was wearing a new shirt, and we both noticed our mutual friend of seven years was wearing new shoes.

These are trivial examples, but the point is this: noticing slight changes in a person's behavior, appearance, or state-of-mind requires knowing the person well and over a long period of time.

And it is very satisfying to feel known and noticed.

Time. It heals all wounds, wounds all heels, and more than anything else drives intimacy in relationships.

From a review of Edward Kennedy's posthumous memoir:

Kennedy tells us that when he was still a child his father once let him know that he had a choice between living "a serious life" and a "non-serious life."

"I'll still love you whichever choice you make,” his father, the bootlegger, wrote. "But if you decide to have a non-serious life, I won’t have much time for you."

Imagine as a child hearing that from your father! I think the better emphasis is personal happiness and fulfillment. But does the parent's emphasis even matter?

Not as much as most people think. Bryan Caplan, in his now gated article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, writes:

The punch line is that, at least within the normal range of parenting styles, how you raise your children has little effect on how your children turn out. You can be strict or permissive, involved or distant, encouraging or critical, religious or secular. In the long run, your kids will resemble you in many ways; but they would have resembled you about as much if they had never met you.

There is plenty of other work on this topic; twin studies are some of the most interesting. I am not optimistic that it will become mainstream thinking in the near term. The parenting industry — and it is an industry, all those books and tapes and classes on how to groom the next Einstein — is large and profit hungry.

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Here are all my links on parenting. Here's why I love my parents. Here is the key to life in one simple flowchart.