marriage
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You may not have heard a little-known fact that’s well-known in the field of sociology: Couples who live together before they marry (what social scientists call “cohabitation”) are more likely to divorce. Why? This is intrinsically odd (counterintuitive, if you like), because you’d think these couples would already have been exposed to each other’s character
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Since I’ve long been interested in extramarital love affairs, thanks to my own experiences, I’ve noticed a persistent explanation for why they happen: It usually boils down to this unproven banality…You had an affair because you don’t believe you deserve love. This sweeping idea is so vague it can be sloppily applied to many people,
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My brain is burning since I saw the movie Babygirl, partly because it depicts an extramarital affair in a very different way than I’ve seen in films before, and also because I could relate to Romy, played by Nicole Kidman, in about 20 ways (not for her wealth or high-powered job as a CEO, unfortunately.)
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In the Fifties and Sixties, my mom was hardly a Trad Wife: she had fallen in love and married, yes…and then she constantly worked because we couldn’t get by on my father’s salary as a subway worker. She also hated household maintenance, and had no interest (or competence) in the joys of “making food from
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M.A.F.S. English professor or not, I’m not embarrassed to admit that I’m a Married at First Sight super-fan. I’ve seen every season since the first, and even with its poor rate of successful marriages (maybe better than The Bachelor/Bachelorette, though), I find it fascinating. Why? Because it’s so difficult to predict which couples will stay
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Let’s say you have to choose Door A or Door B for your future life. Behind Door A is a person you could love passionately all your life. But your fate is to spend only a short time with Person A, and you cannot know how long. Behind Door B is a person you’ll be
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In Part II, I wrote: Ask questions! Not factual questions (“How do you get to work?”), or at least not mostly factual questions. Look, if you’re not just looking for sex or fun (which is sometimes the same thing), you want to plumb the depths, and quickly. Or at least I do, to fend off
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Are “emotional affairs”….affairs?
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When she was only 14, Jane Austen wrote a novel called Love and Freindship (that’s right, she misspelled it), satirizing the tendency of her time to romanticize both attachments as passionate, “undying love.” In our own time and culture, romantic love is assumed to be the basis for marriage, so it makes sense that we
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… My mind went straight to this: Wait, this guy had a GIRLFRIEND? He was 63, a disgruntled loner, not a looker. I doubt he had Ted Bundy’s charm. So what the hell? Why do these men always seem to have a girlfriend in the wings? I want to know how…
Susan Ostrov 