Online dating and the search for true love — or loves

By Katie Engelhart - Wednesday, January 30, 2013 at 9:45 AM - 0 Comments

Peter Dazeley/GETTY IMAGES

In 2003, a young Mark Zuckerberg sat in front of his computer and instant-messaged a friend. Back then, “the facebook thing” was still a rough idea, and 18-year-old Zuckerberg was trying to finesse the concept.

Already, he knew what he didn’t want. “I don’t think people would sign up for the facebook thing if they knew it was for dating,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I think people are skeptical about joining dating things.”

A decade later, a somewhat savvier Zuckerberg has had a change of heart. Last week, Facebook unveiled “Graph Search,” a new search engine that will allow users to comb through data from their existing online networks. At a press launch, Facebook reps showed off the new product, explaining that it could be used to search for restaurants, or for job recruiting. At one point, a Facebook employee stood to demonstrate a search for “friends of my friends who are single and living in San Francisco.” Continue…

What divorce can teach about marriage

By Julia McKinnell - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 at 10:05 AM - 0 Comments

RubberBall Productions/Getty Images

Dana Adam Shapiro would like to meet his true love, his muse, his collaborator. Shapiro is the Oscar-nominated director of the documentary Murderball and author of the acclaimed novel The Every Boy. He’s 39, handsome, single, and has never been married, though he’s been in love with plenty of women and had five three-year relationships.

He wonders if there is something wrong with him. Is he too cynical about marriage to make a long-term commitment? A buddy once told him that “getting married is like breaking into prison to serve a life sentence.”

For answers, Shapiro began interviewing divorced men and women until he’d spoken to 300 people. “I set out to vicariously live through the tragedies of others, hoping to glean some wisdom from the wreckage and to ultimately become so fluent in such failure that I would be able to avoid it in my own love life,” he explains in his new book, You Can Be Right or You Can Be Married.

The more unconventional the lessons he heard, the more impressed he was. “Somebody said to me, ‘Don’t paint the red flags white,’ and that’s something I’ll keep in mind a lot now,” he said on the phone from Berkeley, Calif. Shapiro believes most couples tend to avoid conflict. “But I think the idea of positive conflict, and how to fight fairly, is the key to a good relationship. Don’t surrender. Don’t pick fights but don’t avoid them. Admit if something bothers you.”

He cites the case of a 40-year-old divorced woman who regrets bottling up her jealousy. Her post-divorce behaviour is akin to having “truth Tourette’s,” she told Shapiro. “Now, when I feel jealous, I just say it right away. I’ll just announce it to the person I’m with. I’m through with being a ‘cool’ girl. I’m going to show it all, and I want to be with someone who’s going to be that real with me.”

“Accelerating the inevitable” is Shapiro’s term for it. “So much of the dating process is, let’s face it, faking it, because you really are putting your best foot forward. You want so badly to be liked. You might feign interest in something you’re not interested in. Why don’t we be ourselves as quickly as possible and then we can really see if we have the stuff to make a life together?”

One divorced 30-year-old whose ex-husband was violent suggests that couples seek out “uncomfortable experiences” before their wedding day. She told Shapiro, “Go camping. It might rain and you might get grumpy. Or, you’re on a plane and there’s a baby next to you screaming the entire time. How’s that guy going to handle it? Is he going to be like, ‘Shut that f–king baby up?’ If so, there you go. That’s not the guy you want to marry.”

Stating your needs at the beginning of the next relationship is another good idea, says Shapiro. “I think that people feel that having a need is synonymous with being needy, so they really hold that back.”

In the book, a 42-year-old divorced mom tells Shapiro about arguing with friends over the difference between a need and a want. “My closest girlfriend was there and she’s the strongest woman I’ve ever known, and she said, ‘I’m not ashamed to say that I need my husband. And I will call him and say, ‘I need you now.’ And I know that he’s gonna come and sit there like a nodding dog and listen to me.’ And all the men around the table went pale at the word ‘need.’ We said, ‘What’s wrong with need?’ And they said, ‘We don’t like the word need.’ We like the word want.’ ”

Shapiro says he plans to inform his next girlfriend that he needs to travel a lot and needs to talk about work at home.

He also believes too much compromise is dangerous. “A lot of people said they’d compromised themselves into oblivion. They became a shadow of who they really were. This isn’t the most traditional advice,” he laughs. “ ‘You should fight more, don’t compromise.’ But those are some of the take-aways for me.”

If he does get married, he won’t pledge his love forever. “It’s a silly promise to say, ‘I will love you forever.’ No one can say that. It’s just not true. I don’t care. No one can say it and no one should be loved unconditionally.”

Learning to love with Asperger syndrome

By Julia McKinnell - Thursday, September 13, 2012 at 5:10 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images; iStock; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

The typical man with Asperger syndrome has many questions. “Why do women exaggerate so often?” he wonders, and “Why does my wife need me to keep telling her I love her?”

For the logically minded Asperger guy, few things are more difficult than living with a woman who needs daily displays of affection. The “Aspie” man, on returning home from work, might prefer to seclude himself in his den where he can indulge his hobby of tinkering with train sets—only to discover his wife angrily banging pots in the kitchen, upset that he hasn’t said, “Hello, I’m home.” As one man with Asperger syndrome explained to British therapist Maxine Aston: “She knows I’m home. She will have heard me put the car in the garage. What is the point in telling her something she already knows?”

Aston’s practice is unique, as she specializes in counselling couples in which the male partner has Asperger syndrome and the female does not. In What Men with Asperger’s Syndrome Want to Know About Women, Dating and Relationships, she covers more than 40 of the top questions. “Oh, crikey! I see people from all over the world. I’ve had couples travel from Kenya, Dubai and Canada, yes!” she said in an interview from her home in Coventry, England.

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Of love and politics and life

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 24, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 5 Comments

Jonathan McLeod notes Jack Layton’s use of the word “love.”

It is unfortunate that it requires the death of a man, and the words of a political leader, for the country to embrace an outlook of love over anger, but how glorious, should that be the legacy he leaves to us. Love is transcendant. Love is transformative. It appears Jack Layton understood this. We are fortunate to have such men among us, if only too briefly.

Mr. Layton used the l-word in his first statement last month announcing his new cancer diagnosis. It reminded me, at the time, of something Bill Siksay, citing Svend Robinson, said upon departing Parliament this spring—Mr. Siksay’s remarks had stood out to me as something I’d never heard before. Talking to Anne McGrath for this piece, she reminded of Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians and mentioned former German chancellor Willy Brandt as a leader who had spoken about love and politics. Love was also, to cite perhaps the most celebrated example, at the heart of Martin Luther King’s rhetoric and philosophy.

More thoughts from Brian Topp, Tim Powers, Ralph Goodale, Niki Ashton, Glen Pearson, Nick Taylor-Vaisey, Kady O’Malley and Dan Arnold. From Torontoist, a panoramic image of the chalk tributes outside city hall in Toronto and another picture capturing the extent of the messages, a display that prompted this note last night from Mr. Layton’s son, Mike.

Hot films for a hot summer

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 3:07 PM - 0 Comments

Just a note to the followers of BDJ Unscreened to let you know I will be off the grid until August 15. Time to recharge the batteries and cleanse the palate. For the next few weeks, I’ll be in a cabin in the Laurentians without movies or TV. Just a faint Internet connection that flickers on and off like a dying light bulb. Otherwise, I’m unplugged. My colleague Claire Ward will be reviewing films for Macleans.ca in my absence, beginning with a review of Captain America: The First Avenger this Friday. (Last week Claire joined me in an online conversation about the new Harry Potter.)

While I’m gone, I’ll miss the last of the summer’s action blockbusters. Can’t say I mind. But among upcoming releases, I’m still looking forward to Crazy, Stupid, Love (with that crackerjack cast of Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore and Emma Stone) and The Future, directed by Miranda July—the subject of an intriguing cover story in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine by Toronto’s own Katrina Onstad. Plus Errol Morris’ new documentary, Tabloid, which I caught at TIFF.

As for current movie recommendations, I offered a few in a recent Maclean’s piece on how to escape Hollywood’s alien invasion: Four indie films you should see this summer . The summer tends to be a dead zone for good films, as the box office is ravaged by predatory blockbusters. But is the glass half full or half empty? There’s still lots worth seeing, movies great and small. As I sign off, here’s my list of recommended titles for the summer, some of which may be harder to find than others, depending where you live: The Tree of Life, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, The Trip, Submarine, Beginners, Project Nim, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, A Better Life, and Page One: Inside the New York Times.

Enjoy the summer.  See you on the other side.

Cross-border love

By Julia Belluz and Erica Alini - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 at 10:13 AM - 10 Comments

Photograph by Christopher Wahl

Gemma and Brent Charlton remember the moment they agreed that, against borders and distance, they were going to stay together. It was October 2006, and they were holding hands on a busy Hong Kong street. “There were buses going by, people everywhere,” Brent, 24, remembers. “But we decided it would be just us. We would see what happens.”

The pair was on a study abroad program—she from outside Manchester, U.K., he from Springfield, Ont. They had spent six months exploring Hong Kong, travelling in China. That night, they promised their relationship wouldn’t end with the university exchange. They didn’t realize, though, how much of their life together would hinge on unromantic things like the demands of the labour market, immigration policy—and sheer luck.

For nearly two years, Gemma and Brent kept in touch, mostly over Skype or “the occasional text,” says Gemma, who is 25. “I would have to wait up until 11, 12 at night, for Brent to come home from work so we could talk.” Phone calls were rushed, sometimes exhausting. Brent jokes, “It definitely was not the honeymoon stage.” They saw each other three times before Gemma decided, in 2008, to move to Canada.

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Great Philosophers Who Failed At Love

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 11:52 AM - 0 Comments

As is only fitting for any philosophical tome, Shaffer’s amusing essay in highbrow schadenfreude offers plenty to quibble over. The author’s definition of failure, for one. Thirtysomething Peter Abelard may have begun a long-lasting love affair with Héloïse, his 17-year-old pupil, and was then castrated by a thug in the hire of her enraged uncle, but it’s difficult to say he failed at love—at modern standards of appropriate teacher-student relationships, yes, and certainly in elementary prudence. But love? And how does the fact that Thomas Aquinas, burning with zeal to join the Dominican order, turned down a prostitute’s overture represent failure on his part? Ah well, leave the definitions to the philosophers—most of his 35 guys (and two women), Shaffer has dead to rights.

Consider French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, who strangled his wife in 1980, or Auguste Comte, who threw knives at his wife when he was in deranged mode, and blamed her for slowing down his work pace when he was sane. (As one of Comte’s biographers noted, the pioneer of social studies—who coined the word “sociology”—was only able to love humanity in the aggregate.) Diogenes the Cynic, who waged a lifelong battle against the social customs of ancient Greece—urinating, defecating and masturbating in public—believed love was for men “with nothing to do,” a convenient credo for someone who would probably have had trouble attracting a partner. The repulsive Jean-Jacques Rousseau personally delivered each of the five children he had with his seamstress lover to a foundling hospital.

But most of the philosophers, giant throbbing intellects and all, simply screwed up like the rest of us. They became infatuated with women who wanted nothing to do with them (Nietzsche), led lives of serial divorce (Bertrand Russell), or cheated on their spouses (Martin Heidegger and too many others to list). So what do the lives, as opposed to the teaching, of the great thinkers have to offer this Valentine’s Day? Only this: you can tell a disgruntled spouse that things could be worse—he or she might have married a philosopher.

Dear John, I love Jane

By Julia McKinnell - Monday, December 6, 2010 at 1:20 PM - 37 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

In a new collection of true stories about straight women turning lesbian, all of the women are, and were, married to extraordinarily kind, supportive husbands. Laura Andre, co-editor of Dear John, I Love Jane, points out that these women are “living proof that sexuality can change over time, often against our will. The women in this book didn’t set out to dismantle their marriages and relationships; the last thing they wanted was to hurt their husbands or boyfriends.”

One woman writes that her husband thought it was “cool” at first that she was attracted to women. “I wasn’t the jealous type so it never bothered me if my husband said another woman was sexy or beautiful. In fact, sometimes I would agree, and I spoke freely about different women I found attractive. He thought he had the coolest wife ever,” writes Crystal Hooper. “We always said that nothing and no one could ever come between us. Then along came Zoe.”

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Don't be sabotaged by a selfish partner

By Julia McKinnell - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

GETTY IMAGES; ISTOCK; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY TAYLOR SHUTE

Selfishness pervades every romantic relationship, according to Jane Greer. It creeps in “as you grow more comfortable with your partner and worry less about pleasing them.” A couple starts out “picture-perfect but grow ugly to each other over time,” writes the psychotherapist in a new book, What About Me?: Stop Selfishness from Ruining Your Relationship.

But lately, Greer has been seeing more and more young couples who are “constantly squabbling, jockeying for position, searching for ways to get their needs met.” She blames advancements in technology and a new kind of self-centredness that has reached epidemic proportions. “Never before has the lament ‘You’re not listening to me’ rung so true. In fact, people are listening to and paying attention to everyone and everything except their partner and their relationship,” she writes. “Porn is a click away, old flames are waiting on Facebook.” The new selfishness is changing even the way people think about their relationships: “When it comes down to giving time to your partner, it can feel like a loss of your personal needs rather than an expression of love,” writes Greer.

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'Something very special'

By Cathy Gulli - Thursday, November 25, 2010 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

David Davies/PA; Michael Dunlea/Daily Mail; UK Press/Keystone Press

There was nothing stately or demure about Kate Middleton that night in March 2002. Barely clothed, the lithe brunette sashayed down a dimly lit catwalk toward Prince William, who—sporting a wide grin and dark suit—appeared every bit an aristocratic frat boy. Having secured himself a front-row seat at the charity fashion show for $450, William now saw Kate, heretofore his friendly roommate, in a whole new way: stone-faced. Sexy. Hand on hip. Her straight hair twirled into tight ringlets and laced with yellow ribbons. And wearing nothing but a black band across her breasts, a bikini bottom, and—in the spirit of peekaboo flirting—a sheer, turquoise-trimmed wrap around her long torso. That’s when, it’s been said, William first saw in her his future queen consort.

That image, of course, couldn’t be more different from recent pictures of the newly engaged couple at St. James’s Palace on the day their forthcoming nuptials were announced in a 104-word press release by Clarence House, the Prince of Wales’s private residence. Arm in arm, William and Kate, both 28, stood and smiled elegantly for the requisite “photocall” to appease the press and the public’s increasingly voracious interest in their relationship status. Her royal blue dress—discreet yet celebratory—perfectly complemented the giant sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring that William gave her after proposing during a 10-day safari in Kenya in October. It had belonged to his late mother Diana.

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The Memory Project – Paul Dumaine, Love during WWII

By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

Paul and Joan Dumaine on their wedding day in England on July 4, 1945 | Courtesy of The Memory Project

Click play to hear Paul Dumaine’s complete audio story

Between getting engaged and his marriage in July 1945, Paul Dumaine, an infantryman with the Fusiliers Mont-Royal, survived serious wounds on the beach in Dieppe, and three years as a prisoner of war.

I met a young woman, Joan, who I became engaged to. We didn’t want to get married because the war was going strong and I could have been hurt or killed. So we said that we would wait. On Aug. 19, 1942, I arrived in Dieppe. My fiancée had no idea where I was. The battle was poorly organized. We landed in broad daylight. We got there and the beach was ablaze. The battle was full-on. Everyone was getting killed and falling down all over the place. It was terrible.

I collapsed after an hour. My head was injured. I couldn’t walk. It was like I was paralyzed. I was bleeding. I wanted to go wash myself off in the ocean. My legs were paralyzed from the shock. I had to drag myself on my elbows to the ocean. I washed my head. There was a great big boat called a tank landing craft; a boat that carried tanks. The doors opened and the tanks came out. One of them had foundered on the beach. We used it as a shelter to hide from the Germans.

After three years as a prisoner of war, I was released. I was ill. When I got to England, I stayed in hospital for a month. Joan was still in the army. The colonel called her to his office and said, “Joan, I have some good news.” She thought it was news from her parents. “Your fiancé is in England, at Aldershot. I know that you would like to see him.” She said, “Yes, yes, yes.” “I am giving you a pass. Get dressed in civilian clothes and go see him.” I was lying in my bed. They said to me, “Dumaine, you have a visitor.” She was there. It had been three years. When I saw her, she was so beautiful. I took her in my arms.

'Right now I want to hold you so badly'

By Jane Christmas - Thursday, September 16, 2010 at 3:20 PM - 0 Comments

David Royko/ University of Chicago Press/ istock/ Illustration by Bradley Reinhardt

She had grown into a tall, gorgeous blond, but it was her intelligence and kind heart that won him over. He was thankful to have grown into a taller-than-her fellow, but he was gangly and shy with a prominent Adam’s apple and an even more prominent nose. He fell in love with her when they were just children in Chicago, but he could never muster the courage to tell her how he felt. Instead, he became her best friend, playing Cyrano to her Roxane, and vetting suitors for her. He did such a good job that she married one of them.

Crushed, he packed up for military duty in Korea. But a year later, when he returned to a new posting in Blaine, Wash., he learned that she had filed for divorce. Wasting no time, he grabbed pen and paper and wrote to her, boldly and finally declaring his love.

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The men you should never marry

By By Julia Mckinnell - Monday, May 3, 2010 at 3:11 PM - 69 Comments

Getty Images

If love is blind, “marriage is like a trip to the optometrist’s office,” warns an 81-year-old priest from New Jersey in a new book for women designed to help them evaluate whether the man they’re dating is marriage material. Up front, Father Pat Connor addresses those who might question his authority to speak on the topic. “You might be thinking, ‘He’s a priest. He’s never been married,’ and in that you would be correct.” But, he goes on, “for over 50 years I have had the privilege of speaking with young women on the subject of whom not to marry. These women have opened their hearts and minds while bringing me their questions.” Questions such as: “Is money really important in a marriage?” “Yes. Yes. Yes, to that one,” he writes in Whom Not to Marry: Time-Tested Advice From a Higher Authority.

Remember, he writes, “You can be deeply in love with someone to whom you cannot be successfully married.” If you’re thinking love conquers all, “it doesn’t,” he writes. Top on his list is, “Never marry a man who cannot hold down a job.” Then there’s “never marry a man who has no friends.”

When a portion of Father Pat’s list appeared in the New York Times, a twice-married and divorced woman sent him her own version: “Never marry a man who is more affectionate in public than in private. Never marry a man who notices all of your faults but never any of his own. Never marry a man whose first wife had to sue for child support. Never marry a man whom your children don’t like.”

Father Pat advises women to take a year between the decision to marry and the wedding. “Use the engagement as a time to ask questions,” such as, “What would I be glad to know about him that’s impossible to know in the first few months of dating?”

He writes about one woman whose fiancé loved to shop for expensive clothes. “Then he wants to go to pricey restaurants to show them off,” she told Father Pat. “I prefer eating at home and wearing my comfortable clothes. How can I change him to like the simpler life?” “Change him? Forget it! He’s a bad risk for marriage. I’m afraid it’s just that simple,” Father Pat told her.

One of his must-haves is physical attraction. “There used to be, in one of the formulas used at weddings, a wonderful sentence that was said by each spouse in turn: ‘With my body, I thee worship.’ If you feel no physical attraction to him, don’t marry him!”

He urges women to ask: “Has your love grown since you became serious about one another?” “Do you see in this person the qualities you want in your children?” “Do you love each other with equal intensity and are you sure your love is not one-sided?”

Beware of the “Green-Eyed Monsters.” “Envy and jealousy are as complex as they are puzzling, and they’re both destructive.” He tells of a young woman who loved to dance but complained, “my boyfriend always declines my offers to dance with me. When I’m dancing with other boys, I can feel him staring at us. How can I help him to like dancing and to stop staring?”

“You’ll probably never get your boyfriend to like dancing,” Father Pat told her, “and the staring only means that jealousy is in play here. Have a chat with him about that unlovely quality. If he persists in his jealous-laden behaviour, drop him!”

If your boyfriend has cold feet, “Never put yourself in the position of trying to persuade him to marry you. No good can come of that,” he writes. “It’s important to pay attention to those actions that convey a lack of commitment on his part.”

Adhering to dating rules is another mistake, he says. “I’m uncomfortable with this rules approach to dating—rules that take into account anything from who calls whom and when, who pays for dinner, and how many dates to have before either becoming intimate or moving on. Rules can quickly morph into ultimatums, and that’s no good for anybody.”

Also, think twice about the “fun or quirky proposals,” like eloping to Vegas “on a whim.” Father Pat urges women to “think about it. The decision to get married will affect your entire life. Do you really want to enter into something so casually?”

One couple’s modest engagement rings made him happy. The groom said, “We bought these rings, one for $15, one for $20.” The couple hoped to upgrade later on. Father Pat told them, “I hope you forget in future getting more expensive rings. Put the money toward your children’s college funds!”

Our steamy bodice-ripper wedding

By Cathy Gulli - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 at 10:04 AM - 6 Comments

Photograph by Maria Teijeiro/Getty Images

“What if they turn you into a crazy drug dealer and I’m a manic depressive transvestite?” That was Anne Miller’s initial question to her husband, Michael Davoli, when they were contacted by a publisher about starring in a new genre of romance novel—one based on real couples. “You don’t know what to do when strangers say, ‘Let us tell a fictionalized version of your story, please,’ ” says Miller. “You have to think the worst.”

The couple, who live in Albany, N.Y., was discovered by HCI Books, which publishes inspirational non-fiction titles such as the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, after their wedding appeared in the New York Times’ “Vows” section. HCI was starting a line of “reality-based romance” books—a unique literary venture. The first three novels, marketed under the banner “Vows: Life Romanticized,” will launch in October. They’ll be penned by bestselling authors, who between them have published more than 150 romance novels: Alison Kent (A Long, Hard Ride), Julie Leto (Stripped), and Judith Arnold (Barefoot in the Grass). Miller and Davoli’s story should capture readers, says HCI editorial director Michele Matrisciani, because it has the elements of a juicy romance: “The conflict, drama, love, quirkiness, personality.”

It’s also rich in innuendo-laced encounters. Before they started dating, Davoli considered renting an apartment in Miller’s building. They ran into each other in the lobby, and Miller offered to “watch his dog if he moved in,” she recalls. Davoli took the place above hers. When he got locked out one night, Davoli knocked on Miller’s door for help. “So I picked his lock,” she says, “and after that we went on our first official date.” They fell in love—buoyed by their enthusiasm for sports. “Going upstairs to watch the game” became code for “something else.”

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Pray for Mr. & Ms. Elizabeth Gilbert

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 10:41 AM - 8 Comments

When readers last left Elizabeth Gilbert, she and her Brazilian lover were jumping joyously into the Java Sea. The leap was metaphorical as well—a triumphant ending to Eat, Pray, Love, the American writer’s post-divorce, pan-continental self-discovery tour capped by her falling in love with a man she dubbed “Felipe,” a precious gem importer 17 years her senior. The 2006 single-gal escape fantasy became a cultural phenom, selling millions of copies, inspiring travel junkets, and spawning a chick flick starring Julia Roberts out later this year.

Now there’s a sequel, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, which traces a more tortuous internal trek: Gilbert’s attempt to shed her (re)marriage aversion before taking Felipe as her husband. She succeeds, more or less, though sadly all indicators point to the legalized love match being doomed.
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Women like more primal “hairy, muscular” men during tough economic times

By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 11:02 AM - 1 Comment

As the economy shrinks after a decade of gluttonous consumption—demographer Bernard Salt says new taboos against smoking, gambling, corporate greed, immoral behaviour and obesity have lead to a rise in environmentalism and the death of the metrosexual. Salt says a study shows that the length of women’s hemlines also reflects changes in the economy. Hemlines rise during a boom, he says, and drop during a recession. In a boom, women are not worried about their financial security and are “attracted to slim, geeky, metrosexual hairless males,” he told the audience at a marketing convention in Brisbane, Australia. “Whereas in a downturn, evolutionary theory kicks in for survival, and women are concerned about their food supply and look for someone a little more muscular, more primal, a little more hairy.” Salt cites a rise in fear as the reason why people “retreat to the tribe for security,” and why women would be attracted to a man who could “fight off a mammoth,” adding that marketing will probably reflect this shift in consumer tastes.

Brisbane Times

Anti-love drugs?

By Cathy Gulli - Friday, June 6, 2008 at 4:28 PM - 0 Comments

Depression is a tyrant. A woman I spoke with recently described her experience with it as feeling like she had been rolled up in a thick, black carpet and cut off from the world.

For her, antidepressant drugs, of which she tried many, helped. They work for a lot of people.

But these meds may have a negative impact too. This is the worst I’ve heard: antidepressant drugs may make it harder for people to fall in love. 

The hypothesis is put forth by The Nature of Love blogger, Helen Fisher, in a 2007 booked called What is your Dangerous Idea? 

Incidentally, she runs what appears to be a dating service website. 

And yes, I know, this idea is more than a year old—but come on, it’s interesting.

More Depression

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, June 4, 2008 at 11:18 AM - 0 Comments

Will I ever run out of depressing ’80s title sequences for shows that should have ended years ago? No. No, I will not. Here is the ninth season of The Love Boat, when Julie had been booted off the ship for being a coke fiend and the new blond on board was… Ted McGinley. Of course. Who else?  And, worst of all, they dumped Jack Jones’ recording of the theme song and replaced it with Dionne Warwick. Who was more popular than Jack Jones, but nonetheless, re-recording an iconic theme song almost always is a shark-jumping moment. Also note that they clearly couldn’t afford any guest stars who cost more than the bare minimum. (I love Gordon Jump and Melanie Chartoff, but nobody says, “oh, Melanie Chartoff’s on tonight, let’s set the VCR!” Okay, maybe I would say that, but nobody else.)

These titles are from a German broadcast, so we get “Gavin McLeod als Kapitän.”