How "The Sims" turned me into a home wrecker - Life stories - Salon.com: "When I was younger, I figured I'd have everything together by 30. I would have a stable and rewarding career. A partner I loved and trusted. A quaint little bungalow on a tree-lined street. Maybe even a child. But here I was, rounding the corner to the big three-oh and none of these things were even a blip on the horizon. Sometimes, even finding a matching pair of socks to wear in the morning was a small personal triumph. At 29 and 11/12ths, I felt like less of a grown-up than I did at 25 -- the last time I actually had dental insurance.
There was nothing I could do to slow down time. So, in an effort to distract myself from the dreaded birthday countdown, I picked up a habit I hadn't dabbled in for years.
I started to play video games."
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Monday, October 11, 2010
Grown Up but Irresponsible
THEY have sex with friends, acquaintances and people they’re casually dating. Many have never been tested for H.I.V. or any other sexually transmitted disease, but they rarely use condoms. Who are they?The irresponsible scoundrels are not teenagers but 50-something singles, according to the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, one of the most comprehensive national sex studies in almost 20 years, carried out at the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University.
It turns out that “friends with benefits” — a sexual partner who is “just a friend,” and neither a soulmate nor a romantic interest — isn’t just for teenagers and college students anymore, and maybe it never was. Young adults may have given the practice a new name, but it probably started during the ’60s sexual revolution, when the middle-aged Americans of today were young themselves.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/weekinreview/10rabin.html?_r=1&ref=weekinreview
Read On
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Emotional Affair: The difference between an Emotional and Physical Affair
Question: What Is The Difference Between An Emotional Affair And A Physical Affair?http://divorcesupport.about.com/od/emotionalaffairs/f/emotianlaffair.htmThe traditional definition of cheating is that one person in a committed relationship is physically involved with someone other than his/her spouse. In recent years, cheating has been reclassified to include not only the physical affair but, also, the emotional affair.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Is infidelity natural? Ask the apes
(CNN) -- In recent weeks, a series of CNN articles have appeared purporting to get to the bottom of male infidelity. "Men More Likely to Cheat on Women With Bigger Paychecks," one headline informs us; yet in the body of the article we are told that the opposite is true as well: "A man who makes significantly more money than his girlfriend or wife is also more likely to cheat."
It's a bit bewildering, keeping track of all the things that could cause a man to be unfaithful. Earn too much and he might cheat, but earn too little and he might cheat then, too.
Association is not the same as causality, but news outlets have latched on to this anyway as the reason actress Sandra Bullock was betrayed; high-and-low-earning ladies everywhere had better beware.
This article and others like it that surface in the media every so often amount to something of a cottage industry in the justification of male infidelity. Scratch the surface of any of them and you get a phenomenon of male entitlement that is oddly abetted by some women.
For example, if you thought that the man himself had anything to do with it, former "sugarbabe" and mistress Holly Hill explains otherwise in an article that ran a few weeks ago: "Men are hardwired to betray women on the long-term." In this view, man is but a victim of faulty "wiring" -- although the wires evidently worked well enough to fund her "sugarbabe" business.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/09/02/shalit.infidelity/index.html?hpt=C2
Monday, August 30, 2010
How Sex Hurts the Workplace, Especially Women
Sex in the workplace doesn't just hurt those parties involved. Sure, Mark Hurd's recent scandal produced three obvious casualties: Mark Hurd, Hewlett Packard and its shareholders, and even, to an extent, Jodie Fisher. But in the barrage of press attention since the news broke, little mention has been made of a large group of other casualties: high-achieving female executives.
Women's careers tend to stall out in upper-middle management and female executives need the support and sponsorship of C-suite men if they are to stand a chance of climbing the highest rungs of the corporate ladder. Sad to say, in the wake of the Hurd ouster, sponsorship is going to be in even shorter supply. However tangled the Hurd/Fisher narrative becomes, a large proportion of male leaders who read the story will have one and only one takeaway: "Poor guy was fired for dining alone with a junior woman. No one is even alleging a sexual relationship. How crazy is that! It makes me want to avoid ever being alone with a younger female colleague." So said one C-suite male I talked to.
All of which puts a crimp on sponsorship, a relationship which requires a senior executive to "use up chips" to help a high potential mid-level executive gain visibility, win plum assignments, and eventually get promoted. To take on a protégée — a serious commitment — a sponsor needs to get to know the candidate well and spend a significant time one-on-one (possibly even having dinner!) in order to assess his or her potential and decide whether he or she is worth backing.
Research out this fall from the Center for Work-Life Policy shows sponsorship to be the critical promotional lever for women in the marzipan layer, the layer just below the top layer of management. No matter how high achieving, an upper middle-level female executive will fail to find career traction unless she is sponsored by a powerful senior executive — who, more often than not, is male and married.
High Flying Women lie about Sex Too
What’s a girl to do? According to new research, men are more likely to be unfaithful if their wives are high-fliers – so maybe your marriage will be safer if you stay at home and bring up the children.
Except, unfortunately, that sounds like even less fun: although women who are financially dependent on their husbands are not likely to cheat, their highly paid spouses still tend to stray.
“At one end of the spectrum, making less money than a female partner may threaten men’s gender identity by calling into question the traditional notion of men as breadwinners,” reckons Christin Munsch, author of The Effect of Relative Income Disparity on Infidelity for Men and Women. “At the other end of the spectrum, men who make a lot more money than their partners may be in jobs that offer more opportunities for cheating, like long working hours, [and] travel.”
It turns out that the best bet for women hoping to ensure their husbands’ fidelity is to make roughly 75 per cent of their partner’s earnings. I can see exactly why this would work: it’s enough to allow the woman to feel financially independent – and for her husband to understand that to be the case – but not enough for the man to feel that his masculinity is impugned.
Luckily, it is indeed often the case that husbands make a bit more than their working wives – a few years on what Americans call “the Mommy track” often depresses women’s earnings, even for couples with roughly parallel careers.
But these things are hard to plan, particularly since many of us meet our future spouses at university or in the first few years of our working lives. At that point, a decision that one or other partner will be the main breadwinner seems more straightforward.
Munsch’s assumption is that men’s confidence comes under threat if their wives earn substantially more then they do, whereas it is socially acceptable for women to be supported by their husbands. There is doubtless a lot of truth to that – but there may be other explanations for her results.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/tracycorrigan/7951397/High-flying-women-lie-about-sex-too.html
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