via guardian.co.uk
Turns out, if you control for income and and education, marriage appears to confer little benefit over cohabitation on child development. Hat tip to flutterby. Original research report here.
Why Feminism Is the Anti-Viagra
11-Apr-11
Our mammalian brains come wired with very ancient sexual preferences, quite prominent in the most popular forms of male and female erotica preferred by Homo sapiens. Men are aroused by being dominant and by submissive women, women are aroused by being submissive and by dominant men. In the bedroom, inequality beats equality.
If you suspect this is some kind of stealth agenda for justifying belligerent or misogynistic male behavior, read on, for there is a fascinating neural caveat. One of the most startling findings from our desire research is this: men and women’s brains each come wired with the neural circuitry for both sexual dominance and sexual submission. When Nature builds our brains, it installs both the “male” and “female” subcortical circuits, but apparently only links one of these circuits to the arousal system. Scientists can trigger lordosis in male rats by activating their dormant submission circuitry, and can trigger masculine mounting in female rats by activating their dormant dominance circuitry.
via psychologytoday.com
Where have all the most appealing men gone? Married young, most of them—and sometimes to women whose most salient characteristic was not their beauty, or passion, or intellect, but their decisiveness.
via hookingupsmart.com
Check out the rest of the post — lot’s of interesting stuff.
It’s not impossible to have ANY passion with comfort or ANY comfort with passion. It’s that the two don’t coexist easily. The very thing that ignites passion is friction and instability. Once again, look at your past. Passion is usually brief, intense and rocky. Comfort, on the other hand, tends to be softer and more nurturing.
Comfort, therefore, is not nearly as exciting, but it tends to last longer. Studies say that passion usually dissipates in 18-24 months. Which is why people who expect their passion to last for 40 years, in essence, are trying to defy the laws of nature.
via evanmarckatz.com
Will Your Marriage Last?
03-Jan-11
First, contrary to popular belief, Huston found that many newlyweds are far from blissfully in love. Second, couples whose marriages begin in romantic bliss are particularly divorce-prone because such intensity is too hard to maintain. Believe it or not, marriages that start out with less “Hollywood romance” usually have more promising futures. Accordingly, and this is the third major finding, spouses in lasting but lackluster marriages are not prone to divorce, as one might suspect; their marriages are less fulfilling to begin with, so there is no erosion of a Western-style romantic ideal. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it is the loss of love and affection, not the emergence of interpersonal issues, that sends couples journeying toward divorce.
By the end of Huston’s study in 1994, the couples looked a lot like the rest of America, falling into four groups. They were either married and happy; married and unhappy; divorced early, within seven years; or divorced later, after seven years–and each category showed a distinct pattern.
via psychologytoday.com
The Futurist: The Misandry Bubble
02-Jan-10
It is true that women, on average, earn less per year than men do. It is also true that 22-year-olds earn less, on average, than 40-year-olds. Why is the latter not an example of age discrimination, while the former is seized upon as an example of gender discrimination?
If women truly did earn less for doing exactly the same job as a man, any non-sexist CEO could thrash his competition by hiring only women, thus saving 25% on employee salaries relative to his competitors. Are we to believe that every major CEO and Board of Directors is so sexist as to sacrifice billions of dollars of profit? When the ‘Director of Corporate Social Responsibility’ of a nun congregation wrote to TJ Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, that his company should have more women in its Board of Directors, Rodgers replied with a letter explaining why the pursuit of profit could not accommodate such political correctness.
via singularity2050.com
Posted via web from crasch’s posterous
This is the Question
07-Apr-09
The Science of When to Get Married
When Charles Darwin wrote “This is the Question,” a set of notes he drafted between 1837 and 1838, he was not pondering finches. “This is the Question” represented the evolutionary theorist’s attempt to logically evaluate whether he should marry his girlfriend, Emma Wedgwood.
no phone, QOTD
16-Oct-08
I accidentally left my phone in Idaho. So I’ll be incommunicado by phone until tomorrow.
Also, heh:
“All marriages are same-sex marriages, after about two years.”
-”Joe”, commenting on this article
I’m not sure what I think about this article by Lori Gottlieb, but it touches on some things I’ve been thinking about recently. As a guy, the pressure on me to “settle” is much lower than it is on a woman who wants to have children. Even so, I’ve been much happier when I’ve been in a relationship.
However, I also want to find the best mate that I can. This has caused me to end relationships with good women, who, for one reason or another, I thought weren’t right for me. And given the prospect of pain from future breakups, I’ve been quite reluctant to make the effort to enter into additional relationships, unless it is with someone with whom I think I could spend the rest of my life. As a result, I often feel lonely.
I’m not sure what the right tradeoff is.
By the time 35th-birthday-brunch celebrations roll around for still-single women, serious, irreversible life issues masquerading as “jokes” creep into public conversation: Well, I don’t feel old, but my eggs sure do! or Maybe this year I’ll marry Todd. I’m not getting any younger! The birthday girl smiles a bit too widely as she delivers these lines, and everyone laughs a little too hard for a little too long, not because we find these sentiments funny, but because we’re awkwardly acknowledging how unfunny they are. At their core, they pose one of the most complicated, painful, and pervasive dilemmas many single women are forced to grapple with nowadays: Is it better to be alone, or to settle?
My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year. (It’s hard to maintain that level of zing when the conversation morphs into discussions about who’s changing the diapers or balancing the checkbook.)