WHEN IT COMES TO BREAKING-UP, THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A FRIENDLY GHOST.
A moment of silence, please, in honor of the Charlize Theron / Sean Penn break-up.
Can you believe another Hollywood romance, inexplicably down the drain?
One minute they were headed down the aisle, and the next, she’s ignoring his phone calls, emails and texts, and pretending he barely existed in the first place. In other words, she’s ghosting him.
The rumor-mill (which is always right), describes Penn as a hyper-critical, tantrum-prone, alcohol-fueled bully. So when Charlize couldn’t take it anymore, she did what she had to do.
Sure, but by ghosting him? Was there no other way?
Ghosting is a modern-day break-up phenomenon, that seems to be gaining in popularity. It consists of foregoing traditional measures of ending a realtionship, like communicating, or saying good-bye, or asking the person you were dating not to contact you anymore.
WHY WHAT’S BETWEEN YOUR EARS AND WHAT’S BETWEEN THE SHEETS HAVE MORE IN COMMON THAN YOU THINK.
If you leave your house looking like a sexy kitten, or a zombie accountant, people might think you’re nuts. Unless it’s Halloween.
A full-body massage is great. Unless Dan, your creepy boss, is trying to give it you.
If you’re zooming down the road at 110mph, it better be a race track.
What I’m talking about here is context.
It’s what makes the difference between a $500 speeding ticket and an impressive lap time. It’s what separates your cool costume from a 5150 commitment against your will. It’s what distinguishes romance, from a sexual harassment suit.
And it’s what makes all the difference in the world, when it comes to your sex life.
Why it’s just not cool, to be chill.
When it comes to dating, being “chill” has climbed the ranks as a highly coveted, basically non-negotiable quality that our romantic partners should possess. Wait. Did I say dating? I meant “hanging out.” Or “talking to.” Or “chillin with…”
Sorry, I’m not sure…
A few minutes on Tindr, Hitch, or Cupid, will render incontrovertible evidence that if you are not CHILL, then you might as well be dead.
Wait, what’s that? You’re honest and fun? Understanding and ambitious? You have amazing personal hygiene, great friends, and breasts that men and women alike would murder their grandmother to get their hands on? Doesn’t matter. If you’re not chill, then, well, good luck to you.
A culture of “chill” has invaded out modern dating climate.
Checking the weather? Don’t bother. It’s chill. It’s always chill.
GET THIS. SOME OF YOUR RELATIONSHIP PROBLEMS HAVE NO SOLUTION.
That’s right. No matter how many fights you get into, or how many different ways you find of saying the same thing, you and your partner will not make it better. That thing you’ve fought about from the beginning of time? It will probably stick around until the end of time. It will stay bad, painful, annoying, or ridiculous, literally forever.
According to research, most of our relationship problems, 69% of them in fact, are unsolvable.
Why? Because, says relationship researcher John Gottman, they are based on deeply ingrained differences in personalities and needs. i.e.Olivia Pope herself couldn’t fix them.
So, how do you know if you're dealing with a perpetual problem?
5 RELATIONSHIP HACKS TO HELP YOU FIGHT WITH YOUR PARTNER WITHOUT RUINING YOUR RELATIONSHIP.
Everybody fights.
Everybody has a belly button. Everybody poops. And everybody fights. These are 3 inarguable truths, behind which lies all psychological health and spiritual success.
You know who didn’t fight? Ward and June Cleaver. And were they happy? No. They were miserable. Every night after dinner, Ward stumbled into the basement to look at pictures of his ex-girlfriend, and finish off a bottle of gin he’d refer to as Wilson, until he blacked out. All the while, June tucked herself into her twin bed, to recite the serenity prayer exactly 103 times before falling asleep.
Conflict in our relationships is a lifeline to their health. Conflict, like sex. Conflict, like acceptance. Conflict, like love, is the beating heart of our partnerships, transmitting the blood, sweat and tears necessary for survival.
Why ambivalence in relationships, Isn't the kiss of death.
Back in July, Mark Manson wrote a blog post that achieved internet breaking kind of buzz; Sexy felon Jeremy Meeks, meets Kim Kardashian’s butt, kind of buzz.
In this article, he introduces the Law of F*ck Yes or No, an edict that provides one clear directive for how to simplify our screwed up lives.
His advice goes as follows: If you’re thinking about getting involved with someone new, they should inspire a full blown F*ck Yes, in order for you to move forward.
The other person, must then reciprocate with an F-yes of equally mammoth proportions, in order for you to proceed with them.
When I first read his post, I agreed hands down.
Our story begins 12,000 years ago in a sleepy hamlet called paleolithic Egypt. Among boring things like ritual burial sites and harpoons, you’ll find some of the earliest surviving examples of pornography.
Cave drawings depicting nude bodies in exaggerated states of sexual excitement, as well as close-ups of good-old human genitalia have been found in these paleolithic chambers. More recently (2005), archeologists found what they believe to be a 7,200 year old scene of a sexually aroused male body bending over a female figure.
According to my calculations, doggie-style has been around for at least 7,000 years.
We may have traded in our cave walls for computer screens, and our chisels, for hi-definition video cameras, but (as you can tell from your partner's search history), porn is anything but on the decline.
There's a point in a relationship when you feel like a nuclear bomb is about to explode inside your throat. Like you’ve swallowed liters of Pepsi and chased them with Alka-Seltzer. Like Miley Cyrus is swinging on that good old wrecking ball of hers, aiming for your pathetic little heart. This is the horrifying instant, in which the words “I love you,” want to pull a geographic from your mouth, and into the perfectly shaped ears of your beloved.
Some of us relish hearing and saying these words. We feel brave, uplifted, open, and closer to our partners. Brene Brown defines vulnerability as “uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.”If this isn’t it, I don’t know what is.
TO OTHERS, HOWEVER, THE THOUGHT OF TELLING SOMEONE WE LOVE THEM IS ON PAR WITH WATCHING A HOME VIDEO OF OUR OWN CONCEPTION, WHICH OUR PARENTS ADMIT, GOT PRETTY WILD.
HOW TO DEAL WITH YOUR PARTNER'S SEXUAL PAST!
It's probably safe to assume that the person you're currently sleeping with, slept with someone else before you. In fact, she might have slept with someone else immediately before sleeping with you, if you're not monogamous. It's also probably safe to assume that she perfected that Rock-a-Bye-Booty you like so much with someone else, and that she realized she was into light spanking with yep, you got it, her Brazilian ex who as she puts it, "helped the flower of her sexuality blossom." (p.s. puke)
I for one, learned the hard way that La Isla Bonita is a silly song to have sex to. That's the kind of invaluable information that I know for sure has been appreciated by my partners.
Some of us don't worry too much about what, (or who) came before us. My own partner, for example, says infuriatingly reasonable things like "It's none of my business," or "It had nothing to do with me." Comments to which I soundly reply by walking away indignantly and cracking open my copy of When Things Fall Apart.
THERE'S ONLY ONE RULE AND IT WILL SAVE YOUR LOVE LIFE.
So I'm having a conversation the other day with a lovely human being. She and I are in her car, blithely arguing about systems theory or flash mobs. I'm almost certain that I'm right and she's wrong, as is so often the case between us.
Thanks to my interest in neuroscience, I happened to know that my autonomic nervous system was doing it’s thing, via my sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems which were regulating my cardiac and vasomotor activity, balancing my cortisol levels, and integrating input from my limbic system. In a nutshell, keeping it real.
SUDDENLY, THIS LOVELY HUMAN ACCUSES ME OF GETTING DEFENSIVE.
I was doing no such thing, so I might have snapped back and told her that the British woman inside the GPS system was better attuned to me than she was, and that her ability to be wrong so many times in a row was as impressive as it was sad.
Why slut-shaming is ruining your sex life!
So it looks like KStew and RPatz are back together. Huge sigh of relief. Order has been restored in the sleepy hamlet of Hollywood.
As an 11 year old friend of mine says, "sometimes people in movies fall in love." True. And sometimes, people in movies have a hard time in their relationships. Sometimes people in movies put on their matching Chinese cashmere Snuggies, sit in their Spanish Revival style living room, underneath an original collection of Hiroshi Sugimoto photographs, and have a come to jesus conversation about the state of their union.
So Snow White had a not so snow white moment.
Why can't we leave it at that and admire K-Rob for their capacity for forgiveness and reconciliation? Kristen is being slammed in the media for (gasp) having cheated on her boyfriend. A 22 year old cheating on her boyfriend? What a way to devastate the nation.
HOW OFTEN DO YOU AND YOUR SEX PARTNERS TALK ABOUT THE SEX YOU'RE HAVING?
- Do you talk more about Justing Bieber than about your own beaver?
- More about Law and Order than about the way the law regulates our bedrooms?
- More about whether you should get bangs, than how you are (or aren't) getting banged?
- More about Glee than about experiencing actual pleasure in the bedroom?
Allow me to digress.
This past weekend, I attended the 2012 Good Vibrations Sex Summit, among the likes of Carol Queen, trans activist Yosenio V. Lewis and the sexysmart Emily Morse. Tucked in the honeymoon (conference) suite of the Marriot Marquis, icons and iconoclasts of sex, pop culture, media, academic research and scientific inquiry got in bed together and did it.
And by did it, I mean they came together and started ridiculously poignant conversations, that we should all be getting in on.
There's a song by Akron/Family that I've been listening to everyday for about a week now. The lyrics go "Don't be afraid, it's only love. Don't be afraid, it's only love. Love is simple."
LOVE IS F*CKING SIMPLE.
But it sure ain't easy. And you know why it's not easy? Because we make it harder on ourselves than it has to be. We take something beautiful and we piss all over it. I'm about 85% sure Thich Nhat Hanh said that.
If you're anything like me, you have a giant ego to go along with your giant heart and your incredible fashion sense.
And our ego complicates the sh*t out of our love lives. Egos can't stand to be ignored. They love scheming and plotting and scandal. Worst of all, they'll do anything, and I mean anything to look good.
Our egos are little Blair Waldorfs running amok on the Upper East Side of our personalities. If you have no idea what that means, a) start watching Gossip Girl and b) it doesn't matter, you get the idea.
LUCKILY, THERE'S A SECRET TO LASTING LOVE, OR AT LEAST TO LOVE LASTING MORE THAN A WEEK:
5 NO-NONSENSE WAYS, TO SEND YOUR EX PACKING FOR GOOD.
Ok, so you just got dumped. It was awful. You looked down at your phone and there it was, a text from your now ex saying something like “it's over baby, xoxo Gossip Girl.”
Or it was even worse and your partner said they “loved you, but they weren’t in love with you." Yeah right.
Or get ready for this: they died. Yep, that happens.
It really doesn’t matter if your break-up was with your love of 50 years or with that dude from OKCupid who looks just like Anderson Cooper and decided to stop emailing you. Or even if it was with the cutie who works at Gap, who you’re not exactly dating, but you could be...
Getting over a broken heart is hard. Maybe one of the hardest things in the world.
IT'S TIME TO CELEBRATE YOUR GAY STRAIGHT QUEER BI TRANS QUESTIONING POLY PAN ASEXUAL SELF.
The coming out process is as diverse and unique as the individuals experiencing it. For a few of us, it’s like ripping off a band-aid: mildly painful, but quick. For most of us, however, it’s a continual process of unwrapping a gauze that encircles all aspects of our lives. Sometimes we are pushed out of the closet by external circumstances. At other times, we simply put one foot in front of the other and walk out on our own.
OTHERS OF US DON’T COME OUT UNTIL THE PAIN OF “STAYING IN” HAS BECOME UNBEARABLE.
The benefits of coming out are great, but they might not be quickly or readily apparent. It’s unlikely that we’ll make an announcement over our school intercom, to the sound of wild applause. We don’t get a shiny new toaster for being the 500,000th person to come out. But the bounty of inner cash and prizes is magnificent. It comes in the form of self-respect, integrity and congruence. We stop relating to ourselves as if we were broken, flawed, or perverse and we can finally release the dead weight of our secrets.
I hear about body shame, eating disorders, chronic dieting, and body dysmorphia on an almost daily basis in my psychotherapy practice. Seems like everyone with a heartbeat and a Facebook account thinks that their thighs are too big. Somehow, fitting in with our peers is predicated on fitting into our skinny jeans. This is sad and it is dangerous. The emotional byproducts of negative body image are poor self-esteem, isolation, self-neglect and a hungry loneliness that's never quite satisfied.
If we take a page from almost any ladymag, we end up with more than just tips on how to f*ck like a vampire or undress for success. It’s an oversimplification for sure, but without proper community and self-support, internalized messages from popular culture can turn us into bullies against our own bodies.
AND THESE DAYS, OUR VAGINAS ARE NEXT ON THE HIT LIST.
