Via the SLOG:
Holy epic music.
Relationships
New love is fleeting.
in Love, Relationships
Artwork by Aashika Damodar.
From the New York Times:
New Love: A Short Shelf Life
IN fairy tales, marriages last happily ever after. Science, however, tells us that wedded bliss has but a limited shelf life.
American and European researchers tracked 1,761 people who got married and stayed married over the course of 15 years. The findings were clear: newlyweds enjoy a big happiness boost that lasts, on average, for just two years. Then the special joy wears off and they are back where they started, at least in terms of happiness. The findings, from a 2003 study, have been confirmed by several recent studies.
The good news for the holiday season when families gather in various configurations is that if couples get past that two-year slump and hang on — for another couple of decades — they may well recover the excitement of the honeymoon period 18 to 20 years later, when children are gone. Then, in the freedom of the so-called empty nest, partners are left to discover one another — and often their early bliss — once again.
When love is new, we have the rare capacity to experience great happiness while being stuck in traffic or getting our teeth cleaned. We are in the throes of what researchers call passionate love, a state of intense longing, desire and attraction. In time, this love generally morphs into companionate love, a less impassioned blend of deep affection and connection. The reason is that human beings are, as more than a hundred studies show, prone to hedonic adaptation, a measurable and innate capacity to become habituated or inured to most life changes.
With all due respect to poets and pop radio songwriters, new love seems nearly as vulnerable to hedonic adaptation as a new job, a new home, a new coat and other novel sources of pleasure and well-being. (Though the thrill of a new material acquisition generally fades faster.)
Read the rest of the article here.
Must-read for the straight men: Flirting.
From Charlie Glickman, and continuing on a theme from previous posts this month:
Something I Want Men To Know Before Flirting With Women
There’s been an important shift in several different communities and scenes lately. In the kink world, in atheism circles, among feminist folks and their allies, in pagan communities, I’ve been seeing more people than ever before talking about the effects of sexual coercion, assault, harassment, unwanted attention, and other related topics. Of course, none of this is particularly new and women have been talking about it for years. But what’s different is the nature of the dialogue. More men who want to be allies to women are speaking up, and thanks to the potential of the internet and social networking, more people are seeing the patterns than ever before. There are plenty of folks with lots of great stuff to say, and I don’t feel the need to repeat their words here. Instead, I want to address something that I wish I’d understood much earlier than I did.
Many of the reactions to this growing awareness that I’ve seen from men is some form of resentment that they don’t get to flirt with, cruise, or attempt to pick up women whenever they happen to see someone attractive. Leaving aside the underlying assumption that men should be able to express their sexual desire any time we want, I want to talk about the general cluelessness of most men around the incessant sexual intrusion that most women experience and the effects that has on flirting.
I’m writing this specifically for the men who want to flirt with women, whether the hope is for a one-night stand, a relationship, a conversation, a date, or simply to pass the time. What happens when the intention is to harass, stalk, annoy, or get any other reaction from women is a different thing. But right there, that is the root of the problem. A lot of the time, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to tell the difference. That sucks for the guys who genuinely want to connect with someone. And you know what? As much as it sucks for you and me, it’s many, many times worse for women. We can decide to deal with this situation or not, but women don’t get that choice because they get harassed all the time. So the first thing we need to wrap our brains around is that expecting women to have sympathy for how we feel when this is unpleasant for us is like expecting someone with a broken leg to have sympathy for someone who’s got a sprained finger. If they have the bandwidth and interest, that’s great! But resenting them when they don’t isn’t helpful. We need to stop expecting women to coddle our feelings and take care of them for ourselves.
Please go read the rest here.
The link between pronouns and dating success.
From Shots (NPR's Health Blog):
To Predict Dating Success, The Secret's In The Pronouns
On a recent Friday night, 30 men and 30 women gathered at a hotel restaurant in Washington, D.C. Their goal was love, or maybe sex, or maybe some combination of the two. They were there for speed dating.
The women sat at separate numbered tables while the men moved down the line, and for two solid hours they did a rotation, making small talk with people they did not know, one after another, in three-minute increments.
I had gone to record the night, which was put on by a company called Professionals in the City, and what struck me was the noise in the room. The sound of words, of people talking over people talking over people talking. It was a roar.
What were these people saying?
And what can we learn from what they are saying?
That is why I called James Pennebaker, a psychologist interested in the secret life of pronouns.
About 20 years ago Pennebaker, who's at the University of Texas at Austin, got interested in looking more closely at the words that we use. Or rather, he got interested in looking more closely at a certain subset of the words that we use: Pennebaker was interested in function words.
For those of you like me — the grammatically challenged — function words are the smallish words that tie our sentences together.
The. This. Though. I. And. An. There. That.
"Function words are essentially the filler words," Pennebaker says. "These are the words that we don't pay attention to, and they're the ones that are so interesting."
[...]
Which brings us back to speed dating.
See, one of the things that Pennebaker did was record and transcribe conversations that took place between people on speed dates. He fed these conversations into his program along with information about how the people themselves were perceiving the dates. What he found surprised him.
"We can predict by analyzing their language, who will go on a date — who will match — at rates better than the people themselves," he says.
Specifically, what Pennabaker found was that when the language style of two people matched, when they used pronouns, prepositions, articles and so forth in similar ways at similar rates, they were much more likely to end up on a date.
"The more similar [they were] across all of these function words, the higher the probability that [they] would go on a date in a speed dating context," Pennebaker says. "And this is even cooler: We can even look at ... a young dating couple... [and] the more similar [they] are ... using this language style matching metric, the more likely [they] will still be dating three months from now."
Read the rest of the article for the full scoop here.
Polygamy in Netherlands.
Passed along by Andrew (thanks!).
This is from 2005 - I assume that there have been more of these types of marriages since.
From the Brussels Journal:
First Trio "Married" in The Netherlands
The Netherlands and Belgium were the first countries to give full marriage rights to homosexuals. In the United States some politicians propose “civil unions” that give homosexual couples the full benefits and responsibilities of marriage. These civil unions differ from marriage only in name.
Meanwhile in the Netherlands polygamy has been legalised in all but name. Last Friday the first civil union of three partners was registered. Victor de Bruijn (46) from Roosendaal “married” both Bianca (31) and Mirjam (35) in a ceremony before a notary who duly registered their civil union.
“I love both Bianca and Mirjam, so I am marrying them both,” Victor said. He had previously been married to Bianca. Two and a half years ago they met Mirjam Geven through an internet chatbox. Eight weeks later Mirjam deserted her husband and came to live with Victor and Bianca. After Mirjam’s divorce the threesome decided to marry.
Victor: “A marriage between three persons is not possible in the Netherlands, but a civil union is. We went to the notary in our marriage costume and exchanged rings. We consider this to be just an ordinary marriage.”
Asked by journalists to tell the secret of their peculiar relationship, Victor explained that there is no jealousy between them. “But this is because Mirjam and Bianca are bisexual. I think that with two heterosexual women it would be more difficult.” Victor stressed, however, that he is “a one hundred per cent heterosexual” and that a fourth person will not be allowed into the “marriage.” They want to take their marriage obligations seriously: “to be honest and open with each other and not philander.”
Documentary: The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye.
in Gender, Relationships
From the documentary description:
[...]
But that's just the preamble to the story. Defying artistic boundaries, Genesis has re-defined his art as a challenge to the limits of biology. In 2000, Genesis began a series of sex reassignment surgeries in order to more closely resemble his love, Lady Jaye (née Jacqueline Breyer), who remained his wife and artistic partner for nearly 15 years. It was the ultimate act of devotion, and Genesis's most risky, ambitious, and subversive performance to date: he became a she in a triumphant act of artistic self-expression. Genesis called this project "Creating the Pandrogyne", an attempt to deconstruct two individual identities through the creation of an indivisible third.
[...]
The homepage for the film is here.
AT&T silent treatment ad.
Also passed along by Laura (thanks!).
Silent treatment.
Passed along by Laura (thanks!).
Sexual relationships road map.
Click to make larger:
Where do you fit?
More wisdom from Jenna Marbles.
The queen of satire, with more of her signature genius. NSFW language!
Documentary: I Love You And You And You - End of Monogamy
From the BBC:
A growing number of people are choosing a new way of life. They have rejected monogamy and turned their backs on conventional relationships. They believe their lifestyle is the future. They believe in polyamory.
Polyamory is the philosophy and practice of loving more than one. It means you no longer have to make do with one partner. You can have two or three, and so on without fear of jealousy or reprisal, and so can your partner.
With divorce rates almost up to one in two and 60% of couples having affairs, this fascinating film follows two ‘polyamorous’ families to see whether this growing subculture really could be a justifiable alternative to monogamy…?
Happy Valentine's Day.
in Love, Relationships
From Google:
Lars and the Real Girl.
On the theme of adult dolls (passed along by Andrea - thanks!):
And one more on real dolls.
More robot love.
Davecat is a visionary in the robot-human intimacy world. He is a "doll husband", probably the first ever. His relationship with Sidore, a Real Doll, is going on ten years plus, although she's recently worn out and has been reincarnated (i.e., replaced with the same model).
From an Asylum article about Dave and Sidore:
Let's pretend, for a second, you're a lonesome guy who has bad luck with women. You buy an upscale silicone love doll and grow attached to "her"; but, after a decade of lovin', she starts to fall apart.
What's a man to do?
If you're 37-year-old Michigan telemarketer Dave Cat, you have the $6,500 rubber lady "reincarnated." Which is to say, you commission an exact replica of her to be stripped, molded and painted. And you bring her back from the freakin' dead.
Dave considers himself a "doll husband" and hasn't dated a flesh-and-blood woman since he bought his Real Doll -- a synthetic female with a skeletal frame, joints, and rubber sex organs -- in July 2000.
So imagine his sense of horror when, a few months ago, he noticed an 8-inch tear in her lower back, where her plastic hips connect to a spine. "She was literally bed-ridden," he tells Asylum. "I couldn't take her downstairs, and the sex was very limited."
Worried, he called Real Doll founder Matt McMullen, who is the mad scientist of the sex-doll industry. "He asked us to save her,'" McMullen says. "To me it was really touching."
Dave spent years conceiving his doll's personality and back story. He'll tell you her name is Sidore -- "friends call her Si-Chan" -- and that she was born near Tokyo, but later moved to England. She's a Goth and is "partial to Joy Division, Mecha-based video games and foot rubs."
The rest of the article is here.
Dave has blogged extensively about his relationship, and it's fascinating on many levels. From his bio:
Long-term partner to Synthetik Goth girl Sidore Kuroneko, Davecat spends his days sleeping, (barely) restraining his contempt for popular culture, researching developments in Gynoid and high-end dutch wife production, listening to Power-electronics and Sixties yé-yé in equal measure, pretending he’s a bon vivant, overshooting his spending limit, and writing about himself in the third person. He lives in a city on a land mass, somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere.
His blog can be found here.
The idea of human-robot relationships is nothing new. For example, in the 1982 film Blade Runner (which rules, and you should see it if you haven't), Harrison Ford's character falls in love with a female replicant. The trailer:
Is this what the future holds for us?
Meet Roxxxy.
According to experts in the field, we're not far off from full-on robot-human intimate relationships. From a LiveScience interview with Dr. David Levy, one of the pioneers:
"My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots," artificial intelligence researcher David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands told LiveScience. Levy recently completed his Ph.D. work on the subject of human-robot relationships, covering many of the privileges and practices that generally come with marriage as well as outside of it.
At first, sex with robots might be considered geeky, "but once you have a story like 'I had sex with a robot, and it was great!' appear someplace like Cosmo magazine, I'd expect many people to jump on the bandwagon," Levy said.
The rest of the article, including discussion of robot love, ethics, and more pragmatic issues, can be found here.
The idea of having sex with life-sized dolls is nothing new. As a matter of fact, there are already piles of sex dolls on the market, most of which are inflatable. For the DIYers out there, you can also make your own like these:
Instructions and more images can be found here.
But Roxxxy is different. She has five different personalities to choose from, and rudimentary artificial intelligence. Roxxxy doesn't come cheap, though, at $7000 US.
From an article on gizmag.com:
When it comes to technology, the sex industry is no laggard, and as robotics become more human-like in their appearance and abilities, US-based company TrueCompany is poised to launch Roxxxy – the world’s first "sex robot" that has many more capabilities than your average sex doll. Apart from having better defined physical features than previous dolls, Roxxxy has been programmed with her own personality and her manufacturers say she can listen, talk, carry on a conversation, feel your touch and respond to it, as well as move her private areas inside when she is being “utilized” to deliver an unforgettable erotic experience. There are even plans for a male version - Rocky the Robot.
The full article, with image gallery, is here.
Roxxxy made her debut at last year's AVN expo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MeQcI77dTQ
Roxxxy's webpage is here.