With all the recent talk about childless women, can a niece or nephew inspire motherhood? Growing up in a Christian, Midwestern household, it was natural for me to fantasize about marriage, a wedding and an incredible husband...but what about babies? I didn't feel that longing...until my nephew arrived.
What attracts you to someone when you first meet them? What keeps the passion alive in a relationship? How do turn-ons change over time? These were some of the questions on a recent survey conducted by YourTango, Glo.com and Chemistry.com. Over 20,000 people took the survey and the results were analyzed by Dr. Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist and author of numerous influential books on love. You can see all the results at www.RekindleAttraction.com. Here, we talk with Dr. Fisher about sex, love and the new age of relationships.
I’ve been working on my new book and it’s thrown me back into the time I left my partner in 2007. As I re-read what I’ve written so far, it occurred to me that we had a ridiculously long honeymoon phase in our relationship. For most couples, the honeymoon lasts a few months to a few years. For us it lasted sixteen years.
A new study by psychologists Jens Förster, Kai Epstude, and Amina Özelsel at the University of Amsterdam says romantic love—or even thinking about romantic love—opens the curtains of the mind and unleashes creative thinking.
When enmeshed in the search for love, it can be difficult to determine whether it should be something we find or something that we decide to do. Many people experience the romantic love story. But a lot of couples find love to be something more learned and practiced. For people who are still hunting, it's difficult to decide whether to view it as a noun or a verb. Louise Rafkin has been interviewing couples and telling their love stories in a weekly column in the San Francisco Chronicle for the past couple years. As someone who is still searching for the one, she pondered the question of love and how to attain it in Modern Love in the New York Times.
While you may know that love usually doesn't come with a guaranteed fairy-tale ending, you probably are still holding out for, or trying to have your marriage live up to, the idea of truly passionate and romantic love. Elizabeth Ford and Daniela Drake, M.D., authors of the new release Smart Girls Marry Money: How Women Have Been Duped Into the Romantic Dream -- And How They're Paying For It, are here to change your mind, or at least tell you why "happily ever after" hasn't quite happened to them. Read: Marrying "Up" AOL Health: Can you explain the theory that your book is based on -- the idea that women will be better off in the long run if they marry for money?
Love Buzz recently reported that romantic love lasts an average of two years, six months and 25 days. While assigning the enchantment phase an exact number might be a bit absurd the idea that new relationship energy doesn't last is old news. Anyone who's been in a long-term relationship knows that the crazyfranticloveglow eventually fades. Or so we thought. Apparently some couples stay madly in love for more than 20 years, and science has proof.
