stress
When he says, "I had a bad day," do you say, "Mine was worse"?
When your spouse comes home from work and tells you his boss yelled at him in front of three colleagues, do you one-up him with a story of the client who reamed you out in a meeting—and later spilled his coffee on your shirt? When you tell your date you need to check out early tonight because you have a 6am conference call tomorrow, does he tell you that he's getting up at 5am to go to the gym? If this sounds familiar, you may be getting sucked into "misery poker."
In a new relationship-focused Wall Street Journal column called Read More
Married couples are forced to move back home.
The dinner table is getting crowded again. Empty nesters who waved goodbye to their grown-up children are welcoming them back home again, this time with a spouse in tow.
Known as "boomerang children," the percentage of adults who move back in with their parents after living on their own is on the rise. In many cases, the circumstances revolve around a recent job loss, a sudden foreclosure or a financial crisis. For Rosecrans Baldwin and his wife, moving in with her parents was a quick solution to what they thought was only a temporary problem, otherwise known as … Read More
Heart disease, frown lines and obesity in women can be symptoms of a stressful marriage.
Hang up the phone.
Leave the house. Put down the donut. Separate yourself. New news out of the UK shows that having a stressful marriage can increase a woman's risk of heart disease. So if your marriage is giving you more misery than pleasure, according to this study, it's best to break it off before your health takes a downward spiral.
Turns out, being in a stressful, strained relationship not only increases blood pressure, it also increases the wives' cholesterol and obesity rates.
But don't think only the women suffer from these bad relationships. Their male counterparts, otherwise know … Read More
Admitting to faking the big O, 70 years of sex advice and stress vs. romance.
Love Bytes: three must-click love, sex and relationship links.
How to tell your man you've been faking your orgasms. [Lemondrop]
The best and worst sex advice from the last 70 years. [Glamour]
Is stress draining you of romance? [DivineCaroline]
Locking lips is much more chemically complicated than we once thought.
Sure, we've always gotten a tingly, head rush when we kiss someone we're attracted to, but we never knew that swapping spit caused such a complicated hormonal rickashay.
During a recent study at Lafayette College, researchers studied the cortisol and oxytocin levels in 15 heterosexual, kissing couples. Cortisol, known as the stress hormone, is released to help the body get back to normal after a rush of agonizing events. Oxytocin, on the other hand, is the hormone to blame for all those girly, gooey feelings of closeness after sex.
It's often been said that women release oxytocin after … Read More
The economy may be affecting your marriage, Oprah's foreplay chart, and a new aphrodisiac.
The morning quickie: the perfect way to start your day. Read on for three interesting love and sex tidbits.
The economy is putting strain on marriage. You may not realize it's happening to you:
Many couples seeking counseling don't initially associate their problems with the economy, says Chris Tuell, a licensed professional clinical counselor in Cincinnati.Rather, couples complain about anxiety, depression and increased anger, "then you look at some of the stresses," Tuell says, "and one of the first ones they mention is the economic issue." Detroit Free Press
Check out Oprah's sex chart—you and your partner label your preferred foreplay … Read More
A new study says physical intimacy can reduce tension—especially work stress. Start cuddling now!
Work stress got you down? Monday blues getting the best of you? There may be a cure: more cuddling! According to a new study, couples that express intimacy, be it through snuggling, kissing or sex, have lower levels of the stress hormone, cortisol. The study supports past research that's found that married people are generally healthier than singletons (and we're not just talking health-care benefits) and that women who are in bad relationships have weaker immune systems.
For a week, 51 German couples recorded their anxiety levels and activities and collected daily saliva samples so scientists … Read More
In relationships, financial conflict might actually be about something deeper.
My poor cousin Dan. A middle-aged joker with a surprising spiritual bent, he'd been single a long time when he met… well, let's call her Lynn. It was great, he said, to be intimate with someone again. They saw each other every day, and within a couple months they were living together. But even on their first date, Dan remembers, there were signs: all the talk about the Lexus or Infiniti she wanted; all that food she ordered and didn't eat. Nevertheless, he felt good about the agreed-upon plan for sharing his place, which he owned. Lynn would pay $500 … Read More