ESSAYS & ARTICLES
The $500,000 You Should Get – But Won’t
What if you knew that you’d lost half a million dollars because someone didn’t pay you your fair share of your salary? What would be your next step?
For Love or Money
Men say young women are demanding as hell—about money, about sex, about everything. So how come their mothers aren’t?
Why The Least Interested Loses in Long-term Love
A reader reminds me that, in my blogs about the Power of the Least Interested, I forgot to speak about how the phenomenon plays out in long-term relationships. Does the least interested maintain power over the more interested partner, once romantic attraction moves into love?
Not for very long. The usual set-up years ago was the familiar eager-to-please woman endlessly trying to engage her distracted, disengaged, or plainly disinterested husband. Her heartbreaking, losing techniques: Asking questions. Repeating questions. Attempting to be seductive, funny, young, pretty. (Just saying these in print makes me mad and remind me of all those magazine articles: “Ten Surefire Ways to Make Him Happy!” and all those songs about how to please, win back and stand by that cheatin’ guy.) One study showing that husbands and wives speak to one another an average of 13 minutes a week (and then, only because they have to arrange childcare and meal issues) says it all: Interest in one’s partner is at risk over time. And if that partner happens to be a woman, well, poor dear.
Exit Donna Reed and Father Knows Best
On my last television show–a cable-access show in Connecticut called The Love Goddess Show–I had two guests, a woman and a man, Louise and Tracy, …
Advice or Abuse?
Why do we suddenly love experts who scream at their quivering audiences? What is it in us that wants the Glenn Beck experience with our …
Whose Laundry Do YOU Do?
Women of all ages tell me that they want evolved relationships with enlightened men, men who know that developing intimacy skills is part of the job …
The Power of the Least Interested – Part 1
(Part 1 of 7)
I’ve been thinking a great deal about the notion of power in love. Not power as in control, but how it is that the person in a relationship who cares the least has so much of the power—at least in the early stages. A piece in Psychology Today this week features the work of three social scientists studying uncertainty in romantic attraction. Their study counters the “reciprocity principle” of attraction, which states, in effect, that if someone is attracted to you, you’ll be more attracted to him—and vice versa.
If only. More often, in my long experience in this field, uncertainty is key.