Page Turner's Blog, page 72

I Can’t Tell You What Kind of Partner I Am, and That’s Okay

“You write an awful lot about other people, how kind they are to you, and how much you appreciate them. I find myself thinking that I hope you are as kind to them back. I hope you make an effort, too. And I wish you’d write more about what kind of partner you are, because I don’t like wondering about it.”  » Read more

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Don’t “Lower” Your Dating Standards. Examine Them.

Look, I’ll just say it. Some people are really bad at picking romantic partners. What drives interpersonal attraction is often mysterious, hard to pin down. Perhaps it’s pheromones. Maybe it’s something within our genes deciding that we’d make good offspring with THAT PERSON OVER THERE (a phenomenon that strangely occurs even when it’s not biologically possible to bear children with a partner for whatever reason).  » Read more

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Pain Never Gets Any Better Unless You Confront It & Even Then It Still Takes A Very Long Time

“What you do,” he said, “is just lie there with your thoughts. Don’t judge them. Just let them happen. Let yourself feel everything you’re feeling. Think everything you’re thinking. Without distraction.”

He didn’t call it mindfulness then. I wouldn’t learn that word until much later. From someone else.

Instead, my first fraught dance with my own mind wouldn’t have a name.  » Read more

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It Was Terrifying the First Time I Dated Someone Who Was Really Good to Me

I remember being scared a lot when we first started dating. Suspicious. Worried.

Not about you. Not about us. Or our fit. No, we always made sense to me.

I was worried because you kept doing nice things for me. Completely unprompted. You paid close attention to me, and you saw the areas of my life that were unwieldy and offered to help.  » Read more

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Is Having a Mother-in-Law From Hell the Norm? Not Necessarily

Ah, in-laws. There are so many popular references to monstrous in-laws. I can’t tell you how many “my mother-in-law is a nightmare” jokes I heard growing up.

Because of this, I grew up with the expectation that if I did eventually marry, my mother-in-law would be a royal pain in the neck.

Interestingly,  » Read more

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Huh, They Confirmed Fragile Masculinity in the Lab

Fragile masculinity is a cultural phenomenon that’s getting talked about more and more the past few years. Basically, when a man has a fragile sense of masculinity, he believes that manhood is something uncertain, that must be earned, and that can be lost.

Typically, in this belief system, manhood is defined by proving that you are not emotional.  » Read more

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Sometimes You Just Don’t Have Enough Data Points

To minimize the geekiness in this essay, I’ll talk as quickly as I can (possibly risking inaccuracy via that brevity) about a basic statistical concept.

When you’re trying to conduct a scientific study, proper experimental design is a must — if you want to be able to have any hope of trusting the results.  » Read more

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What Is Financial Infidelity?

While sexual infidelity gets most of the heat these days, it turns out there’s another form of infidelity that’s markedly more common: Financial infidelity.

Studies show that as many as 41% of Americans say they have hidden secret debts, accounts, or purchases from their partner or spouse.

These sorts of behaviors are known as financial infidelity.  » Read more

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The 5 Apology Styles from Chapman (of the 5 Love Languages)

I’ve been meaning to cover this topic on the blog for a while. As some of you know, I write essays fairly frequently that deal with apologies. While research has shown that people are generally quite unforgiving (a finding I find personally depressing, as people are also imperfect and mess up,  » Read more

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Self-Partnering Sounds an Awful Lot Like Solo Polyamory

I’ve been reading more and more about a new relationship term lately: Self-partnering.

It had a big pop culture moment last month when Emma Watson declared herself self-partnered in an interview.

Since then, multiple articles have spun off, and people are talking more and more about the idea of self-partnering. The concept that a person could be single but not feel lonely,  » Read more

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