Page Turner's Blog, page 73

Does Abuse Require Bad Intent or Can It Be the Result of Simple Incompetence?

I didn’t think of myself as being a survivor of anything — much less abuse — until I was in my 30s.

The news was delivered to me in my therapist’s office, spoken as an casual aside, quickly, as though she assumed the information was obvious to me.

“Well, that’s pretty common for people who have had abusive childhoods,  » Read more

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In Straight Relationships, Men Are More Likely to Be the First One to Say “I Love You”

When I talk about someone being “a hopeless romantic,” most people are likely to assume I’m talking about a woman. Because we’re fiends for romance, don’t you know? Sensitive creatures obsessed with feelings and affection and all the trappings of a loving partnered life.

Romance junkies.

Straight men, on the other hand,  » Read more

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People Get More Anxious When Others Take Risks Than When They Do So Themselves

Have you ever sat up all night and worried about someone?

I sure have. Especially if I knew they were doing something particularly risky or dangerous, like driving a long distance when the weather was bad.

In one instance, a loved one was several hours late arriving home, and I couldn’t get a hold of them by phone (not normal at all for them).  » Read more

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Once Upon a Time, You Could Sue People for Breaking Up With You

Our current conception of marriage as a romantic institution founded on love is relatively new. For hundreds, arguably thousands of years (since marriage ceremonies were documented as early as 2350 B.C. in Mesopotamia), marriage existed primarily to establish strategic alliances between families.

Marriage was a practical fixture, usually having a lot to do with money.  » Read more

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What Is a Midlife Crisis?

Midlife crisis. I’m screwing my face up involuntarily just writing the phrase. There are so many damn jokes about it. I’ve been dreading my own for decades now, for far longer than made sense to. Afraid catching myself behaving like the characters on a deck of “Congratulations, You’re Over the Hill!” novelty playing cards.

I suppose my gender has spared me the brunt of it.  » Read more

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People Are Very Devoted to Their Preferred Fight Labels

“How could you not know I was upset with you?” I asked him, boggling. “How could you possibly have thought that trip went well? We fought the whole time.”

“We did not fight,” he replied.

I found myself speechless out of shock. “I cried and yelled. You argued and yelled back,  » Read more

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The Perils of Talking Over Your Relationship Issues With Other People

I published an essay here recently that compared a rough spot in an otherwise happy relationship to a freak cold day in a warm climate:

I’ve had a lot of long-term relationships. Some of them were rocky, some were much more even keel.

Nevertheless, all of them had conflict every once in a while.  » Read more

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Not All Romantic Gestures Look the Same

I’m not really a morning person and not really an evening person. I function about equally well all day long (even took a test that confirmed it). Sometimes I refer to myself as an asynchronous person. How I feel is more a function of how much sleep I got the night before than what time of day or night it is at the moment.  » Read more

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Proofreading Your Dating Profile Could Make You More Attractive…But Only to Certain People

Since I’ve studied linguistics and particularly have enjoyed psycholinguistics (a field of study sometimes also known as the psychology of language), I am not one of those people who fly around everywhere correcting everyone else’s grammar.

I’m instead more interested in how language is used in everyday life (whether or not that lines up with the correct way to structure communication).  » Read more

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Yet Another Reason to Cry: To Help Speed Recovery

A while back, this series featured an article called “Why Do We Cry? Two Dueling Explanations.”

The piece looked at a study that explored the following two possible popular explanations for crying as a social behavior:

The Helping Hypothesis. The idea behind this is that we evolved to cry in order to solicit social support from others.

  » Read more

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