Page Turner's Blog, page 90

Yes, Forcing Yourself to Smile Actually Does Make You Feel a Little Better

My grandma once told me that if you’re sad that you should just put on bright lipstick and smile.

Her reasoning was more about self-protection than anything else. She said that people would be too busy looking at your lipstick to notice your sadness.

And so you’d avoid the most dreadful states of all: Pity.  » Read more

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When They Say, “The Hell With Your Life, Step Into Mine.”

I’ve been thinking about it for several years now, how easy it was for you to tell me you hated all of my friends. And how you expected that not to hurt.

“I have enough friends,” you said.

And little by little, I spent less and less time with anyone else other than you.  » Read more

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What Is Pocketing and Has It Ever Happened to You?

It seems like every day a new term comes out to describe another aspect of dating in the modern age.

There’s a lot to describe because dating other people is complicated. It’s kind of a jungle out there.

The newest term I just learned is “pocketing.”

What’s Pocketing?

What’s pocketing?  » Read more

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When You’re in a Long Distance Relationship, It’s Easy to Get Addicted to Waiting and Forget to Live

There are moments, such as the one that oppresses me now, when I feel my own self far more than I feel external things, and everything transforms into a night of rain and mud where, lost in the solitude of an out-of-the-way station, I wait interminably for the next third-class train.

-Fernando Pessoa,  » Read more

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When Your Partner Is the One Doing the Jealousy Baiting

I recently posted an article about jealousy baiting. In it, I talk about two situations in which someone who had been intimate with a partner of mine used that fact to be cruel to me.

I didn’t go into specifics in that article because I didn’t want the individuals to recognize themselves (on the off chance they were reading it).  » Read more

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Don’t Count Your Chickens Before They’re Hatched But Make Sure to Build a Coop

Well, that didn’t take long. I worried it’d take a long time to find someone who wanted to buy my house, which is in a great location but 100 years old and not without its idiosyncrasies.

Turns out it was extra credit worry.

After a flurry of activity and interest regarding my newly listed house,  » Read more

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Shooting the Messenger: When You Tell People Bad News, They Like You Less

It can be tough when you have a difficult message to deliver. Especially unpleasant news.

I’ve definitely been in situations when I had to be the one to deliver bad news and then promptly had my head bitten off by the recipient — even in situations where I didn’t do anything and all of the action involved third parties!  » Read more

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Huh. Being Able to Describe Negative Emotions Might Protect Against Depression.

Like a lot of other people, I grew up in a house where we didn’t really discuss emotions at all — and certainly not negative emotions.

In fact, it wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I was good at differentiating between them and expressing them clearly. I’d learned that you said you were “mad”  » Read more

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It’s Possible to Force Yourself To Be Something You’re Not (Especially Short Term), But It’s Painful

As I write this post, my house is finally on the market. When the realtor stepped back into the house, he was bowled over by all the renovations that we made since the last time he visited.

I wasn’t sure what to expect going into that meeting with him. Didn’t know if he’d recommend more improvements.  » Read more

The post It’s Possible to Force Yourself To Be Something You’re Not (Especially Short Term), But It’s Painful appeared first on Poly.Land.

So Apparently I’m Securely Attached, But I Didn’t Get the Memo

I recently covered a study on pronoun use and attachment styles for Psyched for the Weekend, a recurring feature in which I geek out with brief takes about some of my favorite psychological studies and concepts.

As part of that article, I posted a quiz that you can take to discover your own attachment style.  » Read more

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