Counselling Central » Relationships

She’s Just Not That Into You: Why Men Fail To Take The Hint

admin — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 23:22:02 +0000

It’s a classic tale of unrequited love: Boy meets Girl. Boy likes Girl. Girl is not really that into Boy. Totally failing to take the hint, Boy pursues Girl anyway.

The storyline is common, and not just in Hollywood romance films. A new study found that men tend to overestimate how attractive they are to women, while women most often underestimate how much men want them.

While the outcome of these scenarios can go either way, researchers suspect that there may be deeply rooted reasons why signals get crossed when men and women check each other out. The findings may offer insight for women who are sick of unwanted advances and advice for men who are repeatedly confused by women’s reactions to their solicitations.

“Throughout history, men have had to make this decision,” said Carin Perilloux, a psychologist at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. “Is this individual sexually interested in me or not?”

If our male ancestors erred on the side of going for it, she and colleagues have hypothesized, they would’ve ended up with more chances to spread their genes, even if it meant that they had to deal with some extra rejections along the way. And that repeated reinforcement of overconfident behavior might have been enough to shape the way men tend to act today.

“For men, missing out on a mating opportunity is a huge cost,” Perilloux said. “Women could have sex with 1,000 men in a year and still have only one or maybe two offspring. Mating opportunities aren’t as directly related to reproductive success for women.”

Plenty of previous studies have confirmed the stereotype: Men tend to have an overinflated sense of how sexually appealing they are to women. It’s not that they think every woman they meet wants to go to bed with them, Perilloux said. Rather, men are more likely to walk away form an interaction with a woman thinking that she’s into him, while the woman thinks, “Well, that was a nice friendly conversation.”

To better understand how that kind of bias plays out and why, Perilloux and colleagues put about 200 college students into a speed-dating sort of situation. Told that they were participating in a study about first impressions, each student interacted with five students of the opposite sex. After three minutes of innocuous conversation, participants rated their partners on all sorts of measures, including how interesting they seemed and how interested they seemed to be on a scale from one to seven.

As expected, men tended to think that women were a full point more interested in them than women actually were, the researchers report in paper to be published in Psychological Science. Women, on the other hand, guessed that men were a full point less interested than they actually were. Some men were more off in their misperceptions than others, and the study turned up some clues that could explain why. Compared to men who said they generally valued long-term relationships, for example, men who said they were on the prowl for casual sex were more likely to assume that women wanted them much more than was true.

There was also a relatively big gap between perception and reality in men who women ranked low on a scale of attractiveness. Hotter guys, on the other hand, had a more realistic sense of how women saw them — possibly because they didn’t need to be overconfident to score a hook-up. Men were most likely to misread signals from the most attractive women, and for those women, they illustrated the biggest difference between perception and reality. One possible explanation is that the prettiest women usually get the most attention from men, allowing them to be choosier, said Peter Todd, a cognitive psychologist at Indiana University in Bloomington.

“The research in this area is important because it provides insight into some of the sources of potentially harmful misunderstandings regarding sexual intent between men and women,” Todd said. “This paper in particular gives more support for the idea that men over-perceive the sexual interest of women, and it indicates which men paired with which women are most likely to show this over-perception.”

Many women like the attention they get from men, even if they don’t feel the same way in return. But others get tired of having to constantly fend off men who think a benign interaction carries sexual overtones. And for those women, Perilloux said, the new research suggests that it might be worth toning down flirtatious tendencies in certain situations, including simple gestures like smiling, making eye contact and touching men on the arm.

To avoid unexpected rejections, overconfident men could work on exercising caution and waiting for more direct signs from women before making a move.

Fox News

The Five Love Languages

admin — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 21:43:13 +0000

Dr. Gary Chapman wrote the book “The Five Love Languages” in 1992, and since it’s debut it has sold more than five million copies. In the book Dr. Chapman asks the question, “What if you could say or do just the right thing guaranteed to make that special someone feel loved?” The secret? Learning the right love language! So what are the five love languages?

Words of Affirmation

Actions don’t always speak louder than words. If this is your love language, unsolicited compliments mean the world to you. Hearing the words, “I love you,” are important—hearing the reasons behind that love sends your spirits skyward. Insults can leave you shattered and are not easily forgotten.

Quality Time

In the vernacular of Quality Time, nothing says, “I love you,” like full, undivided attention. Being there for this type of person is critical, but really being there—with the TV off, fork and knife down, and all chores and tasks on standby—makes your significant other feel truly special and loved. Distractions, postponed dates, or the failure to listen can be especially hurtful.

Receiving Gifts

Don’t mistake this love language for materialism; the receiver of gifts thrives on the love, thoughtfulness, and effort behind the gift. If you speak this language, the perfect gift or gesture shows that you are known, you are cared for, and you are prized above whatever was sacrificed to bring the gift to you. A missed birthday, anniversary, or a hasty, thoughtless gift would be disastrous—so would the absence of everyday gestures.

Acts of Service

Can vacuuming the floors really be an expression of love? Absolutely! Anything you do to ease the burden of responsibilities weighing on an “Acts of Service” person will speak volumes. The words he or she most want to hear: “Let me do that for you.” Laziness, broken commitments, and making more work for them tell speakers of this language their feelings don’t matter.

Physical Touch

This language isn’t all about the bedroom. A person whose primary language is Physical Touch is, not surprisingly, very touchy. Hugs, pats on the back, holding hands, and thoughtful touches on the arm, shoulder, or face—they can all be ways to show excitement, concern, care, and love. Physical presence and accessibility are crucial, while neglect or abuse can be unforgivable and destructive.

So which love language do you prefer to receive? Which love language do you project?

To find out more about this book, and the work of Dr. Chapman, visit 5 love languages

The Secret To A Happy Marriage? Be Delusional

admin — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 17:26:59 +0000

Finally, a study that makes perfect sense. According to a study published in the May issue of the journal Psychological Science, the happiest marriages are the ones that are the most, well, delusional.

As reported today in the Los Angeles Times, the study shows that of 222 newlywed couples who were followed for three years, those who had an abnormally high level of “rose colored” glasses about each other were the only pairs who didn’t show a decline
in their level of marriage happiness.

“People who were the most idealistic about their partner in the beginning showed no decline at all in satisfaction over the first three years of marriage,” said study lead author Sandra Murray, psychology professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Is there anyone who is surprised by this?

Whenever I have asked a woman who has been with her husband for decades what their secret is, I usually get an answer along the lines of, “I got myself a great man.” Maybe she does, but why not an answer along the lines of, “We communicate well,” or “We have the same values,” or “The sex is hot!” Instead, it’s always some variation of “He’s great.” Even when he’s not.

For example, there was the couple that was good friends with my grandmother. They’d come over for dinner once and awhile and I was always struck by their lovey-dovey demonstrativeness, despite their decades-long marriage. It turns out that the man had once had an affair with another woman and left the union for two years. The wife merely waited for him to come back and, when he did, she promptly forgave him and picked up where they left off. When I asked my grandmother why she’d forgive him so quickly, my grandmother answered, “She’s always thought he was it.” Ah, sweet delusion.

Then there’s my friend. She’s been married for over a decade and is very happy. Last year, I went to a party with her and her husband and watched as he drank gallons of hooch and noisily flirted with every female in the near and far vicinity. “Isn’t it nice my husband is so social?” my friend asked, starry-eyed. Um, indeed.

I think of supermodel Janice Dickinson’s memoir No Lifeguard On Duty. Dickinson’s father, as she writes, was a horror show: An abusive jerk who sexually preyed on his three daughters. He also had a habit of cutting off people in traffic, then getting
out of the car to confront them with explosively demented diatribes. Dickinson recalls that her mother would look out the window as he terrified some innocent elderly couple and ask, dreamily, “Isn’t he funny?” They never divorced.

So I guess being delusional is the key to a long, happy marriage. If so, forgive me if I say I’d rather have a short, miserable one.

Kiri Blakeley, Forbes

Do You Want To Be Rich? Try Being Moderately Happy

admin — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 18:03:11 +0000

Some people believe that earning the most money will make them incredibly happy. What they probably don’t know is that being incredibly happy may not earn them the most money. A new study finds that when it comes to financial success, you’re better off being a moderately happy person rather than someone who’s chronically ecstatic.

Researchers at the University of Virginia, the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, and Michigan State analyzed several sets of data in a paper recently published in Perspectives on Psychological Science. Their conclusion: Mildly happy people — those who rank themselves a 7 or 8 on a life-satisfaction scale of 1 to 10 — achieve more than the blissful 10s. “The people in our study who are most successful in terms of income, education, and career are mildly happy most of the time,” said Ed Diener, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois.

Numerous studies have found that happy people enjoy an advantage over malcontents: Cheerful people earn more, enjoy better health, have closer relationships, and live longer, among other benefits. But in this case, researchers wanted to explore how happy you need to be to get those perks. Do the 10s enjoy the highest well-being in all areas of life? The answer is no — and there may actually be a downside to scoring at the top of the scale. In a survey of more than 100,000 people in 96 countries, for example, the 8s on the 1-to-10 scale perform best in the realm of achievement.

Diener surmises that the 8s benefit from the creativity and energy of happiness, which help them stay committed in the pursuit of long-term goals and overcome obstacles along the way. But the 8s also maintain a touch of worry, stress, or internal dissatisfaction that motivates them to strive for more. “Emotions steer our behavior, and they are there for a reason — to help us function better,” says Diener. Swiss psychologist Norbert Semmer, for example, studied people who were dissatisfied with their work, following them over a period of time. Not surprisingly, these workers were more likely to quit their jobs and find a new situation. While a few people were simply chronic complainers, many of those studied were happier in their new workplace. In other words, negative emotions played an important role in improving their circumstances.

Among the studies reviewed, researchers analyzed a survey of college freshman in 1976, who were asked to rank their happiness. Twenty years later, a follow-up survey of the same people found that those who scored in the top 10 percent in well-being reported average salaries of $62,681, compared to $54,318 for the bottom 10 percent. But the next-to-happiest group was earning the most: $66,144. Analyses of long-running panel studies from Australia, Germany, and Britain produced similar results.

On the other hand, if you define success in terms of relationships, the joyful 10s are the clear winners. In a survey of current college students, the “very happy” group was more gregarious and ranked higher in self-confidence, energy, number of close friends, and time spent dating. (Those who ranked themselves merely “happy” had higher grade point averages, attended class more frequently, and were more conscientious.) “The 10s are more sociable and positive, so people like them,” says Diener, and the global survey demonstrated similar results.

The effusively happy tend to look at their relationships through rose-colored glasses. In a separate study of dating couples not included in this paper, Diener’s research team randomly beeped participants while they were with their partners, and asked them to write down how happy they were. Then they surveyed them at a later time about their relationships. Some participants reported being happier in retrospect than they had felt in their moment-to-moment account. “People who misremembered in a positive direction were more likely to be together six months later,” Diener says.

In other words, the 10s tend to idealize their partners and look for the best in them, leading to more enduring and upbeat relationships. Alternately, the lack of satisfaction that drives the 8s to want more in their work lives might also prompt them to be more critical of their partners, to more readily see their faults — and to be more willing to look around for something better. But while relationships are better for the joyous, it turns out that there’s a big deficit to perpetual euphoria: Super-happy people don’t live as long as the moderately happy, according to a long-term study of gifted children. “We were shocked that the happiest people didn’t live longer,” says Diener.

He speculates that the most upbeat people may not take symptoms of illness seriously, or may follow a physician’s recommendations in a halfhearted way. Or they may take foolish risks, such as the active 77-year-old Californian who went biking during a heat wave and later succumbed to heat stroke. In addition, just as the physiological arousal associated with chronic stress takes a toll on health, so too can the sustained arousal of intense positive emotions, Diener suggests.

“People who chase continual emotional highs will usually fall short because the biological cards are stacked against their being able to sustain this emotional intensity,” he writes in an upcoming book on well-being. “In the quest for continuing intense positive emotions, some individuals turn to drugs.” The upshot? If you feel generally satisfied with your life, your work, and your relationships most of the time, think twice before buying into the self-help movement and its search for a continuous streak of “peak moments.”

“Happiness, like spirituality, is partially a private pursuit, defined by individuals based on their personal values,” says Diener. “Be wary when people tell you to live for the moment, to strive for an exciting life, or that you ought to be happier. Chasing super-happiness is a mistake that can lead you astray and be self-defeating.”

Laura Rowley, Yahoo Finance

How To Help A Friend Get Over A Relationship Break Up

admin — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 16:53:54 +0000

It was an old yellow Lab named Maverick that helped Tom Chiarella through the darkest days of his divorce. Not a soul-searching therapy session or devil-may-care trip to Vegas, but daily, ritualized walks with Maverick who, as it happens, didn’t even belong to Chiarella. “I told my friend, ‘I see you walking your dog by my house every morning and I’m always jealous,’” recalls Chiarella. “One morning he knocked on my door and said, ‘You wanna walk with me?’ Every morning for three months we walked with this dog.”

Chiarella, a writer at large for Esquire, is well versed in the nuances of human relationships. But his daily walks taught him a few things about friendship and the role it plays in healing a broken spirit. “The key is to be the person who shows up,” he says. “If marriage sometimes feels like a series of obligations, when it ends it can feel like freedom. But it also feels like a whole lot of empty time. The main thing was having a ritual every morning.”

Friends play a critical role in the getting-over-your-ex process. But once you show up, as Chiarella recommends, it can be tricky to know what your hurting friend needs. Should you play therapist? Social coordinator? Speaker of heretofore unspoken truths? Experts say a delicate smattering of all three – emphasis on delicate. “Romantic love is an addiction,” says biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, a leading expert in the science of human attraction who uses magnetic resonance imaging to study the brain in love. “When you are rejected in love, you don’t stop loving the person; in fact, you can love them more. Any kind of barrier to getting something you want makes you want it even more.” Which is good to know, before you set off trying to help your lovesick pal.

“The whole point of knowing this is an addiction is to treat it as an addiction,” says Fisher. “People assume we’ve got enough control of ourselves to snap out of it, but in an addiction you can’t assume that any longer. You’ve got someone who’s deeply in love, deeply attached, experiencing intense craving and physical and emotional pain. That’s not a good combination for happiness.” It’s also why you should help your friend toss the old love letters, take down the photos and un-Facebook-friend the ex. “If you want to give up drinking, you don’t keep a bottle of bourbon on your desk,” says Fisher. “Get rid of all the stimuli that’s likely to trigger the intense craving.”

Even if your friend is the one who called off the relationship, he or she is still experiencing withdrawal and loss, and might need your permission to mourn. I had this incredibly amicable divorce where we went, ‘Oh, my God. This isn’t working. Let’s get divorced,’” says Sascha Rothchild, author of “How to Get Divorced by 30: My Misguided Attempt at a Starter Marriage” (Plume). “I started dating immediately and pretended like I was having the most fun ever for a year, until I actually had a meltdown at someone else’s wedding.”

In hindsight, Rothchild wishes a friend had stepped in earlier. “If my friends had said, ‘It’s OK to cry and be pathetic,’ it might have given me license to get to those feelings sooner,” she says. “I wish someone had said to me, ‘You need to cry,’ and shaken me out of my, ‘Oh my God, I’m having the best time drinking and wearing clothes a 17-year-old would wear.’” Help your friend find his or her better self, in other words.

“You stand around playing a lot of pool and just being there when they need you,” says Chiarella. “And a lot of times that’s when the advice comes in. You talk about what to do better next time. I can tell my friend, ‘You know, all the anger and the yelling and stuff, that doesn’t play well with everybody.’” And ideally, says Rothchild, the togetherness and advice-giving take place outside of the house. “Bring them coffee and slowly ease them out the door,” she says. “It’s really important to not let your world get small.” All the better if you can ease them toward a new experience. “Take them to a place they would never go in a million years,” she says. “A monster truck rally. A museum. Not necessarily to meet someone, but just to look around and see, ‘There are so many people in the world and I owe it to myself to not spend too long pining over someone I’m no longer with.’”

And try to stay at your friend’s side as long as you’re needed. “The only thing I wanted to feel is (that) I wasn’t alone,” Chiarella says. “I didn’t need to feel like I was always right; I was wrong a lot. A lot of people go through a breakup and think, ‘What is my day without that other person?’ Your friends help you find that middle ground.”

Sascha Rothchild, author of “How to Get Divorced by 30: My Misguided Attempt at a Starter Marriage” (Plume), has played counseled and counselor through various heartbreaks. She offers the following wisdom. Get a hobby. “I decided to stop being the kind of person who hated things I never tried. I started doing yoga. I tried snowboarding. I tried doing trapeze. Some of the things I liked and some I didn’t, but by becoming a more interesting person I ended up attracting more positive people around me, and dating quality guys became much easier.”

Stop comparing. “You need a clean slate. After a breakup you either find someone just like the person you just broke up with, or you know that person was wrong for you so you find the polar opposite. Either way, if you’re basing your next relationship on the previous one, the next one will fail.”

Get some exercise. “It releases endorphins and makes you feel better and more powerful and makes you look better, which makes you feel more confident.”

Don’t be a victim. “Once you’re a victim, you’re just pathetic. You get in this spiral where you’re not taking any responsibility and you feel like you can’t take control of anything in your life. You need to feel powerful to become a better person for next time.”

Chicago Tribune, APA

Men Who Drive A Porsche: Do Women Find Them More Desirable?

admin — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 17:00:18 +0000

New research by faculty at Rice University, the University of Texas-San Antonio (UTSA) and the University of Minnesota finds that men’s conspicuous spending is driven by the desire to have uncommitted romantic flings. And, gentlemen, women can see right through it.

The series of studies, “Peacocks, Porsches and Thorstein Veblen: Conspicuous Consumption as a Sexual Signaling System,” was conducted with nearly 1,000 test subjects and published recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“This research suggests that conspicuous products, such as Porsches, can serve the same function for some men that large and brilliant feathers serve for peacocks,” said Jill Sundie, assistant professor of marketing at UTSA and lead author of the paper.

Just as peacocks flaunt their tails before potential mates, men may flaunt flashy products to charm potential dates. Notably, not all men favored this strategy – just those men who were interested in short-term sexual relationships with women.

“The studies show that some men are like peacocks. They’re the ones driving the bright colored sports car,” said co-author Vladas Griskevicius, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota.

According to the researchers, women found a man who chose to purchase a flashy luxury product (such as a Porsche) more desirable than the same man who purchased a non-luxury item (such as a Honda Civic). However, there was a catch:
Although women found the flashy guys more desirable for a date, the man with the Porsche was not preferred as a marriage partner. Women inferred from a man’s flashy spending that he was interested in uncommitted sex.

“When women considered him for a long-term relationship, owning the sports car held no advantage relative to owning an economy car,” said co-author Daniel Beal, assistant professor of psychology at Rice. “People may feel that owning flashy things makes them more attractive as a relationship partner, but in truth, many men might be sending women the wrong message.”

Though often associated with Western culture, extreme forms of conspicuous displays have been found in cultures across the globe and throughout history.

While finding that men may use conspicuous consumption as a short-term mating signal, the researchers discovered that women don’t behave in the same manner and don’t conspicuously spend to attract men.

“Obviously, women also spend plenty of money on expensive things,” Sundie said. “But the anticipation of romance doesn’t trigger flashy spending as it does with some men.”

David Ruth. Rice University, Medical News Today