"Making" The Ideal Partner

Chasing perfection.

We've probably all tried our hand at it at sometime or other: whether in the realm of sports, school, music, cooking, and the list could go on. There's something deep within us that longs to be able to play the perfect tennis match, score a perfect grade on that French test, sing with perfect pitch and cook the perfect meal in order to impress someone on a first date. Yet we fail miserably most of the time and realize once again that we live in a world where perfection just does not exist - we'll have to wait for the next world, the eternal one, to experience it fully.

Although we know this intellectually and are capable of applying it to all kinds of life situations, we tend to not want to accept it when it comes to finding the right partner - we want him/her to be perfect! (Disclaimer: I promise this will be the last post on relationships for a while ;-)) But as Daniel Goleman reminds us in his book Social Intelligence, that's just not going to happen:

Are You Feeling Safe Or Suffocated?

A romantic relationship can be the best or worst thing that has ever happened to you. There are, of course, many different factors that play a role in how your relationship will turn out. I won't go into all that. To my mind, one of the most important questions every serious partnership needs to answer is this: Do I feel safe or suffocated?

Baby, I Love Your... Sweat!

A while back a good friend of mine was seeing a woman who openly confessed to him that she felt attracted to him when she could smell his sweat. (The reasons for the initial attraction were different... or at least I hope they were!) At the time I thought to myself: "Well, strange women are everywhere, so I'm not surprised!" But now I know that it's actually quite common and normal for women feel that way.

Yup, in case you're not sure you just misread or misunderstood that, let me repeat it again:

Apparently women are attracted to a man's sweat. 

To be more exact, to its odor. Nice, huh?

All You Need Is A Canoe

Emotions.

We all have them, we all have to live with them.
And we have to make sure that they don't influence us in a negative way. That may sound easier than it actually is, as a study by Dan Ariely seems to show (I say "seem" because of what I wrote in my post "Why Don't You Prove It?", which you can check out here).

In his book The Upside of Irrationality he writes about the problem of negative feelings and how they tend to influence our behavior (and especially decision-making) in a chapter entitled The Long-Term Effects of Short-Term Emotions. 

What American Football and Dating Have in Common

I've never tried online dating. I don't think I ever will.
But if you had asked me why I don't want to give it a try, I would not have had a very reasonable answer for you. It was just a feeling, a hunch that I wouldn't really enjoy it, that it wouldn't lead to finding a long-term partner anyway. I couldn't explain it... until now.