A real guy dishes on what guys want on a first date. Ah the first date. In your teens and 20s it is always filled with anticipation and excitement.

Moral* principles do more harm than good. We apply them self-servingly and selectively. They operate at the wrong level of abstraction, distracting us from the right level.

In my previous post , I drew attention to Marco Del Giudice’s research which for the first time has documented what many women married to mildly autistic men already know: that geeky guys can make surprisingly faithful and rewarding spouses. But what some mildly autistic men married to such women also know is that the success of their marriages usually relies in equal part on the fact that their wives are much more mentalistic than they are.

The current economy is the worst most of us have seen in our lifetime.

The thoughts and concerns of the typical teenaged girl are divided as follows: 2% is devoted to family, 5% school, and 10% friends, leaving the remaining 83% for boys. Though these percentages are merely estimates and should not be taken as fact, I am confident that my approximations are pretty darn close.  This is because not only am I an avid Molly Ringwald fan, making me an expert on the subject matter, but because I, Stasi Harrell, was once a teenaged girl. Though I have made great strides in my recovery, I admit that I was a certifiable boy-aholic.

“There can be no rainbow without a cloud and a storm.” John H. Vincent In order to explain and understand emotions, we can divide them into two groups: The emotions we term ‘positive’ and those that we term ‘negative’.

  Upgrade To Career 4.0; Practice “Harnicissism;” and Become a Good Ancestor In a previous post I wrote that a key pathway to psychological health and resiliency and healthy in today’s world is learning to “forget yourself.” This post describes ways to do that in three important realms of your life – your work, your personal relationships, and your life “footprint.” In the earlier post I explained that “forgetting yourself” doesn’t mean neglecting your own legitimate needs or concerns. Rather, it means letting go of our human tendency to overly dwell on ourselves – our own concerns, needs, desires, slights, complaints about others, and so on. Psychological health and resiliency in today’s world grows when you can do that and put your energies in the service of something larger than yourself: problems, needs and challenges that lie beyond your own personal, narrow self-interest

  It’s good to see that the NY Times has caught up to the advancing psychological knowledge which indicates – overwhelmingly – that, Freud, Portnoy, and the parenting industry notwithstanding – adult problems and deficiencies can’t all be blamed on mom. If you haven’t read Richard A. Friedman’s article, ” Accepting That Good Parents May Plant Bad Seeds” ( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/health/13mind.html?ref=todayspaper ), you should.

This blog post is adapted from a longer essay on this topic that will be appear in an upcoming Psychology of Twilight anthology published by BenBella Books.  For more racial analysis of news and popular culture, join the | Between The Lines |   Facebook page and follow Mikhail on Twitter . ___________________________________________________________________________   “All real living is meeting,” wrote philosopher Martin Buber, and certainly it is the case that every person’s life is filled with other people. Indeed, Gestalt theory regards self awareness and relationships as inseparable.

We live in a society that constantly exposes us to images of sex that has little to do with healthy sexual intimacy between two adults. Women are treated as sex objects instead of beautiful, intelligent individual.…

I’ve chosen three questions from readers to discuss in this week’s post. To those who sent me these questions, please recognize my answers are by necessity general as I obviously don’t know you personally nor the details of the situations you wrote about. I do hope my answers can provide you new ways to think about the problems you’re facing as well as provide other readers useful perspectives on similar situations they may be facing in their own lives, but please don’t mistake any of the following for my professional medical advice.

“The art of love… is largely the art of persistence.” (Albert Ellis) “Never let your persistence and passion turn into stubbornness and ignorance.” (Anthony J. D’Angelo) “A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success.” (Elbert Hubbard) What are we supposed to do when our beloved seems to reject our love

A highly successful professional man started therapy to get help with his personal relationships. One problem was that the very things that helped him calm down after a particularly tense time at work – alcohol and sex – was creating difficulties with his girlfriend.

“You are the sunshine of my life… You are the apple of my eye.” (Stevie Wonder) “All you need is love, love, Love is all you need” (The Beatles) Ideal love is often described as providing us with the meaning of life

It's great when birth control works to our advantage. It's horrible when the way it works is to stop us from having sex in the first place! One woman finds herself, for medical reasons, needing to use condoms for a few months