“Do you still love me?”
“How much do you love me?”
“You don’t love me as much as you used to.” |
This is not a man speaking. A man would never say these things. When we fall
in love, we are smitten, deranged and focused solely on our love object. We
wish to conquer her or, at least, get her to consent to a pair-bonding
agreement that excludes others. Both sexes know that this state lasts for
6-18 months, after which further commitment is required or else the
relationship flounders.
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Men understand the nature of the verbal contract, and we are content. For a
man to be in love is an absolute, an inviolate, like his opinions on his
team or his music collection. We would never think to ask a woman to
quantify just how much in love with us she is — we’re just happy with the sex
on tap, the intimacy and having someone to pretend our cooking and dress
sense are unparalleled.
Read more at women.timesonline.co.uk |
On Driving:
Women are better drivers than men, at least judging by how many of us die in car accidents. |
There are many reasons why men are more likely to live at home in their 20s than women – we must not ignore this problem |
Last week, the Office of National Statistics released statistics that showed men in their 20s were twice as likely to live at home as women. A flexible labour market – with greater youth unemployment, more unpaid work placements as entry routes and a decline in young people’s earnings relative to older workers – means less income and stability to cover rising living costs, especially housing. And the growth in casual relationships and singledom means the pooling of resources to cover the costs of living is less likely. These factors have all contributed to the rise of the boomerang generation over the past few decades. |
How we buy jeans may depend on our gender, according to research that examines shopping behavior through an evolutionary lens. |
Our ancestors didn’t shop for holiday gifts, but the way we buy may owe credit to thousands of years of evolution. |
In a new study, researchers propose that our mall-visiting behaviors harken back to the days when men hunted and women foraged. |
Modern men, for example, generally want to get into a store and get right back out — just like their hunting forefathers wanted to find and bring meat home as quickly as possible. On the other hand, women get back to their foraging roots by sorting through racks of sweaters on sale — as if scanning plants for signs of ripeness. |
If girls just want to have fun, as Cyndi Lauper belted out in 1983, does that mean boys are serious stoics? Lauper probably wasn’t trying to make a sociological statement in her head-bopping anthem, but her lyrics point to a much-debated question about gender differences. In studying the relative happiness of people across the globe, do men and women exhibit distinctive emotional characteristics? In short, is one sex generally happier than the other? |
Despite the potential pitfalls of empirical happiness studies, we can draw some conclusions about who the happiest sociological groups of people are. Generally, older people are happier than younger ones. Wealth and good health also give us something to smile about more often. Yet when it comes to the happiness gender gap, things aren’t so cut and dried. Read more at health.howstuffworks.com |
 This week an American journal called Sex Roles has published a report on Female Breadwinners. In America nearly a third of households have a woman bringing in the main wage; in the UK 11 per cent of women outearn their men – predicted to be 25 per cent or more by 2030 (following the trends of girls massively outperforming boys at school and university and the consequent genderquake in the professions: already 60 per cent of new solicitors are women).
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Of course being a mum and the main source of the family income is not an easy gig; I call it doing the double shift. The researchers found that many women denigrate their husbands’ contribution around the house to make themselves feel better about their absence. |
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