LIFE’S UPS AND DOWNS 生活札記

EnglishWith all the stimulus ready to go into more broadband, bigger tax cuts and infrastructure, some of America’s most expensive societal investments are also on the decline and in need of a bailout — getting married.

Marriage in America is on the rocks. People skirt the issue, talking about how career women delay marriage until it’s too late, or about how men marry younger the second time around. But the truth is, except for the highest-income Americans among us, fewer and fewer of us are getting married at all.

Married couples with children now make up fewer than one in four U.S. households. That’s half the rate of 1960. Married households of any type have been in the minority since 2005.

It’s not that people are suddenly more promiscuous, or more celibate. Americans are pairing off and staying together just as much as ever, but now it’s without the rings, gowns and expensive photographers. They are America’s committed cohabiters, and theirs is the fastest-growing kind of U.S. household. According to the Census, there are 5.2 million such cohabiting couples, and they are raising 2.2 million children.

Committed cohabiters are more downscale than married parents — they have lower incomes, lower education levels and lower rates of home ownership. There is now a great and growing marital divide between the rich who can afford it and the downscale, who are living more and more without it.

But today it’s not just the young who are living in what just a generation ago was called living in sin — their parents have adapted and are living that way too. The fastest growth in cohabitation is among the over-50 set. Oftentimes, widows, widowers and divorced Americans over 50 — who now total 25 million people — don’t want to complicate inheritances (or burial plans) with a second marriage, but they are committing to each other with devotion just as tender as young people experience, and they are counting very much on the other’s being there at the end.

Society values marriage and monogamy, though, so why isn’t it doing anything about it? There are two options: make marriage economically and socially more attractive, or go with the flow and expand the privileges and obligations of “common law” couples. Right now we are letting the chips fall where they may — a tactic which is currently causing marriage to continue to wither away as an institution. The word “partner” is increasingly replacing the word “spouse.”

If we wanted to increase the number of marriages, we have a number of ideas readily at hand. Tax breaks, instead of tax penalties. Yes-fault divorce. A push for religious leaders to stop spending so much time decrying some marriages (e.g., gay ones, interracial ones), and instead focus on encouraging marriage in the first place. Maybe a national “Spouse Day,” to go along with Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.

How about revisiting those traditional anniversary gifts? Forget the paper in year one and the wood in year five — let’s upgrade the scale. Call 10 years the “silver” anniversary, to celebrate more lavishly those who make it there. Make 25 the “golden” one. And for those who make it to 50 years, hell, give them the Hope Diamond.

Alternatively, we could expand the rights and obligations of committed cohabiters. Every legal arrangement in society — from child custody to survivors’ benefits to next-of-kin decision-making — is affected by this new living arrangement. And so is every institution that gears its benefits around families. Can an unmarried significant other, even a longstanding one, skip the waiting list at the country club because his “friend” already belongs? Can a widowed life partner keep her beloved’s rent-controlled apartment? Can you still get the family rate at Disneyland if the adults in your group are unrelated by either blood or marriage?

Marketers, too, have yet to recognize committed cohabiters as a class and start offering products that acknowledge their unique status. Towels with his and her initials, but separately designed. Address labels that can actually handle two full names. How about a legal and will kit that allows cohabiters to choose just how separate-and-apart they want to be in death, as in life? And if Hallmark is missing out on all those wedding anniversary cards, maybe it’s time to celebrate when we moved in together.

In a sense, relationships at home are increasingly paralleling relationships at work with employers. Whereas 50 years ago, people expected to have one or two jobs for life, now some estimates say they expect six or seven. If marriage was meant to be “’til death do us part,” cohabitation is a little more like “’til life drives us apart.”

At home as at work, Americans are signing on, but without all the trappings that might make progression to the next stage too difficult. And social planners better catch up. They have fallen behind on what could be the most basic of trends — how to accommodate people navigating the middle ground between uncommitted hook-ups, and the “institution” of marriage. And with the financial crisis hitting the downscale the hardest, it may lead to even more cohabitation without marriage, accelerating this microtrend into something bigger.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

EnglishWomen with larger chins are more likely to cheat on their partners, according to research.

Psychologists have found that adult females who have prominent chins are more sexually active than those with softer features, yet are less attractive to men looking for a long-term partner.

Larger chins on women are often caused by a high level of the male growth hormone testosterone, present in all women in various amounts.

The hormone also increases sexual assertiveness in a woman, a tendency more commonly attributed to males.

The researchers, from four universities across the US and Canada, took a group of young women and questioned them on their sexual histories and fantasies.

These women were then rated by a group of men on their desirability as a life partner.

It was concluded that men will shun women with such masculine features when looking for a long-term partner because they fear being cuckolded.

Psychologists believe it is linked to their evolutionary desire to have a partner who will produce children for only one man.

Authors of the study, published in the journal Personality And Individual Differences, said: “The findings are important in demonstrating that perceptions of women as desirable and trustworthy long-term mates can be reliably gleaned by men from viewing only the women’s facial features.

“Results suggest that information about women’s sexual unrestrictedness, which is related to their risk of infidelity, can potentially be conveyed by the masculinity of women’s faces.”

The theory has many examples in the celebrity world.

Actress Meg Ryan, 47, who has a strong chin, famously cheated on her husband Dennis Quaid with her co-star Russell Crowe.

However, the actress Joanne Woodward, who has a dainty jawline, was happily married for 50 years to Hollywood icon Paul Newman until his death in September.

Dr Lorne Campbell, a psychologist from Western Ontario University, who took part in the project, wrote: “It is difficult to conceal physical features, such as facial characteristics, that are partly governed by testosterone and reliably correlate with one’s sexual history and attitudes.

The research is the first to our knowledge to suggest that a more masculine facial appearance in women might convey their sexual unrestrictedness and perhaps their long-term mate quality.”

Source: Telegraph

繁體中文英國一項研究發現，「炒飯」對象越有錢，越容易讓女性達到性高潮。專家指出，這是女性「內建」的順應進化現象，驅使女性選擇優質對象，證明女性先天有釣金龜婿的傾向。

根據進化心理學，不光女性，男性先天也有這種淘金傾向，目的都是為了讓自己的基因儘可能延續下去。

星期泰晤士報報導，紐卡索大學心理學者波勒特（Thomas Pollet）等人取材一項針對中國5000名民眾生活習慣的深度訪談資料，分析其中1534名有男性伴侶的女性，發現男伴收入對她們達到性高潮的頻率有極大正面影響。

不僅中國女性如此，先前在德國和美國進行的研究也顯示，女性的性高潮頻率雖還受男伴五官、身材端正與否以及有無魅力等影響，但金錢似乎仍是更重要因素。

美國奧斯汀德州大學心理學教授巴斯（David Buss）在其著作《欲望的進化》（暫譯，The Evolution of Desire）中指出，性高潮能讓女性對條件優異男性的感情更上層樓，或者性高潮可能是女性性滿足而不會另覓炒飯對象的信號，箇中涵義是：「我對你忠貞不二，所以你應該投資在我和我的後代上。」

EnglishWhen a guy is aroused, his sweat activates the female brain.

Scientists have long debated whether humans, like animals, use chemical signals called pheromones to communicate sexual interest to potential mates. Problem is, the effects of pheromones are thought to be subconscious - meaning that if we do communicate using them, we sure don’t know it. It’s also hard to know what these pheromones might be and how we sense them, so researchers understand little about them.

But if human pheromones are going to be anywhere, they’re going to be in sweat, right? Denise Chen, a psychologist at Rice University in Houston, and her colleagues devised an experiment to compare how women respond to different forms of male sweat - sweat produced in everyday situations versus that produced when a man is turned on.

Chen and her colleagues asked 20 heterosexual guys to stop wearing deodorant and scented products for a few days. Then they told the men to put small pads in their armpits as they watched pornographic videos and became aroused (the researchers confirmed, using electrodes, that the images did the job). Later, the guys were asked to exchange those pads for fresh pads to collect the sweat they produced when they weren’t aroused. Then the researchers recruited 19 brave women to smell the men’s pads while undergoing brain scans.

Sure enough, the women’s brains responded very differently depending on which sweat they sniffed. The sexual sweat, but not the normal sweat, activated the right orbito-frontal cortex and the right fusi-form cortex, brain areas that help us recognize emotions and perceive things, respectively. Both regions are in the right hemisphere, which is generally involved in smell, social response, and emotion.

Our sexual intentions, in other words, may be a lot clearer than we ever intended them to be. That crush you have on your co-worker? She may already know - at least subconsciously.

Source: Live Science

EnglishAs stock markets across the globe have plummeted, more people have opted to try their luck looking for love online as a distraction from financial woes — and to save themselves money, according to dating Web sites.

A list of Web sites have reported a pickup in activity since the global financial crisis hit in September as people seek a companion during tough times and save money on face-to-face dates by searching for potential partners on the Internet.

“On days when the U.S. Dow Jones industrial (average) went down by a lot, by more than 100 points, more people were likely to log in and spend more time on the site,” Gian Gonzaga, senior research scientist at Web site eHarmony told Reuters.

“It makes a lot of sense. People seek out companionship in times of stress. Studies repeatedly show that being in a relationship can help a person’s psychological and physical health.”

The Dow Jones industrial average is down 35 percent this year, hitting a year low on November 21, and presenting a new situation for the relatively new online dating industry which has only gone through one economic crisis before, after the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

Match.com, an online dating service, said it had experienced its largest membership growth over the last seven years in November as the daily drumbeat of bad economics sent people looking for love.

“During these trying times, people are looking for hope in their inbox,” said Thomas Enraght-Moony, CEO of Match.com which has online dating sites in 40 countries.

Perfectmatch.com reported a 47 percent jump in the number of members in the three months to November compared to the previous quarter, supporting theories that online dating could be a countercyclical business that does well in an economic downturn.

A poll by Opinion Research Corp., conducted on behalf of eHarmony, found that 57 percent of Americans said the credit crunch made them worry about their love lives with married men the most stressed group with 63 percent of them concerned.

But when researchers divided the 1,092 respondents into age groups, those aged between 25 and 34 were most stressed about the impact their personal economic situation would have on their love lives, with 75 percent of them concerned.

However, researchers found that younger, single people who were stressed about the economy and its impact were more likely to seek out a relationship.

Older people, who were more likely to be married, were concerned that financial stress would harm their relationship, particularly if they feared losing their job or their house.

“When people are stressed they want to find a relationship but if they are in relationship, that extra stress will make that relationship that bit harder,” said Gonzaga, adding that similar surveys in Australia and Britain came up with the same results.

“Stress gets under the skin of relationships. Partners spend less time together because they have to work more. There are often more fights over bills and household budgets.”

Another survey by Avalanche LLC, which operates online dating Web sites date.com, matchmaker.com, and amor.com, found 48 percent of people were spending more time online or on the phone with a potential date before spending on a face-to-face meeting.

Source: Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE4B74ZY20081208)