Arsenio Hall is returning to TV. In a salute to all Arsenio Hall Show fans (remember his hilarious intros?) here’s my relationship spin on things about dating, love and sex that will make you go hmm…
Can you believe that a man’s image of the perfect romantic partner varies depending upon whether he is feeling hungry? In a report from the British Journal of Psychology it was concluded that males with empty stomachs preferred heavier females.
The CDC reports there are 1.1 million Americans between the ages of 25 and 40 who are still virgins. And, here is what I found most fascinating: The odds that a man aged 25-44 has not had sex are 1 in 36. And by the time a woman enters the age range of 25-44, the odds she had no male sexual partner are 1 in 59 – so yes, women outpace men in losing virginity.
If I earned a penny every time someone told me “most men cheat,” I’d have more money than Tyler Perry. In the United States, the odds a man who has ever been married or is living with someone has cheated during the relationship are 1 in 4.76 (21%). For women, the odds are 1 in 9.09 (11%).
Research on seduction has found that mimicking the verbal and nonverbal behavior of strangers enhances their liking of the individual who mimicked them. Men, in multiple dating experiments, evaluated the dating interaction more positively when the woman mimicked them, and that mimicry was associated with a higher evaluation score of the personal relation and the sexual attractiveness of the woman.
MSNBC reports that more than nine out of ten Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex. Interestingly, these high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s – directly challenging perceptions that people were more conservative with sex in the past. The study’s author, Lawrence Finer stated, "This is reality-check research. Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades.”
I always thought marriage had the economic benefit of increasing your wealth, but that’s not so, according to Barbara Kiviat of Time magazine. She says the “conventional wisdom” is that sharing a mortgage and other big expenses lowers the cost of living, but “the economic benefit of marriage isn’t what it used to be.” Why? There are several factors, but the main reason for the narrowing married-single gap is that single women make a better living now.
In the past few years, psychologists have discovered there are 3 common factors among relationships that survive have: 1) They accentuate the positive in life more than the negatives. 2) They not only cope well during hardship, but also celebrate the happy moments and work to build more of these into their lives. 3) They excel in their ability to support each other under difficult circumstances.
According to a study published in the journal Obesity, women who lived with a partner for at least a year increased the likelihood of being obese. For men, the odds of being obese doubled after 1 year of cohabitation. The study also found that couples who lived together for two or more years were significantly more likely to have at least one partner be obese.
From very interesting research outlined in “Do people know what they initially desire in a romantic partner?” from Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, speed dating and longitudinal studies were conducted to discover that we rarely end up with people who possess the “top” characteristics we initially claim to be important. The study concludes with “when it comes to romantic preferences, people lack introspective awareness of what influences their judgments and behavior.”
According to an online survey by one of the largest online dating sites, men and women have completely different fears when it comes to internet courting. The survey showed, when meeting someone in person they had originally met online, women most fear meeting a serial killer. Men most fear meeting someone overweight. Wow!
