True story: Somewhere between our initial flirtations over email and the end of our second date, I found out that my fiance-to-be’s surname was not Jaffe; it was Lorre. Thank goodness his friends tend to call him by his last name, so that all I had to do was listen to another one of his long, boring stories (j/k, babe!) to realize that I’d remembered it wrong.

But if you don’t get lucky like that, Tango’s got a short list of other memory tricks that just might work. One comes straight from ex-Prez Bill Clinton, who reportedly repeats a person’s name back at him or her while looking him or her in the eyes… I’m guessing this explains much about Slick Willie’s usual effect on the her’s.

Of course, as the story points out,  you can always just ask. I like to ask while feigning a moment of memory-escaping befuddlement (hand to forehead, squeeze eyes closed a sec), and then when I ask “What’s your name again?” and inevitably receive the person’s first name, I say, “No, no, no, I’m sorry — I meant your last name.” It works!

We all know love can feel like a roller coaster. But for Amy Wolfe, 33 — a real-life Leigh Swift? — love is a roller coaster. As the Telegraph reports:

Amy Wolfe, a US church organist who claims to have objectum sexuality, a condition that makes sufferers attracted to inanimate objects, plans to marry a magic carpet fairground ride. This follows a “courtship” of 3,000 rides over ten years with the 80 ft gondola ride called 1001 Nachts. Miss Wolfe, 33, from Pennsylvania, will change her surname to Weber after the manufacturer of the ride she travels 160 miles to visit 10 times per year, according to reports.

“I love him as much as women love their husbands and know we’ll be together forever,” she said.

Miss Wolfe first fell for the ride when she was 13: “I was instantly attracted to him sexually and mentally.

“I wasn’t freaked out, as it just felt so natural, but I didn’t tell anyone about it because I knew it wasn’t ‘normal’ to have feelings for a fairground ride.”

In any regard, she’s not alone. Say what you want about the symbolism involved in marrying the Eiffel Tower, but according to this article by the creator of a documentary on the topic, “Why people really fall in love with objects is a controversial issue. The OS [Objectum Sexual] members believe it to be metaphysical but most of the women I interviewed had serious difficulties in early childhood, from severe sexual abuse to abandonment and rejection.” Many of them have Asperger’s Syndrome, which can make interpersonal interaction challenging. From the latter article: “It is not that an Asperger person does not long for human relationships; they do, desperately. But someone who falls in love with objects can control that relationship on their own terms,” says psychotherapist Jerry Brooker. “Their objects will not let them down. That is extremely attractive for a person who is otherwise often desperately lonely.”

So we’re not going to point fingers and laugh here; I’m sure we’ve all whispers of similar feelings: devotion to an excellent pen, say, or passion for a perfect tomato — perhaps even, once in a while, preferring their company to that of humans.

That said, for a good-natured game (a grownup version of “Then Why Don’t You Marry It”), let’s play: if you could marry an inanimate object, what would it be? I mean, besides grilled cheese.

In Nerve.com’s new “I Did It For Science” piece, “Boob Power,” contributor Bianca Merbaum puts her chest to the test. In her obvious, but entertaining, experiment Bianca attempts to gather petition signatures for a ridiculous cause with and without cleavage. The results will not shock you. What’s more interesting is the discussion by the bright Nerve commenters, who go meta on the narrative:

“rb” writes

Let’s look at the bigger picture… In the end this is a short story (and an entertaining one) about one young woman’s attempt to come to terms with and understand part of her body that has affected her self image and self understanding her entire life.

“PCE” writes

…I must point out that when you switched from Rackus Minimus to Major Boobage, your own behavior changed as much as that of your subjects. I think that is the most important message of this article. When you act in a manner that says you are comfortable with yourself, and how you look is not something you should apologize for, people will always respond in a more positive way. …

And if you want to go even more meta, yes, I clicked on link to this article because it said “boobs.”

Read it for yourself here.

Via BoingBoing:

Music can have an overwhelmingly strong hold on the human mind, dramatically swaying our emotions and evoking memories. How come? The new issue of Scientific American Mind surveys recent research on music and the mind. For example, the power of music may come from its influence on regions of the brain responsible for language, feelings, movement, and other unrelated systems. It could also be an important vehicle for emotional communication and connection from which societies emerge. The article looks at studies supporting such theories. From SciAm Mind:

The musical tongue may also transcend more fundamental communication barriers. In studies conducted over the past decade, cognitive psychologist Pam Heaton of Goldsmiths, University of London, and her research team played music for both autistic and nonautistic children, comparing those with similar language skills, and asked the kids to match the music to emotions. In the initial studies, the kids simply chose between happy and sad. In later studies, Heaton and her colleagues introduced a range of complex emotions, such as triumph, contentment and anger, and found that the kids’ ability to recognize these feelings in music did not depend on their diagnosis. Autistic and typical children with similar verbal skills performed equally well, indicating that music can reliably convey feelings even in people whose ability to pick up emotion-laden social cues, such as facial expressions or tone of voice, is severely compromised.

Recently, in a clever experiment, acoustics scientist Roberto Bresin and his co-workers at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm garnered quantitative support for the idea that music is a universal language. Instead of asking volunteers to make subjective judgments about a piece of music, scientists asked them to manipulate the song—in particular, its tempo, volume and phrasing—to maximize a given emotion. For a happy song, for instance, a participant was supposed to manipulate these variables by adjusting sliders so that the song sounded as cheerful as possible; then as sad as possible; then scary, peaceful and neutral.

The researchers found that the participants—expert musicians and, in another study, seven-year-old children—all landed on the same tempo for each song to bring out its intended emotion, be it happiness, sadness, fear or tranquility. These findings, which Bresin reported at the 2008 Neuromusic III conference in Montreal, bolster the idea that music contains information that elicits a specific emotional response in the brain regardless of personality, taste or training. As such, music may constitute a unique form of communication.

From EthanZuckerman.com:

Marriage, as it turns out, is an extremely good predictor of happiness. Married people make more money per capita, eat better, live longer, have more sex and enjoy it more. In terms of comparisons of happiness, you’d need to be making $100,000 more as an unmarried person to be as happy as a married person. (On average, and your mileage may vary, of course. And please, keep in mind, this is Gilbert talking, not me.) Is this a causal relationship? Maybe happier people are simply more likely to get married? That’s true, but studies over time reveal a very common pattern — people are less happy before marriage, experience a happiness peak shortly after marriage, and become slightly less happy a few years into marriage, though remain significantly happier than before marriage.

Well, that’s better news than something about marriage, after all that, making you less happy. But please keep this from the folks who are happiest of all when they’re bugging singles to shack up.

We already know that yogurt is the official food of women. (Dessert: Fling Bar.) And that real men don’t eat the savory egg tart that dare not speak its name. A.K. Whitney over at Siren (via The Frisky) has even been told — by the waiter she just ordered from — that Beef Stroganoff was “a man’s dish.” So tell: have those stereotypes — steeped in lame, undercooked notions of masculinity and femininity — made their way onto your plates? Are you a guy who gets a look for ordering salad? A gal who asks for regular…and gets served Diet?

OK, now I’m hungry. And not, it should be noted, for a rice cake.

OK, so maybe it’s not exactly revenge to read that muscular men have more sexual partners and tend to lose their virginity at an earlier age than untoned dudes. But payback time’s a comin’: turns out skinny guys actually live longer. Ain’t no party like a retirement-home party!

According to a recent evolutionary psychology study from the University of Pittsburgh, “The beefier the man… the more sexual partners he had. [But] compared to skinnies…muscular men also tended to producer fewer infection-fighting white blood cells and less of an important immune molecule.”  Point, emo dudes.

I often take a friend breakup harder than I do a lover breakup. Because we’re not supposed to break up with our friends. Boy- and girlfriends are practically designed to come and go, while friendship is so meaningful and precious that it makes us utter little sweet nothings like “A friend is forever” or “Friends till the end.” Nobody’s ever said “Boyfriend till the end.” Just doesn’t sound right.

So I take a little let-myself-off-the-hook comfort in this recent study showing that most friendships come with an expiration date, too. In fact, sociologists found that the seven-year-itch phenomenon applies just as much to our platonic relationships as it does our sexual ones.

During that stretch of time, as one summary put it, “personal network sizes remained stable, but many members of the network were new. Only 30 percent of  the original ‘helper’ friends and discussion partners had the same position in a subject’s network seven years later, and only 48 percent were still part of the social network.”

Perhaps we were readier to acknowledge that friendships evolve (or don’t!) as we do — and that some have a natural shelf-life — we’d be better able to take their ends in stride?

An epidemic of narcissism is what may be keeping you single, according to the authors / psychologists cited in this piece at the Daily Beast. “Narcissism, even in small doses, has shifted courtship into a high-stakes relationship culture,” goes their argument. “Now that people think more highly of themselves, expectations of what a relationship should be like have skyrocketed into the realm of superlatives. Twentysomethings not only expect to waltz into high-level career positions right out of college, they also expect partners who have the moral fortitude of Nelson Mandela, the comedic timing of Stephen Colbert, the abs of Hugh Jackman, and the hair of Patrick Dempsey.”

But … don’t the grownups say every generation is self-absorbed? And shouldn’t we have [healthily] high expectations for lasting love? Don’t some young’uns just need to grow up a bit? That’s what they’re wondering over at the The Frisky, where Wendy Atterberry writes, “I suspect today’s youth, just like the generations before, will mature and become less self-involved over time. They’ll begin seeing potential mates in terms of not only how happy they make them feel, but how much better they are when they’re with them: better friends, better employees, better contributing members of society.”

Read ’em both. And tell us: what do you think, given that your opinion is of course the most insightful of all? 😉

Via Mary Elizabeth Williams at Broadsheet:

Marital breakups are rarely easy, but for couples with children, they often come with the added nagging fear that you’re forever ruining your kids’ lives. But a new study (PDF) affirms what anyone whose own childhood resembled a Richard Yates novel suspects — that sticking together for the sake of the kids can backfire.

The study, provocatively titled “Are Both Parents Always Better Than One? Parental Conflict and Young Adult Well-Being” (from the California Center for Population Research at the University of California-Los Angeles), charts the progress of 1,963 households from teens to early 30s. While citing that “children tend to do better living with two biological married parents,” the study is a reassuring academic loogie in the face of self-sacrifice, an acknowledgement of the role of “poor quality marriage” in drinking and dropout rates.

Speaking about the study to Science Daily, the paper’s co-author, Cornell associate professor Kelly Musick, said, “the advantages of living with two continuously married parents are not shared equally by all children … Children from high-conflict families are more likely to drop out of school, have poor grades, smoke, binge drink, use marijuana, have early sex, be young and unmarried when they have a child and then experience the breakup of that relationship.”

An intact marriage isn’t automatically a successful one — for anybody. (The study also helpfully cites previous findings that “although marriage confers benefits to adults on average, those in poor quality marriages are no better off than the single and, indeed, may fare worse on some measures.”) Despite our continued cultural insistence upon equating divorce with failure, for parents whose relationships have become unbearable, the best way to save the family may be to dissolve it.