Anybody else game to test this out on their next blind (so to speak!) date? From a study covered in the London Telegraph:

“The longer a man’s gaze rests on a woman when they meet for the first time, the more interested he is. If it lasts just four seconds, he may not be all that impressed. But if it breaks the 8.2 second barrier, he could already be in love they say.”

Women were found to stare for equal lengths of time whether they were attracted to the guy or not. Why? Because, the article explains (“explains”), “… women are more wary of attracting unwanted attention because of the risks of unwanted pregnancy and single parenthood.”

[Charlie Brown confused headshake] Wuzzuh?

And I thought it was just me who mind-jumped ahead too fast on the first date.

“At 22, Leslie Morgan Steiner seemed to have it all, a Harvard diploma, a glamorous job and apartment in NYC, and a handsome boyfriend. But this golden girl was hiding a dark secret. She’d made a mistake shared by millions, she fell in love with the wrong person…”

Watch the video trailer for Crazy Love here.

According to  Tony Dovolani, a pro on ABC’s Dancing With The Stars, dancing can improve your relationship, and not just with Bruno Tonioli. In fact, Dovolani spends time between seasons helping couples cha-cha, waltz, and salsa their groove back.

“It’s almost like you have a newfound love for each other,” Dovolani told Tango. “Discovering new steps together teaches couples to interact with each other. They’re looking into each other’s eyes, anticipating the next move. It opens up energy channels of feeling and connection. It rejuvenates everything.”

Can Dovolani even teach the broken-hearted to boogie back? ‘Cause we’re rooting for Rycroft in more ways than one.

(Puzzled by the subject line? Click here. It’s a classic.)

Speaking of Carrie and Randy, I told you so.

From today’s New York Times:

Moreover, teenage girls can’t be expected to support Rihanna just because of her gender, youth culture experts say. They see themselves as sharing equal responsibility with boys. Parity, not sisterhood, is the name of the game.

During a presentation about dating violence [!!!] to ninth graders at Hostos-Lincoln Academy this week, one girl said, “If they hit you, smack them back. Both my parents say that to me.”

When Danielle Shores, 17, a high school junior in Austin, Tex., heard about the fight, she thought: “Yeah, men hit women, and women hit men. It was blown out of proportion because they’re celebrities.”

She sounded miffed. “My best friend got hit by her boyfriend, and I don’t see people making a big deal about it,” Ms. Shores said.

Good: girls see themselves and their peers as strong, expected to take care of themselves. Sad: that means hitting back — and shrugging it away* — rather than telling anyone who hits them to step the eff off.

What, if not this, is it gonna take? For the moment, I have no answers.

* At least outwardly. Wonder how many are trembling, or at least conflicted, inside.

Listen to Oprah! Tyra too! (And BG!)

In an act of ultimate woo-pitching, your male luv-uh seduces you on the beach, on a hot summer night, under a full moon… pinch me, I’m dreaming? No, but you are about to get pinched in all the wrong places by a horseshoe crab.

That’s just one of the nifty, species-specific mating rituals outlined in this food-for-thought post over on Wired’s science blog. Collectively, they sound an awful lot like, well, dudes.

“Some of these rituals are designed to convey reproductive fitness. Others are meant to trick reluctant mates into a one-night stand. And — hermaphrodites withstanding — it’s nearly always the males who try to catch the attention of ladies,” says the piece.

The animals listed engage in acts of attraction that sound either dizzyingly romantic (oh, to find an elephant of one’s own!), oddly gender-flippy (it’s the male grouse that shakes his caboose to catch the gal’s eye) or eerily reminiscent of the worst Saturday-night meat market ever (skull-butting, peen jousting).

Or would you rather be a fish?

I thought it was just the English major in me that despised the butchered staccato — not to mention the soulless narrative and truncated nuance — of texting. Turns out, it was probably just my estrogen talking.

Studying text messages submitted by young men and women to Allmusic, Italy’s TRL-like interactive music channel, researchers from Indiana University found that “while men historically talk more in public settings, when the exchanges occur via text messaging in a public venue …  it is the women who push their messages closest to the character-count limit, who use more abbreviations and insertions, and who implement more emoticons (like smiling and frowning faces).”

In other words, while men historically out-verbiage women oratorially, women seem to try harder and longer (yup, that’s what she said… and said and said) at conveying content and meaning when they have to do so via SMS.

Funny enough, I was planning to announce to my friends this week (via my much-loved Facebook page, a technology I so prefer to txt) that I am *off*texting*for*good!*. My status shall soon read: “Rose no longer emits or accepts text messages. She is a callivore, not a textinarian.” And yeah, I just made up those two zeitgeist-ready words. Feel free to pass along.

And by “good time,” they mean hiking, eco-activism, trading nerdy theories about “Lost.” Yes, Ryan Blitstein and his girlfriend/wingman have each other — and Facebook and MeetUp and CraigsList — but they also have solitary jobs in a relatively new city (Chicago), and, as Blitstein writes in a nice essay at Salon.com, they are also having a hard time making friends.

“My Facebook profile is bursting at the seams with hundreds of acquaintances, colleagues and contacts, many within walking distance. But I can count on one hand the number I’d even take out for a drink. So much for the brave new world of social networking,” Blitstein writes. “Until recently, I thought of myself as different, especially when it came to maintaining friendships with other men. I am not afraid to ask a guy out on a so-called man-date. I don’t need to use SportsCenter or an action movie or an indie rock show to overpower the supposed latent homoeroticism that some men attribute to one-on-one male socializing. I’m as comfortable talking about relationships with another dude as I am arguing about politics. But it seems the older I get, the harder it is to find new people to engage in these conversations.”

And: “There is a vast gulf between vaguely keeping in touch with someone and actually sharing, experiencing, exploring and all the other things you give and get and take from a close friendship. I find it increasingly difficult to cross over that gulf with those I’m meeting now. It’s a poignant thing to be a full-grown human and realize you’re deficient in something that seems so effortless for children.”

Blitstein’s essay is not an obvious broadside against the “alienation” of “technology,” yadda yadda. (I’d argue that the “connectedness” fostered by Facebook, while often superficial in one sense, still does the job of affirming one’s role in one’s own life story. High school! Camp! That crappy post-college internship! OMG! Hi hi hi!) But judging by many of the letters written in response, Blitstein and his girlfriend are not, so to speak, alone — and I think there is something new and modern, if not high-tech, about that. When we married much younger, skipping the seeking-our-fortunes/-selves segment of our twenties, we kept our high school and college friends because we’d graduated with them, like, last year. Now, like our phones, we’re mobile. There are more phases in our lives, more places to put down — and pull up — stakes. Makes sense to me.

What about you? Has making friends gotten harder for you as you get older? Might that also make it harder to make more-thans, too, given that “through friends” can be a romantic goldmine?

A group of scientists at Lafayette University recently found that kissing reduces levels of the stress hormone cortisol. They also noted higher levels of the emotional-bonding chemical oxytocin in the guys  they studied — but curiously, not in the girls, whose oxytocin levels pretty much stayed the same.

The study’s subjects were male and female, college-age students from the school — no same-sex couples were studied! Erm! — who were asked to make out in the student health center for 15 minutes. Memo to Lafayette admissions: put that in the catalog!

While I am tickled to find that there’s a Latin-derived “-ology” for the study of kissing — philematology — I wish it didn’t sound quite so much like “phelgmatology.” And to an extent, I’m happy to remain a layman rather than overanalyzing the art of kissing. For example, I don’t think I need to know that “men prefer ‘sloppy’ kisses, in which chemicals including testosterone can be passed onto the women in saliva. Testosterone increases the sex drives in both males and females.” Dropping that bit of science on me has, I think, actually ruined my next makeout session.

Via Broadsheet:

Now that woman can drink ventis with impunity, maybe we’ll no longer be “too tired” for sex. But otherwise, most discussions of much-studied low female sex drive — and prescriptions for revving it up — lack a look at the big picture, argues Amanda Marcotte in today’s AlterNet (via RHRealityCheck). Hormones, toddlers, fatigue, fate: not that they don’t play a role. But we do not live in a vacuum. (Or to vacuum; we’ll get to that). What’s missing from these conversations, according to Marcotte? The role sexism plays in turning us off. In other words: It’s not you, it’s the patriarchy.

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