Science Daily: “New research by psychologists at the University at Buffalo and Miami University, Ohio, indicates that illusionary relationships with the characters and personalities on favorite TV shows can provide people with feelings of belonging, even in the face of low self esteem or after being rejected by friends or family members.”

I could have told you that. (But I told Liz Lemon instead.)

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?

Via The Frisky:

Sure, the Web has made many aspects of our lives easier, but it’s also complicated a few things—specifically, how we date, flirt and meet potential love interests. And while the date movie du jour, “He’s Just Not That Into You,” may seem a few years behind, we’ve pulled together a helpful up-to-date guide to Flirting 2.0.

Click here for excellent graphic flow chart.

Simon Cowell and Terri Seymour: What is it with American Idol and text-message breakups?

(And with calling me “The [sic] BreakUp [sic] Girl“?)

“In my day, if we wanted to commit adultery, we trudged 14 miles in the snow to the next farmhouse over, and we made love on a scratchy bale of hay. You’d get your rocks off, but you’d also get a low-grade infection from all the minor cuts and scrapes. And we liked it! We loved it!”

— My attempt at aping Dana Carvey’s Grumpy Old Man routine

Time to dust off all your antiquated notions of who’s cheating, why and how. A story published this week in the New York Times says that marital infidelity is markedly up among the young and the old — never mind such well-worn scenarios as the Seven Year Itch or the forty- or fiftysomething midlife crisis:

“The lifetime rate of infidelity for men over 60 increased to 28 percent in 2006, up from 20 percent in 1991. For women over 60, the increase is more striking: to 15 percent, up from 5 percent in 1991. The researchers also see big changes in relatively new marriages. About 20 percent of men and 15 percent of women under 35 say they have ever been unfaithful, up from about 15 and 12 percent respectively.”

And what are considered the culprits of all this out-of-wedlock canoodling? The more societal scourges change, the more they stay the same… drugs and porn! Researchers quoted in the article say that newfangled voodoo fixes like Viagra and hormone replacement therapies have allowed seniors to “express their sexuality into old age,” while the proliferation of Internet porn may be “affecting sexual attitudes and perceptions of ‘normal’ behavior” among the impressionable young.

Other modern trappings — such as cell phones, IMs, and that Holiday Inn Express you stayed in last night — may also be to blame for the significant rise in adultery among women: “…married women are more likely to spend late hours at the office and travel on business. And even for women who stay home, cellphones, e-mail and instant messaging appear to be allowing them to form more intimate relationships.”

If I were a sociology undergrad, I’d try to impress the bejeesus out of my prof by tying all this in to other examples of how modern society, with all its lifesaving/moneymaking innovations, seems geared towards isolation: Bowling Alone, dinner alone, etc. And that then, when an individual, even a married one, gets to a point where he/she feels isolated even from his/her own spouse, a more despearte lurch towards intimacy, such as an extramarital affair, is more likely to take plac.e

Then again, I never actually took any sociology courses, so you tell me what you think in the Comments section below.

It’s election time and we’re ALL poll-crazy. But do we really believe that a pregnant woman’s weight directly affects her child’s political leanings? Or that American women “prefer computers to men?” Well, maybe this fella. But that’s not my point!

The Telegraph reports that Yankee ladies “prefer” to spend most of their waking hours with their computer, not with their suitor (or their family, or their Exercycle).

Oh. Oh?

1. “Women.” Women? So there’s no difference between your grandma and your boss? Kay.

2. Men. We’re not going to address men’s computer usage: time at work, time at Warcraft, and stuff like that? Oh.

3. “Prefer.” Do I prefer to write, read, communicate, be employed? If women were not at work on the computer machine, does that mean that men would also quit their jobs so they could cuddle and take walks all day? Give me a billion dollars and we can all go start a commune (with wifi, or I ain’t stayin’)!

Sounds like the researchers may not understand what computers actually do, or how relationships actually work, for that matter. What if I’m talking to friends and family on the computer, and what if I do that in intervals all day long? What if I’m wooing a man? What if I’m on the laptop while on the couch with my mate? What if I’m buying us movie tickets? What if I’m shopping online? What if by shopping you distinguish shoe shopping in person from buying foot spray and diaper wipes for the menfolk and babies online because I’d rather spend my meager free hours not running errands?

This study doesn’t address the millions of social science studies showing that, despite working as many hours or longer than men, women still do most of the household chores, cooking, child-raising, man-pleasing, key-finding, vacation-planning than their male counterparts.

If women did NOT spend more time on the PC than on exercising, they’d have to work out more than 9 hours every day. Does that sound right to you? But the study makes it sound like it’s unfortunate that we don’t. I think they also just called us fat.

I know that ever since we here at BG HQ introduced the world to the saucily lower-cased slydial, a service that allows you to call directly into someone’s voice mail — ring-free — the world has, in turn, been waiting impatiently for the slydial video contest to arrive directly into our YouTube.

And as of yesterday — finally — there it was. The “How sly Are You?” sweepstakes gives you 90 seconds to show us just how slyly  you slydial. (The company has provided some sample videos for sly-spiration.)

Just one question: how sly is it, exactly, to make a video of yourself lying to your boss/boyfriend/mother/car insurance agent and post it on YouTube?

“Uh, yes, hello, Breakup Girl? Gee, I guess your phone is off or something because this went straight to voice mail. Yeah, well, anyway, this is Maria and you know that post I said I’d write today on the slydial YouTube contest? I just am not going to be able to get to it. I’m sorry. Maybe you could get on of the other super-bloggers to do it? I think Mia said she had some time on her hands…”

Thanks (or maybe, no thanks?) to Ziggs.com, you can now get an email alert every time someone Googles your name. For $4.95 per month, you’ll learn how many times your name was searched, the keywords used to scope you out, and the location (city and state) of the searcher. Sound enticing?  Don’t you remember what can happen when you know too much about someone before even meeting them?   If you’re part of the morethanIneedtoknow squad, find like company with The Frisky:

Anyone who has a blog and checks his or her stats regularly knows that feeling when an ex’s work place ISP pops up in the list of recent visitors. There’s a visceral reaction that, depending on circumstances, can open old wounds, create false hope, and stir up old romantic feelings that probably ought to stay dormant. Aren’t relationships and dating complicated enough already? Hasn’t modern technology and the new avenues of communication and connecting shaken our mental stability enough already?  Do we really need one more thing to analyze in determining whether someone may or may not be interested us?

I say, long live mystery! What’s left of it, anyway. What say you?

Worse for me than the sound of the morning alarm is the buzz of my boyfriend’s Wackberry vibrating on the bedside table. Seriously, dude. Since when is texting more important than spooning?

But that even louder buzz you hear is the sound of 5,655 people like me grumbling about their partners.  Men’s News Daily reports this tidbit from Sheraton Hotel’s recent survey  of 6,500 traveling executives: 87 percent of them admitted, likely propped up with pillows and a scowling spouse at their side, that they bring their Blackberries to bed. And: 35 percent of them said they’d choose their PDA over their spouse. YIKES! Of course, those couples may have issues that predate the telegraph, but still.

So yeah, my boyfriend — who is not even an executive, but clearly some sort of international man of mystery — definitely brings his phone to bed. I mean, phones. He has two Blackberries plus a third phone, which is like a Bat phone for his ex, who is the only one with the number — but that’s a different story.