We recently had the opportunity to sit down with Laurie Davis, author of Love@First Click and founder of eFlirt Expert, and picked her brain for dating and relationship advice. For those of you looking to rewire your relationships, check out this video for some great tips on how to break negative patterns and move forward to a healthier, happier love…
Over dinner my friend Jane makes an offhand comment: “I couldn’t stand my husband when I first met him.” Immediately, I’m intrigued. They’ve been married eight years and she’s head over heels in love with him. She continues, “He was the most obnoxious, pompous know-it-all I’d ever met.” “What finally changed your mind?” I ask, expecting some big gesture on…
For some people, the words yielding and surrender might evoke romance novels—lovers swept away by passion, tearing each other’s clothes off, transported to an idyll of true-love-forever. Or yielding and surrender can raise the specter of submissive women who are ceaselessly compliant, handmaidens in the backgrounds of men’s lives. But there’s another perspective. Surrendering to a partner, yielding to his…
For over two decades I’ve tried to maintain a civil relationship with my sister-in-law, my husband’s brother’s wife. Without dredging up a lot of toxic memories, let’s just say we never hit it off. Both of us, however, have consistently tried to at least tolerate each other. Even so, we’ve had several major fallouts, which have put a strain not…
I left them quite intentionally, my blue-collar family, but now I can look back with great appreciation. They scraped together the money that my private-college scholarship didn’t cover, probably not understanding that it meant I would leave their world for one they would never enter—the reward and punishment of a good education. Decades later, I’ve learned to fake it, to…
I’m at one end of the couch, my 88-year-old father at the other in the living room of his condo in Fountain Hills, Arizona. We could easily pass for strangers, but not because of our limited contact since he moved here from New Jersey 28 years ago. Encroaching dementia has estranged my father from me as well as from himself.…
Last week I wrote about starting Zen’tinis, a conversational salon. Maybe, like me, you’ve been to enough cocktail parties, networking events, and informal hangouts and you long for the substance of real stimulation. You wish you could have it in an environment where you can learn the thoughts of the folks around you and share one or two of your own.…
A few years ago, something struck me: our culture simply doesn’t offer many situations that are designed to support us in authentic dialogue. Most of the time, adults interact in ways that are either accidental or transactional. Cocktail parties are about transaction according to attractiveness; business-networking events are all about the elevator pitch. We rarely walk into those kinds of…
Her Story By JMR I was 37 when I was diagnosed with severe renal failure. That same day, I also learned that I was pregnant with my first child. I had been trying to get pregnant for a few months, after convincing my husband and finally feeling ready. The timing was not perfect, though. I had just started a business,…
