How Marriage Has Changed Dramatically Throughout History

In 2017, Australians were asked “Should the law be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry?”. The answer was a resounding “yes” – more than 60% of those who expressed a view backed marriage equality.

Real appreciation is a gift of love straight from the heart, an acknowledgement of another’s greatness and beauty, and a way of showing your partner that you really care. Many women need specific kinds of appreciation. And many men don’t understand this.

Find out what kind of acknowledgment means most to the man in your life. How does he most need to be appreciated? You may be surprised. Please don’t get the idea that men don’t need appreciation for inner qualities of being.

A sense of humor is an attractive trait. There is abundant cross-cultural evidence that shows that being funny makes you more desirable as a mate, especially if you are a man. But once the initial flirting is over, and you are in a romantic relationship, how large a role does humor play?

Energy, like water, is the life-giving sustenance of the earth. Sexual energy is nourishment for the totality of ourselves -- the body, the mind, and the spirit. It is the water of life, replenishing the gardens of the human temple. Working with energy is a pivotal factor in our overall state of happiness.

A stressful event, such as the death of a loved one, really can break your heart. In medicine, the condition is known as broken heart syndrome or takotsubo syndrome.

A healthy relationship stimulates both partners' individual growth. A functional relationship is not a fairy-tale type 'they lived happily ever after' scenario; it is subject to the same stresses and challenges inherent in any human partnership.

Two men regularly meet at a sex club, so that one (‘the top’) can fist the other (‘the bottom’). One night, the fisting duo stay until the club closes. The lights click on in their sobering glory, exposing the prosthetic hand that the top has been inserting into the anus of the bottom.

I pray that I no longer seek for the other one for I have found completion in me. And if in my solitary journey,  I happen to join with another soul, let our hearts merge because we have so much love to give... And if we find ourselves taking, let our receiving be based on...

Picture Morgan Freeman, Donald Trump or Margaret Thatcher. Most likely you can hear their voices in your mind, and the characteristic inflections that they put on certain words, as well as their tone and pitch.

Times are changing, and for the most part, the word 'crone' is now accurately being used as a synonym for a woman who not only embodies postmenopausal wisdom, but shares it with the world. It is the time when the wisdom and healing of a woman's menopausal journey quickens in her heart, and her desire to share all that she has learned drives her back to the outer world.

Imagine your partner unexpectedly changes their Facebook status from “in a relationship” to “single” and then refuses to communicate with you. This sounds awfully cruel, completely robbing you of your right to find out why you have been dumped so that you can get some closure and move on.

When the King of Sweden asks Joan, the protagonist of the newly-released film The Wife, what she does for a living, she replies, ironically, “I am a king maker”. This poignant scene takes place towards the film’s end, as Joan (Glenn Close) takes part in the festive dinner celebrating her husband being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Love has to be understood, not as a biological infatuation — that is lust. That exists in all the animals; there is nothing special about it. Love is the fragrance of a silent, peaceful, meditative heart. Love has nothing to do with biology or chemistry or hormones...

Most children adjust well to parental separation and divorce, at least in the long term. A minority of children of separated parents have long-term problems, which can affect them through their childhood and into adult life. But it’s conflict between separated parents, and not the separation itself, which accounts for many of the problems children of separated parents experience.

We can only trace romantic love back to about a thousand years ago. Prior to that, there wasn't any romantic love. It's an idea that has been invented, like a philosophy or a religion. It has been made very special.

The image of the partner who is most attractive to you is buried deep within your unconscious mind. You began sketching this picture soon after your birth and before you were a teenager the composite was nearly complete. Your Imago has a dominant influence over the type of partner you seek, the way you relate to him, and how happy you will be together. The relationship script you wrote as a child is based on both the Imago you created and the childhood wounds you suffered.

For a lecture course I teach at Brown University called “Love Stories,” we begin at the beginning, with love at first sight. To its detractors, love at first sight must be an illusion – the wrong term for what is simply infatuation, or a way to sugarcoat lust. Buy into it, they say, and you’re a fool.

It’s been said that whatever brings us to face the essential truth of our lives may be called “grace.” Frequently, grace assumes a form that feels more like a curse than a blessing. It can be a life-threatening illness, the loss of a family member, being fired from a job, the kids leaving home (or coming back), divorce, a serious accident, or any number of possible crises that can be encountered in one’s life.

The most common sexual problem is low desire, according to a research study we recently published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Around 40 per cent of the women we asked, and 30 per cent of men, reported experiencing problems with low desire during the last six months.

Research shows we think young people have a lot more sex than they do in reality – and men have a particularly skewed view of the sex lives of young women.

When I tell people I’m studying women who like gay male porn I get some pretty mixed responses. Men tend to tilt their heads quizzically to one side. “Really?”

‘The world has always belonged to males,’ wrote Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949), ‘and none of the reasons given for this have ever seemed sufficient.’

How often do you tell the special people in your life exactly what it is that you love most about them? How often do you identify what's good about your spouse, lover, children, sisters, brothers, dad, mother, uncles, aunts, friends, and colleagues -- and actually put it into words so there can be no doubt?

As the TV series Westworld wraps up its second season, the show continues to spark discussion about a potential future that involves lifelike sex robots.

Quite often, I spend time with people who are extremely critical of themselves for having multiple failed relationships. The truth is, they're missing the point: We can't fail, because there's no way to do these things wrong. A failed relationship, if you put it into its proper context, is a chance to...

The old cliché tells us the most desirable men are “tall, dark, and handsome” – and scientific research confirms that heterosexual women tend to prefer partners who are taller than them.

Taking time apart from a loved one is often thought of as the end of the relationship. But after 53 years together, and helping to guide thousands of couples, Joyce and I view separation as a sometimes vital necessity in a relationship...

It was a well-kept secret among historians during the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the practice of magic was widespread in the ancient Mediterranean

When my husband Charlie and I conducted our study, Secrets of Great Marriages: Real Truths from Real Couples about Lasting Love, these are the practices that respondents told us had held them in good stead to grow their exemplary relationships.

Some couples seem blessed with everlasting love. Then, there’s the rest of us—who start running into trouble once the honeymoon is over. We encounter differences, disagreements, disappointments. Buttons get pushed. And communication breaks down as issues become increasingly hard to resolve.

Sharing your life with a loving partner is very rewarding and meaningful. Since we work with couples, we often ask them how they met. Often they will respond that they met online. Typically, they are somewhat embarrassed when they reveal this, thinking that it should have been a more natural and romantic way of meeting. But...

Lying about availability is a common deception online dating users tell potential partners, according to a new paper. “Until now, it has been relatively unclear how often mobile daters use deception in their messages before they meet the other person,” says Markowitz.

Housework is often understood as a gendered negotiation based on the traditional roles of homemaker (feminine) and breadwinner (masculine). While gender norms have shifted dramatically in the past few decades, theories of housework are still stuck on this 1950s model.

Romantic couples with a large age gap often raise eyebrows. Studies have found partners with more than a ten-year gap in age experience social disapproval.

The statistics are terrifying: In Canada, one woman is killed every week by her partner; globally, one third of women will suffer violence at the hands of someone they love in their lifetime. But what if survivors like Susan are also dealing with the effects of a traumatic brain injury along with the fear and trauma of finally having escaped a long-term abusive relationship?

Our intimate live-in relationships offer us a constant reminder of the work we still have to do. If we are successful, we can transform an ordinary relationship into the precious gift of partnership.

Most Americans who get married today believe they are choosing their own partners after falling in love with them. Arranged marriages, which remain common in some parts of the world, are a rarity here.

In a widely read blog post, Jennifer Willoughby wrote this phrase after each of the many reasons she gave for enduring what she described as her abusive marriage to former White House aide Rob Porter: “And so I stayed.”

We're programmed to have unrealistic expectations from movies and TV, from romance stories promising wonderful experiences with people who anticipate our every wish. We want someone to be always caring, always considerate, always loveable, always giving. But these romantic illusions too often leave us feeling cheated...

Infidelity highlights the potential fragility of our closest and most important of relationships. But despite the blunt belief infidelity is the result of immoral and over-sexed individuals wanting their cake and eating it too, the reality is far more nuanced.

Your first sexual partner may have more to tell you about your spouse or current lover than you may think. Although this may sound surprising to you, studies have shown early experiences play a role in who we choose as a sexual partner.

Your most important decision may be figuring out your best romantic partner. Relationships matter – a lot. They have implications for your health, your reactions to stress and even how you look at the world. But how can you determine if your current romantic partner is the best of the best for you?

There can be plenty of tension associated with Valentine's Day. One cold, dreary February 14th, I am at the grocery store at 5 p.m. In the parking lot I can see men getting out of their cars and scurrying into the store. Inside at the express lane checkout counter are five men standing in line, each holding a dozen roses...

To create a truly lovely Valentine's month and build more joy, love, and peace in your life, I offer you ten tips for building and sustaining good personal and intimate relationships. This article full of numbers is followed by eight Valentine gifts that don't cost any money and blatantly show your love.

The paradox of vulnerability in relationships, the path to connection, is to allow yourself to be both strong and vulnerable at the same time. When you do, it allows your partner to get to see the real you with your defenses down. This means no hiding. Not from yourself, not from your partner and best of all no hiding from the truth.

To be vulnerable with a woman is to allow yourself to be seen and known in your entirety, not just your powerful, independent, secure, loving and capable self. To be vulnerable is to show her your fear, pain, shame, and need for love.

Characteristics merely reflect gross exaggerations of important evolutionary qualities that we actually want in a long-term partner.

We all know what infidelity is, but a universal definition is difficult to carve out—especially in the digital age. Is watching porn cheating, or is it only cheating if the person on the other side of the screen is live?

Simple behavioural tests have now allowed us to see how this organisation is revealed through biases in how we see and interact with the world – and each other – often without us being aware of it.

A male African jacana bird mounts a female, but who takes the lead in caring for the young?. In many species, the males develop elaborated sexual traits to attract females and dissuade potential rival males through competition.

Heterosexual men have unwanted sex with women for two reasons, interviews with 39 college men suggest: in order to conform to gender expectations and to avoid uncomfortable interactions.

Allegations about sexual harassment in Hollywood, British politics and various other sectors have exposed a reality already familiar to most women.

There’s no doubt: Fewer people are making a commitment to marriage. Barely “more than half of adults in the U.S. say they’re living with a spouse. It is the lowest share on record, and down from 70 percent in 1967.”

Any child (or spouse) who has been scolded for their tone of voice – such as shouting or being sarcastic – knows that the way you speak to someone can be just as important as the words that you use. 

The quality of women’s relationships with their partner is diminished if they view their parenting division as unfair or want to spend more time working, our new study of employed parents in Canada has found.

The list was one I never thought I would make. I stared at the book titles I had jotted down for reference; each of them looked at divorce from a different angle. I felt I was at the end of my rope as I drifted farther and farther away from any hope of restoring the unity we...

Sex has a strong influence on many aspects of well-being: it is one of our most basic physiological needs. But millions of people spend at least some of their adulthood not having sex.

Persons living with dementia don’t have sex. Or they have weird sex. Or they have dangerous sex, in need of containment.

When Joan Holloway – the bombshell office worker on the show “Mad Men” – enters a room, she knows she looks good and is going to turn heads.

What does it mean to be fully committed in a monogamous relationship? The traditional meaning has to do with focusing your romantic energies only upon your partner. You are not committed if you have “one foot outside the door,” meaning you are still available for romantic relationship with another person.

"A childless royal couple finally has a baby... Life spins along normally for the next sixteen or so years. One day, the princess discovers..."

Trust is the foundation of love. Yet how do you build it? With monotonous regularity you hear your friends and colleagues say, "You can't trust anyone anymore." Almost every popular magazine you open has an article about how couples cheat on each other. Yes, a majority of married men and women do...

It’s often said that the opposite to love is not hate, it’s indifference. Why then are some of us so seemingly fickle in our ability to switch from love to hate in an instant?

What do your exes have in common? A new study finds that the people we date share many similarities—both in terms of appearance and personality.

REALationship. Okay, it’s a cute word. But what does it mean to have a real relationship, a relationship with substance? What does it take to have a relationship that not only lasts, but also thrives with loving connection?

When it comes to power in romantic relationships, men are often cast as dominant and women as deferential. But working against this are caricatures of domineering women with their “hen-pecked husbands” and “whipped boyfriends.”

It’s up to you to take smart risks with love. You don’t want to put your heart in the care of anybody who’s going to hide their true self, treat you poorly, and/or turn out to be psychologically unavailable. Trust must be earned and renewed regularly by our actions.

We all lie. How contradictory it is: we are taught as children that we must always tell the truth, that we shouldn’t lie, yet society teaches us to lie “appropriately” — in order to avoid conflict, to be polite, to get what we want...

Are we relationship material? Boy this sounds like a loaded question. A question that I have been spending quality time asking myself.

When it comes to reporting the number of sex partners or how often they have sexual intercourse, men and women both lie. While men tend to overreport it, women have a tendency to underreport it.

In today's changing times, we are looking for a better way to be ourselves, not someone we were raised to be. In this time of intense self-discovery, all others serve as our mirrors.

Many couples have a special song – “our song” – that reminds them of a significant event or time in their relationship, like when they first met, their wedding or when they were separated by war.

Online dating is an increasingly popular way for people to find love, but that also makes it an attractive target for those with less than romantic intentions.

Even happy couples can be pretty clueless about the ploys each partner uses to avoid dealing with their feelings, new research suggests.

In the late 16th century, the famous French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote about two marriages between people of the same sex. At the time, same-sex marriages were not recognized by religious or civil law...

Being compassionate to a spouse makes you feel good, even if the nice thing you did goes unnoticed.

It may seem that new relationships are entirely fuelled by dreams and hopes for a perfect future. But the past can have a powerful influence too – often more so than we would like to admit

In America, 60 percent of digital media consumption now occurs on mobile or tablet devices instead of desktop computers.

In the beginning, humans were androgynous. So says Aristophanes in his fantastical account of the origins of love in Plato’s Symposium.

E L James’s Fifty Shades trilogy is a bona fide publishing, and now film, sensation. Whatever you think about the trilogy and its film adaptations...

In honor of Valentine’s Day, here are five love songs that pose serious scientific questions. Experts from the University of Melbourne offer insights about the evolution of love, how it changes our bodies, and what human couples can learn from prairie voles and spiders.

Being someone’s BFF is a big deal – you don’t hand over the other half of your “Best Friends” necklace to just anyone. Having a romantic partner who is also your best friend potentially sounds perfect.

Love sure does hurt, as the Everly Brothers knew very well. And while it is often romanticised or made sentimental, the brutal reality is that many of us experience fairly unpleasant symptoms when in the throes of love.

Study after study affirms that people want a partner with a sense of humor. But it’s less about cracking jokes than about finding a style of humor that makes you both laugh.

Cities as distant and varied as Moscow and Manchester, New York and Newport, Beijing and Blackpool all have one striking feature in common.

Whether people are struggling to save a marriage, to cooperate in a family crisis, or to build rapport with a difficult boss, they usually have one thing in common: They need to share emotional information that can help them feel connected.

My favorite fairy tale as a child was Cinderella, so when I met Charlie and fell in love with him, I thought my prince had come. But these kinds of fantasies are a setup for expectations that are impossible to fulfill...

Most people think just one sperm is needed to fertilize a woman’s egg and make a healthy pregnancy. However, biologists now believe sexual intercourse is not just a sperm delivery process, but also a kind of biological communication.

The notion of mind reading conjures images of psychic powers, crystal balls and other aspects of the paranormal.

I celebrated my first Gay Pride Day in San Francisco on June 28, 2015. Two days earlier, the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage with the Obergefell v. Hodges decision.

Maybe you can't see an obvious reason why you haven't found happiness in your relationships, but somehow it's not happening as you envisioned. You can't seem to locate the answers that will bring everything together. Don't give up. Understanding is a journey...

For the philosopher Bertrand Russell, drinking alcohol was a sign of misery: happy people – a category that for the rapacious Russell included sexually satisfied people – did not seek escape in booze.

Aging is generally associated with improvements in our quality of life: We become more proficient in our work, learn how to manage our finances better and our bonds with loved ones deepen.

Heterosexual romantic relationships have historically been all about men courting and “keeping” women. And it’s a powerful tradition.

In a relationship there are myriad issues to manage. Who walks the dog? Does his mother like me? Whom are we supporting to win RuPaul’s “Drag Race All Stars 2”? But there is one issue that can often be harder to manage – how do we as a couple deal with HIV?

Many people involved in abusive partner relationships don’t think of the mistreatment as abuse, say researchers. Yet over the course of a lifetime, one-fourth to one-third of women in the United States will experience abuse from an intimate partner.

The majority of our relationships are in shambles. The U.S. divorce rate hovers at 40 percent, but that’s not the whole story.

Attempting to game the mysteries of love – or, in dating site eHarmony’s terms, “the secret sauce of attraction” – is nothing new. Equally old, of course, is the failure inherent in all such attempts to do so.

Stress isn’t good for you, but it’s not good for your spouse, either. For older married couples, one spouse’s long-term stress can cause the other’s weight gain.