Know you're in a healthy relationship

Know you're in a healthy relationship - Everyone talks about being a good, healthy relationship. But what exactly does 'healthy' signify. Put simply, you are in a healthy relationship when you feel good about yourself when around your loved one and there is an equal amount of give and take between both the partners. Most important is the trust factor, you should feel safe around the other person and trust him/her with your secrets. Remember, healthy relationships evolve as each person evolves in his or her ability to be loving to both, themselves and each other.

Here are some important factors for a healthy relationship:

Kindness

Is kindness more important to each of you than having your way, being in control, or being right? Do you each receive joy out of being kind to each other? Being kind rather than controlling with each other is essential for a healthy relationship.

Spontaneous warmth and affection

This is an important factor. Affection and warmth toward each other help a couple to appreciate the essence of each other, rather than just pinpoint the faults. Consequently, it also helps strengthen the relationship as they are able to enjoy each other, both as individuals, and as a couple.

Laughter and fun

It's vital to the well being of your relationship that both of you laugh and play together. Learn to appreciate and enjoy each other's sense of humour, especially in the midst of difficulties. Both of you need to let down and be playful with each other, letting yourselves be like kids together, as laughter and fun play a huge role in a healthy relationship.

Enjoying time together and time apart

You may both be each other's favourite person to spend time with. However, it is also essential that you grow as individuals and spend quality time with yourself, indulging in your hobbies and passions.

Individual friends and interests

Some couples spend a lot of time together because they really enjoy it, while others spend a lot of time together out of fear of being alone. It is important for a healthy relationship for each person to have friends and interests, so that they are not dependent on each other. Dependency is not healthy in a relationship, especially emotionally.

Resolving conflicts

All relationships experience conflicts in some form or the other. It is not the conflict that is the issue, but how you deal with it. As a couple, you need to have a method for resolving conflict or else you will end up just sweeping aside. Also, if fighting is a part of how you deal with conflict, learn to fight fair, do not be hurtful or insulting.

Letting go of anger

If one or both of you get angry, do you hang on to it, punishing your partner with it, or can you easily let it go? In healthy relationships, both partners are able to quickly move on, back into kindness and affection.

Trust in your love

You need to trust each other that the love is solid, even in very difficult times. You need to know that you can mess up, fail, disappoint the other, emotionally hurt the other and that your love will still be there. This level of trust is essential for a healthy relationship.

Listening, understanding, accepting and learning

Even though you are a couple, each of you need to feel heard, understood and accepted. Share your secrets with your partner without the fear of being judged. Be interested in learning about yourselves and each other than in controlling each other. Listen to each other with an open heart and make the effort to understand your partner before judging each other or defending your actions.

Sexuality

Your sexual relationship needs to be warm and caring. Be sexually spontaneous and more importantly, talk with each other about what brings pleasure to each of you.

Freedom to be yourself

Just because you are a couple, it doesn't mean you have to be a mirror image of each other. Remember, you are individuals with your own personal choices and tastes. To be in a healthy relationship, you need to have the freedom to be yourself without the fear of being criticised. Learn to support each other in pursuing what brings you'll joy. After all, happy individuals make happy couples. ( indiatimes.com )

Blog : Popular Styles | Know you're in a healthy relationship

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You’re Right! Meetings Actually Do Make You Stupider

You’re Right! Meetings Actually Do Make You Stupider - Attention: are you a corporate shill? Do you spend many of your billable hours in overlong meetings with an intellectually trudging project leader? Are you watching the clock, screening co-workers calls and marking your boss’s e-mails as spam? Well, turns out you may feel that way because the very premise of “meetings” includes an ensemble cast of your company’s cubicle-piloting can-doers and scientific evidence that the very meeting you’re dreading is also sucking down your IQ points like a strawberry milkshake.

A new study has found that group interactions actually lower your intelligence (read: “make you dumber” if you just got out of one).

“You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain dead as well,” said Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and the Computational Psychiatry Unit at the institute, who led the study.

The study: Scientists in Virginia matched groups according to IQ, ranked the performance of the group members on cognitive tasks against the each other, and then revealed the rankings. When group members were told how others had performed, “we saw dramatic drops in the ability of some study subjects to solve problems,” explains the lead researcher. “The social feedback had a significant effect.”The scientists used an MRI to read the results.

What it means: You feel pressure in a group, and tend to think-without-thinking that you’re not as smart as the other members in your pack. This assumption has something of a psycho-somatic effect on your brain, actually making you less able to solve problems.

Sorry ladies! Likely due to your increased ability over men to be empathic, you’re actually much more vulnerable to this effect. The lead author added: “Our study highlights the unexpected and dramatic consequences even subtle social signals in group settings may have on individual cognitive functioning.”

Also, we shouldn’t just give meetings all the criticism. This can apply to any social function: Pictionary with friends, a dinner party, or a night at the pub with your roommates (though other factors are probably involved in that one).

Because I care, you have my permission to print this off and use it as an excuse to get out of that meeting you’re dreading this week. ( inquisitr.com )

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Monogamy? I think it's possible

Monogamy? I think it's possible - The Playboy mogul tells Celia Walden about his upcoming wedding, the new club and why Kate Middleton would make a great bunny.

'A stag night?” Hugh Hefner repeats my question incredulously. “I’ve been having a stag night for the past 50 years, so no, not this time, young lady.”

When the 85-year-old Playboy founder marries 24-year-old former Playmate Crystal Harris next week, he insists that it’ll mark the end of half a century’s carousing. “I wasn’t planning on getting married again but we’ve been together two-and-a- half years and I can’t imagine meeting anyone I’d get on better with. People make so much of the age gap but we have a lot in common. Yes, there’s a certain 'student-teacher’ quality to our relationship, but surrounding myself with young people helps keep me younger.”

He pauses, pensive all of a sudden. “Plus, you know, you reach a point where you think: 'Maybe it’s time to settle down’.” Sitting beside her boss in the study of his West Hollywood home, Hefner’s PA, Mary, suppresses a snort.

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner (centre) arrives at Stansted Airport on June 2, 2011 in Stansted, England. The photograph is a recreation of a picture originally taken in the 1960's, with ten of the new London Bunnies. Mr Hefner is back in the UK to mark the launch of the new Playboy Club in Mayfair, which opens on June 4

On my first visit to the Playboy Mansion four years ago, when Hefner threw a “Midsummer Night’s Dream” party, the dress code was “underwear only” and these same mahogany furnishings were strewn with semi-naked female bodies of a not dissimilar hue. In a Bedouin tent erected on the lawn, where waitresses wearing only a thin layer of iridescent body-paint served up platters of sushi to guests, our host presided from a throne-like armchair, encircled by his then harem, Holly [Madison], Bridget [Marquardt] and Kendra [Wilkinson].

Over the years, the girlfriends have been too numerous to tally, even Hefner conceding that he “stopped counting a long time ago”. On the marriage front, however, the Chicago-born media magnate has been positively abstemious by celebrity standards, having been married only twice before: once to college sweetheart Mildred Williams and again to Playmate Kimberly Conrad.

Here in the States, his forthcoming wedding is being hyped as “bigger than William and Kate’s”. “I thought the royal wedding was such a glamorous event,” he chuckles. “We could do with a little more of that kind of thing nowadays – it injects a little romance into people.”

Would the Duchess of Cambridge have made a good recruit, had she not been snapped up? “As a bunny, you mean?” he rejoins eagerly. “Absolutely. She’s a beautiful little lady and very glamorous.”

Although the Playboy Mansion attracts more visitors than Buckingham Palace every year, Hefner and Harris’s wedding promises to be a little more intimate than William and Kate’s. Only 300 people have been invited to witness the pair exchange vows on June 18, and the mogul’s three sons, David (59, from his first marriage), Marston (21) and Cooper (20) are to be groomsmen. “That means a lot to me,” Hefner says quietly, “and they’re thrilled about the wedding.”

All of this is touching stuff, and it’s hard to look at Hefner’s face – that of a tom-cat who just keeps getting the cream – and feel any real sense of outrage, but why is a man whose life and livelihood revolve around rejecting monogamy getting married at 85? “Because I’m totally capable of being a good husband. I can be devoted, sensitive…” Faithful? “Yes.” He looks surprised. “Absolutely. I do think that monogamy’s… possible,” he says, choosing his words carefully. “I just don’t think it’s the natural way of things.”

Recent high-profile marriage breakdowns – such as that of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver – don’t seem to have dented his new-found optimism. “Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. The only immorality is in the lying: it’s in the hypocrisy.”

It’s a desire to fight hypocrisy – and react against the puritan background he was born into – that has driven Hefner. From conservative, Midwestern, Methodist stock (his parents were teachers), Hefner accepts that he “fell a little far from the tree”. “I accepted their general ideals, but I had a real problem with that repressive attitude towards sex.”

As a teenager growing up in the aftermath of the Second World War, Hefner spent his afternoons at the cinema, engrossed in Marilyn Monroe’s behind, Jean Harlow’s bust and Dorothy Lamour’s legs. So there was, at least, one brunette?

“Oh yes,” he chuckles. “Because I’ve been in my blonde period for so long, people get the impression that they’re all I really care about. But my first wife was a brunette and besides,” he adds, with a smile, “the truth is that most blondes began as brunettes.”

After a stint in the army and a degree in psychology at the University of Illinois, Hefner got a job selling cartoons to magazines. It was his mother, curiously, who agreed to back him when he decided to start up Playboy, lending him £400. The magazine hit the top shelves in 1953 with a partially nude cover shot of Monroe and the brand – embodied by Hefner, already living the archetypal bachelor’s life at the Playboy Mansion – was an immediate success.

It wasn’t until Penthouse provided competition in the Seventies that sales began to fall, and although Playboy Enterprises – which includes branded television and radio, casinos and merchandising – has fizzed and faltered over the decades, the business was valued at £135 million in January when Hefner finally took his empire private.

Whether the Playboy brand is still as seductive to Brits as it was when the first London club opened in 1966 – attracting the likes of Julie Christie, Rudolf Nureyev and Woody Allen – remains to be seen. On Saturday, Hefner opened a new club in Mayfair, a “retro gentlemen’s paradise” (with an annual membership fee of £15,000 a year) boasting a restaurant, bar, barber’s shop and smoking terrace.

I’m curious to know whether Hefner thinks our attitude to sex is any different from America’s. “Historically there’s never been a great deal of difference,” he says. “We share this total hypocrisy: we’re both fascinated by all things sexual but we also have a problem with sexuality and connect all this guilt and shame to it. The thing about Playboy is that it manages to plug into a more romantic, Fifties side of sex.”

The words “romance” and “glamour” crop up a lot in Hefner’s speech. When he talks of old screen stars, musicals and the love songs he adores, his voice threatens to break. He strikes you then as a man-child who has been consumed by the same woman-shaped nostalgia for the past 70 years.

I’ve got to ask: has he ever had therapy? “I haven’t, but yes I do think it’s possible that a lack of love in the home transformed itself into a desire for romantic love later on. I was raised in a house where there weren’t a lot of hugs, and my brother and I were both very aware of that.”

Does he feel loved now?

“Oh yes.”

Every morning, when “the Hef” breakfasts in bed on corn flakes with chopped bananas, he says he has the same thought: “I must be the luckiest guy on the planet.”

Reinterpreting the original concept behind the brand and making Playboy “a brand for playboys” is a clever move to make now, when masculinity is on its way back.

“Do you know that Girls of the Playboy Mansion [a television series] was more popular with women than men?” he asks me. And why does he think that was? “Because the next generation of women grew up and they were sexually liberated.”

The feminist activist Gloria Steinem, who once likened a woman reading Playboy to “a Jew reading a Nazi manual”, may no longer be as vocal, but the judging by the “EffOffHef” campaigners brandishing bowls of rabbit droppings outside the club last week, attitudes haven’t changed as much as he thinks. What would he say to the feminist movement which accused him of degrading, objectifying and abusing women? “Quite simply: you got it wrong,” he shrugs. “And the reasons are understandable. But the sexual revolution was for both sexes: women were the victims of repression, too.”

And yet the EffOffHef campaigners would hardly see him as a champion of women now, would they? He chooses to disregard the sarcasm: “I’m a champion not just of women but of women’s rights,” he says forcefully.

“Look, I’m celebrating life. I accept that it isn’t for everybody but my belief is that it doesn’t matter how many boyfriends or girlfriends you have if you treat them well. In the end, I want to be remembered as someone who has had some positive impact on changing social sexual values.” ( telegraph.co.uk )

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Are You Too Busy for Love?

Are You Too Busy for Love? - How being accomplished might make women today seem unapproachable — and what they should do about it.

Those of us perpetually single know not to dwell upon one question. Yet at some point, it will nag at us: Why am I always single?

So when my girlfriend Jude's husband, Patrick, offered his surprising opinion during a dinner party, I was all ears. "I'm just glad I asked Jude out in college," he says. "Women were scary enough then, but now you're all so busy and accomplished. It makes you unapproachable."

Looking at the astonished female faces around the table, I secretly wondered if he was right. Are we becoming too busy for relationships?

Are You Too Busy for Love?

"Single women are told to stay busy for two reasons," says Bethany Marshall, Ph.D., author of Deal Breakers. "It's easier to meet men when you're out trying new things, and being distracted can stave off loneliness. But if you don't slow down, you may not even notice when a man is interested in you, or you might convey that your life is full enough as is."

Take my single friend Alexia — classic multitasker. A 34-year-old television producer, she has a prestigious job at a media company, owns her apartment, takes Italian lessons, and in her "spare" time leads an art history lecture at her local community center. Oh, and she also runs marathons. Guys gutsy enough to approach her usually fall puffing by the wayside.

Or Judith Offman, 36, a research biologist who juggles work with hobbies like cooking classes, film club, and Pilates. Like many women, she embraced an after-work activity — volunteering at a Jewish festival — to meet men. She loved it so much, she now runs it herself. "But I'm so busy with the event, I'm still single three years later," she says.

And then there's journalist Anita Sethi, 31. When she's not scrambling to meet one of her many deadlines, she's writing a novel and gallivanting through South America. Yet her glittering résumé hasn't helped her love life — in fact, her last date said he prefers "homey" women.

My suggestion to women is this: Quit wondering why he didn't call, and hop off the treadmill for a bit. Or your soul mate may come along and you won't even notice. You'll be late for an artisan butchery class and run right by (or over) him. ( msn.com )

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