Why we SHOULD talk to strangers

Kim Stark has made a career of talking to strangers. She made it her task to try to understand why she does that, in this TED talk. She has decided that it is better to use one's perceptions than to use categories, such as the category of "stranger." Using this category means that we are not treating others as fully human. There are other benefits. Some studies show that people are more comfortable opening up to strangers than to people they believe they know. We expect that people we know understand us--we expect them to read our minds. Not so with strangers, with whom we start from scratch. Sometimes they do understand us better. Maybe we need strangers, but how should we interact with them, how do we balance both civility and privacy, which are the guiding rules in the U.S. In other countries there are other rules. In Denmark, many folks are extremely adverse to talking to strangers. Stark offers and exercise that involves smiling, and then "triangulation," commenting on a third person or a thing. Or engage in "noticing," such as complimenting the other person on something (and you can most easily talk to a stranger's dog or baby). Or engage in "disclosure," sharing a personal experience, and this tends to cause the "stranger" to reciprocate. Stark's main message is that we need to stop being so wary of strangers and to make a place for them in our lives. At The Atlantic, James Hamblin follows up with his own explorations on talking to strangers.

Continue ReadingWhy we SHOULD talk to strangers

ALAIN de BOTTON: We marry the wrong person because we fail to focus on excellence in resolving conflict

Alain de Botton has written an extremely insightful article at the NYT on why we marry the wrong person. What do we traditionally look for: During a perfectly romantic date, we propose marriage as an attempt to bottle up romance forever. Or we act Machiavellian, seeking to find someone for strategic advantages. There's nothing bad about any of this, but it leaves out a critically important area of concern. Alain de Botton urges that we not overlook that we are all dysfunctional, and that dysfunction often is left unexplored until after the vows are uttered.

We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?” Perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us or can relax only when we are working; perhaps we’re tricky about intimacy after sex or clam up in response to humiliation. Nobody’s perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.
For instance, we tend to seek those things that traditionally make us happy, but many of those things are things from our dysfunctional childhoods:

What we really seek is familiarity — which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes. How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy.

Continue ReadingALAIN de BOTTON: We marry the wrong person because we fail to focus on excellence in resolving conflict

The stress children put on a marriage

The happily ever after trope goes something like this:  Love, marriage, children, happiness.   However, that is not what the statistics show.  "Parents often become more distant and businesslike with each other as they attend to the details of parenting."  The source of this sad passage is "Decades of Studies Show What Happens to Marriages After Having Kids," in Fortune Magazine. The statistics show that having children drives a married couple apart more than it brings them more closely together:

The irony is that even as the marital satisfaction of new parents declines, the likelihood of them divorcing also declines. So, having children may make you miserable, but you’ll be miserable together.

Worse still, this decrease in marital satisfaction likely leads to a change in general happiness, because the biggest predictor of overall life satisfaction is one’s satisfaction with their spouse.

Continue ReadingThe stress children put on a marriage