SLOW Movement

WSJ: Japan's Philanderers Stay Faithful to Their 'Infidelity Phones'

THE A-HED

January 11, 2013, 2:21 a.m. ET

Japan's Philanderers Stay Faithful to Their 'Infidelity Phones'

Cads Attracted to How Outdated Device Hides Calls, Texts; Juggling Three Girlfriends

By DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI

Philanderers in Japan prefer one particular model of mobile phone, as WSJ's Daisuke Wakabayashi reports. He runs down how the phone works.

TOKYO—Over the past few years, as many people rushed to trade in their old phones for smartphones, Japan's philanderers have remained faithful to one particular brand: Fujitsu Ltd.'s older "F-Series" phones, which feature some attractive stealth privacy features.

The aging flip-phone—nicknamed the "uwaki keitai" or "infidelity phone"—owes its enduring popularity to customers who don't believe newer smartphones are as discreet at hiding their illicit romances.

Bloomberg News

Older DoCoMo phones, shown 2009, are still popular because of privacy features.

A Japanese blogger who goes by the name Bakanabe and writes anonymously about picking up women, said he looked into buying a new device but found the privacy settings fell short of his current phone. Instead, he opted to refurbish his battered, three-year-old Fujitsu flip-phone with a new casing and a new battery.

"Women may want to check my phone for strange emails or calls when I'm not around. With Fujitsu's 'privacy mode,' they can't see that information at all," he said in an email. "The key is to give off the impression that you're not locking your phone at all."

Fujitsu's "privacy mode" is a layer of nearly invisible security that hides missed calls, emails and text messages from contacts designated as private. If one of those acquaintances gets in touch, the only signal of that communication is a subtle change in the color or shape of how the battery sign or antenna bars are displayed. If ignored, the call doesn't appear in the phone log.

The changes are so subtle that it would be impossible to spot for an untrained eye. When the privacy mode is turned off through a secret combination of keys, the concealed calls and messages appear, and voice mail becomes accessible.

This comes in handy to another blogger who calls himself "Poza." He claims to have various romances on dating sites while juggling three girlfriends. He said he was introduced to the Fujitsu phone nearly five years ago and uses the privacy features to keep from getting caught. He says he recently bought an iPhone, but giving up his Fujitsu phone to carry just a smartphone is "unthinkable."

"In terms of keeping my cheating hidden, this does more than enough," he wrote in an email. Poza, who says he works for a design company in western Japan, declined to provide his real name.

The older Japanese phones also run on software created for the domestic market. For years, this gave the manufacturers significant control over new features but limited their international reach. With smartphones running Google Inc.'s Android operating system—the main software option for today's handsets—the Japanese makers don't have as much control to develop new features.

Fujitsu started offering the privacy mode in 2002 as part of more stringent security requirements for all phones offered by NTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan's largest carrier. Takeshi Natsuno, a senior DoCoMo executive at the time, said he insisted on tougher security after hearing too many stories of couples splitting or workers landing in hot water because they left their phones out and unguarded.

FUJITSU F-03 PHONE

"If Tiger Woods had this Japanese feature in his phone, he wouldn't have gotten in trouble," said Mr. Natsuno, now a professor at Keio University's Graduate School of Media and Governance.

The phones, though, aren't available outside Japan.

With emails, phone calls and text messages all coming into the phone, it is also where many affairs are carried out. Toshiyuki Makiguchi, who runs Uwaki Rescue SOS, a Tokyo-based consulting company to help people find out if their partners are cheating, said more than half of his 600 customers a year find some evidence of cheating on their partner's mobile phone.

Fujitsu promotes the strong security of its phones, but does so without acknowledging its subset of loyal cheater fans. Fujitsu spokesman Naoki Mishiro said tight security is critical these days with so much sensitive information on handsets. He declined to comment on the infidelity phone nickname.

These days, the devotion of infidelity phone users is being tested. Both Japanese carriers and Fujitsu are starting to phase out the older phones for an all-smartphone lineup. And a growing number of so-called cheater apps are looking to bring similar functions to smartphones.

As a result, Fujitsu has added some of the privacy features to its smartphone lineup. The company's new models conceal calls and emails from contacts marked private. Like its older cousin, it alerts the users with a subtle change in the battery or antenna mark. However, the privacy mode requires a separate mail and address book app designed by Fujitsu, rather than the default email program and address book provided by the carrier.

"It's totally useless," said blogger Bakanabe, who researched the Fujitsu smartphone before sticking with his existing phone. "I hold out hope that Fujitsu adds the real privacy mode with its next smartphone."

Fujitsu said it aims to roll out more convenient and secure features in the future.

The world appears to be catching up with the infidelity phone.

Delaware-based CATE, or Call and Text Eraser, has been offering a similar level of security since last year. It is an app for Android-based smartphones that intercepts and hides text messages and phone calls from people on a selected "blacklist." Those texts and calls, as well as the app itself, remain hidden until the user punches in a code.

"I believe most cheaters use text and get caught by the text," said Neal Desai, a 25-year-old entrepreneur from Austin, Texas, who raised $70,000 for the $4.99 app on ABC's reality TV show "Shark Tank."

At $4.99 per download, CATE has been downloaded more than 10,000 times, and an iPhone version will be available soon, said Mr. Desai.

When told about Fujitsu's privacy features that have been available in Japan for several years, Mr. Desai was impressed: "That's more genius than my app."

—Miho Inada contributed to this article.

Write to Daisuke Wakabayashi at [email protected]

NY Times: A Man. A Woman. Just Friends?

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April 7, 2012

A Man. A Woman. Just Friends?

By WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ

CAN men and women be friends? We have been asking ourselves that question for a long time, and the answer is usually no. The movie “When Harry Met Sally...” provides the locus classicus. The problem, Harry famously explains, is that “the sex part always gets in the way.” Heterosexual people of the opposite sex may claim to be just friends, the message goes, but count on it — wink, wink, nudge, nudge — something more’s going on. Popular culture enforces the notion relentlessly. In movie after movie, show after show, the narrative arc is the same. What starts as friendship (Ross and Rachel, Monica and Chandler) ends up in bed.

There’s a history here, and it’s a surprisingly political one. Friendship between the sexes was more or less unknown in traditional society. Men and women occupied different spheres, and women were regarded as inferior in any case. A few epistolary friendships between monastics, a few relationships in literary and court circles, but beyond that, cross-sex friendship was as unthinkable in Western society as it still is in many cultures.

Then came feminism — specifically, Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of feminism, in the late 18th century. Wollstonecraft was actually wary of platonic relationships, which could lead too easily, she thought, to mischief. (She had a child out of wedlock herself.) But she did believe that friendship, “the most sublime of all affections,” should be the mainspring of marriage.

In the 1890s, when feminism emerged from the drawing rooms and genteel committees to become a mass, radical movement (the term “feminism” itself was coined in 1895), friendship reappeared as a political demand. This was the time of the “New Woman,” portrayed in fiction and endlessly debated in the press.

The New Woman was intelligent, well read, strong-willed, idealistic, unconventional and outspoken. For her, relationships with men, whether or not they involved sex, had to involve mental companionship, freedom of choice, equality and mutual respect. They had, in short, to be friendships. Just as suffrage represented feminism’s vision of the political future, friendship represented its vision of the personal future, the central term of a renegotiated sexual contract.

Easier said than done, of course. But the notion of friendship as the root of romantic relationships started to seep into the culture. The terms “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” also began to appear in the 1890s.

We take the words for granted now, but think of what they imply, and what a new idea it was: that romantic partners share more than erotic passion, that companionship and equality are part of the relationship. A boyfriend is a friend, as well as a lover. As for husband and wife, Wollstonecraft’s ideal has long since become a cliché. Who doesn’t think of their spouse — or claim to think of them, or want to think of them — as their best friend?

So friendship now is part of what we mean by love. Still, that doesn’t get us to platonic relationships. For that we needed yet another wave of feminism, the one that started in the 1960s. Friendship wasn’t part of the demand this time, but the things that were demanded — equal rights and opportunities in every sphere — created the conditions for it. Only once the sexes mixed on equal and familiar terms at school, at work and in the social spaces in between — only once it was normal and even boring to see a member of the opposite sex at the next desk — could platonic friendships become an ordinary part of life.

And that’s exactly what has happened.

Friendships with members of the opposite sex have been an important part of my life since I went to high school in the late 1970s, and I hardly think I’m alone. Consult your own experience, but as I look around, I don’t see that platonic friendships are actually rare at all or worthy of a lot of winks and nudges. Which is why you don’t much hear the term anymore. Platonic friendships now are simply friendships. But doesn’t the sex thing get in the way? At times, no doubt. It’s harder for the young, of course — all those hormones, and so many of your peers are unattached. In fact, one of the most common solutions to Harry’s quandary is to have sex and then remain friends. If the sex thing gets in the way, the answer often seems to be to just get it out of the way.

But it doesn’t always get in the way. Maybe you’re not attracted to each other. Maybe you know it would never work out, so it’s not worth screwing up your friendship. Maybe that’s just not what it’s about.

So if it’s common now for men and women to be friends, why do we so rarely see it in popular culture? Partly, it’s a narrative problem. Friendship isn’t courtship. It doesn’t have a beginning, a middle and an end. Stories about friendships of any kind are relatively rare, especially given what a huge place the relationships have in our lives. And of course, they’re not sexy. Put a man and a woman together in a movie or a novel, and we expect the sparks to fly. Yet it isn’t just a narrative problem, or a Hollywood problem.

We have trouble, in our culture, with any love that isn’t based on sex or blood. We understand romantic relationships, and we understand family, and that’s about all we seem to understand.

We have trouble with mentorship, the asymmetric love of master and apprentice, professor and student, guide and guided; we have trouble with comradeship, the bond that comes from shared, intense work; and we have trouble with friendship, at least of the intimate kind. When we imagine those relationships, we seem to have to sexualize them.

Close friendships between members of the same sex, after all, are also suspect. Even Oprah has had to defend her relationship with Gayle King, and as for men and men, forget about it.

I cannot think of another area of our lives in which there is so great a gap between what we do and what our culture says we do. But maybe things are beginning to change. Younger people, having grown up with the gay-rights movement and in many cases gone to colleges with co-ed dormitories, are open to a wider range of emotional possibility.

Friendship between the sexes may no longer be a political issue, but it is an issue of liberation: the freedom to love whom you want, in the way that you want. Maybe it’s time that we all took it out of the closet.

William Deresiewicz is an essayist, critic and the author of “A Jane Austen Education.”

WSJ: When It's Just Another Fight, and When It's Over

BONDS
Updated April 3, 2012, 1:07 p.m. ET

When It's Just Another Fight, and When It's Over

By ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN

One evening shortly after their seventh anniversary, Louis and Shelley Silberman had an argument while preparing dinner. Neither recalls what that fight was about. But both remember how, in the middle of it, Ms. Silberman suddenly screamed at her husband: "We are done being married! I want you to move out!"

Elizabeth Bernstein on Lunch Break looks at how to know when your marriage or romantic relationship is over and what are the signs a relationship is no longer worth fighting for?

Mr. Silberman was floored. The couple had two sons, ages 1 and 3. They had met at a Club Med on the Caribbean island of Martinique when they were in their early 20s and had moved in together almost immediately. They'd bonded over tennis and travel. Mr. Silberman had fallen for her vibrant, fun-loving personality. Ms. Silberman liked how friendly and active he was.

"I thought it was just another fight," says Mr. Silberman, who lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., and owns a company that trains medical professionals and aestheticians to perform anti-aging laser procedures.

After his wife blurted out that she wanted a divorce, Mr. Silberman pleaded with her to talk about what was wrong. She refused. They both cried. She stormed off to bed.

Brandon Sullivan for the Wall Street Journal

Shelley Cook, left, and Louis Silberman, divorced after seven years of marriage, but became friends and now work together.

Live Chat

Elizabeth Bernstein discussed with readers ways of recognizing the end and breaking up as painlessly as possible. Replay the event.

"It's hard to say 'bye' nicely, there's so much built-up anger," says Ms. Silberman, of Cave Creek, Ariz., now 44 years old, who has since remarried and is now Shelley Cook.

Couples typically wait an average of six years in an unhappy marriage before seeking help, according to the Seattle-based Gottman Institute. Deciding whether to leave a committed relationship can be a sad and complex process.

A new type of therapy, called "discernment counseling," breaks with traditional couples counseling, which seeks to solve relationship problems. Instead, discernment counseling, pioneered by Bill Doherty, a professor in the family social science department at the University of Minnesota, aims to help struggling couples decide whether to divorce or remain married. The new therapy is part of the Minnesota Couples on the Brink Project, which Dr. Doherty launched last year. He came up with the idea for the project after a local family court judge told him that a striking number of couples in his divorce court handled the process so well that he wondered why they were splitting up.

In a study of divorcing couples published last year in the Family Court Review, the results showed that about 30% of individuals who were divorcing said they would seriously consider a reconciliation service if it was offered by the court. Additional research that matched spouses' responses found that in about 10% of couples both partners were open to reconciliation.

Dr. Doherty estimates that in 30% of couples who seek marriage counseling, one person is what counselors call "leaning out," or wanting to go, while the other is "leaning in," or wanting to stay.

In discernment counseling, Dr. Doherty helps the leaning-out spouse decide if the decision to leave the marriage is the correct one. And he helps the leaning-in spouse cope in a way that doesn't make the situation worse—without pleading, threatening or otherwise turning off the already irritated spouse.

Over five sessions, Dr. Doherty has the couple examine what was good about the marriage, what got them to this point and what they did to try and save the marriage. He lays out three alternatives: marriage as it has been, divorce, or a six-month reconciliation with marriage therapy. Of the 25 couples Dr. Doherty counseled, 40% decided to try the reconciliation; the rest divorced or are still thinking it over.

There are plenty of reasons why people stay in a miserable marriage. They hope things will get better or stay for the kids. They are scared of what comes next. They think there will be a specific moment when they will know that they should leave. (Therapists say there isn't.)

Very often, a spouse doesn't speak up for fear of hurting the other person. Men are particularly bad about this, psychologists say. They typically have a tougher time expressing emotions and don't like to feel they are letting their wives down. They may immerse themselves in work or other activity and become distant.

People "feel that if they distract themselves, the problem will take care of itself, the marriage will just dissolve," says Susan Pease Gadoua, a clinical, licensed social worker, author of "Contemplating Divorce" and director of Changing Marriage in San Rafael, Calif., which helps couples whose relationships are in strife.

Many people looking to get out of a marriage behave badly. They check out emotionally. Have affairs. Wake up one day and just walk out. These behaviors hurt their spouses even more. "The greatest source of pain for a person who is the leave-ee is that they didn't have an opportunity to respond and work on things with their spouse," Ms. Gadoua says.

Ms. Cook had been thinking of leaving her marriage for several months. She preferred to stay home with the children, but he wanted her to work. She resented the long hours he spent on his new business. Therapists say marriages break up over time due to many factors, but Ms. Cook remembers the moment she knew her marriage was over: While she was hospitalized during her second pregnancy, her husband came to visit—and talked on and on about his business. "I thought, 'Is this how it's going to be for the rest of my life?' " Ms. Cook says.

Jason Millet

The Silbermans began fighting more, often over little things. Mr. Silberman tried to get his wife to talk about what was wrong. She refused, turning on the TV or going to another room. After Ms. Cook demanded her husband move out, he pushed her to reconsider, to think of the children. He promised to change. Then he moved to a hotel, hoping the separation would be short-lived.

At his request, the couple went to counseling, but lasted only a few sessions. "It became very apparent that she wasn't budging," says Mr. Silberman, now 47. "I was checked out for so long that I was exhausted," Ms. Cook says. Nine months later, the couple divorced. She began seeing someone else. He became depressed, recovered, began dating.

Several years later, Ms. Cook was diagnosed with breast cancer and went through chemotherapy and radiation. After she finished, Mr. Silberman offered her a job. "I figured if it helps her, it helps the kids," he says.

That was eight years ago. Ms. Cook still works for her ex-husband, now as a laser-procedure trainer. Two years ago, the couple self-published a divorce guide, "After the Happily Ever After." Although they still squabble a lot, both say they are friends. "Leaving before the fire burned down the whole house made a big difference," Ms. Cook says.

Time to End the Relationship?

And if so, how do you break the news in a way that does the least emotional damage? Marriage therapists offer advice:

•Peer into the future. Talk to a lawyer and an accountant, research what an apartment would cost, ask a real-estate agent to estimate a sale price for your house, says Susan Pease Gadoua, a licensed social worker who specializes in helping couples with relationship strife. 'You will either become energized or depressed,' she says, 'and that will be telling.'

•Tell your spouse early. As soon as you start losing your commitment to the relationship, speak up, therapists say. 'Bring up divorce when you still don't want it,' says Bill Doherty, director of the Minnesota Couples on the Brink Project.

•Do therapy on a trial basis. If you think your marriage could be salvaged, find an objective professional and agree on a trial period, typically six months to a year.

•Expect the worst. Anticipate that your spouse will be shocked and behave badly. Regardless, listen calmly—for more than one conversation—to give your spouse a chance to respond.

•Stick around. If you're the one leaving, don't move out or cut off contact too quickly. Some therapists even suggest continuing to live together for two to six months, if that's what your spouse wants, to ease the transition, Ms. Gadoua says.

—Email Elizabeth Bernstein at [email protected] or follow her column at www.Facebook.com/EBernsteinWSJ.

A version of this article appeared April 3, 2012, on page D1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: When It's Just Another Fight, and When It's Over.

WSJ: In China, IKEA Is a Swede Place for Senior Romance, Relaxation

THE A-HED
DECEMBER 1, 2011

In China, IKEA Is a Swede Place for Senior Romance, Relaxation

Free Coffee, Empty Beds Set Intimate Tone; Retailer Struggles to Police the Unruly

By LAURIE BURKITT

At 62, Tang Yingzhuo, a retired widow looking for love, doesn't think it is appropriate to scope out men at bars, clubs or Karaoke joints. That's why she goes to IKEA.

Yang Jie/The Wall Street Journal

Chinese seniors find coffee and love at IKEA.

The former tax-bureau worker is among the throngs of seniors who meet every week at the Swedish retailer's cafeteria in Shanghai's Xuhui shopping district to take a second shot at romance.

Retired and divorced chiropractor Qian Weizhong is also on the prowl. On a recent Tuesday at IKEA Mr. Qian was excited to get the number of a woman he referred to as a "nice lady." He plans to ask her out soon, he said.

While Ms. Tang and the rest of the lonely hearts club flock to the do-it-yourself furniture shop for its clean, homey environment, they pose something of a challenge for IKEA. They sit for hours in the cafeteria, leaving behind orange peels and egg shells they have picked off boiled eggs brought from home. Occasionally, security guards intervene to try to keep order.

At the weekly IKEA romance session in Shanghai, the elderly arrive in swarms of 70 to 700 to get the free coffee offered to holders of the IKEA Family membership card. Zhou Hong, the official IKEA card swiper, says she typically hands out an average of 500 coffee cups each time the group meets.

Ms. Tang, seated amid the backdrop of Poang reading chairs and Vreta poufs, sips coffee and says she is grateful to have such a meeting place. "I make more senior citizen friends when I come here," said Ms. Tang. "There's more to offer than meeting a boyfriend at IKEA."

In China, IKEA is planning to up its nine locations to 17 stores by 2015 to meet demand from the nation's growing middle class, who aspire to Western lifestyles at affordable prices. But some are still in the gawk-phase. They come out of sheer curiosity, or to behold the vast spaces bursting with thousands of gadgets and creature comforts.

As culture and commerce intersect, some unusual behavior has emerged. And older folks aren't the only troublemakers. Young people, often with kids in tow, plop on chairs to watch videos on their smartphones. People aren't shy about kicking off their shoes and tucking into display beds for a nap.

On a recent Sunday in Beijing, Liu Yunfeng sat in a 3,999 yuan ($625) white leather Tirup chair, watching home videos from the screen of her Sony digital camera while her shoeless daughter jumped on the Nyvoll bed of a mock-up room.

"She loves all the different rooms they have," said Ms. Liu, sitting near a man who had dozed off on another bed.

IKEA isn't alone. Other big chains, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and McDonald's Corp., are accustomed to Chinese consumers spending lots of quality time—if not serious money—at their often huge, comfortable stores.

Policing the freeloaders and the unruly isn't so easy. Attempting to tell a rowdy crowd of seniors to lower their voices recently, 24-year-old security guard Li Ya says he encountered resistance. An older man who didn't enjoy being hushed by someone 40 years his junior, says Mr. Li, once splashed scalding coffee on him. "They always argue that they have the right to do what they want here," says Mr. Li.

Earlier this year, after a spate of altercations—and realizing that the seniors were taking seats away from paying customers—managers of the Shanghai IKEA outlet decided to take action.

To keep order, they bolstered security, assigning six guards to the cafeteria on Tuesdays and Thursdays in addition to the usual two posted there on other days.

They created a special roped off zone for sitting, allowing more tables to be open for shoppers who wanted warm tilapia, not hot dates.

They also propped up a notice board at the entrance of the cafeteria, pleading with the group to disband. "IKEA would hereby like to inform this group and its organizers: Your behavior is affecting the normal operations of the IKEA cafeteria," the notice said.

It went on: "Frequent fights and arguments do serious harm to the image both of Shanghai residents and IKEA. Bringing in outside food and tea violates the cafeteria's regulations…If you are a member of this group, we feel we have warned you, do not use the resources of IKEA to organize events of this kind."

Spokeswoman Yin Lifang said IKEA is attempting to find the group's organizers so that it can negotiate with them. Members of the group deny there are organizers.

With people of all ages using big-box stores as their personal playgrounds, a new term has emerged: "retailtainment."

A blend of the words retail and entertainment, it is now frequently used by companies and strategists.

Several years ago, some Wal-Mart stores in China set up a children's camp for summer and winter school breaks. During daily sessions, children are encouraged to try their hands as part-time greeters and announce deals over the broadcast system.

Whether that is enough to convert the campers into consumers is another matter. "If I go to Wal-Mart I'll want to go for the day," said Cui Hongyan. "I can buy my goods somewhere else much more quickly."

McDonald's, with its free Wi-Fi and clean bathrooms, is adding more electrical outlets to most of its China stores in hopes that people will actually come and hang around longer.

In Hong Kong, the fast food giant is developing a service known as "McWedding" to encourage people to marry in their stores. One proposed feature of the ceremony: When it is time for the big kiss, the bride and groom can each chomp on the end of a french fry until their lips meet.

Meanwhile IKEA, known for its Swedish meatballs, has no plans to allow nuptials in its cafeterias.

—Yang Jie contributed to this article.

Write to Laurie Burkitt at [email protected]

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

NY Times: Love, the Many-Splendored Emotion

 

 

August 12, 2011

Love, the Many-Splendored Emotion

By JUDITH SHULEVITZ

ALL ABOUT LOVE

Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

By Lisa Appignanesi

401 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $28.95.

 

The news about love — if anything can be said to be new when it comes to love — is that it affects us on more levels than we realized. Poets and artists have long viewed love as a prime mover, but by the beginning of the last century, scientists and philosophers were dismissing it as socially and scientifically irrelevant. Love was confined to private life, where only women and novelists and psychoanalysts were supposed to pay much attention to it. Then, a little more than half a century ago, biologists and economists and psychologists decided that love mattered after all, and began conducting experiments to determine how much.

The early science of love looks a little shocking in retrospect. Experiments meant to demonstrate that mammals attach themselves to mothers because they need love, not just food, all too often required outright torture. Researchers snatched baby creatures away from mother creatures and put them in cages to prove that life without love was a sad, diminished thing. The science of sexual attraction made use of more benign methods, but until more women entered the field and started asking different questions, the experiments tended to produce stunning affirmations of Western patriarchal stereotypes. Whatever the results, however, this work did make scientists appreciate the central importance of love for life. Love or the lack of it turned out to affect not just psyches but also bodies; not just brains and genitals but also hormones and the expression of genes; not just the well-­being of individuals but also the flourishing of societies.

Today, biology is said to be powered by love. A rat will grow up fat and sassy if well-­licked by its mother, nervous and underdeveloped if licked poorly or not at all. Culture is sometimes seen as an artifact of love, too, or at least of what Darwin called sexual selection. Sporting matches or music competitions, among other costly and apparently useless displays, have been reinterpreted as the human equivalent of the peacock’s tail, ways of signaling genetic excellence.

In “All About Love,” Lisa Appignanesi, who has written extensively on the history of psychoanalysis, turns her back on the ever-­growing scientific literature on love, largely out of disgust with the way sociobiological theories get used to defend a conservative social order: “I’ll believe in evolutionary psychology more, perhaps, when it’s used less as an explanation for male philandering and female nesting,” she writes. What she wants to know is how we humans experience love individually, psychically — love being neither purely bodily nor purely mental but irreducibly both. In the words of the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, it’s the “imaginative elaboration of physical functions.”

A latter-­day Romantic, Appignanesi also celebrates the Byronic power of this “unruly emotion” to wreak havoc on our lives. “Rapture at bottom contains something of the asocial, the criminal, and desire may indeed be fueled by the breaking of bonds, whether of clans, families, or godly and social rules,” she writes. Love is a story we tell ourselves, if sometimes a dangerous one. The “purported facts” about love “garnered from the labs of biologists, cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists” are, to her, mainly ways of bolstering dominant social narratives. To really understand love, she argues, you have to demythologize those narratives, whether they’re fictional or factual or in that somewhere-­in-­between place where memoirs dwell.

You might say that Appignanesi aims to play psychoanalyst herself, listening between the lines of our culture’s semi-self-aware monologues about longing and desire. And a conscientious therapist she is, diligently assembling the “life history of love,” its arc through our lives. First comes first love: our crazed, adolescent forays into passion, when “carnal desire transports the lovers into a heightened world and everything in that world takes on powerful new meanings.” Next comes marriage, and its corollary, adultery, when the private ecstasies of love and the ungovernable nature of desire run up against the social expectation of unflagging monogamous romance. On she moves to child rearing, surely the most contested and political form of love today. Appignanesi wraps up her survey with friendship, which “catapults us out of the sphere of kin and binds us into the world of others,” she writes. Friendship is wise and calm and companionable and therefore best appreciated in old age.

To illustrate the different stages of love, Appignanesi recounts the plots of novels, poems and operas. She analyzes the popularity of cultural touchstones like the 1995 dating manual “The Rules” (its appeal betrays “a deep anxiety about appropriate modern codes”). She dissects marital narratives — “Pride and Prejudice,” "Bridget Jones's Diary" — and traces the evolution of the Cinderella narrative into high-end romantic fiction (“Jane Eyre”) and middlebrow chick lit (the “wittily exuberant” "Eat, Pray, Love"). She quotes a lot of psychoanalysts, Freud and Lacan and Donald Winnicott and Adam Phillips (an accomplished aphorist who hovers over the pages like an interrupting angel). “Why is it,” she asks, “that passionate love and loss seem to be so bound up with one another?” All later loves, she answers, stand in for that first, all-­absorbing love for mother, who is inevitably left behind. To become an individuated, language-­wielding “I” is to betray the “symbiotic plenitude” of infancy. Or as Appignanesi puts it, echoing Lacan: “To say ‘I am’ is already to say ‘I have lost.’ ”

Appignanesi offers up a brief history of marriage, from the Greeks through Victorianism and the sexual revolution and into the present. She outlines the literary history of love, by way of Dante and the troubadours of Provence. In her chapter on love in families, she gives the briefest of nods to the new science of epigenetics, which has shown how a mother’s experiences — the food she eats, the stress she feels — can regulate her child’s hormones and even affect his genes. But Appignanesi quickly shuts down this fascinating line of inquiry, warning that “the exponential growth in theories about early childhood is oddly coincident with the rise of feminism,” as if the science existed exclusively to perform the task of social control. She sidesteps the question of homosexuality, not just because the subject is too big but because, she explains, she aims to undermine the categories of gender and permissible versus impermissible sexuality that the very notion of homosexuality rests upon.

Appignanesi’s approach to love is aphoristic and whimsical. She loves to overturn some bit of conventional wisdom, rather than risk boring us with arguments. There is no unifying theory here, just a bewildering topography. We wander in a forest of other people’s fictions and ideas, often guided by little more than some faintly comical historical generalities. (“In the annals of love, adultery has ever played a raucous part.” )

For those of us who adore love stories — and who doesn’t? — a tour d’amour ought to be enough. That it isn’t tells you something about what it takes to write about love. Love stories, like love itself, turn less on things that are easy to summarize — situations, plots — than on the little details that give a tale or encounter its unexpected power: a gripping tone, a flash of wit, the eerily sadistic undertones of an erotic obsession. Such grace notes rarely make it into potted synopses.

No literature has fewer grace notes than scientific articles about love, of course. And yet at their best these documents have a freshness that Appignanesi’s book lacks. There’s something jolting, in the best possible sense, about science’s incessant quest to measure the unmeasurable, to give precise coordinates to knowledge that may have been common but was still vague. By now, everyone knows that you’re supposed to cuddle your infant, but who would have predicted that if you don’t, the mental health consequences may be passed down for three generations? Who would have guessed that, in the chemical sense, at least, people really may be made for each other — that the success or failure of a kiss may be due not just to feelings or technique but also to an unconscious olfactory response to your lover’s pheromones? Love cuts deep, much deeper, in some ways, than even our greatest poets have been able to describe. We are only beginning to learn how far down it goes.

Judith Shulevitz is the author of “The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time.”

ST: Marriage - Don't wait for stars to be aligned

News

Home > News > Home > Story

Jun 26, 2011

Marriage: Don't wait for stars to be aligned

Govt will try to raise rate but couples should not wait for tangible perks, says MG Chan

By Jessica Cheam

(from left) NTUC FairPrice CEO Seah Kian Peng, co-chair of the National Family Celebrations organising committee Lim Soon Hock, DPM Teo, Minister of State for Community Development, Youth and Sports Halimah Yacob and MG Chan enjoying a game at the Family Day Out carnival at Marina Bay yesterday. -- PHOTO: LIANHE ZAOBAO

 

The Government will keep on trying to raise the marriage rate in Singapore, but couples also should not hinge their decision to tie the knot on just tangible incentives, said Acting Minister for Community Development, Youth and Sports Chan Chun Sing yesterday.

Singaporeans should not wait till 'all the stars are aligned', such as owning an HDB flat or a car, before they get married, he advised. This is because it is impossible to have the perfect conditions for getting married or having a child.

Major-General (NS) Chan was speaking on the sidelines of the National Family Celebrations at Marina Bay yesterday.

Earlier, at the same event, Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean reminded participants in a speech that everyone has a part to play in making Singapore family-friendly.

'As a society, we need to help our families to cope and to thrive by building a pro-family environment. This goes beyond government measures, such as Baby Bonus, paid maternity leave and childcare leave,' said Mr Teo.

The DPM added that the celebrations - an annual event organised by the National Family Council, which this year focused on youth - are a 'good reminder to us parents that strong family support is essential for our young people as they mature as adults'.

Said MG Chan: 'This has to do with the culture, that we bring up our children to be more family-oriented, that the family is always at the centre of one's life.'

MG Chan commented on recently released figures which show Singapore's marriage rate having dipped to a historic low last year.

He said Singaporeans should be more concerned about long-term marriage trends instead of worrying about any blips in the statistics.

'Let us look at the trend rather than a particular year's statistics... There might be one or two reasons why there is a drop, but overall I think we're more concerned with the trend,' he added.

'We're not too excited when next year there's a sudden increase or dip. What we're more interested in is whether the trend overall is a more positive one.'

The month-long National Family Celebrations closed yesterday with its Family Day Out carnival, which drew 36,000 Singaporeans to Marina Bay to spend a day with their families.

[email protected]

Economist: Nupital economics

Food for thought for couples planning for their weddings.

===

Nuptial economics

Unbridled

Wedding jollity—more or less

Apr 28th 2011 | from the print edition

WHEN Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer in 1981 millions of Britons partied in public. Far fewer were expected at street parties for Prince William’s wedding on April 29th, not least because of the red tape that now snags public gatherings. David Cameron vainly told local authorities to “let people get on and have fun.”

Few prime ministers need to implore their people to party. More often governments are trying to stop them: the Afghan authorities have been considering a proposal to limit the boom in weddings, sombre affairs under the Taliban. The suggested limit is 300 guests and a few dollars per head.

Other countries have similar worries. Wedding laws in Tajikistan now maintain that only one course may be served. India’s legendary nuptial shindigs risk emptying not just the country’s wallets, but its bellies too. In February the food minister estimated that close to 15% of all grains and vegetables in the country are wasted through “extravagant and luxurious social functions”, such as lavish wedding banquets. Days later, diners at a society wedding pecked at a 100-dish menu. Party-poopers want India’s food security laws to curb such profligacy.

Some rich governments choose to subsidise expensive weddings. In the United Arab Emirates many males (a third of Dubai men, for example) wed foreigners, at a quarter of the price of marrying a local girl. The government aims to reduce the rising number of single local women by offering prizes of up to $19,000 to men who marry them.

Surveys in America price the average wedding at close to $30,000 (though the mean is inflated by high-cost dos; the median is lower). Costs peaked in 2008; economic gloom has since dampened them. Yet over 20 years the price has almost doubled, while America’s marriage rate is down by nearly a third.

Last year the canon chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, Giles Fraser, argued that outsize celebrations were a threat to marriage itself. He said modern British nuptials were an “overblown vanity project” seen out in “an atmosphere of narcissism and self-promotion”. Most clergy, he argued, now prefer taking funerals. Perhaps. But Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding, likely to reach more than a billion viewers worldwide, is unlikely to assist the noble cause of nuptial austerity.

WSJ: Do You Get an 'A' in Personality

BONDS
APRIL 5, 2011

Do You Get an 'A' in Personality?

By ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN

In the never-ending quest to help people co-exist peacefully with their spouses, children, siblings and in-laws, therapists are turning to tools used to assess the psychological stability of pilots, police officers and nuclear-power plant operators: personality tests.

I'm not talking about the pop quizzes in magazines that claim to help you determine the color of your aura or what breed you'd be if you were a dog. I am referring to tests that are scientifically designed and heavily researched, consisting of dozens if not hundreds of questions that identify specific aspects of your personality. Are you a thinker or a feeler? Intuitive or fact-oriented? Organized or spontaneous?

Answering questions like these helped Mardi and Richard Sayer get through a difficult period a few years ago when their adult daughter, Maggie Sayer, moved back into their Middletown, R.I. home.

Testing Your Relationships

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, one of the better-known personality tests, probes subjects with 567 true-or-false statements on a wide range of seemingly random topics, including ...

67. Like poetry
115. Not afraid of blood
148. Feel the best ever
163. Don't fear snakes
189. Like to flirt
193. Avoid stepping on sidewalk cracks
220. No worries about appearance
275. Difficulty talking in front of class in school
302. Easily get impatient
318. Expect to succeed
348. Wish were a child again

Source: Abbreviated items excerpted from the MMPI®-2 Booklet of Abbreviated Items. Copyright © 2005 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the University of Minnesota Press. "MMPI" and "Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory" are registered trademarks owned by the Regents of the University of Minnesota.

Depressed at the time, Maggie would often stay up half the night watching TV, then sleep past noon. Her parents, worried and frustrated, tried to push her to move forward with her life. "We would fight about God knows what," says the younger Ms. Sayer, now 30 and living in Santa Monica, Calif., where she is an assistant at a school for film-industry professionals.

The three decided to see a life coach, who administered a personality test, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, to each of them. Mardi Sayer says she discovered that she and her husband are extroverts and "thinkers"; they like to identify goals and move forward directly to achieve them. Their daughter is an introvert, a "feeler" who craves harmony and needs time and freedom to discover what she wants to do.

"It helped us see that she is a different person and will have a different path," says Ms. Sayer, 59, an accounting consultant. "You need to understand yourself in the context of the other people in your life," says her husband, Richard, 63, an attorney.

The tests have had lasting effects on her relationship with her parents, Maggie Sayer says. "My mom and dad weren't being insensitive or uncaring—they just didn't understand how I processed things," she says. "I learned that rather than immediately reacting emotionally to something my parents said, I could step back and formulate my response without having a dramatic meltdown."

Family therapists, marriage counselors and life coaches increasingly recognize that personality assessments can lead clients not only to greater self-insight but also to improved relationships. The tests "can help get to the heart of the problem quickly," says Richard Levak, a Del Mar, Calif., psychologist, who uses them extensively in his practice. "Too often psychologists operate on their intuition and clinical knowledge, but people are not often as they appear."

A test might reveal that someone who appears jovial and self-effacing may actually be insecure and introverted—constantly working to play a role, he says.

Answer Questions, Achieve Self-Knowledge

Here's how to take two of the best-known assessments:

• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory You can take this test only through a trained administrator. Check with the American Psychological Association, or your local chapter, to find someone certified to administer it and interpret the results.
• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Go to MBTIreferralnetwork.org to find someone to administer the test. You also can take it online and receive a one-hour telephone feedback assessment for $150 through the Center for Applications of Psychological Type at www.capt.org. Or take a computer-scored version of the test at MBTIcomplete.com for $59.95.

Hmmm. Dr. Levak offered to give me the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 and interpret my answers. I soon found myself responding to 567 true-or-false statements, on such topics as whether I like to flirt or had trouble speaking in front of the class when I was in school.

Because it was hard to tell exactly what underlying trait each question was assessing, it was impossible to game the test. Besides, individual responses are unimportant; it's the pattern of responses that reveals the personality, says Dr. Levak, who has done personality testing of candidates for television reality shows, such as "The Apprentice."

I wanted to see if the test would reveal something about me that I, or others, didn't already know. When Dr. Levak called with my results, he announced: "You're not hyper like I thought you were." According to the test, he said, I am extroverted, poised and controlled, hate conflict and aim to please, have a good balance between masculine and feminine and can be a bit of a rebel. "I bet as a teenager you hung out with a nice boy with an earring," he said. I shared the assessment with my best friend. "Spot on," she said.

How can knowing this help my relationships? Dr. Levak explained: Because I hate to get mad, I have a tendency to let resentments fester. By the time I allow myself to express anger, I am furious. Then I come across as judgmental rather than hurt. Knowing this, I can work on dealing with my anger before it builds up, he says. And I can be more aware of how others see me.

Lauren Mackler, the Boston life coach who worked with the Sayers, gives clients the Myers-Briggs and the Life Styles Inventory, which assesses habitual behavioral styles. (Life coaches usually help clients understand behaviors and achieve goals, whereas therapists often help clients explore their pasts to understand how their upbringing has influenced their behavior.)

Ms. Mackler uses the tests to help family members see how problems might be driven by personality differences and come up with strategies to adjust.

Consider what happens when an introvert comes home hoping to chill after a rough day at work—only to find his extrovert partner waiting to recap every moment of her day. The introvert gets angry; the extrovert feels hurt. Ms. Mackler tells the extrovert that her spouse needs time alone; she tells the introvert that he needs to make an effort to come out and talk after he has decompressed.

"When people see something on paper, they realize it's not subjective—they have done the test and described the behavior themselves," she says. "It makes it more palatable for them to see and talk about" the issues.

What, exactly, is personality? John D. Mayer, a psychologist and expert on personality testing at the University of New Hampshire, says it is "the system that organizes one's emotions, motives and capacities to think." Personalities are partly innate, partly learned, he says; we can change them a bit, but it isn't easy.

Dr. Mayer says the roots of modern personality tests date back to the early 1900s, when French psychologist Alfred Binet created an intelligence test predicting which children had special needs requiring alternative education. Testing spread to the U.S. during World War I, when the military used a type of personality test to assess if recruits were mentally fit for service.

Early personality tests were designed to assess mental illness. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, developed at the University of Minnesota to help diagnose psychiatric patients, now is used to assess the psychological stability of people with public-safety responsibilities.

The Myers-Briggs was developed in the 1940s by Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katherine Cook Briggs, who despite little advanced training in psychology, immersed themselves in the work of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung and designed the questionnaire based on Jung's personality types.

When family members take personality tests, their self-awareness goes up and they quickly figure out their strengths and weaknesses, says John Williams, a life coach in Portland, Ore., who uses a test in his work with teenagers. "People realize they are different from other people," he says. "The personality test becomes a road map."

—Email Elizabeth Bernstein at [email protected] or follow her column at www.Facebook.com/EBernsteinWSJ.

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

ST: 'Cupid' course - Participants will be taught how to matchmake their single friends

:D

===

Mar 26, 2011

'Cupid' course

Participants will be taught how to matchmake their single friends

By Carolyn Quek

An SDN survey of 1,500 singles last year found that:

• Almost half felt the best way for them to find a partner was through friends

• One in 10 said their family's informal introductions would be the best way to find a mate

Married couple Ian Lin and Liang Yiwen (background) brought their friends Tom Ng and Lio Weiyun together. Mr Ng and Ms Lio are now engaged. Ms Liang feels that pairing two people is a matter of common sense. -- ST PHOTO: NEO XIAOBIN

View more photos

 FRIENDS and relatives of singles are being sought after to play Cupid.

The Government, anxious to get more people hitched and into nesting mode to arrest the falling birth rate here, even wants to help them learn the fine art of matchmaking.

What love is about, the science of attraction, how to set up their friends with panache, and the advice to dish out on what to wear and what to say on that first date - these are topics to be covered in a course run by the Social Development Network (SDN) and to be taught by counsellors or social workers.

It will cost an aspiring Cupid about $20 to learn the moves.

The reason the course is targeted at members of the public is that singles prefer to meet a potential partner through family or friends.

A survey by the SDN last year found that nearly half of the 1,500 singles who responded wanted to meet that someone special through friends; 10 per cent preferred introductions through family.

Minister of State for Community Development, Youth and Sports Yu-Foo Yee Shoon said yesterday at the opening of Real Loves 2011, a week-long slew of events to celebrate marriage, that the pilot run of the course in July will be for marriage solemnisers, because they already show an interest in helping others find love and can spread the word about the course to grassroots workers.

Mrs Yu-Foo said families are now smaller and rely less on the ties that used to bind entire kampungs and spurred villagers to step in to matchmake eligible men and women in their midst.

Today, formal channels like matchmaking agencies do the job, she said.

She had some numbers to show that the exercise is more than a passing amusement: The number of singles is growing. They now make up 32.2 per cent of the resident population aged 15 and older, up from 30.5 per cent in 2000.

If the 61-year-old sounds evangelistic, it is because her own marriage is the result of a crack-shot Cupid. She said she met her husband Yu Lee Wu, now a 64-year-old retired professor, through friends.

Meanwhile, among those who are already playing matchmaker are some who are open to attending the course.

Credit analyst Liang Yiwen, 27, and her research-engineer husband Ian Lin, 28, already claim one success in matchmaking - without formal training: Their friends Lio Weiyun, 27, and Tom Ng, 28, who they brought together last year, are now engaged to be married.

Ms Lio, a human resources executive, and Mr Ng, a bank analyst, met during preparations for the wedding between Ms Liang and Mr Lin last October.

Ms Liang said: 'I'd find out from Weiyun how she felt about Tom, and my husband would tell him. They were shy so we became the middlemen, relaying messages to the other party.'

Ms Liang said she would consider attending the course, although pairing two people was a matter of 'common sense', and the fee may be a deterrent.

Online media-firm manager Yang Huiwen, 24, agreed the fee was a turn-off but thought some tips were worth picking up, going by her 'zero success rate' with matchmaking five couples.

The chief executive of Lunch Actually, Ms Violet Lim, said she does not feel threatened by the programme because a dating agency like hers offers a wider pool of contacts than friends or family can.

'Friends may be well-meaning, but they have their own lives and jobs so the help they give may not be consistent. I think, ultimately, it's good to equip those who are interested in matchmaking with skills, because we all want to see singles married off as well.'

[email protected]

NY Times: Why Monogamy Matters

 

---

March 6, 2011

Why Monogamy Matters

By ROSS DOUTHAT

Social conservatives can seem like the perennial pessimists of American politics — more comfortable with resignation than with hope, perpetually touting evidence of family breakdown, social disintegration and civilizational decline.

But even doomsayers get the occasional dose of good news. And so it was last week, when a study from the Centers for Disease Control revealed that American teens and 20-somethings are waiting longer to have sex.

In 2002, the study reported, 22 percent of Americans aged 15 to 24 were still virgins. By 2008, that number was up to 28 percent. Other research suggests that this trend may date back decades, and that young Americans have been growing more sexually conservative since the late 1980s.

Why is this good news? Not, it should be emphasized, because it suggests the dawn of some sort of traditionalist utopia, where the only sex is married sex. No such society has ever existed, or ever could: not in 1950s America (where, as the feminist writer Dana Goldstein noted last week, the vast majority of men and women had sex before they married), and not even in Mormon Utah (where Brigham Young University recently suspended a star basketball player for sleeping with his girlfriend).

But there are different kinds of premarital sex. There’s sex that’s actually pre-marital, in the sense that it involves monogamous couples on a path that might lead to matrimony one day. Then there’s sex that’s casual and promiscuous, or just premature and ill considered.

This distinction is crucial to understanding what’s changed in American life since the sexual revolution. Yes, in 1950 as in 2011, most people didn’t go virgins to their marriage beds. But earlier generations of Americans waited longer to have sex, took fewer sexual partners across their lifetimes, and were more likely to see sleeping together as a way station on the road to wedlock.

And they may have been happier for it. That’s the conclusion suggested by two sociologists, Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, in their recent book, “Premarital Sex in America.” Their research, which looks at sexual behavior among contemporary young adults, finds a significant correlation between sexual restraint and emotional well-being, between monogamy and happiness — and between promiscuity and depression.

This correlation is much stronger for women than for men. Female emotional well-being seems to be tightly bound to sexual stability — which may help explain why overall female happiness has actually drifted downward since the sexual revolution.

Among the young people Regnerus and Uecker studied, the happiest women were those with a current sexual partner and only one or two partners in their lifetime. Virgins were almost as happy, though not quite, and then a young woman’s likelihood of depression rose steadily as her number of partners climbed and the present stability of her sex life diminished.

When social conservatives talk about restoring the link between sex, monogamy and marriage, they often have these kinds of realities in mind. The point isn’t that we should aspire to some Arcadia of perfect chastity. Rather, it’s that a high sexual ideal can shape how quickly and casually people pair off, even when they aren’t living up to its exacting demands. The ultimate goal is a sexual culture that makes it easier for young people to achieve romantic happiness — by encouraging them to wait a little longer, choose more carefully and judge their sex lives against a strong moral standard.

This is what’s at stake, for instance, in debates over abstinence-based sex education. Successful abstinence-based programs (yes, they do exist) don’t necessarily make their teenage participants more likely to save themselves for marriage. But they make them more likely to save themselves for somebody, which in turn increases the odds that their adult sexual lives will be a source of joy rather than sorrow.

It’s also what’s at stake in the ongoing battle over whether the federal government should be subsidizing Planned Parenthood. Obviously, social conservatives don’t like seeing their tax dollars flow to an organization that performs roughly 300,000 abortions every year. But they also see Planned Parenthood’s larger worldview — in which teen sexual activity is taken for granted, and the most important judgment to be made about a sexual encounter is whether it’s clinically “safe” — as the enemy of the kind of sexual idealism they’re trying to restore.

Liberals argue, not unreasonably, that Planned Parenthood’s approach is tailored to the gritty realities of teenage sexuality. But realism can blur into cynicism, and a jaded attitude can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Social conservatives look at the contemporary sexual landscape and remember that it wasn’t always thus, and they look at current trends and hope that it doesn’t have to be this way forever.

In this sense, despite their instinctive gloominess, they’re actually the optimists in the debate.

NY Times: As the Web Turns

January 12, 2011

As the Web Turns

By ANDREW MARTIN

Hey, fellas, want to spice things up with your lady? Procter & Gamble, the consumer products giant, has some ideas.

A Web site created by the company for husbands and fathers offers articles with titles like “Conquering Sex Problems.” Among other things, the article advises men to take their time in bed.

“If you want a hot woman who acts like a porn star in bed, you need to be prepared to spend some time getting her to that place,” suggests the site, ManoftheHouse.com.

While the Internet is crowded with all kinds of sex advice, P.& G. — the maker of Pampers and Ivory soap and the nation’s largest advertiser — says it has found an untapped marketing opportunity for its products in the family man.

Much of the popular sex advice for men, in publications like Maxim and GQ, is directed toward singles on the prowl, the company says. Even its top rival, Unilever, has gone decidedly raunchier in a campaign for Axe, a grooming brand aimed at young men, that includes a double entendre about cleaning sporting equipment and a man’s private parts.

The P.& G. site gets out of the bedroom, offering tips on grilling burgers, cleaning toilets and disciplining children. It promises, “We’ll make men out of you yet,” while also promoting Gillette razors, Head & Shoulders shampoo and other company products.

“What we are trying to do is speak to the whole man,” said Jeannie Tharrington, a spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble Productions. “Certainly, relationships and sex are part of an adult man’s life.”

Josh Bernoff, senior vice president at Forrester Research who has written about P.& G.’s marketing efforts, said ManoftheHouse.com was not so different from “As the World Turns,” the TV soap opera that was another P.& G. innovation.

“This is the 21st-century version of the soap opera,” he said. “It’s information. It’s topical.”

More and more big companies have discovered the how-to genre as a marketing tool. General Mills offers dieting advice and coupons on Tablespoon.com, and Wal-Mart has a Web site in which mothers blog about everything from being frugal to reviewing products.

Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at the Altimeter Group, a digital strategy consulting firm, said company-generated lifestyle sites could be effective as long as they did not push the brands too hard. Reviewing the homepage of ManoftheHouse.com, he said, “All of these discussions on this page are already happening on Facebook,” he said. “The reason these things do work is that consumers are already having these discussions, having a healthy breakfast, talking about their wives in relationships.”

Ms. Tharrington said company research found that men were going to women’s Web sites to find information on recipes, cleaning the house or getting a stain out of a shirt. As for sex talk coming from a company that has honed a wholesome image — remember Mr. Whipple? — she said, “For us, it’s part of it, but it’s not the whole thing. What we try to do is be tasteful.”

Procter & Gamble has a long history of unusual marketing. The Cincinnati-based company created one of the first radio soap operas as a way to market its products, and years later it created its own soap operas, including “As the World Turns,” for television.

In the last decade, Procter & Gamble was one of the pioneers in word-of-mouth marketing campaigns in which mothers and teenagers were plied with samples and coupons to draw more customers.

In 2000, the company introduced Beinggirl.com, which provides information and expert advice on issues that teenage girls might be too embarrassed to ask a parent or a doctor about, like menstruation, eating disorders, acne and dating. The site also advertises P.& G. tampons and offers free samples.

In the years since Beinggirl.com was created, Procter & Gamble has started several other lifestyle Web sites, including one that is directed at women, Homemadesimple.com. David Germano, the general manager of ManoftheHouse.com, said consumer data showed that 10 percent of the visitors to the women’s site were men.

ManoftheHouse.com has brought on several writers who had established father-focused blogs. Karl Withakay, a Utah-based singer and songwriter who writes some of the sex articles, including “Conquering Sex Problems,” was already writing about relationships for other media outlets.

“The pieces he wrote were based upon his own experience,” said Craig J. Heimbuch, ManoftheHouse.com’s editor in chief, in an e-mail. “I appreciate his perspective a great deal. It lends itself well to the tone of the site, which is men helping men.”

So are men drawn to a PG-rated Web site when so much R- and X-rated competition is out there? Procter & Gamble says that so far it is pleased with the number of visitors. The site was started in June, and by December it had topped a half a million monthly unique visitors.

By comparison, AskMen.com, a site with similar, if more titillating content, had 5.5 million unique visitors in December, according to comScore, the market research firm.

Jonah Disend, chief executive of the brand strategy firm Redscout, questioned whether ManoftheHouse.com would generate a big following. He said men tended to be more interested in specialized publications about a specific hobby or sport.

“Just because no one’s doing it doesn’t mean there’s a real market for it,” he said.

Racy also works. Indeed, that is just what Procter & Gamble’s archrival, Unilever, discovered in its efforts to market Axe. The campaign it started last year, which included the double entendre, has become a sensation; last month, Zeta Interactive proclaimed the ads as having received the most social media buzz in 2010.

“We’ve taken a calculated risk,” said Heather Mitchell, a Unilever spokeswoman, “knowing what resonates with our guys.”

The Washington Post: Tears may send a sexual message in addtition to an emotional one, study fnds

Tears may send a sexual message in addition to an emotional one, study finds

By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 7, 2011; 12:00 AM

 

It's widely held that a woman's tears will turn a man to mush. And many think that sympathetic response is a sign of sensitivity, a psychological shift away from baser male impulses.

But new research suggests that much of the response may be involuntary and that men are unable to help themselves. The smell of a woman's tears, the study found, is associated with a dip in testosterone, the principal male hormone, and a general decline in sexual arousal.

"We've identified that there is a chemosignal in human tears," said Noam Sobel, a neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science near Tel Aviv. Sobel headed the study, which involved exposing men to tears collected in vials. It was published online Thursday by the journal Science.

Historically, tears have been of more interest to poets than scientists.

"Emotional tears" are considered by many biologists to be uniquely human. They're known to have a different chemical composition than tears shed when the eye is simply irritated. The few studies of tears' psychological effects suggest they have a help-soliciting function.

Whether the quenching of ardor is a big part of their evolutionary function or a side effect of a more complicated care-giving response isn't known. But it now seems clear they contain substances that work unconsciously on others.

For practical reasons, Sobel and his colleagues have studied only women's tears. But they suspect that men's tears, and possibly children's, also contain chemical signals and are eager to find out what messages they may convey.

"This experiment opened gazillions of questions. It opened way more questions than it answered," Sobel said.

The new study places human tears in a family of fluids that includes urine and anogenital gland secretions.

Those fluids contain behavior-altering compounds, known as pheromones. Research in rodents has shown that liquids secreted from glands near the eye have a variety of social effects. In mole rats, they reduce aggressiveness in head-to-head underground confrontations. In mice, they stimulate aggression between males but promote mating behavior between males and females.

"What we have found is that human emotional crying may not be so unique after all," Sobel said. "It is a reflection of something common to many if not all mammals, which is chemosignaling through lacrimal secretions."

The study, which entailed collecting tears and exposing people to them in a laboratory, was greeted positively by the small circle of researchers who study crying.

"It's the first report. I think it's quite interesting," said Robert R. Provine, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, who has studied tears as visual cues.

"The results indeed are fascinating," said Ad Vingerhoets of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, who has studied social reactions to crying. However, he said, he suspects that tears' pheromones may have a bigger effect on another hormone, oxytocin, which is associated with social bonding, than on testosterone. He said he hopes further research will head in that direction.

In the study published Thursday, Sobel and his colleagues collected tears from women who cried after watching a sad scene in a movie. The researchers had previously trickled a saline solution - salty water - down the women's cheeks and collected it as a "control" substance. Men were exposed to the two liquids, sniffing them in vials and, for some of the experiments, having a small pad soaked with the liquid taped between the nostrils and upper lip.

The men were unable to distinguish the two liquids; both were odorless. However, the men's physiological states, and to some extent their thoughts, changed depending on whether the liquid was tears or saline.

When presented with emotionally ambiguous pictures of women's faces, 17 of 24 men in the experiment found the faces to be less sexually attractive after sniffing tears than after sniffing saline. After the men sniffed tears while watching a somewhat sad movie not of their choosing, they reported an overall reduction in sexual arousal.

These subjective changes were small; changes in physiological measurements were larger.

The concentration of testosterone in the men's saliva (which reflects the amount circulating in the bloodstream) fell 13 percent after they sniffed tears but stayed the same after sniffing saline. Their physiological state, as measured by skin temperature, heart rate and respiration, also fell after exposure to tears. Functional MRI imaging of their brains similarly showed less activity in areas associated with sexual arousal after smelling tears.

Taken together, the results "jointly suggest that women's emotional tears contain a chemosignal that reduces sexual arousal in men," the researchers concluded. "We have . . . identified an emotionally relevant function for tears."

In an interview, Sobel said that he doesn't think chemical signaling is unique to women's tears. His research used them because they were easier to obtain than men's.

To conduct the study, the research team posted an ad on the Weizmann Institute campus seeking volunteers who could cry easily. About 60 women and one man responded. They were screened to see how easily they cried and to determine the volume of tears they produced.

"We reached this core group of six women criers who could come back to the lab every other day and cry a full" milliliter, Sobel said.

Each woman chose a movie to elicit crying, watching it in private and collecting tears. By far the most successful tear-inducer was the death scene in "The Champ," a 1979 film starring Jon Voight about an over-the-hill boxer making a comeback to provide a better future for his son, whom he is raising on his own.

"That scene is a winner," Sobel said. "Emotion labs all over the world use it to establish sad mood."

Other reliable tear-jerkers were "Life Is Beautiful," "Terms of Endearment," "When a Man Loves a Woman" and an Israeli movie, "Broken Wings."

The researchers now have two male criers and are recruiting more to study the effects of their tears on women and on other men.

Non Sequitur: Blind Date

ST: Marriages & Recession - Ring of truth (NY Times)

Review

Home > Review > Others

Oct 16, 2010

U.S. TRENDS

Marriage & recession: Ring of truth

By Justin Wolfers

-- PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO

 

THE recession has taken a toll on the institution of marriage, we keep hearing. Last month, for instance, when it was reported that the proportion of Americans aged 25 to 34 who are married fell below the proportion who have never married, it was quickly attributed to the economic downturn. Young adults, according to this narrative, have less money to spend on a wedding and are less eager to enter into a lifetime commitment during times of uncertainty.

Then last week, when a report from the Pew Research Centre noted that, for the first time, college-educated 30-year-olds were more likely to have been married than were people the same age without a college degree, the news was interpreted as another side effect of the recent recession. After all, the downturn has been especially hard on young men with no college degree.

But if you look at marriage in the United States over the past century, this interpretation doesn't stand up. Marriage and divorce rates have remained remarkably immune to the ups and downs of the business cycle. Unfortunately, the marriage statistics are easy to misread.

It's misleading to count the wedding rings among people in their 20s and early 30s, because the median age at first marriage in the US has risen to 28 for men (from 23 in 1970) and 26 for women (from 21 in 1970). The fact that these folks are not married now does not mean they won't marry - many of them just aren't there yet.

Look instead at 40-year-olds, and you see that 81 per cent have married at least once. Yes, this number used to be higher - it peaked at 93 per cent in 1980 - but, clearly, marriage remains a part of most people's lives. These statistics are not a perfect barometer either, however, because they reflect weddings celebrated years earlier.

To most accurately track marriage rates, you need to focus on the number of wedding certificates issued. In 2009, the latest year for which we have data, there were about 2.1 million marriages in the US. That does represent a slight decline since the recession began. But it's the same rate of decline that existed during the preceding economic boom, the previous bust and both the boom and the bust before that.

Indeed, the recent modest decline in marriage continues a 30-year trend. And even as the number of marriages falls, divorce is also becoming less prevalent. So a greater proportion of today's marriages will likely persist 30 years into the future.

This is not to say that marriage looks the same today as it always did - over the past several decades, there has been a tremendous shift in married life.

It used to be that a typical marriage involved specialised roles for the husband and wife. Usually he was in the marketplace, and she was in the home, and this arrangement led to maximum productivity.

But today, when families have easy access to prepared foods, inexpensive off-the-rack clothing and labour-saving technology from the washing machine to the robot vacuum cleaner, there's much less benefit from either spouse specialising in homemaking. Women, now better educated and with greater control over their fertility, are in the marketplace, too, and married couples have more money, more leisure time and longer lives to spend together. Modern marriages are based not on the economic benefits of playing specialised roles but on shared passions.

This new model of 'hedonic marriage' has had an effect on who marries, and when - as research I have conducted with my better half, the economist Betsey Stevenson, has documented. In the old days, opposites attracted; an aspiring executive groom would pair up with a less-educated bride. And they would wed before the stork visited and before the couple made the costly investment of putting the husband through business school.

But today, that same young executive would more likely be half of a power couple, married to a college-educated woman who shares his taste in books, hobbies, travel and so on. Indeed, marriage rates for college-educated women rose sharply through the 1950s and 1960s, and have remained remarkably stable since. These women tend to marry after they have finished college and started their careers.

The decline in marriage, it turns out, is concentrated entirely among women with less education - those who likely have the least to gain from modern hedonic marriage.

This is not to say that the economic downturn has had no effect at all on domestic life. Census data shows that the number of unwed couples living together rose sharply last year. With rents high and jobs hard to come by, it's no surprise that people are doubling up.

Still, given that the marriage rate remains on trend, the rise in cohabitation isn't coming at the expense of marriage. Instead, many young couples who might otherwise merely be dating are moving in together. Some of them, no doubt, will eventually marry. Truly, the recession has not torn young couples apart; it has pushed them closer together.

The writer is assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

THE NEW YORK TIMES SYNDICATE

WSJ: Research Into Human Sexuality Leaves a Lot to Be Desired

THE NUMBERS GUY
OCTOBER 9, 2010

Research Into Human Sexuality Leaves a Lot to Be Desired

• By CARL BIALIK

Let's talk about sex.

Nearly 6,000 people between the age of 14 and 94 did so at the behest of Indiana University researchers, who this week published results from their national survey. These respondents said, among other things, how often they have sex with people of the same or opposite genders; which sexual practices they engage in; and whether they used condoms. Sex researchers say it is the first study of this scope and scientific rigor since 1992, when the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center surveyed nearly 3,500 people.

The survey's results are fascinating, but not the final word on sex in America. While researchers took care to find a representative sample of people, the survey population limits or omits a few key groups that could have skewed the results, some health researchers say. And because of the inevitable challenge studies on sex face in persuading people to respond honestly, the findings should be treated with some skepticism.

One area of inquiry that tends to draw a lot of interest can be especially problematic, statistically speaking: comparing how each gender reports on sex. That came into play in the latest study, which found that boys age 14 to 17 say they use condoms 79% of the time during intercourse, compared to just 58% of girls in that age group who said their male partners used condoms.

Numbers Guy Blog

• Sex, and Studying It, Is Complicated

Those numbers might suggest that boys are exaggerating their condom use, or that girls are underreporting it. But the potential mismatch between the sexual encounters each group described also might account for some of the difference. Some respondents might have been having sex with people outside the 14-17 age range. This could affect the results if age influences whether someone uses a condom.

"Sometimes people portray this as if men and women in surveys are closed populations," says William Mosher, a statistician at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics, about the comparisons between male and female sexual behavior. "They are not closed populations."

Then there is the challenge of ensuring that people answer honestly about deeply private matters. Researchers who led the Indiana study acknowledge the difficulty of obtaining truthful information. "There is no perfect method," says Debby Herbenick, research scientist at Indiana University and co-author of the study.

Nonetheless, she says the Indiana group's approach had certain advantages. Researchers hired the survey company Knowledge Networks to interview people electronically. Many pollsters are skeptical of Web surveys because not everyone in the U.S. is online—or online often enough to see ads for Internet-based panels. But Knowledge Networks takes a different approach, contacting people via mail by randomly selecting addresses, and persuading about one in four or five to join a panel. If panelists lack the means to answer online polls, the company equips them.

Another problem with the study: Soldiers, prostitutes and Americans living abroad are unlikely to participate in sex surveys, either because they are outside the geographical range, or because they are reluctant to talk about illicit activities. Their absence can affect results, researchers say.

The survey also had limited statistical power to describe the sexual habits of subgroups of Americans, because of small sample sizes. This prevented researchers from learning much about same-gender sex. And, for instance, an analysis of whether black women who used marijuana before sex also used condoms was hampered by the presence of just eight such women in the sample.

While the anonymity of online surveys might make respondents more comfortable responding honestly, it also can be harder to verify their identity—perhaps the person who claims to be a 45-year-old woman is actually a 20-year-old man. For the last comprehensive survey on Americans' sexual behavior in 1992, researchers faced a different set of issues. Online polling wasn't an option, so interviewers went to people's homes, explains Robert T. Michael, an economist at the University of Chicago and a principal investigator on the study. To persuade respondents to divulge highly personal information, pollsters appealed to people's desire to help supply information and fight the spread of AIDS. "We had a compelling rationale, and our field people were good," Prof. Michael says.

"It's exciting, intellectually challenging research," Prof. Michael says of sex studies. "It's important to get it right."

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

===

October 8, 2010, 7:16 PM ET

Sex, and Studying It, Are Complicated

My print column this week examines the fascinating numbers and tricky statistical issues that accompany sex surveys, such as a high-profile one published by Indiana University researchers this week.

This study in many ways is a descendant of one conducted by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center in 1992. Such studies are so infrequent because sexual research that looks beyond fertility and sexual health issues can be hard to fund, researchers say.

The latest study emerges in a different research climate than the one that produced the 1992 study. The Indiana study makes use of online polling, which wasn’t an option last time around. Knowledge Networks, which conducted the survey, uses mailing addresses to recruit its panel and provides Internet access to households that need it. This helps overcome some potential methodological drawbacks to online research, which also has an important potential advantage for research asking about sensitive topics: It allows researchers to ask about sex without ever personally asking anyone about sex. On the phone or in person, there is “more risk that respondents and research subjects are going to be less honest in their responses,” because of their desire to please interviewers, or not be embarrassed with them, said J. Michael Dennis, executive vice president at Knowledge Networks.

Another important advantage for online polling is cost. “For face-to-face interviews, to get really large numbers, it is considerably expensive,” said Debby Herbenick, research scientist at Indiana University and co-author of the recent study.

Then there are all the inherent challenges with getting people to talk about sex, for which pollsters have devised a wide range of strategies. For the 1992 survey, interviewers avoided asking directly about sensitive topics, either by giving respondents some questions in writing or by using a clever way to cloak their responses. When asking about which kinds of sexual behavior was involved in respondents’ most recent sexual encounter, interviewers would hand over a card where letters corresponded to various options, such as oral sex, and respondents would tick off letters. Interviewers didn’t have the key to the card.

In addition to the interview mode, other characteristics differ between the two surveys — notably questions asked. That lessens the ability to track trends between the surveys.

Funding also differed. The older study was planned with the promise of Congressional money, but when North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms led an effort to block in the Senate, researchers had to delay and turn to other sources, including foundations. The newer study bypassed governmental sources, receiving funding for data collection from Church & Dwight Co., the makers of Trojan condoms. Condoms are a major topic in the research. Herbenick said the company didn’t dictate study design, though it did offer advice.

These surveys nonetheless are broader and in some ways more reliable than the federal government’s efforts to track sexual behavior, which generally are part of broader studies. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, administered in schools, asks just seven questions about sex. It also doesn’t define sex, out of fear that more schools or parents would opt their students out of responding. “We want to ask appropriate questions, but at the same time, we don’t want to create any unnecessary red flags,” said Laura Kann, who helps direct the survey.

Meanwhile, the National Survey of Family Growth, run by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, focuses on reproduction, so it covers only ages 18 to 44, and only in 2002 did it begin to survey men in addition to women.

One finding many of these surveys share is that the stories men and women tell about their sex lives don’t always match up as we’d expect. Typically, men report more sex partners than women do. Also, in the latest survey and in recent studies of college students, more men report their partners achieve orgasm in their latest sexual encounters than the proportion of women who report achieving orgasm, a finding which has received extensive press coverage.

Researchers who have found these results attribute them generally to poor communication between men and women in bed. “We all need to do a better job of communicating,” Herbenick said.

But such findings may be problematic when certain groups are excluded. Robert T. Michael, an economist at the University of Chicago and a principal investigator on the study, pointed out that prostitutes are unlikely to tell strangers about their sex habits, and those with many clients may have a major effect on estimates of average number of sex partners.

His collaborator on the 1992 study, Edward Laumann, said that because of such discrepancies, “people could be describing the same thing,” yet their answers still could add up to different numbers for each gender.

William Mosher, a statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics, added that these surveys generally are fixed on a certain age range, and don’t ask people outside the country about their sex habits — both factors that could lead to mismatches between male and female responses.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that the orgasm reporting gap isn’t real, or even bigger than found — just that there are potential confounding factors. Stanford University sociologist Paula England, who has collaborated on the college studies, said these findings hold up among various subcategories of respondents — which suggests that at least in this population, if not necessarily in the overall population, sex isn’t always perceived the same way by both partners. And Pepper Schwartz, a sociologist at the University of Washington, said a study she worked on in the 1980s found a similar effect, though not as large, among couples — who presumably were reporting on the same sexual encounter. “The direction or percentage might have some wiggle room, but the message is pretty clear,” Schwartz said.

Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

ST: Not the marrying kind

Asia

Home > Asia > Asia > Story

Oct 9, 2010

Not the marrying kind

More S. Korean women shun the altar in favour of career and single life

Marriage is a declining institution in South Korea, a trend that began at least since 1990, when the marriage rate for every 1,000 residents was 9.3. It went down to 7.0 in 2000 and hit a record low of 6.2 last year. It is more often the fairer sex that is recoiling from marriage. Figures show just six out of 10 South Korean women believe marriage is a must, compared with eight out of 10 men. -- PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

 

SEOUL: Attractive, assertive and financially secure, Ms Park Min Kyoung seems like the ideal wife.

But the 41-year-old is single by choice and has no plans to get married any time soon - one of an increasing number of South Korean women who are shunning marriage in favour of their careers and the single life.

According to the government-run Statistics Korea website, South Korea last year recorded the lowest marriage rate at 6.2 marriages for every 1,000 people. Singapore's is slightly higher at 6.6 last year.

Marriage is a declining institution in South Korea, a trend that began at least since 1990, when the marriage rate for every 1,000 residents was 9.3. It went down to 7.0 in 2000.

'If I can find someone who really loves me, I can marry. If not, I don't need to get married. I don't want to do it for money or because I'm lonely,' said Ms Park.

It is more often the fairer sex that is recoiling from marriage. According to recent figures, just six out of 10 South Korean women believe marriage is a must, compared with eight out of 10 men.

Statistics Korea has blamed economic uncertainties for scaring people away from the altar. Ms Park does not dispute this, but thinks the real reason goes much deeper - to how South Korean men are still not treating women as their equal.

'South Korean men are so dominating. They don't know how to treat women. And in South Korea many things are really different from other countries,' said Ms Park, bemoaning the pervasive favouritism for men in her society.

Professor Lee Jae Kyung, director of the Korean Women's Institute at Ewha Womans University, shares her view: 'Because of gender division of labour and inequality in the patriarchal family, many South Korean young women feel marriage is unfavourable to women.'

Graduate Lee So Ra, 24, thinks traditional Korean cultural norms are turning women away from marriage. She says it is the woman who is usually expected to make all the sacrifices in a marriage.

'First of all, I cannot get my career. I would have to take care of his family and him and his child,' Ms Lee sketches her marriage scenario. 'If I come home, my future husband would just be lying down on the sofa, I guess, because that's what my father did.'

Unsurprisingly, South Korea's declining marriage rate has corresponded with a big drop in births in recent years. It now has one of the world's lowest fertility rates - on average only 1.15 children are born to each South Korean woman over her lifetime.

That spells trouble for the country's pensions and welfare system as it would be strained by an ageing population.

Inflexible work practices also make career-minded women like Ms Lee cagey about getting married. 'If I go to a small company and I get pregnant; if I take a rest from my work, maybe they will take away my desk,' she said.

All the perceived minuses of marriage add up to one conclusion for both Ms Lee and Ms Park: If they walk down the aisle, it will be with a foreigner. Ms Park has dated many Western men and argues that they are less domineering than most South Korean men.

Ironically, on the other side of the equation, South Korean men are looking for foreign spouses in the event that they cannot find one at home.

Marriages between South Korean men and Vietnamese, Filipino and Chinese women have become common in recent years, although these have steadily declined over the past five years.

KOREA HERALD/ASIA NEWS NETWORK

Song: Bu Ru Bu Jian (不如不见)

 

ST: When she hears my voice, she knows it's me

Prime News

Home > Prime News > Story

Oct 4, 2010

'When she hears my voice, she knows it's me'

Over the course of 2008 and last year, Straits Times journalists conducted 16 interviews with Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew for an upcoming book on issues critical to Singapore's future. In one interview, Mr Lee paid a quiet yet moving tribute to his wife of 63 years, who was by then bedridden. Here are extracts from Lee Kuan Yew: Hard Truths To Keep Singapore Going, due out in January next year.

Mr and Mrs Lee Kuan Yew at MacRitchie Reservoir in a photo taken in September 1946, when he was 23 and she was 25. They had first met at Raffles Institution in the late 1930s, and married in 1947 in Stratford-upon-Avon while they were law students at Cambridge University. -- PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE LEE FAMILY

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Can we start by asking how is Mrs Lee and how difficult is it for you coping with her illness?

Well, at the beginning it was. When it happened in May last year it was traumatic...She had recovered from her first stroke in 2003, reasonably unimpaired. We dashed her to hospital - the National Neuroscience Institute. There they found a new bleed (in the brain), this time in a more difficult position where it affects the movements. But there was still hope that she would recover with some physiotherapy, although maybe the quality of life would not be as good as before. Then while she was undergoing therapy, within the first two weeks she had two more strokes, one after another. The doctor said it's no use, physiotherapy cannot do anything because it was traumatic. So we brought her home, and I had to shift into my study room, which is next to my bedroom, because she had to have nurses round the clock. All the trauma meant I could not sleep. I developed a heart flutter and all sorts of problems that may have come on a few years later but came on earlier because of the stress.

After a while you adjust yourself mentally. I can do nothing except provide good nursing, so I've resigned myself. So have my children. She's gradually losing more and more of her faculties. There must have been more minor bleeds. Now she has cognition but she can't speak. But that's life. I was thinking to myself when I fell off the bicycle recently - had I knocked my head against the floor, I would be in a similar condition. We can't choose how we go. It's a difficult way of going but life is like that. So I've adjusted and accepted the inevitable. The doctors say even though you expect it, when it happens it's still a blow. I can only wait and see, and I've mentally sort of prepared myself.

It also reminded me of my own mortality and how quickly it can change in the flicker of a second if there's an internal bleed. That's life. I cannot choose how I'm going to go. I just carry on my life and that's that. If you start thinking about it, you will go downhill. Every day is a bonus, so let's carry on.

Is she conscious of what's happening around her? Can she recognise...?

I'm the one she recognises the most. When she hears my voice, she knows it's me. This is after 62 years together, which makes it more difficult for her and for me. Because there's full cognition - when I tell her, look, our daughter is in hospital with some problem, she's suddenly alert and listens. But the hours of cognition are becoming less and less because she's sleeping more and more. Energy levels go down...

I have to psychologically make adjustments. I've adjusted. But there will be another adjustment when she finally isn't here. Then this big house will be empty. Fortunately I'm able to concentrate on my other work, so life goes on. I travel and do all the things I have been doing. If I don't carry on with life, I will degrade. If you think you're going to sit down and read novels and play golf, you're foolish - you'll just go downhill. Every day is a challenge. Every day has problems to be solved.

Who do you turn to if you're feeling a bit down or you want somebody sympathetic to talk to?

I would say my wife.

And now? Do you go to her bedside to talk to her?

I do that every night. I read to her, I tell her what I've been doing for the day and the news of the day from The Straits Times, IHT and Wall Street Journal. Then I read her the poems that she likes and has flagged over the years.

She can't speak. How does she convey how she feels to you?

She blinks. Yes, one blink; no, two blinks.

What were some of the best times you had as a couple?

Well, my greatest joy was when my wife won the Queen's scholarship and I managed to get her into Cambridge immediately after that, because that meant she didn't have to wait for me for three or four years in Singapore. Had she not got a scholarship, I'd have gone back (to Singapore) in three years and finished the bar exams as soon as possible. Before I left, she had said, after three years we will become strangers to each other. I said, no, we won't. In the end, she took a risk and so did I, because we might have drifted apart. She got the scholarship, I got her a place and we got married that December (in 1947) quietly in Stratford-upon-Avon. Then we came back and remarried again in 1950. I don't think that's an offence (laughs), to marry a woman twice, the same woman!

What would you say is the secret to a long and happy marriage?

First of all, we accommodated each other. There was nothing we fundamentally disagreed on. She knew my quirks and I knew her eccentricities. She's a voracious reader. She read Horace, the Iliad and Gibbon's Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire. She read books on fishes, on food - the books on her bookshelf at home. I'm not interested in those subjects but she is. I'm interested in what I am doing. In the case of my memoirs, she would read my drafts and would simplify the English to make it easier to read and understand. Because as a conveyancing lawyer she's particular about the meanings of words, they should be clear, they should be simple. As a result, she influenced my writing style. I used to write convoluted sentences, the way I speak. She says, no, no, speaking is all right because you can repeat yourself and you can pick up where you left off. But in writing, you write a sentence and you move on. So you make it clear and crisp. If you look at my writings before my memoirs, my written style has more loops. She cured me of loops. She said, you want this to be read by O-level students. Don't use multisyllable words when you can use a single-syllable word, which is what (British style guide writer) Ernest Gowers advised. It was good advice. One of my doctors told me, I read your book and I found it very simple. So my wife succeeded. We adjust to each other.

How else did she influence you?

In almost everything. I left the domestic chores to her. She runs the household and the maids. Now I have a problem. I got a man who fixes things up and looks after the maids. It's not satisfactory because he doesn't know what the maids do in the bedroom and it's not cleaned as before. It's a problem. I have to get my sister to teach the cook because my daughter is not interested in these things. She's interested in her work and writing the next article and her BlackBerry. Her cooking is to take raw salmon and put it in the microwave. My wife is a good cook and she gave instructions to the maid on how to cook.

She'll know when something is not right. She's got highly sensitive taste buds and sensitive nostrils. She can tell straight away, oh, you've put too much lengkuas (galangal) and so on, reduce it. I would not have known what was wrong. I just knew it didn't taste good. She would know. I miss all that. Life goes on. Now my sister helps to train the cook. She's a good cook. Life means adjustment. We make do after a while.

FT: Your kids are your paramount investment

Your kids are your paramount investment

By Luke Johnson

Published: September 28 2010 22:37 | Last updated: September 28 2010 22:37

Are high-flyers any good at the “ultimate start-up” – bringing up children? Or is the conflict between relentless ambition and sound parenting simply too great?

I ask this because, with three children under six years of age and various business involvements, balancing the competing demands on my time is a challenge. I get the priorities wrong sometimes – but suspect I’m not alone. Most entrepreneurs I know work 60- or even 80-hour weeks. When they get home they are often exhausted from the struggle of building a company and trying to fulfil their dreams. Being the perfect mum or dad in such circumstances is not easy.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Unions are an obstacle to progress - Sep-21

The buzz of business creation never dies - Sep-14

My name is Business, and I’m a recovering debtaholic - Sep-07

Time to work on the jobs of the future - Aug-24

The perfect partner to provide a new spark - Aug-17

Beware the cost of hidden extras - Aug-10

Research shows that today’s parents spend far more hours a week with their children than in the past. Fathers in the 1950s and 1960s were not expected to devote most of their leisure time to their offspring – it was assumed they would be playing golf or watching football or down the pub rather than ferrying their children to birthday parties or taking them to swimming lessons.

I once heard an astute PR man observe that the two aspects of life that suffer if you fully embrace the role of modern-day father – assuming you take your career very seriously – are friendships and hobbies. The old generation of bosses played it differently: they would spend their holidays and weekends sailing, shooting, skiing, playing squash and tennis, and at dinner and house parties. No doubt the loss of such non-familial relationships and pursuits makes one a less rounded individual. But it is probably better to endure those sacrifices than act as some sort of Edwardian figure – distant, unemotional and barely aware of the detail of your children’s lives, packing them off to a boarding school, effectively subcontracting their whole upbringing.

Of course, by their nature entrepreneurs are highly competitive, and that urge does not diminish outside the office. So certain dynastic magnates appear to display their prowess by having extra-large families – populating the world with their superior genes and proving they can afford to bring up so many boys and girls. And, inevitably, high achievers want their own little darlings to be top of the class, superb at sports and welcomed into the right universities.

All that takes not just money but personal effort and participation, too. Being head of a family is not like managing a business – you cannot delegate bedtime stories, school parent evenings and all the other small delights of parenthood to staff. And compensating for absence by spoiling children with material possessions is a very poor substitute for actually being there. The most impressive offspring of the high achievers are those who enjoy close bonds with their parents, and understand the importance of self-reliance and the obligations of wealth. As Elizabeth Gaskell said: “A wise parent humours the desire for independent action, so as to become the friend and adviser when his absolute rule shall cease.”

The always-on nature of commerce today does not help the cause. Clients and deals will not wait – if you want to get ahead you are expected to be available to answer e-mails and mobile calls at all hours. I am sure many children of the rich and powerful hate devices such as BlackBerrys, for they have induced a form of attention deficit disorder among many fathers, who are endlessly distracted from the school play or carol concert.

As children mature, so entrepreneurs can relate to them about their work. You can never tell which children will reject their parents’ vocation, and which will embrace a similar career path. Many of the most enterprising individuals I’ve met learnt about business from close relatives as they were growing up – such an education is vastly better than any MBA. But often the burden of inheritance can undermine lives. I think every entrepreneur would agree with William Thackeray when he said: “I would rather make my name than inherit it.”

Being a great parent is harder than building a business. And in truth the result endures far more than any financial construct. Ultimately, companies and money come and go, but children really are the future.

[email protected]

The writer runs Risk Capital Partners, a private equity firm, and is chairman of the Royal Society of Arts

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

ST: Perfect 10.10.10 wedding

Lifestyle

Home > Lifestyle > Hot > Story

Sep 19, 2010

Perfect 10.10.10 wedding

Oct 10, 2010 is a special date as wedding bells ring for more than 700 couples here, even though it costs more to say I do on that day

By Jocelyn Lee and Huang Huifen

A date to remember

Here are some figures on couples who chose to get married in Singapore on popular or auspicious dates:

Feb 14, 1995: 1,082

Aug 8, 2008: 443

Sept 9, 2009: 357

Oct 10, 2010: 774 (as of Sept 15)

Average number of marriages on a normal day: 70

JAY LIM, 30, doctor, and ELIZABETH FOCK, 26, cardiac technologist (main picture)

-- PHOTOS: AZIZ HUSSIN, AIDAH RAUF, COURTESY OF CHAI YEE WEI

 

It is going to be a perfect 10 wedding for hundreds of couples in Singapore next month - on Oct 10, 2010.

Statistics from the Registry Of Marriages show that 774 couples have signed up already on that 10/10/10 date, compared to 70 on a normal day.

In recent years, two dates rang wedding bells because of their unique numbers: 357 couples got married on Sept 9, 2009, while 443 tied the knot on Aug 8, 2008.

However, on the calendar of desirable dates, the biggie was Feb 14, 1995. A record-breaking 1,082 couples got hitched that day, as it was Valentine's Day and it coincided with the 15th day of the Lunar New Year.

Oct 10 is not just a Big Day for couples, but it is also a money-spinner for businesses associated with weddings. Hotels are charging 5 to 20 per cent more for bookings made on this date.

Hotels, photographers, florists, stylists and wedding solemnisers are experiencing a surge in demand for that red-hot date.

Soon-to-be-newlyweds who have put a circle around Oct 10 say it is a beautiful date as it has a nice 'ring' to it.

Product executive Kamal Yacob, who is the founding member and bass player of home-grown indie band Stoned Revivals, is among those saying 'I do' that day.

The 37-year-old says: 'We chose this date because of the number 10.10.10. It is unique and easy to remember. It also falls on a Sunday, which is perfect for us.'

He and wife-to-be June Khoo, also 37, are celebrating their wedding on a yacht at Marina at Keppel Bay, so no wonder they want everything to be ship-shape.

Singapore film-maker Chai Yee Wei, 34, who also chose the same date, agrees: 'The Chinese believe that the number 10 represents completion, perfection and beauty when used in the Chinese idiom, 'shi quan shi mei'. I love that idiom and I want my marriage to be perfect.' The idiom means perfect and flawless.

The same goes for St James Holdings marketing executive Gordon Foo, 28, and his 27-year-old fiancee Doreen Chua.

Mr Foo, whose father is St James' chief executive officer Dennis Foo, says: 'It is a nice date. Plus we had the assurance from the feng shui master that it is a good date to get married. Couples who get married on this date are said to conceive within the next three years.'

With a surge in weddings on Oct 10, hotels are also looking forward to that date.

The 15 hotels LifeStyle spoke to are having a busy time. Some have turned away as many as 50 to 100 couples who want to book a venue for their wedding reception that day.

Many of the hotels are imposing a 5 to 20 per cent surcharge on that date.

Pan Pacific Singapore Hotel is hosting three weddings that day, with the earliest booking made more than a year ago. It had to reject more than 100 couples who wanted to hold their reception there then.

The couples who managed to book will pay 20 per cent more, with each table costing $1,388++.

Over at Goodwood Park Hotel, all of its five wedding venues have been booked for Oct 10 for both lunch and dinner, with a $50 surcharge for a table. It had to turn away 50 couples.

Mandarin Orchard is hosting three weddings that day, with a 5 per cent surcharge.

Referring to the Oct 10 date, general manager John Sartain says: 'Ten is an even, round number which is auspicious to the Chinese as it symbolises a pair and union. There's also a Chinese idiom associated to 10 which loosely translates to perfection. Moreover, 10/10/10 is indeed an auspicious date in the Chinese almanac.'

Master Hui Jie, director of Hui Master International Geomancy, says the date is a day of harmony, which means couples will have a harmonious marriage.

Though such obsession with numbers is more prevalent among the Chinese, he adds that the 10.10.10 date is popular with other races as well.

Master Hui Jie, who has picked the date for about 20 couples, says: 'I have an Indian couple who are getting married on that day too.'

Another geomancer, Ms Adelina Pang of Adelina Pang Fengshui Consultancy, says that this number is popular among the non-Chinese because of its novelty and it is an easy date to remember.

Businesses are happy too. Mr Kelvin Koh, founder of Lightedpixels Photography, postponed his sabbatical plans next month after getting 20 inquiries for wedding-photo packages.

Like all wedding photographers, he can take on only one client as a wedding shoot takes up the whole day.

For that day, his terms are that couples must sign up for the $5,000 full-day package instead of the usual option between that and a $4,000 image-only package.

Mr Chris Woon of moretopurple Photography turned away nine couples for that day too, but he will not be charging more for his services.

He says: 'Couples pay for the quality of the work. It is not as if I will shoot particularly well on that day.'

Business at florists is blooming, too.

Florist Michelle Poh, business development manager of The Red Petals Florist, has hired five more staff and rented an extra vehicle to cope with the double workload that day.

She says: 'I will be shuttling among 10 locations and surviving on just a bun the whole day. But I love the adrenaline rush.'

And Sing See Soon Floral and Landscape is increasing its manpower from 40 to 70 that day to cope with an expected 40 weddings.

Local Justice of Peace Tan Poi Eng is solemnising four weddings that day and had to turn away three other couples.

The 63-year-old, who has been a wedding solemniser for the past 11 years, says: 'I restricted it to four weddings on Oct 10 as I did not want to tire myself out. On normal weekends, I may get one wedding or none at all.'

But all the hype does not guarantee a perfect 10 marriage, says consultant Gerard Lee, 30, who has chosen to hold his wedding on Oct 9 instead.

He says: 'All the hotels will be so busy and the quality may be compromised. It may also be a chance for organisers to increase prices.

'A wedding is a once-in-a-lifetime event and I have an important crowd to please. Anyway, the number 9 symbolises everlasting in Chinese, so it's good too.'

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JAY LIM, 30, doctor, and ELIZABETH FOCK, 26, cardiac technologist (main picture)

Wedding reception: Singapore Orchid Country Club

Lim: 'The lame reason is that you can sing that date to the tune of the wedding march.

But seriously, we just want an easy date to remember. We were supposed to get married

on Sept 9, 2009, but we were both working in Australia then.

We had problems booking a venue and make-up artists.

Food-wise, I am concerned about the quality on that day as all the other banquet halls

at the Orchid Country Club where my lunch reception is being held are booked.

I am keeping my fingers crossed.'

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KAMAL YACOB, 37, bass player of local band Stoned Revivals, and JUNE KHOO, 37, account manager

Wedding reception: On a yacht

Kamal: 'We are holding our wedding reception on a yacht with 20 to 30 close friends and family on board. It costs 5 to 10 per cent more to rent the yacht on this date but we did not want to change our decision because of the surcharge. Oct 10 is a nice number and it's on a Sunday, making everything fall into place.'

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CHAI YEE WEI, 34, Singapore film-maker, and DIANE CHAN, 37, marketing manager

Wedding reception: Hotel

Chai: 'We looked around at a couple of hotels but many were already booked on Oct 10. Ultimately, we settled for one that cost over $1,200 a table, which is 20 to 30 per cent more than the usual price. But the date is very good and easy to remember, so it is pretty worth it.'

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FRANCIS CHOO, 34, graphic designer, and ELIN SOO, 24, sales executive

Wedding reception: Goodwood Park Hotel

Soo: 'We started looking for a wedding venue 18 months ago. We wanted a dinner reception but the ballroom at the hotel we wanted was already booked. We were quite disappointed initially but we decided to do a lunch reception by the poolside instead. I like how everything fits in perfectly, because my name Elin also sounds the same as 1-0 (one-zero) when pronounced in Mandarin.'