An 80-year Harvard study found that the biggest indicator of success, longevity, happiness, isn't wealth, it isn't status, it isn't how many abs you have, it is relationships. Not how popular you are, but how many close relationships you have in your life.
Most of us have ideas about what we're looking for in a romantic partner. But psychologist Paul Eastwick says these preferences are surprisingly poor guides for finding love.
I think that when I became a mother, I was led into this club that I didn't know existed before. And inside of this club, women are much more willing to become instantly intimate with one another because the act of raising a child is not something a person can do on their own.
Share a recipe with a neighbor. Tell them what it means to you, who passed it down and what memories it evokes. Chances are they'll start telling you a surprisingly similar story.
Compatibility is not something that you find. [...] A phrase gets repeated. A joke sticks. A ritual forms, and a private world takes shape. Two people across countless tiny interactions, building something that never existed before. That's compatibility. Not finding the right person. Building your private world together.
I realize sometimes I'm the elder and sometimes I'm the youngest person in the room and sometimes I'm right in the middle. And I realize we're all on this journey together and we're all doing the best we can. And I'm really okay with what I don't know. And I think I've only gotten this far because I've been able to admit what I don't know.
Imagine a teenage boy who never learned to cut short his monologues because his AI companion never got bored. Imagine an adult who never learned to apologize because her AI companion never needed an apology. Imagine a world where the answer to the question, "Am I the asshole?" is always a firm and resounding no.
We assume that other people who are happy are in a fundamentally different situation than we are — that they have things we don't have, or they don't have problems that we do. But the research suggests that happy people have essentially found ways to make peace with the same kinds of problems and shortcomings that unhappy people struggle with.
Explaining your why, as long as you're doing it authentically, can create grace and space to where we can disagree, but know we're coming from good places.
Most of us believe that good things should happen to good people and bad things should happen to bad people. When bad things happen to us, we expect others to rush to our side and help us cope. But psychologists have found that this is often not what happens. When bad things happen to good people, we often find that others don't come to help — and may in fact make things worse.
Relationship skills and relational intelligence, even in the workplace, has always been considered soft skills. And soft skills used to be seen as feminine skills. And feminine skills are often highly regarded in principle and disregarded in reality.
I never felt there was judgment coming from David. It was always just joy and pleasure. You know, in a strange way, I think the pressure was really sort of self-delivered by me.
I am so enamored of my mother that it prevents me from being a mother. Like my mother was so large and all-consuming that I was like I am not going to even like replicate this. It's like any sort of like carpet weaver putting like a little error in it so as not to like test the authority of like Allah.
I looked up at him in his eyes and I saw a man who was listening, listening to what I had to say. And Bill turned out to be a wonderful surrogate father who my father greatly admired and called him that.
Having him near always made me feel better. So that wasn't even part of it because I never felt there was judgment coming from David. It was always just joy and pleasure.
Awkward people have social skill deficits. They have a hard time knowing what's expected in a social situation and also have a hard time executing the right social skill. They have trouble communicating, which can be understanding what someone's trying to tell them, but also communicating what they intend to other people. And the third thing is obsessive interests. And I actually kind of love this. People who are awkward really love what they love, but sometimes to their detriment.
I never felt there was judgment coming from David, it was always just joy and pleasure. In a strange way I think the pressure was really sort of self-delivered by me and it's like I want to do a great job here and I want to get everything the way I imagine it to be.
Awkward people have social skill deficits. They have a hard time knowing what's expected in the social situation and also have a hard time executing the right social skill. They have trouble communicating, which can be understanding what someone's trying to tell them, but also communicating what they intend to other people. And the third thing is obsessive interests. And I actually kind of love this. People who are awkward really love what they love, but sometimes to their detriment.
The whole reason why I had become a novelist and wanted to tell stories was so that I could understand my family and honor everything that they had been through, and I kept putting off all these opportunities to sit down with my grandfather and hear his stories and interview him and record him and get all these details because I was just so embarrassed at where my Chinese was. I was too ashamed to speak up, and now I'll never get that chance.
having him near always made me feel better. So that wasn't even part of it, because I never felt there was judgment coming from David. It was always just joy and pleasure.
Awkward people, they actually think about the world and take in the world differently than people who aren't awkward. And it really falls into three characteristics. So awkward people have social skill deficits. They have a hard time knowing what's expected in a social situation and also have a hard time executing the right social skill.
I was thinking about how you can get the same piece of information and depending on who is giving it to you, you might respond really differently. I think about if I'm getting advice from a from somebody who doesn't maybe share my values or doesn't know me well or is in my family and feels like they can, you know, they therefore have a right to to tell me uh how to live versus um you know, somebody who I have chosen as a friend and who might be different from me, but who I have like really really deep respect for um that I might take in that information really differently.
I think it's really important not just in romance novels or in any novel, but almost especially in romance novels to I guess admit that love doesn't conquer everything.
A child with avoidant tendencies will pretend to not notice that their mother is gone. So they continue to play with the toys, but when they document things like heart rate or stress, the child is panicking internally. They're just choosing not to show it externally.
Too many Americans have lost close personal friends, have lost family members to politics where they don't talk to each other anymore. And that number is exploding. And it's incredibly unhealthy. It's bad for our country. It's bad for our souls.
Most people think that communication problems arise because we don't say what we mean. But research suggests the opposite is often true: we say exactly what we mean, but we fail to consider how our words will land on the other person. We're so focused on our own intentions that we forget the listener is constructing their own interpretation of what we say.
We assume that if we are thinking something, other people can see it too. The problem is that our thoughts and feelings are invisible to others. What is obvious to us is often completely hidden to everyone else.
We assume we know what someone is trying to tell us even before they've finished talking. But that assumption leads us to fill in the blanks with our own expectations rather than actually listening — and the result is that we often respond to the conversation we imagined rather than the one we actually had.
Most people think that arguments and misunderstandings happen because people disagree about facts or values. But Yeomans has found that often, the problem is simpler and more fixable: people don't feel heard. They feel dismissed, or they feel like the other person isn't really engaging with what they've said.
We often assume that the people we're talking to share our understanding of a conversation's purpose — but they frequently don't. One person thinks they're having a casual chat, while the other thinks they're negotiating. One person wants emotional support, while the other launches into problem-solving mode.
We assume that other people understand us better than they actually do, and other people assume that they understand us better than they actually do. This leads to a kind of mutual overconfidence in our ability to communicate — and it means that the gap between what we intend to say and what others hear is often much larger than we realize.
Roy loved just doing favors for influential people. And he told his good friend, the gossip columnist, Cindy Adams, that this young Donald Trump was going to go someplace and maybe even to the White House someday.
We assume that what's in our head is plain to see to everyone around us. But the thoughts and feelings we have are invisible to others. And when we forget this, and communicate as if our inner world is on full display, conversations go wrong.
We assume that the people we're talking to understand us, that they grasp what we mean. But research shows that we are often wrong about this. We think we're communicating clearly, but the other person is operating on a completely different set of assumptions.
Most people think of conversations as cooperative endeavors where two people are working together to exchange information. But Deborah Tannen has spent her career documenting how conversations are also performances — rituals laden with hidden rules about status, connection, and identity. When those hidden rules collide, we don't just miscommunicate; we wound each other without ever knowing why.
We often assume that the people we're talking with see the world the way we do — and when they say something that seems strange or hostile, we interpret it through that lens. But much of the time, the other person is operating with an entirely different set of assumptions, and neither party realizes they're not actually having the same conversation.
We often think that the source of conflict in our relationships is a difference of opinions or values. But much of the time, the problem is something more fundamental: we think we're communicating clearly, when we're actually not communicating at all.
Every single marriage has a prenup. It's either one that was written by the government and can be modified by the state legislature of the state in which you reside or it's written by you and the person you allegedly like more than the other 8 billion options in the world.
There is no substitute for a tough piece of feedback from someone who cares about us. And when we can make it safe enough for the people in our lives to tell us those hard things, it not only benefits us, it can spark transformation in our workplaces and in our families.
We expect that people will judge us harshly for saying something awkward, but actually, people often appreciate the effort. The discomfort we feel about saying the wrong thing is much greater than the discomfort the other person feels when we say nothing at all.
People who blow up their lives often aren't doing something irrational — they're responding to a deep psychological need that their current life isn't meeting. The problem is that blowing up your life is a very blunt instrument for addressing that need.
We often assume that people can read our minds — that our feelings, our appreciation, our love, are somehow transmitted through the ether without our having to say anything. But research consistently shows that we dramatically overestimate how much others know about what we're thinking and feeling.
I think people get divorced and their relationships fall apart the same way that I think Thomas Wolf said, uh, people go bankrupt very slowly and then all at once. So, I think it's a lot of little small pieces of disconnection that eventually just catastrophically lead to the failure.
We found that people dramatically underestimate how much others will appreciate their expressions of gratitude. They think the other person will feel awkward or that the note will seem, you know, a little bit over the top. But in study after study, we found that recipients felt much more positive about receiving these kinds of messages than senders anticipated.
1mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
