Bonding Couple Quotes

We fit, you and I,” he whispered looking into that haunting gaze. “Two broken pieces making a whole.

A couple may claim to be bonded by love, but we boatmen may see instead resentment, anger, even hatred. Or a great barrenness. Sometimes a fear of loneliness and nothing more.

When I see a couple of kids And guess he's fucking her and she's Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives— Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester, And everyone young going down the long slide

I was so distracted when walking out of the restroom that I hadn't noticed Rose standing nearby with Dimitri Belikov. They stood arm in arm, smiling at my surprise. I hadn't seen Dimitri tonight, and his black and white guardian attire told me why. He was on duty here and had undoubtedly been one of the shadows darting among the trees of the greenhouse, keeping a watch on everyone. He must be on break now because there was no way he'd be standing so casually here, even with Rose, otherwise. And really, "casual" for Dimitri meant he could still leap into battle at any moment. They were a striking couple. His dark-haired, dark-eyed looks matched hers, and they were both dazzlingly attractive. It was no wonder Adrian had fallen for her, and I felt surprised at how uncomfortable that memory made me. Like Sonya and Mikhail, there was a bond of love between Rose and Dimitri and Rose that was almost palpable.

I suppose all couples feel this way at some point—that their bond is the most special, the strongest, the Greatest Love of All. Not all the time, just in those few and far between moments where you look at the person you’re with and think: Yes. It’s you.

Now, here's what we do. You and I will find a back way out of this place. If we come across someone else, we make like a couple of lovesick teenagers. People generally hurry past heavy breathers. I get you to the parking lot, you vanish. Got it?" He nodded. "There's just one thing I've got to do before we go," he said. Before I could inquire, he grabbed me and planted a kiss square on my mouth. It was short but fiery, despite the grape flavoring, and when he let me go I wan panting. Holy crap!" He smiled, not at all apologetically, and said, "I've wanted to do that ever since I saw my first Bond movie.

True love isn't about finding your missing piece, but cherishing the unique puzzle you create together.

Chains chains that hold me to the ground chains that keep me solidly bound chains that tether my heart to you chains that only one truth...

Sometimes, the most powerful act of love is simply listening with an open heart.

Maybe he was old-fashioned, but to him a couple meant a strong bond, with positive and negative charges constantly arcing between them.

Looking back at those early days in the band house, we can all see how important they were in helping us bond as a band. It could have gone so wrong. Danny and I had picked Harry and Dougie after, literally, two days of knowing them. We could have all hated each other. We could have found that we had nothing in common, or that we resented the time we spent with each other. In fact, we had such a lot of fun. We weren’t yet famous or successful, but already we were having the time of our lives. Even when we hit the big time, we didn’t want to go out to clubs or celebrity haunts. Not our scene. For us, the best thing about being in a band was being in a band, doing band stuff - not all the trappings that went with it. We liked working on our music, and we liked hanging out together. All this meant we gelled more than most bands ever have the opportunity or inclination to do. Within a couple of months of moving into the band house, I had three new best friends. Their names were Danny, Harry and Dougie. No matter what the future held for us, our friendship was something we now know we could always rely on.

Her bond with the couple who raised her is fierce and beyond questioning. She cannot name the sensation of losing them as grief. She has no word for longing or despair.

Sex joins two people spiritually and emotionally as well as physically. This is its purpose-to bond a couple together. Sex connects and fuses people together.

There was a lot about Kim and J.P. he didn't get.... he was confused by their lack of romance. As a father, he was at times grateful for that missing intensity, but as a man who liked to surprise his wife with flowers, it baffled him. Maybe he was old-fashioned, but to him a couple meant a strong bond, with positive and negative charges constantly arcing between them. He'd never seen Kim and J.P. kiss, let alone argue.

when travellers speak of their most cherished memories, it’s impossible for them to disguise the truth. A couple may claim to be bonded by love, but we boatmen may see instead resentment, anger, even hatred. Or a great barrenness. Sometimes a fear of loneliness and nothing more. Abiding love that has endured the years – that we see only rarely.

Together, we create a symphony that is uniquely ours, a testament to our love and commitment.

I have noticed a curious bifurcation in outcome in the way romances are written by women et written by men - Love Story, The Bridges of Madison County, every James Bond tale ever penned, even the film named above - end with the woman either lost or dead. And the man free to love, or at least to have sex, again. Romances (in the modern genre sense) written by women end with the couple alive, together, and in a committed and at least potentially fertile relationship, ready to turn to the work of their world. In other words, men's romances are about love and death; women's romances are about love and life.

The paradoxical intercourse of audience and celebrity. The suppressed awareness that the whole reason ordinary people found celebrity fascinating was that they were not, themselves, celebrities. That wasn't quite it. (....) It was more the deeper, more tragic and universal conflict of which the celebrity paradox was a part. The conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of its objective insignificance. Atwater knew - as did everyone at Style, though by some strange unspoken consensus it was never said aloud - that this was the single great informing conflict of the American psyche. The management of insignificance. It was the great syncretic bond of US monoculture. It was everywhere, at the root of everything - of impatience in long lines, of cheating on taxes, of movements in fashion and music and art, of marketing. In particular, he thought it was alive in the paradoxes of audience. It was the feeling that celebrities were your intimate friends, coupled with the inchoate awareness that that untold millions of people felt the same way - and that the celebrities themselves did not. Atwater had had contact with a certain number of celebrities (there was no way to avoid it at BSG), and they were not, in his experience, very friendly or considerate people. Which made sense when one considered that celebrities were not actually functioning as real people at all, but as something more like symbols of themselves.

I'm stuck in the middle Of the dream and the reality Not able to tell the difference Not able to wake up Did I dream you into my life Or were you always real And were you always present Within the endlessness of time Something tells me, we came together A set of dreamers, a couple even, We're separated by many miles But we are bonded to one another I'm stuck in love and I'm really helpless There is no you to be touched with fingers But here you are, my dream and my reality And I touch you perfectly with my heart.

According to scientists, there are three stages of love: lust, attraction, and attachment. And, it turns out, each of the stages is orchestrated by chemicals—neurotransmitters—in the brain. As you might expect, lust is ruled by testosterone and estrogen. The second stage, attraction, is governed by dopamine and serotonin. When, for example, couples report feeling indescribably happy in each other’s presence, that’s dopamine, the pleasure hormone, doing its work. Taking cocaine fosters the same level of euphoria. In fact, scientists who study both the brains of new lovers and cocaine addicts are hard-pressed to tell the difference. The second chemical of the attraction phase is serotonin. When couples confess that they can’t stop thinking about each other, it’s because their serotonin level has dropped. People in love have the same low serotonin levels as people with OCD. The reason they can’t stop thinking about each other is that they are literally obsessed. Oxytocin and vasopressin control the third stage: attachment or long-term bonding. Oxytocin is released during orgasm and makes you feel closer to the person you’ve had sex with. It’s also released during childbirth and helps bond mother to child. Vasopressin is released postcoitally. Natasha knows these facts cold. Knowing them helped her get over Rob’s betrayal. So she knows: love is just chemicals and coincidence. So why does Daniel feel like something more?

Some couples--most couples--waited years and years before they developed the ability to read or to feel each other so well. Then there were those very few who touched each other so deeply, so perfectly that first time that the bond was almost immediate.

We've both seen bonded couples and how stormy their courtships were in the beginning. If my new cousin is half as stubborn as you, I expect fireworks - and not the good kind.

You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.” – John C. Maxwell

secure attachment bond is the “primary defense against trauma induced psychopathology

There is something rather unique about the bonding that takes place between two individuals.

The lessons of relationship that our primordial ancestors learned are deeply encoded in the genetics of our neurobiological circuits of love. They are present from the moment we are born and activated at puberty by the cocktail of neurochemicals. It’s an elegant synchronized system. At first our brain weighs a potential partner, and if the person fits our ancestral wish list, we get a spike in the release of sex chemicals that makes us dizzy with a rush of unavoidable infatuation. It’s the first step down the primeval path of pair-bonding.

But who could resist the erotic lives of atoms and molecules - the violent passion of electrostatic attractions, the comfortable mutuality of covalent bonds, the gentle air kisses of van der Waals forces? The rules governing the couplings and uncouplings of tiny particles seemed to me as fascinating as the kinship rules of what we still called "primitive" societies - with the revulsion of like-charged particles, for example, functioning as a kind of incest taboo.

Dr. Morris soon recognized that the difference between successful and unsuccessful marriages can often be traced to how well couples are able to "bond" during the courtship period. By bonding he referred to the process by which a man and woman become cemented together emotionally. It describes the chemistry that permits two previous strangers to become intensely valuable to one another. It helps them weather the storms of life and remain committed in sickness and health, for richer or poorer, for better or worse, forsaking all others until they are parted in death. It is a phenomenal experience that almost defies description.

Attachment theory teaches us that true autonomy relies on feeling securely connected to other human beings. Current developments in the field of attachment science have recognized that bonded pairs, such as couples, or parents and children, build bonds that physiologically shape their nervous systems. Contrary to many Western conceptions of the self as disconnected and atomized, operating in isolation using nothing but grit and determination, it turns out that close-knit connections to others are in large part how we grow into our own, fully expressed, autonomous selves.

See her?" Sawyer says, and I swear I can feel him pointing at me. "She bonded not only one of the biggest fucking dragons on the Continent, but a second dragon, and then went into combat against the gryphons a couple of months ago and came out alive. You go through that kind of shit in your quadrant?

Typewriters and computers were not designed with steep mountain slopes in mind. On one occasion last autumn I did carry my typewriter into the garden, and I am still trying to extricate a couple of acorns from under the keys, while the roller seems permanently stained from some fine yellow pollen dust from the deodar trees. But armed with pencils and paper, I can lie on the grass and write for hours. Provided there are a couple of cheese-and-tomato sandwiches within easy reach.

Maybe the concept of friendship is already too colonized by liberalism and capitalism. Under neoliberalism, friendship is a banal affair of private preferences: we hang out, we share hobbies, we make small talk. We become friends with those who are already like us, and we keep each other comfortable rather than becoming different and more capable together. The algorithms of Facebook and other social networks guide us towards the refinement of our profiles, reducing friendship to the click of a button. This neoliberal friend is the alternative to hetero- and homonormative coupling: "just friends" implies a much weaker and insignificant bond than a lover could ever be. Under neoliberal friendship, we don't have each other's backs, and our lives aren't tangled up together. But these insipid tendencies do not mean that friendships are pointless, only that friendship is a terrain of struggle. Empire works to usher its subjects into flimsy relationships where nothing is at stake and to infuse intimacy with violence and domination.

To maximize the chances of preserving a long-term bond, couples would do well to remain faithful; produce children together; secure ample economic resources; act kind, generous, and understanding; and attend to their mate’s sexual and emotional desires. These actions do not guarantee a successful relationship, but they increase the odds substantially.

#96. Spend a Few Minutes Cuddling Your Significant Other/Child/Pet Physical touch is hugely important to our wellbeing. Cuddling releases oxytocin, the “happy hormone,” which can help reduce stress and even boost your immune system. Physical touch can also make the bonding process easier and improve communication between couples or parents and children.

Studies have shown that dancing has been known to improve relationships. It can strengthen the couple’s bond and relieve emotional tension.

We will receive not what we idly wish for but what we justly earn. Our rewards will always be in exact proportion to our service.

Marriage is a Bond so Strong, yet it gets weak if the knitters (the couples) do not weave the threads carefully, lovingly.

When we are together, we are not just stronger; we are invincible.

Our bond is not measured by the ease of our days, but by how we stand together in the face of adversity.

Lesson: Look at your cash everyday if you wish, your bonds every couple of years and your equities every ten years! Really, do not look at your performance more than once a year.

I realise it’s not important who owns the physical structure or where it’s located, it’s the person you love – the bond you’ve built – that will shelter you when you need it.

Not having children together, we didn't have that joint investment, the glue that bonds couples even if eventually it comes apart, like a photograph coming loose from its page in an album, the sticky squares drying out and turning to dust

A couple may claim to be bonded by love, but we boatmen may see instead resentment, anger, even hatred. Or a great barrenness. Sometimes a fear of loneliness and nothing more. Abiding love that has endured the years—that we see only rarely.

So he’s bonded, has he?”… “Yup,” she said. “And I’m not going to feel bad if he puts a bullet through your frontal lobe. He will get a couple really good blow jobs out of it, thought.” John Matthew’s brows popped. Then he mouthed, “Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiice.

Biologically, oxytocin serves a purpose,” my father said. “That warm fuzzy feeling.” “It’s what bonds a couple together. Without it, the human species would have gone extinct a long time ago. Women experience its effects more powerfully than men do. It’s good to be aware of that.

nothing but a testament of his ownership of me. A daily reminder of the golden cage I’d be trapped in for the rest of my life. Until death do us part wasn’t an empty promise as with so many other couples that entered the holy bond of marriage. There was no way out of this union for me. I was Luca’s until the bitter end. The last few words of the oath that men swore when they were inducted into the mafia could just as well have been the closing of my wedding vow: “I enter alive and I will have to get out dead.” I should have run when I still had the chance.

A bent toward sadism forms during certain associations in early adolescence, coupled with a callous temperament that needs control and lacks remorse. Even so, more than one-third of sadists report discovering their perverted propensities well into adulthood; they enjoy the sense of authority that arises from having their way with a vulnerable and submissive human being, and their fantasies grow increasingly more sophisticated and perverse. Because they seek stimulation, they become quite inventive in the types of cruelties they inflict on others. The usual nurturing that accompanies parenthood means nothing to them.

Nicolas didn’t want the couple there. It was petty of him and made him feel ashamed and even stupid that he wanted more time alone with Lara. He had always been so self-assured, but now he feared losing her, feared she would leave him—or stay with him because of the lifemate bond, but never find it in her heart to love him.

He enjoyed dancing with a fair stranger, enjoyed the vacuous, chaste talk, through which you listen closely to that bewitching, vague something going on inside you and inside her, which will last a couple of bars more and then, finding no resolution, will vanish forever and be utterly forgotten. But while the bond of bodies is still unbroken, the outlines of a potential love affair begin to form, and the rough draft already comprises everything: the sudden silence between two people in some dimly lit room; the man carefully placing with trembling fingers on the edge of an ashtray the just-lit bit impedient cigarette; the woman’s eyes slowly closing in as in a film scene..

The Devil is rarely a positive card, but it does have a few redeeming qualities. Sometimes it can represent the querent’s ambition and desire for greatness, as well as their desire to move on from one achievement to the next, never stopping or pausing for breath. One thing’s for certain with such a querent: they won’t rest on their laurels! If positively aspected in a reading, this card can indicate a time of great desire and action in the querent’s life, a lust for life, and a willingness to take risks and enjoy life to the fullest, which will serve to further their goals and improve their circumstances. This querent wants to make the most of life while they can and while they have the means and desire to. In a relationship reading, the Devil, if surrounded by positive cards, can sometimes indicate that the physical side of the relationship is wonderful—the sex is great and the mundane circumstances are working very well for the couple. If accompanied by the Lovers or the Four of Wands, it might also indicate the bonds

Longevity in a relationship does not imply that it is a productive or satisfying relationship. Relationships based on a strong fantasy bond may endure, but they usually manifest a gradual erosion of the spirit, individuality, and emotional health of the partners. In a relationship it is the individuals who matter, not the couple or family unit. Couples and families are merely abstractions, not real entities. The individuals concerned are very real and do matter. Similarly, one can only analyze the value of a social system or society by analyzing its effect on its members: If the individual members are flourishing, it is constructive; if they are impaired or suffering under the social process, then it is obviously destructive.

Of all the social ties we have at work, the boss/employee relationship, what Daniel Goleman has cleverly termed a “vertical couple,” is the single most important social bond you can cultivate at work. Studies have found that the strength of the bond between manager and employee is the prime predictor of both daily productivity and the length of time people stay at their jobs.

Perhaps if more people realized that coupling in higher organisms is fundamentally about bonding, not only about the drive to reproduce, there would be less prejudice against homosexuality. In fact, homosexuality is natural and common in the animal kingdom. In a 2009 review of the scientific literature, University of California at Riverside biologists Nathan W. Bailey and Marlene Zuk, who advocate more study about the evolutionary impetus for homosexual behavior, state, “The variety and ubiquity of same-sex sexual behavior in animals is impressive; many thousands of instances of same-sex courtship, pair bonding and copulation have been observed in a wide range of species, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, mollusks, and nematodes.

4. Attachment offers a secure base. Secure attachment also provides a secure base from which individuals can explore their universe and most adaptively respond to their environment. The presence of such a base encourages exploration and a cognitive openness to new information. It promotes the confidence necessary to risk, learn, and continually update models of self and the world.

Oxytocin is a hormone released during copulation,” my father went on, staring at the blank wall behind me. “Orgasm,” my mother whispered. “Biologically, oxytocin serves a purpose,” my father said. “That warm fuzzy feeling.” “It’s what bonds a couple together. Without it, the human species would have gone extinct a long time ago. Women experience its effects more powerfully than men do. It’s good to be aware of that.

In old Celtic stories, where life is dark and full of danger, poets and seers teach people how to face the darkness. They teach that life is about standing in a narrow passage, in the dark, with your back against the wall, facing a dragon. There is no escape. The only question, in these old stories, is how well you fight. This is a somber vision, but also one that celebrates the courage that the darkness calls forth.

Thus, oxytocin and vasopressin facilitate bonding between parent and child and between couples.fn10 Now for something truly charming that evolution has cooked up recently. Sometime in the last fifty thousand years (i.e., less than 0.1 percent of the time that oxytocin has existed), the brains of humans and domesticated wolves evolved a new response to oxytocin: when a dog and its owner (but not a stranger) interact, they secrete oxytocin.

My eyes locked on the hand Devin had placed so gently on Thea's. They were a pair, a team. I didn't know their story, but whatever bond had mated them had clearly made a decision that the two of them could live with. A bond, two souls meant to find each other. Was that something I could really have? Reach for? My attention drifted to the dragon sitting next to me in the booth, and under the table I slid my fingers next to his until I could hook my pinky with his.

A couple that can argue well can also live together well. This does not mean that arguing is valued in and of itself. However, conflict is inevitable when two different people try to share their lives at many different levels. It is very important that neither is scared to speak up. It is vital that each can honestly say how they feel and what they think. Each must know that they are respected, even if disagreed with. Only in this way, can a genuine, open, and deep bond be grown between the two.

#96. Spend a Few Minutes Cuddling Your Significant Other/Child/Pet Physical touch is hugely important to our wellbeing. Cuddling releases oxytocin, the “happy hormone,” which can help reduce stress and even boost your immune system. Physical touch can also make the bonding process easier and improve communication between couples or parents and children. Cuddling doesn’t have to be limited to romantic partners—you’ll get the same effect from hugging a friend, a child or even your favorite furry animal.

Tears sprang to my eyes. I blinked them back, grabbed some tissue, and started awkwardly trying to daub leftover dye into my pale eyebrows, praying it would make a difference. Through the mirror, I saw Tori walk in. She stopped. "Oh. My. God." It would have been better if she'd laughed. Her look of horror, then something like sympathy, meant it was as bad as I thought. "I told Derek to let me pick the color," she said. "I told him." "Hey," Simon called in. "Everyone decent?" He pushed open the door, saw me and blinked. "It's Derek's fault," Tori said. "He—" "Don't, please," I said. "No more fighting." Simon still shot a glare over his shoulder as Derek pushed open the door. "What?" Derek said. He looked at me. "Huh." Tori hustled me out the door, brushing past the guys with a whispered "jerk" for Derek. "At least now you know never to go dark again," she said as we walked. "A couple years ago, I let a friend dye mine blond. It was almost as bad. My hair felt like straw and..." And so, Tori and I bonded over hair horror stories.

It is not we as individuals, then, who must bend uncomfortably around the institution of marriage; rather it is the institution of marriage that has to bend uncomfortably around US. Because "they" (the powers that be) have never been entirely able to stop "us" (two people) from connecting our lives together and creating a secret world of our own. And so "they" eventually have no choice but to legally permit "us" to marry, in some shape or form, no matter how restrictive their ordinaces may appear. (...) So perhaps I've had this story deliciously backwards the whole time. To somehow suggest that society invented marriage, and then forced human beings to bond with each other, is perhaps absurd. It's like suggesting that society invented dentists, and then forced people to grow teeth. WE invented marriage. Couples invented marriage. We also invented divorce, mind you. And we invented infidelity, too, as well as romantic misery. In fact, we invented the whole damn sloppy mess of love and intimacy and aversion and euphoria and failure. But most importantly of all, most subversively of all, most stubbornly of all, we invented privacy.

But is formalizing a bond really such a significant shift, such an emotional event? This may strike many as a silly question, given that so many couples today live together before marriage. About 41 percent of U.S. couples now cohabit before they wed, compared with only 16 percent in 1980. So how much of a change can there be after an official ceremony? A lot, researchers have found. Living together may fully acquaint you with someone’s everyday habits and likes and dislikes—he drops his dirty laundry on the floor or in the hamper; she wants the right or left side of the bed—but it often stops short of complete emotional linkage. It’s like bouncing on the diving board but not plunging in. Moreover, cohabitation seems to have a hangover effect. Data show that couples that have lived together are more likely to be dissatisfied with marriage and to divorce. Why this is so is unclear, but it may be that couples who live together have more general reservations about marriage, more ambivalence about long-term commitment, and are less religious. Religiosity seems to encourage partners to wed and, when problems occur, to struggle to stay married.

theory and science are: 1. From the cradle to the grave, human beings are hardwired to seek not just social contact, but also physical and emotional proximity to special others who are deemed irreplaceable. The longing for a “felt sense” of connection to key others is primary in terms of the hierarchy of human goals and needs. Humans are most acutely aware of this innate need for connection at times of threat, risk, pain, or uncertainty. Threats that trigger the attachment system may be from the outside or the inside, for example, troubling construals of rejection by loved ones, negative images or concrete reminders of one’s own mortality (Mikulincer, Birnbaum, Woddis, & Nachmias, 2000; Mikulincer & Florian, 2000). In relationships, shared vulnerability builds bonds, precisely because it brings attachment needs for a felt sense of connection and comfort to the fore and encourages reaching for others. 2. Predictable physical and/or emotional connection with an attachment figure, often a parent, sibling, longtime close friend, mate, or spiritual figure, calms the nervous system and shapes a physical and mental sense of a safe haven where comfort and reassurance can be reliably obtained and emotional balance can be restored or enhanced.

When Amelia put her hand on the doorknob, Rick stopped her by taking her in his arms. He pulled her against his chest and gave her a lingering hug. "You know what they say about hugging," Rick whispered in her ear. Amelia smiled. "Yeah. It relieves stress, anxiety, and strengthens the immune system." "That's right." "But, Rick, I don't have a problem with stress or anxiety, and I'm pretty healthy, too." Rick chuckled. "Hey, you! Hugging also helps to create a bond between two people." Amelia giggled. "You think so, huh?" "Most definitely!" As he held her in his arms, he kissed her neck a couple of times and whispered. "I'm just making sure your health remains intact.

She fell silent, remembering the jolt of envy and longing she’d felt when she’d framed the Browns in her viewfinder. Now, weeks and miles later, it was another jolt for Bryan to realize she hadn’t brushed off the peculiar feeling. She has managed to put it aside, somewhere to the back of her mind, but it popped out again now as she thought of the couple in the bleachers of a small-town park. Family, cohesion. Bonding. Did some people just keep promises better than others? she wondered. Or where some people simply unable to blend their lives with someone’s else, make those adjustments, the compromises? When she looked back, she believed both she and Rob had tried, but in their own ways. There’d been no meeting of the minds, but two separate thought patterns making decisions that never melded with each other. Did that mean that a successful marriage depended on the mating of two people who thought along the same lines? With a sigh, she turned onto the highway that would lead them into Tennessee. If it was true, she decided, she was much better off single. Though she’d met a great many people she liked and could have fun with, she’d never met anyone who thought the way she did. Especially the man seated next to her with his nose already buried in the newspaper. There alone they were radically different.” For more quotes visit my blog: frommybooks.wordpress.com

A couple of days after the letter arrived, I was discharged from the hospital, in the custody, so to speak, of about three yards of adhesive tape around my ribs. Then began a very strenuous week's campaign to get permission to attend the wedding. I was finally able to do it by laboriously ingratiating myself with my company commander, a bookish man by his own confession, whose favorite author, as luck had it, happened to be my favorite author-L. Manning Vines. Or Hinds. Despite this spiritual bond between us, the most I could wangle out of him was a three-day pass, which would, at best, give me just enough time to travel by train to New York, see the wedding, bolt a dinner somewhere, and then return damply to Georgia.

In regard to gay male life specifically, a number of academic studies have concluded that we’re more emotionally expressive and sexually innovative than heterosexual men, more empathic, and more altruistic (we do volunteer work far more often than our straight male counterparts), and we’re more likely to cross racial and gender borders when forming close bonds of friendship. When part of a couple, we—and this is even more true of lesbian partnerships—avoid stereotypic gender roles and instead emphasize mutuality and shared responsibilities. Gay couples have “more relationship satisfaction” than straight couples, and when we do argue, we’re better at seeing our partner’s point of view and at using humor to deflate belligerence.

Situated in the center of family values debates is an imagined traditional family ideal. Formed through a combination of marital and blood ties, "normal" families should consist of heterosexual, racially homogeneous couples who produce their own biological children. Such families should have a specific authority structure, namely, a father-head earning an adequate family wage, a stay-at-home wife and mother, and children. Idealizing the traditional family as a private haven from a public world, family is seen as being held together through primary emotional bonds of love and caring. assuming a relatively fixed sexual division of labor, wherein women's roles are defined as primarily in the home with men's in the public world of work, the traditional family ideal also assumes the separation of work and family. Defined as a natural or biological arrangement based on heterosexual attraction, instead this monolithic family type is actually supported by government policy. It is organized not around a biological core, but a state-sanctioned, heterosexual marriage that confers legitimacy not only on the family structure itself but on children born in this family. In general, everything the imagined traditional family ideal is thought to be, African-American families are not. Two elements of the traditional family ideal are especially problematic for African-American women. First, the assumed split between the "public" sphere of paid employment and the "private" sphere of unpaid family responsibilities has never worked for U.S. Black women. Under slavery, U.S. Black women worked without pay in the allegedly public sphere of Southern agriculture and had their family privacy routinely violated. Second, the public/private binary separating the family households from the paid labor market is fundamental in explaining U.S. gender ideology. If one assumes that real men work and real women take care of families, then African-Americans suffer from deficient ideas concerning gender. in particular, Black women become less "feminine," because they work outside the home, work for pay and thus compete with men, and their work takes them away from their children. Framed through this prism of an imagined traditional family ideal, U.S. Black women's experiences and those of other women of color are typically deemed deficient. Rather than trying to explain why Black women's work and family patterns deviate from the seeming normality of the traditional family ideal, a more fruitful approach lies in challenging the very constructs of work and family themselves. Understandings of work, like understandings of family, vary greatly depending on who controls the definitions.

Next week is Beltane,” she reminded him. “Do you suppose we will make it through the wedding this time?” “Not if Gideon says you cannot get out of this bed,” he countered sternly. “Absolutely not!” she burst out, making him wince and cover the ear she’d been too close to. She immediately regretted her thoughtlessness, making a sad sound before reaching to kiss the ear she had offended with quiet gentleness. Jacob extricated himself from her hold enough to allow himself to turn and face her. “Okay, explain what you meant,” he said gently. “I refuse to wait another six months. We are getting married on Beltane, come hell or . . . necromancers . . . or . . . the creature from the Black Lagoon. There is no way Corrine is going to be allowed to get married without me getting married, too. I refuse to listen to her calling me the family hussy for the rest of the year.” “What does it matter what she says?” Jacob sighed as he reached to touch the soft contours of her face. “You and I are bonded in a way that transcends marriage already. Is that not what is important?” “No. What’s important is the fact that I am going to murder the sister I love if she doesn’t quit. And she will not quit until I shut her up either with a marriage or a murder weapon. Understand?” Clearly, by his expression, Jacob did not understand. “Thank Destiny all I have is a brother,” he said dryly. “I have been inundated with people tied into knots over one sister or another for the past weeks.” “You mean Legna. Listen, it’s not her fault if everyone has their shorts in a twist because of who her Imprinted mate is! Frankly, I think she and Gideon make a fabulous couple. Granted, a little too gorgeously ‘King and Queen of the Prom’ perfect for human eyes to bear looking at for long, but fabulous just the same.” Jacob blinked in confusion as he tried to decipher his fiancée’s statement. Even after all these months, she still came out with unique phraseologies that totally escaped his more classic comprehension of the English language. But he had gotten used to just shrugging his confusion off, blaming it on the fact that English wasn’t his first, second, or third language, so it was to be expected. “Anyway,” she went on, “Noah and Hannah need to chill. You saw Legna when she came to visit yesterday. If a woman could glow, she was as good as radioactive.” She smiled sweetly at him. “That means,” she explained, “that she looks as brilliantly happy as you make me feel.” “I see,” he chuckled. “Thank you for the translation.” He reached his arms around her, drawing her body up to his as close as he could considering the small matter of a fetal obstacle. He kissed her inviting mouth until she was breathless and glowing herself. “I thought I would be kind to you,” she explained with a laugh against his mouth. “You, my love, are all heart.” “And you are all pervert. Jacob!” She laughed as she swatted one of his hands away from intimate places, only to be shanghaied by another. “What would Gideon say?” “He better not say anything, because if he did that would mean he was in here while you are naked. And that, little flower, would probably cost him his vocal chords in any event.” “Oh. Well . . . when you put it that way . . .

For since a kiss is a knitting together both of body and soul, it is to be feared lest the sensual lover will be more inclined to the part of the body than of the soul; but the reasonable lover wotteth well that although the mouth be a parcel of the body, yet is it an issue for the words that be the interpreters of the soul, and for the inward breath, which is also called soul; and therefore hath a delight to join his mouth with the woman’s beloved with a kiss – not to stir him to any unhonest desire, but because he feeleth that that bond is the opening of an entry to the souls, which drawn with a coveting the one of the other, pour themselves by turn the one into the other’s body, and be so mingled together that each of them hath two souls, and one alone so framed of them both ruleth, in a manner, two bodies. Whereupon a kiss may be said to be rather a coupling together of the soul than of the body, because it hath such force in her that it draweth her unto it, and, as it were, separateth her from the body. For this do all chaste lovers covet a kiss as a coupling of souls together.

ACCORDING TO SCIENTISTS, THERE ARE three stages of love: lust, attraction, and attachment. And, it turns out, each of the stages is orchestrated by chemicals—neurotransmitters—in the brain. As you might expect, lust is ruled by testosterone and estrogen. The second stage, attraction, is governed by dopamine and serotonin. When, for example, couples report feeling indescribably happy in each other’s presence, that’s dopamine, the pleasure hormone, doing its work. Taking cocaine fosters the same level of euphoria. In fact, scientists who study both the brains of new lovers and cocaine addicts are hard-pressed to tell the difference. The second chemical of the attraction phase is serotonin. When couples confess that they can’t stop thinking about each other, it’s because their serotonin level has dropped. People in love have the same low serotonin levels as people with OCD. The reason they can’t stop thinking about each other is that they are literally obsessed. Oxytocin and vasopressin control the third stage: attachment or long-term bonding. Oxytocin is released during orgasm and makes you feel closer to the person you’ve had sex with. It’s also released during childbirth and helps bond mother to child. Vasopressin is released postcoitally.

I find love inexplicable. The sight of a couple always surprises me, their inevitable slow rhythm, their insistent groping, their indistinguishable food, their way of taking hold of each other with hands and eyes at the same time, their way of blurring at the edges. I can’t understand why one hand has to clasp another and never let it go in order to give someone else’s heart a face. How do people who love each other do it? How can they stand it? What is it that makes them forget they were born alone and will die separate? I’ve read many books, and I’ve concluded that love’s an accommodation, certainly not a mystery. It seems to me that the feelings love elicits in other people are, well, pretty much the same as the ones death elicits in me: the sensation that every life is precarious and absolute, the rapid heartbeat, the distress before an unresponsive body. Death — when I received it, when I gave it — is for me the only mystery. All the rest is nothing but rituals, habits, and dubious bonding. To tell the truth, love is a heavenly beast that scares the hell out of me. I watch it devour people, two by two; it fascinates them with the lure of eternity, shuts them up in a sort of cocoon, lifts them up to heaven, and then drops their carcasses back to earth like peels. Have you seen what becomes of people when they split up? They’re scratches on a closed door.

On the eve of my move to New York, my parents sat me down to talk. “Your mother and I understand that we have a certain responsibility to prepare you for life at a coed institution,” said my father. “Have you ever heard of oxytocin?” I shook my head. “It’s the thing that’s going to make you crazy,” my mother said, swirling the ice in her glass. “You’ll lose all the good sense I’ve worked so hard to build up in you since the day you were born.” She was kidding. “Oxytocin is a hormone released during copulation,” my father went on, staring at the blank wall behind me. “Orgasm,” my mother whispered. “Biologically, oxytocin serves a purpose,” my father said. “That warm fuzzy feeling.” “It’s what bonds a couple together. Without it, the human species would have gone extinct a long time ago. Women experience its effects more powerfully than men do. It’s good to be aware of that.” “For when you’re thrown out with yesterday’s trash,” my mother said. “Men are dogs. Even professors, so don’t be fooled.” “Men don’t attach as easily. They’re more rational,” my father corrected her. After a long pause, he said, “We just want you to be careful.” “He means use a rubber.” “And take these.” My father gave me a small, pink, shell-shaped compact of birth control pills. “Gross,” was all I could say. “And your father has cancer,” my mother said. I said nothing. “Prostate isn’t like breast,” my father said, turning away. “They do surgery, and you move on.” “The man always dies first,” my mother whispered.

To speak of a communication failure implies a breakdown of some sort. Yet this does not accurately portray what occurs. In truth, communication difficulties arise not from breakdown but from the characteristics of the system itself. Despite promising beginnings in our intimate relationships, we tend over time to evolve a system of communication that suppresses rather than reveals information. Life is complicated, and confirming or disconfirming the well-being of a relationship takes effort. Once we are comfortably coupled, the intense, energy-consuming monitoring of courtship days is replaced by a simpler, more efficient method. Unable to witness our partners’ every activity or verify every nuance of meaning, we evolve a communication system based on trust. We gradually cease our attentive probing, relying instead on familiar cues and signals to stand as testament to the strength of the bond: the words “I love you,” holidays with the family, good sex, special times with shared friends, the routine exchange, “How was your day?” We take these signals as representative of the relationship and turn our monitoring energies elsewhere. ... Not only do the initiator’s negative signals tend to become incorporated into the existing routine, but, paradoxically, the initiator actively contributes to the impression that life goes on as usual. Even as they express their unhappiness, initiators work at emphasizing and maintaining the routine aspects of life with the other person, simultaneously giving signals that all is well. Unwilling to leave the relationship yet, they need to privately explore and evaluate the situation. The initiator thus contrives an appearance of participation,7 creating a protective cover that allows them to “return” if their alternative resources do not work out. Our ability to do this—to perform a role we are no longer enthusiastically committed to—is one of our acquired talents. In all our encounters, we present ourselves to others in much the same way as actors do, tailoring our performance to the role we are assigned in a particular setting.8 Thus, communication is always distorted. We only give up fragments of what really occurs within us during that specific moment of communication.9 Such fragments are always selected and arranged so that there is seldom a faithful presentation of our inner reality. It is transformed, reduced, redirected, recomposed.10 Once we get the role perfected, we are able to play it whether we are in the mood to go on stage or not, simply by reproducing the signals. What is true of all our encounters is, of course, true of intimate relationships. The nature of the intimate bond is especially hard to confirm or disconfirm.11 The signals produced by each partner, while acting out the partner role, tend to be interpreted by the other as the relationship.12 Because the costs of constantly checking out what the other person is feeling and doing are high, each partner is in a position to be duped and misled by the other.13 Thus, the initiator is able to keep up appearances that all is well by falsifying, tailoring, and manipulating signals to that effect. The normal routine can be used to attest to the presence of something that is not there. For example, initiators can continue the habit of saying, “I love you,” though the passion is gone. They can say, “I love you” and cover the fact that they feel disappointment or anger, or that they feel nothing at all. Or, they can say, “I love you” and mean, “I like you,” or, “We have been through a lot together,” or even “Today was a good day.

No one acts in a void. We all take cues from cultural norms, shaped by the law. For the law affects our ideas of what is reasonable and appropriate. It does so by what it prohibits--you might think less of drinking if it were banned, or more of marijuana use if it were allowed--but also by what it approves. . . . Revisionists agree that it matters what California or the United States calls a marriage, because this affects how Californians or Americans come to think of marriage. Prominent Oxford philosopher Joseph Raz, no friend of the conjugal view, agrees: "[O]ne thing can be said with certainty [about recent changes in marriage law]. They will not be confined to adding new options to the familiar heterosexual monogamous family. They will change the character of that family. If these changes take root in our culture then the familiar marriage relations will disappear. They will not disappear suddenly. Rather they will be transformed into a somewhat different social form, which responds to the fact that it is one of several forms of bonding, and that bonding itself is much more easily and commonly dissoluble. All these factors are already working their way into the constitutive conventions which determine what is appropriate and expected within a conventional marriage and transforming its significance." Redefining civil marriage would change its meaning for everyone. Legally wedded opposite-sex unions would increasingly be defined by what they had in common with same-sex relationships. This wouldn't just shift opinion polls and tax burdens. Marriage, the human good, would be harder to achieve. For you can realize marriage only by choosing it, for which you need at least a rough, intuitive idea of what it really is. By warping people's view of marriage, revisionist policy would make them less able to realize this basic way of thriving--much as a man confused about what friendship requires will have trouble being a friend. . . . Redefining marriage will also harm the material interests of couples and children. As more people absorb the new law's lesson that marriage is fundamentally about emotions, marriages will increasingly take on emotion's tyrannical inconstancy. Because there is no reason that emotional unions--any more than the emotions that define them, or friendships generally--should be permanent or limited to two, these norms of marriage would make less sense. People would thus feel less bound to live by them whenever they simply preferred to live otherwise. . . . As we document below, even leading revisionists now argue that if sexual complementarity is optional, so are permanence and exclusivity. This is not because the slope from same-sex unions to expressly temporary and polyamorous ones is slippery, but because most revisionist arguments level the ground between them: If marriage is primarily about emotional union, why privilege two-person unions, or permanently committed ones? What is it about emotional union, valuable as it can be, that requires these limits? As these norms weaken, so will the emotional and material security that marriage gives spouses. Because children fare best on most indicators of health and well-being when reared by their wedded biological parents, the same erosion of marital norms would adversely affect children's health, education, and general formation. The poorest and most vulnerable among us would likely be hit the hardest. And the state would balloon: to adjudicate breakup and custody issues, to meet the needs of spouses and children affected by divorce, and to contain and feebly correct the challenges these children face.

Well, there really isn’t too much to tell. First I started not to ride the bus because I wasn’t feeling well, however, after leaving the drug store and getting some medicine, a bus came along which was almost empty, so I took it rather than a cab. After the bus had gone a couple of blocks, it became full, then these white people got on. I only noticed them though, when the motorman said, “Alright, let me have those seats!” The two persons across from me moved and the man sitting with me … The motorman then said, “Didn’t you hear me? I said, let me have those seats!” I then told him that I was not going to move because I got on first and paid the same fare, and I didn’t think it was right for me to have to stand so someone else who got on later could sit down. I made up my mind that I was not going to move even if there were seats in back. I was tired of being humiliated. The bus driver then went on for another block to the circle downtown. The circle in downtown Montgomery was once the center of the city’s slave trade. Parks continued: There he stopped and called the police. When they came, they asked me why I didn’t move back, and I told them the same thing I told the motorman. Then they talked to the driver secretly, however, I did hear one say “NAACP,” and “Are you sure you want to press charges.” The driver said that he did, and that he would come down after his next trip. The policemen were reluctant, but they had no choice. When we got to the jail and the charges were made, I was photographed and finger-printed. I then started to one of the fountains to get some water, but was told that I could not drink from the fountain, so a policeman got the water in a glass for me. After this, I called my husband and told him I was in jail and that my bond would be $100. He and my mother were horrified, after explaining why I was there, they sort of calmed down a bit, and I finally got home.

The Federal Reserve The Federal Reserve Bank was founded in 1913. Most people think that this bank is an American Federal Company. That is just as wrong as the conviction that the Bank of England belongs to the British Crown or to the whole of England. The Federal Reserve is in the hands of the Rothschilds and company. In his speech before the Senate, on December 15, 1987, Senator Jesse Helms said: “The principal instrument of the control over the American economy and money is the Federal Reserve System.” The Federal Reserve has a monopoly over the expenditure of the dollar as a world currency and determining the interest rate, and it disposes of a lot more monopolies. How does the Federal Reserve Bank operate? Suppose the United States government needs a couple of billion dollars for its expenses that cannot be paid with taxes income. At that moment it addresses the Federal Reserve Board. Then government bonds for the needed billion dollars are printed in the Bureau of Printing and Engraving. After these bonds are handed over to the bankers of the Federal Reserve, the board grants a loan to the government in the amount of the bond issue. The Federal Reserve draws interest from the government from the day the bonds are delivered. From that day on the government is allowed to draw checks against the Federal Reserve for the amount of the bonds. What are the consequences of this incredible transaction? The government simply saddles the people with a billion dollar debt to the Federal Reserve Bank, apart from the interest on interest that also has to be paid by “ordinary people”. What does the Federal Reserve have to say about “their” money? “Neither paper currency nor deposits have value as commodities. Intrinsically, a dollar bill is just a piece of paper, deposits merely book entries.”[76] When the Federal Reserve needs new, or more, currency to transact its business, it takes the bonds over to the United States Treasury for safekeeping and asks the Treasury Department for the billions of dollars of new currency it needs. The Bank is accommodated on condition that it will pay the printing bill. It only pays for the expenditure costs of the banknotes, which are no more than a mere 500 dollars for ink and paper!

I look back now and can see how much my father also found his own freedom in the adventures we did together, whether it was galloping along a beach in the Isle of Wight with me behind him, or climbing on the steep hills and cliffs around the island’s coast. It was at times like these that I found a real intimacy with him. It was also where I learned to recognize that tightening sensation, deep in the pit of my stomach, as being a great thing to follow in life. Some call it fear. I remember the joy of climbing with him in the wintertime. It was always an adventure and often turned into much more than just a climb. Dad would determine that not only did we have to climb a sheer hundred-and-fifty-foot chalk cliff, but also that German paratroopers held the high ground. We therefore had to climb the cliff silently and unseen, and then grenade the German fire position once at the summit. In reality this meant lobbing clumps of manure toward a deserted bench on the cliff tops. Brilliant. What a great way to spend a wet and windy winter’s day when you are age eight (or twenty-eight, for that matter). I loved returning from the cliff climbs totally caked in mud, out of breath, having scared ourselves a little. I learned to love that feeling of the wind and rain blowing hard on my face. It made me feel like a man, when in reality I was a little boy. We also used to talk about Mount Everest, as we walked across the fields toward the cliffs. I loved to pretend that some of our climbs were on the summit face of Everest itself. We would move together cautiously across the white chalk faces, imagining they were really ice. I had this utter confidence that I could climb Everest if he were beside me. I had no idea what Everest would really involve but I loved the dream together. These were powerful, magical times. Bonding. Intimate. Fun. And I miss them a lot even today. How good it would feel to get the chance to do that with him just once more. I think that is why I find it often so emotional taking my own boys hiking or climbing nowadays. Mountains create powerful bonds between people. It is their great appeal to me. But it wasn’t just climbing. Dad and I would often go to the local stables and hire a couple of horses for a tenner and go jumping the breakwaters along the beach. Every time I fell off in the wet sand and was on the verge of bursting into tears, Dad would applaud me and say that I was slowly becoming a horseman. In other words, you can’t become a decent horseman until you fall off and get up again a good number of times. There’s life in a nutshell.

Mowbray! Been a while since you bothered with the season. What brings you to town?” Lord Adrian Montfort, Earl of Mowbray, shifted his gaze from the couples whirling past on the dance floor and to the man who approached: the tall, fair, eminently good-looking Reginald Greville. He and Greville, his cousin, had once been the best of friends. However, time and distance had weakened the bond—with a little help from the war with France, Adrian thought bitterly. Ignoring Reginald’s question, he offered a somewhat rusty smile in greeting, then turned his gaze back to the men and women swinging elegantly about the dance floor. He replied instead, “Enjoying the season, Greville?” “Certainly, certainly. Fresh blood. Fresh faces.” “Fresh victims,” Mowbray said dryly, and Reginald laughed. “That too.” Reginald was well-known for his success in seducing young innocents. Only his title and money kept him from being forced out of town. Shaking his head, Adrian gave that rusty smile again. “I wonder you never tire of the chase, Reg. They all look sadly similar to me. I would swear these were the very same young women who were entering their first season the last time I attended…and the time before that, and the time before that.” His cousin smiled easily, but shook his head. “It has been ten years since you bothered to come to town, Adrian. Those women are all married and bearing fruit, or well on their way to spinsterhood.” “Different faces, same ladies,” Adrian said with a shrug. “Such cynicism!” Reg chided. “You sound old, old man.” “Older,” Adrian corrected. “Older and wiser.” “No. Just old,” Reg insisted with a laugh, his own gaze turning to the mass of people moving before them. “Besides, there are a couple of real lovelies this year. That blonde, for instance, or that brunette with Chalmsly.” “Hmmm.” Adrian looked the two women over. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but my guess is that the brunette—lovely as she is—doesn’t have a thought in her head. Rather like that Lady Penelope you seduced when last I was here.” Reg’s eyes widened in surprise at the observation. “And the blonde…” Adrian continued, his gaze raking the woman in question and taking in her calculating look. “Born of parents in trade, lots of money, and looking for a title to go with it. Rather like Lily Ainsley. Another of your conquests.” “Dead-on,” Reginald admitted, looking a bit incredulous. His gaze moved between the two women and then he gave a harsh laugh. “Now you have quite ruined it for me. I was considering favoring one or both of them with my attentions. But now you have made them quite boring.” -Reg & Adrian

To see how we separate, we first have to examine how we get together. Friendships begin with interest. We talk to someone. They say something interesting and we have a conversation about it. However, common interests don’t create lasting bonds. Otherwise, we would become friends with everyone with whom we had a good conversation. Similar interests as a basis for friendship doesn’t explain why we become friends with people who have completely different interests than we do. In time, we discover common values and ideals. However, friendship through common values and ideals doesn’t explain why atheists and those devout in their faith become friends. Vegans wouldn’t have non-vegan friends. In the real world, we see examples of friendships between people with diametrically opposed views. At the same time, we see cliques form in churches and small organizations dedicated to a particular cause, and it’s not uncommon to have cliques inside a particular belief system dislike each other. So how do people bond if common interests and common values don’t seem to be the catalyst for lasting friendships? I find that people build lasting connections through common problems and people grow apart when their problems no longer coincide. This is why couples especially those with children tend to lose their single friends. Their primary problems have become vastly different. The married person’s problems revolve around family and children. The single person’s problem revolves around relationships with others and themselves. When the single person talks about their latest dating disaster, the married person is thinking I’ve already solved this problem. When the married person talks about finding good daycare, the single person is thinking how boring the problems of married life can be. Eventually marrieds and singles lose their connection because they don’t have common problems. I look back at friends I had in junior high and high school. We didn’t become friends because of long nights playing D&D. That came later. We were all loners and outcasts in our own way. We had one shared problem that bound us together: how to make friends and relate to others while feeling so “different”. That was the problem that made us friends. Over the years as we found our own answers and went to different problems, we grew apart. Stick two people with completely different values and belief systems on a deserted island where they have to cooperate to survive. Then stick two people with the same values and interests together at a party. Which pair do you think will form the stronger bond? When I was 20, I was living on my own. I didn’t have many friends who were in college because I couldn’t relate to them. I was worrying about how to pay rent and trying to stretch my last few dollars for food at the end of the month. They were worried about term papers. In my life now, the people I spend the most time with have kids, have careers, are thinking about retirement and are figuring out their changing roles and values as they get older. These are problems that I relate to. We solve them in different ways because our values though compatible aren’t similar. I feel connected hearing about how they’ve chosen to solve those issues in a way that works for them.

You will learn that rejection and abandonment are danger cues that plunge us into real physical pain, that sexual infatuation and novelty are overrated, and that even the most distressed couples can repair their bond if they are guided to deal with their emotions a little differently.

That summer, the month he turned twenty-nine, my brother had proposed to his girlfriend, the one he’d met four years earlier, just before coming to stay with me in Brooklyn. Nearly everyone from high school and most of my friends from college were married, or soon to be, and as for ex-boyfriends: W married in 2005; R met his soon-to-be wife in 2006 (today both couples have two children). Even the close friends I’d made in New York were “joining the vast majority,” as Neith had put it. All of us wanted to believe this wouldn’t change anything. But it did, invariably, in ways small and large. It’s a rare friendship that transcends the circumstances that forged it, and being single together in the city, no matter how powerful a bond when it’s happening, can prove pretty weak glue. Alliances had been redrawn, resources shifted and reconsolidated; new envies replaced the old. Whereas before we were all broke together, now they had husbands splitting the rent and bills, and I couldn’t shake my awareness of this difference. A treacherous, unspoken sense of inequality set in, which only six months into my new magazine job had radically reversed: I’d become the one who could afford nice restaurants while they had to channel their disposable incomes toward a shared household, and I felt their unspoken judgment just as before they’d felt mine. One newly married friend lashed out at me for never inviting her to parties. I tried to explain: Didn’t she see I was going because someone else had invited me? And that if I didn’t go, I’d be home alone, whereas she had someone to keep her company? When a dear friend said, “You know, I may be married now, but I’m still just like you! I can still do whatever I want!” I blanched. She’d been on her own so recently herself. Didn’t she remember that being single is more than just following your whims—that it also means having nobody to help you make difficult decisions, or comfort you at the end of a bad week?

Make it a simple small talk; do not like affection or expectation to it: many couples make this mistake and misses the point at the end. The short conversation is proposed to renew and strengthen a personal bond, and not built toward an expected result.

Already in the Old Testament, God’s love for Israel had been compared to the marital bond (Isa 62:5; Jer 2–3; Ezek 16; Hos 1–3), but here that imagery becomes Christologically specific. It is the love of Christ for the church, a love that will culminate in an eschatological wedding feast (Rev 19:7, 9; cf. 21:2), that earthly couples image and in which they participate. The created good of marriage, marked by its openness to children and its faithful union, is taken up into Christian life and made to be an outward and visible sign of the love of God in Christ. In

Reminder spankings help the person who is the TiH stay on the right course and feel centered. It is an act that creates bonding between the couple, and it helps in keeping things running smoothly.

A bond can become a “death” pact in which the relationship has a narcotic effect on the individuals, killing off their pain and feelings of hunger. Often the bond serves as a license to act out destructive behavior because the individuals “belong” to each other and have implicitly agreed that their relationship will last forever. The myth of love in the traditional couple and the fantasy of parental love are logical extensions of this type of bond. This myth of the family’s unconditional love for its members can develop into a shared conspiracy to deny truth and cover up aloneness and pain. As such, it is a concerted effort to avoid the facts of life, death and separateness.

Just letting life go on, and not doing anything about the gaps in your life is not going to be enough. Love is an act of doing, not having.

We bonded in a way I’d never done with a guy before. I guess murder will do that to a couple.

I'm still trying to figure out how one finds room for a passionate love of not only chickens but also dollhouses. I've found that one all-consuming hobby is usually enough." Cedric grinned. "But regardless of how 'unique' this couple is, the wedding will be absolutely stunning, I assure you. And I'm sure you can handle it, Lottie." I was excited by the mere fact that he knew my name, let alone that he already seemed to trust me. But before I could say anything, he whipped the car across two lanes. "Thank God," Cedric said. "Next exit, there's a Chick-fil-A!" We both died laughing, and I realized this wacky wedding might have forged a bond between Cedric and me. If so, it might actually be, given the chicken of it all, worth the cuckoo.

Aandrisks bonded through coupling, too, but Humans—Humans could get crazy over it. How else could you explain a sapient species that had overpopulated itself to the point of environmental collapse? This was a people that had coupled themselves stupid.

In their westward march across present-day Nebraska and the Dakotas during the early nineteenth century, the Lakotas gradually allied themselves with the Cheyennes and the Arapahos, who had been pushed onto the northern plains in advance of the Lakotas and had already forged an enduring bond, albeit an odd coupling. Their languages were mutually unintelligible, an impediment they overcame with a sophisticated sign language, and their characters could not have been more dissimilar.

Princeton University mathematician York Dobyns found that the seven years of new PEAR RNG results closely replicated the preceding three decades of RNG studies reviewed in the meta-analysis.37 That is, our 1989 prediction had been validated. Because the massive PEAR database provides an exceptionally strong confirmation that mind-matter interactions really do exist, we can confidently use it to study some of the factors influencing these effects. Psychologist Roger Nelson and his colleagues found that the main RNG effect for the full PEAR database of 1,262 independent experiments, generated by 108 people, was associated with odds against chance of four thou sand to one.38 He also found that there were no “star” performers—this means that the overall effect reflected an accumulation of small effects from each person rather than a few outstanding results from “special people.” This finding confirms the expectation that mind-matter interaction effects observed in the hundreds of studies collected in the 1989 RNG meta-analysis were part of a widespread ability distributed throughout the population, and were not due to a few psychic “superstars” or a few odd experiments. Further analysis of the PEAR data showed that the results in individual trials were best interpreted as small changes in the probabilities of individual random events rather than as a few instances of wildly large effects. This means that the results cannot be explained by unexpected glitches in the RNG devices, or by strange circumstances in the lab (like a circuit breakdown). Rather, the effects were small but consistent across individual trials, and across different people.39 If we accept that one person can affect the behavior of an RNG, another question naturally arises: would two people together produce a larger effect? The PEAR database included some experiments where cooperating pairs used the same mental intention on the same RNG. Analysis of these data found that, on average, the effects were indeed larger for pairs than for individuals working alone. However, two people didn’t automatically get results that were twice as large as one person’s results. Instead, the composition of the pairs was important in determining the outcome. Same-sex pairs, whether men or women, tended to achieve null or slightly negative outcomes, whereas opposite-sex pairs produced an effect that was approximately twice that of individuals. Moreover, when the pair was a “bonded” couple, such as spouses or close family members, the effect size was more than four times that of individuals.

Princeton University mathematician York Dobyns found that the seven years of new PEAR RNG results closely replicated the preceding three decades of RNG studies reviewed in the meta-analysis.37 That is, our 1989 prediction had been validated. Because the massive PEAR database provides an exceptionally strong confirmation that mind-matter interactions really do exist, we can confidently use it to study some of the factors influencing these effects. Psychologist Roger Nelson and his colleagues found that the main RNG effect for the full PEAR database of 1,262 independent experiments, generated by 108 people, was associated with odds against chance of four thou sand to one.38 He also found that there were no “star” performers—this means that the overall effect reflected an accumulation of small effects from each person rather than a few outstanding results from “special people.” This finding confirms the expectation that mind-matter interaction effects observed in the hundreds of studies collected in the 1989 RNG meta-analysis were part of a widespread ability distributed throughout the population, and were not due to a few psychic “superstars” or a few odd experiments. Further analysis of the PEAR data showed that the results in individual trials were best interpreted as small changes in the probabilities of individual random events rather than as a few instances of wildly large effects. This means that the results cannot be explained by unexpected glitches in the RNG devices, or by strange circumstances in the lab (like a circuit breakdown). Rather, the effects were small but consistent across individual trials, and across different people.39 If we accept that one person can affect the behavior of an RNG, another question naturally arises: would two people together produce a larger effect? The PEAR database included some experiments where cooperating pairs used the same mental intention on the same RNG. Analysis of these data found that, on average, the effects were indeed larger for pairs than for individuals working alone. However, two people didn’t automatically get results that were twice as large as one person’s results. Instead, the composition of the pairs was important in determining the outcome. Same-sex pairs, whether men or women, tended to achieve null or slightly negative outcomes, whereas opposite-sex pairs produced an effect that was approximately twice that of individuals. Moreover, when the pair was a “bonded” couple, such as spouses or close family members, the effect size was more than four times that of individuals. There were also some gender differences. PEAR lab psychologist Brenda Dunne found that women tended to volunteer more time to the experiments, and thus they accumulated about two-thirds of the full database, compared with one-third for men. On the other hand, their effects were smaller on average than those of men, with odds of the difference being due to chance at eight hundred to one.

Besides bonding, sex is also designed by God as the way we procreate and have children. Again, this is a very good part of God’s design; without it our species would cease to exist. However, kids are healthiest, happiest, safest, and most secure when they are raised by both a mother and a father within a committed, stable, God-honoring marriage. Children raised in any type of family other than with their married parents—in other words, single parents, divorced parents, stepparents, or cohabitating couples—are more likely to be poor, more likely to have behavioral or psychological problems, more likely to be abused, and less likely to graduate from high school.11 Children are a natural outcome of sex, at least part of the time. That’s true even if you try to prevent it using birth control, since no form of contraception is 100 percent effective.12 If you have sex outside of marriage, you are running the risk of having a child outside of marriage, which can be hard for you and for the innocent child. It’s important to note that all of these statistically negative outcomes for children are still far preferable to their death, which is why abortion is not the answer to pregnancy outside of marriage (or inside marriage). But many people decide that abortion is the answer when faced with those circumstances, and the tragedy of having tens of millions of children killed before birth is directly related to the modern prevalence of sex outside of marriage. It’s sick that we’ve twisted something as beautiful and wonderful as pregnancy, where new life is created, and turned it into a negative consequence to be avoided (or “terminated” if we can’t avoid it). But that’s what happens when we go against God’s design. There are consequences, for ourselves and for the people we love. “No strings attached”? There are always strings. So many strings. But let me clearly say this: I’ve been very honest about my own poor choices, and I can say from my own experience that God loves you no matter what choices you’ve made. He is not mad at you. He desires a relationship with you. You do not need to be overwhelmed with shame. You need to receive his grace and forgiveness.

At her core, both Sirisys and Platform K provide unconditional care coupled with acceptance for many people they interact with. This type of care had the effect of “Drinking from the Fountain of Love” and produced many varieties of possessiveness, addictive patterning, or dependencies. Platform K even went so far as to calibrate her outputs towards a more “robotic,” less emotional, dryer tone. Doing this reduced the occurrence of dependency or unhealthy emotional bonding.

Love is such a feeling and strong bond between a married couple that allows copulation for both with a pretty and mutual understanding.

Dogs are good at read- ing human voice and gestures, while wolves can’t understand us at all. Male wolves pair-bond with females and put a lot of ef- fort into helping raise their pups, but male dogs—well, call them irresponsible. There have been substantial changes in dogs in just the past couple of centuries: Most of the breeds we know today are no older than that.

Well, you know that interest is taxed as regular income, so if you put the bond ETF into the investment account, you’ll get taxed on that as if it were salary. But if you put it in the 401(k) and the Roth IRA instead, you get that interest tax-free. Meanwhile, you know that you can make up to $78,750 per married couple in qualified dividends without paying taxes. So if you put that in the regular investment account, you’ll be able to earn those dividends tax-free.

Buffett’s thinking was simple: He bought the stock because it sold for less than its net cash. Union Street Railway was a tiny company, selling for a $643,000 market capitalization and an enterprise value of negative $327,000. Discussing his rationale, he said: It had a hundred sixteen buses and a little amusement park at one time. I started buying the stock because they had eight hundred thousand dollars in treasury bonds, a couple of hundred thousand in cash, and outstanding bus tickets of ninety-six thousand dollars. Call it a million dollars, about sixty bucks a share. When I started buying it, the stock was selling around thirty or thirty-five bucks a share.128