Manic Monday?

Boss on your back already?

Have you lost the will to work and it’s not even lunchtime yet?

Tell us about it at My Very Worst Job. Here’s the intro to our new-ish site:

Workers of the world might just be united by one conviction: work is a four-letter word. Of course it is when you have bitchy bosses, vicious water cooler gossips and menial assignments that make you feel about as big as a paperclip. It doesn’t matter if you’re a no-wage intern, middle-level salary man or even the boss, everyone suffers from the working (wo)man’s blues some time. But don’t fret too much because there’s workers’ comp in the form of hilarity and sympathy at My Very Worst Job™.

Come visit and share!

We can’t live on love alone. Those tender feelings won’t fix your fiance’s finances, end your hottie’s cigarette habit (and your disapproval of it) or that nagging age gap between you two. In the early dawn of a relationship, passion might obscure these issues but in the long run, opposite (smokers-non-smokers, savvy v. scattered brained money attitudes, young babe and the older guy/gal matches) pairings do not work. That’s the argument put forth by ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It?’ a study conducted by the Australian National University. Researchers followed the progress of 2,500 married and cohabiting couples for a seven-year period to ascertain what keeps people together and what pulls them apart. It’s full of interesting observations and might explain the end of your last relationship more logically than ever. Money, children and bad habits feature heavily. And having done it all before makes no difference on a person’s ability to make a relationship work the next time around. The study found that “partners who are on their second or third marriage are 90 percent more likely to separate than spouses who are both in their first marriage.” What do you think? Does experience matter? Do opposites attract? Can you date a smoker/drinker if you don’t yourself indulge?

Bad boys, femme fatales and impossible relationships. We’d sworn that we’d quit all that masochistic mental fun and games a while back but if we’re being real about it, we’ll concede that there’s something inexplicably alluring about that charming, intellectual that never calls you back despite all your deep conversations (and other activities), or that stunning girl that turns up at your doorstep at her convenience (and in the wee hours of the morning) and that on-off relationship that’s punctuated with addictive drama.

Cristina Nehring’s new treatise, A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century has, well, vindicated our difficult love obsession. She argues that in the quest for picture-perfect relationships, crazy passion and all it inspires has been sacrificed.

“We inhabit a world in which every aspect of romance from meeting to mating has been streamlined, safety-checked and emptied of spiritual consequence … Romance in our day is a poor and shrunken thing.”

Nehring calls for throwing caution to the gusting wind  - and covers celebration of failure, feminism’s fault for the passion deficit and other sexy/buzz kill areas. We’re looking forward to reading the tome but even reviews have got us hot under the collar. When we read the first lines of the NYT book review – “For most of us love is largely a matter of shared mortgage payments, evenings curled up on the couch in front of a video, or maybe a night in a hotel for an anniversary” – we thought : really? Then we read and kinda agreed with Amanda Fortini’s central take in her Salon piece that our contemporary ideas of all-consuming ardor are perfectly in place:

“…most people long to experience love, especially love of the wildest, most complicated sort. And I would venture to guess that many have — romance born of mischief, with a co-worker, perhaps, or a professor or student; obsessive love characterized by vigilant waiting for calls and e-mails, or a humiliating inability to stop calling even after the relationship is broken. Most of us have not consciously or categorically banished passionate love from our lives, we just can’t seem to make it fit…One of the reasons…may be that we can’t seem to afford it economically or temporally.”

We also perused (and giggled a bit) Ross Douthat’s NYT Op-Ed, which reckons that mad love is well and thriving – except amongst the members of the chattering classes. Enough of other people’s thoughts, what are yours? Tell us below!

Summer is officially here and what is it about the heat that makes us want to date more? Perhaps it’s those warm nights or days at the beach wearing close to nothing that’s getting us all hot and bothered. Or maybe we’ve just seen Grease one too many times. From festivals, weddings and BBQ’s to boating, fireworks and outdoor screenings, it seems that the warmer months make us more social — and in turn more likely to look for love. To help get you in the mood, Glamour has compiled a list of romantic beach reads.  And The Hypnotic Love Coach Debra Berndt has a few tips on how to keep your summer romance alive so that it doesn’t expire come fall.

What was your best summer date, fling or love story?

The course of modern love does not run linear. The chronological norm of days gone by – flirting, dating, doing the naughty, true love – is often reversed in our hook-up happy times. Everything starts with the naughty part. There’s no first base to get to but rather, as the folks at the newly-launched Sex Really site note, many of us are “running the bases backwards.” Although cricket is the preferred stick and ball game over in the U.K., we think that the baseball metaphor aptly describes the courtship rituals on that side of the pond. Indeed, many happy relationships begin in this back-to-front manner but of course, for every one hook-up that results in happily-ever-after, there are countless others that don’t. One gal, Hephzibah Anderson, a sexy and cerebral scribe for The Guardian no less, decided to try something different or rather, nothing. After hitting 30, she took a vow of celibacy for 12 months. Her sexless days and nights (plus curiosities such her “chastity wardrobe”) are chronicled in her book, Chastened: No More Sex in the City. And although, in her article, Anderson does not report a cutesy happy ending in the days after her vow expired (no prince but one relationship, a couple of ‘I love yous’ and an unintended dry spell), her findings point to the longevity of a rather old-fashioned idea: good things come to those who wait.

Love does not know any boundaries but it does have some borders. We were reminded of them when we read this piece about the North-South of the River loving divide in London. Dating far, far outside your hood can indeed be a pain. In London, black cabs won’t go Sarf of the river Thames after a certain hour. As for getting home, well, just don’t get yourself laid in the outer post codes because you’ll be doing the commuter train ride of shame in the early a.m. unless you want to kiss away those hard-earned pounds on a minicab ride home. 

Similarly, in New York, there are several dating demarcation parallels including the 14th Street Mason-Dixon line for downtown-ers who won’t go up, the various bridges for Brooklyn snobs who refuse to take Manhattan and the Holland Tunnel for those who won’t consider courting New Jersey’s finest. Los Angeles’ troublesome traffic situation means that a union between a Westside gal and an Eastside boy is rather unlikely. Apparently, sitting in jams to see someone – no matter how beloved – is just not sexy. And we’ve heard of Angelenos, who think that getting together with someone who lives in the 818 (the San Fernando Valley area) constitutes a long-distance relationship.

The main pro of close quarters coupling is that you get to see each other without the travails of the Tube, expense of cabs and hassles of the road. The easy access can also be a con – especially if it does not work out (or if you have a Very Worst Date) and then you have to see him or her at your neighborhood spots. There’s also something to be said about broadening your horizons beyond the usual burg suspects. 

Still, it seems more or less, we all date and mate in close proximity to our habitats. Because there are many bridges and tunnels all over the world, we know that there are many similar divides. Tell us about the geographic dating cut-off points in your city or town. How far would you (or won’t you) go for love?

From relating the size of a guy’s bulge to their racial background to the supposed universal love of lingerie, Lemondrop brings us Ten Famous Sex Myths, Debunked, proving that while sex and love may have some commonalities for people, we probably shouldn’t stereotype since everyone has their own likes and dislikes. Even if you think you’ve seen (or heard) it all, it seems everyone could benefit from more communication on the topic. A tease from the intro: 

“I’m always amazed that even the most educated, intelligent men and women believe certain things about sex that are completely false,” says Barbara Keesling, PhD, professor of Psychology of Human Sexual Behavior at California State University, Fullerton, and author of The Good Girl’s Guide to Bad Girl Sex.

We will, however, welcome wholeheartedly the new study out of London claiming that smarter chicks have better sex lives.

Our current Great Recession is getting tougher every day. Could dating, em, rich be the way out? We went to Tatiana Boncompagni, a journalist and author who’s specialized in chronicling the ways of the rich and aspiring, for advice on following the money. While researching her second novel, Hedge Fund Wives, she took a lot of HFWs to lunch and asked them all sorts of prying questions, including how to successfully date (even in this economy!) a hedge funder/banker/financier for that Happily-Ever-Harry-Winston-after.

Here’s what Tatiana, who’s happily married, gleaned tips-wise: 

1. Pretend not to care about money, but look like you’ve got plenty of it. (No matter how bad things get, he still doesn’t want to date a girl with chipped nails, frizzy hair and overgrown eyebrows.)

2. Cook for him. (Broiling a steak is surprisingly easy, ladies.)

3. If you happen to make more money than him, don’t rub it in his face. (And don’t tell your friends, who will gladly do it for you.)

4. Try not to laugh when he starts crying at the ATM.

5. Knowing how to give a great blow job works in any economy.

And Tatiana had a few more words of wisdom to add to this list: 

“If you follow these simple rules you may just be able to survive the recession with your relationship intact. But might I suggest that any of you eager readers out there take a second or two to ask yourself: Is it really worth it? Consider the opportunity costs—i.e. the hotties you could be dating—and the costs (all the upkeep and ego stroking!) versus benefits (that diamond engagement ring is getting smaller by the day…) and come to your own conclusion.”

Your biggest concern used to be whether your potential boy/girlfriend would embrace the Star Wars, Woody Allen or whatever geeky, obscure or embarrassingly mainstream obsession you have as much as you. But times have a-changed and you might want to check if you and your date have tech compatibility . If, for example, you are a phone call kinda guy and she’s a text maniac, things might not be smooth sailing on the communication front (which we hear is the crucial ‘relate’ part of relationships that many neglect). There’s even research to back up these claims, courtesy of this Washington Post article.

The piece also sheds light on connection choices and age. Daters over 40 prefer the old school method of contact: the telephone. The twenty-somethings are fluent and IM/text/Facebook as their first call in the dating game. Those in their 30s are apparently stuck in between. So some are extremely comfortable say, drunk dialing, but not so good with the Facebook first date request approach. We imagine (and know) that all of you have a huge number of Very Worst Dates to share. We look forward to hearing them!