Re-Igniting the Romance with Date Night
Good news – doing new and exciting things together help keeps a relationship fresh and intense. AdventureMan and I have always wanted to take dance lessons together, but have never had the time. I can hardly wait! Snorkeling in a new and exotic site . . . an African safari . . . trying a new restaurant, a new cuisine . . . finding new places to explore . . . novelty helps keep a marriage fresh and engaging.
From The New York Times. You can click this blue type to read the entire article.
Long-married couples often schedule a weekly “date night” — a regular evening out with friends or at a favorite restaurant to strengthen their marital bond.
But brain and behavior researchers say many couples are going about date night all wrong. Simply spending quality time together is probably not enough to prevent a relationship from getting stale.
Using laboratory studies, real-world experiments and even brain-scan data, scientists can now offer long-married couples a simple prescription for rekindling the romantic love that brought them together in the first place. The solution? Reinventing date night.
Rather than visiting the same familiar haunts and dining with the same old friends, couples need to tailor their date nights around new and different activities that they both enjoy, says Arthur Aron, a professor of social psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The goal is to find ways to keep injecting novelty into the relationship. The activity can be as simple as trying a new restaurant or something a little more unusual or thrilling — like taking an art class or going to an amusement park.
The theory is based on brain science. New experiences activate the brain’s reward system, flooding it with dopamine and norepinephrine. These are the same brain circuits that are ignited in early romantic love, a time of exhilaration and obsessive thoughts about a new partner. (They are also the brain chemicals involved in drug addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder.)
Most studies of love and marriage show that the decline of romantic love over time is inevitable. The butterflies of early romance quickly flutter away and are replaced by familiar, predictable feelings of long-term attachment.
. . . . . .
Dr. Aron cautions that novelty alone is probably not enough to save a marriage in crisis. But for couples who have a reasonably good but slightly dull relationship, novelty may help reignite old sparks.
And recent brain-scan studies show that romantic love really can last years into a marriage. Last week, at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference in Albuquerque, researchers presented brain-scan data on several men and women who had been married for 10 or more years. Interviews and questionnaires suggested they were still intensely in love with their partners. Brain scans confirmed it, showing increased brain activity associated with romantic love when the subjects saw pictures of their spouses.
It’s not clear why some couples are able to maintain romantic intensity even after years together. But the scientists believe regular injections of novelty and excitement most likely play a role.
Through the Eyes of AdventureMan
I’ve had some really smart friends in my life, and sometimes, those who are really really smart get confused about normal everyday things.
We had a wonderful friend, Bill. His wife was a high school teacher, and when he saw the sign “Aim High – Air Force!” on Ramstein Air Force Base, he said “Look, sweetie, there’s the high school!”
Another time, on Mother’s Day, we were sitting in church with Bill and his wife and my husband said to Bill “I really like your new Land’s End jacket!” and Bill said “How did you know it was from Land’s End?” and my husband said “Because you still have the label on the cuff.” We were all still crying from laughing so hard when the priest glared at the four of us (troublemakers!) as he processed down the aisle.
AdventureMan is a lot like that. He thinks differently. Driving along the Gulf Road the other day, he said “You wouldn’t think there was enough demand for models here that they would have a special school.”
Then he said “what’s up with that?”
We both started laughing, because to us, it looks like something called an “entrenchment tool” or shovel, and we use them when camping to make a temporary toilet, so it’s not exactly something we would mount on the back of our truck, all gleaming and shiny. But we may be thinking differently, and there may be a really good reason this is done that we don’t know about, so if any of you know why it would be a good idea to mount a shiny shovel, please share!
The other night AdventureMan couldn’t get his at-home wireless connection to work, he’d been trying for several nights and couldn’t get a signal. I moved the stack of books and papers directly behind his laptop, between him and the router, and voila! instant wireless connection. He is a really really really smart man, but just has a little problem with the small things. 😉
(He always looks to see if I have mentioned him in the blog)
Brilliant Sunrise, 5 Apr 09
Goooooooooooood Morning, Kuwait! 🙂
It is going to be another gorgeous day in Kuwait. Don’t let this “heavy fog” deter you. When I got up, the sunrise was so bright, I couldn’t see the sun, it was refracted all over the sky. I was only able to get the shot by focusing on the reflection of the sun on the water.
It is going to be a fantastic week – sweet warm days and cooling off evenings, perfect for sitting outside and drinking coffee, visiting with friends – and a little later in the week, a chance of more rain:
AdventureMan and I saw Journey to Mecca yesterday, along with about 500 others living in Kuwait. The movie is still packing people in! The audience was about 3/4 full with children, and I thought “oh this is going to be great, crying children and people talking on their cell phones.” I was SO wrong. Although the movie theater was full, I did not hear a single phone, I did not hear a single crying child – the movie held us all spellbound. We loved the movie, and we loved seeing it in the IMAX theatre.
(There are special headsets for non-Arabic speakers, with the dialogue in English. We didn’t know; they just spotted us as probably-non-Arabic and handed us the headsets.)
Sometimes, I am just slow. My niece, Little Diamond, had recommended a book called Travels with a Tangerine: From Morocco to Turkey in the Footsteps of Islam’s Greatest Traveller, but it was not until yesterday that I got it – that Ibn Batuta was from Tangiers! Sometimes, I am just slow . . . sometimes I can grasp subtleties but the obvious escapes me totally.
You can buy this book from Amazon.com for a mere $10.17 plus shipping. Yes, I own stock in amazon.com.
You can also probably find it at the Kuwait Bookstore, that amazing store in the bottom of the Al Muthanna Mall, near the Sheraton Circle downtown.
56,660 Kuwait Car Accidents: 2008
This is a totally breathtaking statistic. Kuwait just isn’t that big. That is more than one thousand car accidents, every week, in Kuwait.
We had three accidents in front of my house this morning. One included a school bus. Thank God, there were no children on board.
I would love to see a statistical breakdown on age groups, nationality, whether speed was involved, and whether the person was using a mobilephone while driving when the accident occurred.
One of my readers reported she had been in a car accident shortly after her arrival in country. A car going too fast rear-ended them. In almost every country in the world, if someone hits you from behind, they are charged, immediately, with following too closely and inattentive driving. You are supposed to be driving carefully enough to anticipate the car in front of you slowing down. Here, after six months, and several trips to the police station, it was determined that her husband was at fault. Unbelievable.
She adds that thanks be to God, no harm came to the infant traveling in the front seat of the car that hit them, on his mother’s lap, or they would have been liable for that, too. Unbelievable.
56,660 car accidents in 2008 alone
Staff Writer Al Watan
KUWAIT: Head of the Traffic Safety Department Bader AlـMatar has warned that the number of annual traffic accidents is on the rise. An estimated 56,660 car accidents and 410 cases of accident related fatalities occurred in 2008. AlـMatar added that the United Nations reports that car accidents claim more than 1,300,000 fatalities around the world each year, most of whom are young men.
Jazeera Customer Service
“Hello! Hello! Do you speak English?”
“Yes, my dear, I do! How can I help you?”
“I am trying to book a flight to Larnaca!”
“What date?”
“I’m flexible. I am trying to book for April 16 to April 23, but when I try to book, they tell me that no flights are available for that day! I have tried every day in April and May! How can there be no flights?”
“One moment, my dear.” (sound of typing and clicks and humm of distant voices)
“The first flight will be in July!”
“Oh no! It shows that Larnaca is a destination NOW!”
“No, my dear, the first flight will be in July. July 4th!”
“No, no, I don’t want July, thank you. How about flights to Salalah? I get the same message!”
“Yes! Yes, my dear, we have flights to Salalah! I can book it for you now! What dates?”
“Do I have to connect through Bahrain?”
“No, no, flights direct from Kuwait.” (sounds of typing, clicking, voices humming . . .)
“How about those same dates – April 16 – April 23?”
“The first flight will be in June!”
(Me, laughing) “It’s a little HOT in Salalah in June! I was hoping for something in April!”
“No, no, my dear, the first flight will be in June!”
“Thank you!” (I hang up laughing. I may not like the news he gives me, but his undisturbable good humor gives me a huge grin.)
Geraldine Brooks: People of the Book
I love the way Geraldine Brooks writes. I got hooked when I read Nine Parts of Desire and then again when I read Year of Wonders. You can read my review on her award winning March here. So I could hardly wait for People of the Book to come out in paperback, so I could read it. (Those hard cover books hurt too much when they fall over if I fall asleep, and are too heavy and bulky to carry on airplanes.)
Here is what I like about Geraldine Brooks. Her books are not easy to read. They make you uncomfortable. They make you think. They give you another perspective, and that perspective challenges your assumptions.
The heroine, Hannah, is not very likable. She is cold, she makes poor decisions, and she has a very uneasy relationship with her mother. She is, on the other hand, a master of her craft, which is stabilizing and restoration of old books. She is the specialist called in by museums to help preserve masterful works, and to identify forces at work which can cause grave damage to these books.
While this is a work of fiction, it is based on an actual book and some of the history surrounding it. The Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish holy book, is a real book. Some of its history is known – including the fact that it was twice saved from destruction by Moslems, one a very brave librarian in Sarajevo who rescued and preserved it risking his own life, the fact that it was saved from destruction during the Italian inquisition by a Catholic priest. From tiny bits of physical evidence, Geraldine Brooks weaves an entire book creating a story how all the individuals and forces that might have been involved in the creation and preservation of this one special book.
People of the Book is a mystery – Hanna goes in and in the process of evaluating and analyzing the book, gathers tiny bits of “evidence” – a tiny grain of salt, a hair, wine stains. As she investigates, lab results come back, filling in missing pieces of how this book might have travelled from Spain of the convivencia (Medieval Spain) to modern day Sarajevo. Slowly, slowly, Brooks reveals to the readers the real (fictional!) people behind the tiny pieces of evidence.
The plot is interesting. What grabbed me from the beginning, however, is that this is a real book-lovers book, written by a woman who loves books. We learn about how books are created, how book conservators know, from looking at the origin of a sheet of paper, where a book was created and about what time period it was created. We learn about different treatments of paper, we learn about inks, we learn how pigments are created, and we learn about illustrations.
I was captivated by all the love of book-creation present in this book. Most of all, I love it that she dedicated this book to the librarians of the world, those unsung heros who devote their lives to the preservation of information. It was definitely worth a read – and, as an exception to most of my rules, it will probably be worth a re-read.
A friend recommended a video of Geraldine Brooks discussing this book at a book-talk at Northeastern University. It is a little long – you will need about 38 minutes of your time if you want to listen to this amazing woman:
Female Police Given Ranks Equal to Men
The Police Academy attracted 16 women with university degrees – HOOOO-AHHH! I imagine these women are going to shake things up a little – in a good way – around police headquarters. Mabruk, mabruk, Kuwait.
Women officers given rank equally to men
Staff Writer – from Al Watan
KUWAIT: An Amiri decree was issued requiring female police officers to be put on equal footing with their male counterparts in terms of rank. Accordingly, Minister of Interior Sheikh Jaber AlـKhaled AlـSabah issued an executive order to rank women police officers according to the same requirements as given to male officers.
The first batch of women police now includes 16 Lieutenants, all of which have university degrees, eight Warrant Officers, all holding technical diplomas, and three Sergeants who have secondary school certificates.
Last updated on Friday 27/3/2009
First Kuwaiti Policewomen Graduate
Wooo HOOO on you, Kuwaiti policewomen! It is always hard to be in the vanguard, you take the criticisms, you take the disbelieving stares, and you handle questions, even from your own families. It’s always tough to be out front – to be a leader.
First group of policewomen graduate
From today’s Al Watan
KUWAIT: His Highness the Amir and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces Sheikh Sabah AlـAhmad AlـSabah has attended on Wednesday the graduation ceremony of the 35th batch of military cadets, the 20th batch of specialized officers and the first batch of female cadets at the Support Authority Institute of the Saad AlـAbdullah Academy for Security Sciences.
The ceremony witnessed the graduation of the first batch of policewomen in the country. His Highness the Amir who arrived at the academy at 10:30 a.m. was warmly received by the Minister of Interior Lieutenant General Sheikh Jaber AlـKhalid AlـSabah, as well as other senior police officers.
The ceremony was also attended by His Highness the Crown Prince Sheikh Nawaf AlـAhmad AlـSabah, Vice President of the National Guards Corps Sheikh Mishaal
AlـAhmad AlـSabah, His Highness the Prime Minister Sheikh Nasser AlـMohammed AlـSabah, First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of State for Defense Sheikh Jaber AlـMubarak AlـSabah, as well as other members of the ruling family, senior statesmen and members of the families of the graduating cadets.
Representatives of the 35th batch of military cadets then handed over the national flag to the representatives of the 36th batch. The Assistant Director General of the Academy for Education and Training Affairs Brigadier Dr. Waleed Khalaf BinـSalama read the ministerial decrees before inducting the new male and female police officers into the police force.
His Highness the Amir handed the graduates awards and certificates in appreciation for their efforts and then received the shield of the academy, that is dedicated to him, from Major General Yousef Mubarak AlـMedhahka. ـKUNA
Last updated on Thursday 26/3/2009
Al Kout Festival
Wooo HOOOO! An event we know about BEFORE it happens!
March 31 and April 1, 11am -7pm. American University of Kuwait, Salmiya Campus
The Arabian Heritage Project is proud to present “Al-Kout Festival”
(Old Kuwait Festival) an event being held to celebrate the grand opening of the
Arabian Heritage Project, a research, archival, and outreach center dedicated to
promoting and fostering the heritage of the Peninsula and related cultures.
Two days of celebration from 11 am till 7 pm at the American University Of
Kuwait campus in Salmiya. The event will include National Museum Exhibits, live
performances by Kuwaiti traditional bands (Bin Hussein and Mayouf), Sawt
musicians, Bedouin poetry, Kuwaiti History Game Show, distinguished live
Craftsmen, a Bazaar, old Kuwaiti cars, refreshments; basically a chance to
experience authentic Kuwaiti Tradition and Culture at its best.
The Festival opens at 11am, performances (Kuwaiti Sawt musicians, poetry,
Kuwaiti music piano recital, etc.) begin at noon. Sea bands begin at 5pm each
day.
Please note, parking is limited. Carpooling is advised.
Diary of a Six Day Bahama Cruise
In yesterday’s e-mail, thank you old friend!
Diary of a Six Day Bahamas Cruise
DEAR DIARY … DAY ONE
My husband and I are all packed and ready to get on the cruise ship. I’ve packed all my pretty dresses and make-up. I’m really excited.
DEAR DIARY .. DAY TWO
We spent the entire day at sea. It was beautiful and we saw some whales and dolphins. What a wonderful vacation this has started to be. My husband spent most of the day gambling. I met the Captain today and he seems like a very nice man.
DEAR DIARY … DAY THREE
I spent some time in the pool today. I also did some shuffle boarding and hit some golf balls off the deck. The Captain invited us to join him at his table for dinner. I felt honored and we had a wonderful time. He is a very attractive and attentive gentleman. My husband spent more time gambling.
DEAR DIARY … DAY FOUR
Went to the ship’s casino … did OK .. won about $80. My husband wanted to stay and gamble more. The Captain invited me to have dinner with him in his state room. We had a luxurious meal complete with caviar and champagne. He asked me to stay the night but I declined. I told him there was no way I could be unfaithful to my husband.
DEAR DIARY … DAY FIVE
Went back to the pool today and got a little sunburned. I decided to go to the piano bar and spend the rest of the day inside. The Captain saw me and bought me a couple of drinks. He really is a charming gentleman. He again asked me to visit him for the night and again I declined. He told me that if I didn’t let him have his way with me he would sink the ship. I was appalled. My husband spent most of the night gambling.
DEAR DIARY … DAY SIX-
My husband spent most of the day gambling.
I saved 1600 lives today …. twice !!!!
Just to be perfectly clear – this is a JOKE! It is not me, Intlxpatr, that went on the cruise. It is a joke!
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