Why Some Guys Stay Single

Do you find yourself wondering why most of your buddies have steady dates, yet you can barely secure a first date, let alone a second (and, playing a regular game of Mahjong and Canasta with your grandparents and their friends doesn’t count)? Guys, if so, it’s time to ask yourself a few Foxy questions…

Do you… have a problem with eye contact?
Even if you love everything about this other person, it won’t matter, if you can’t take your eyes off their body parts. They’ll likely think you’re out for one thing, or that you’re just kind of creepy. Sure, they might be wearing something revealing, but that’s no excuse to stare all night long. Get a grip and get comfortable with eye contact, which creates a much better bond.

Do you… eat like a caveman?
Utensils are there for a reason — so you can eat like a gentleman. Shoveling food into your mouth is not something you should subject your date to. Same goes for talking while chewing. Not only is it unpleasant to watch at a time when your job is to be easy on the eyes, it’s a red flag that says you’re a little short on self-awareness — an important characteristic in a mate.

Do you… trim your toenails?
Not that your date will necessarily see your toenails right away, but when they do end up eyeballing them, unkept toenails are a guaranteed huge turnoff. It means you don’t take care of yourself, and valuing yourself is an important part of a healthy relationship. Plus, let’s not forget the damage they can do to the other person’s leg when you’re snuggling up on the sofa watching movies.

Do you… order “everything on the side” at a restaurant?
In other words, do you order like a girl?  Please don’t. Because if your date has to be tortured by, “I’ll have the Cobb salad, but no cheese, avocado, or bacon, and dressing on the side, and the pasta, but no oil please, and extra light on the pinenuts,” they may be forced to hide under the table or at least wonder what kind of demanding partner you could be. If you have dietary restrictions, do your best, just don’t get into what will happen to your belly if you don’t follow them.

Do you… assume you’re going to strike out?
The Secret said it once but we’ll say it again: In a lot of ways, you manifest your own destiny. So, if you have lots of thoughts about being unlucky in love, you may be pushing people away in ways you may not even know. If you assume the worst of the world and yourself, spend a few minutes before your date making a mental list of why you’re looking for a relationship and why you are an incredible a catch.

By Rita Mauceri and Elycia Rubin

Survive embarrassing dinner-date mishaps

Dining mishaps come in all forms. And no, we’re not talking about using the wrong fork for your salad! Spills, slip-ups, unsightly smears, these can turn a delightful dinner into a bit of a nightmare. Here’s a guide to make the best of some messy situations…

The Spray
Chatting while in the midst of chewing a bite is never desirable, although sometimes it’s unavoidable. If you accidentally spit a bit of “collateral” on your company, it can be downright mortifying! Take a napkin and playfully wipe them off. A laugh and a shrug can do wonders! If you get lucky and they don’t happen to notice that spot of food that landed on their sleeve, reach over and brush it off by touching their arm to emphasize something you’re saying — they’ll never know.

The Whole Tooth
Poppy seeds, fresh ground pepper, and shredded lettuce are top threats to your dignity. There’s nothing like enjoying a delicious meal and leisurely conversation only to discover you’ve had a ribbon of green stuck around your tooth for the last hour. If your date points it out, laugh it off and graciously excuse yourself to remove it. Do not try to pick it out at the table! If you discover it on your own by way of a trip to the restroom, let it slide or make a light joke of it when you return to the table (depending on whom you’re dining with).

The Spaz
You pick up your fork to take a bite of tomato basil linguini and then SPLAT, it’s all over your lap. Whether it’s pasta sauce or iced tea, there’s nothing slick about spilling food on yourself or the table, but you can handle the aftermath with grace. Just smile and say “whoops,” then gently wipe yourself off with a napkin. If the spill calls for a more hardcore anecdote, excuse yourself to the bathroom to wipe it away with soap and water. It’s better than feverishly scrubbing at the table.

The Drop Out
If you drop a utensil on the floor, flag the waiter and politely ask for a replacement. He or she will generally retrieve the fallen item, so you don’t end up diving under the table. Handle it as a non-event and move on with your meal. If you’re at someone’s home, subtly retrieve the item and go to the kitchen to rinse it off.

The Food Face
Even for the most cautious diners, certain foods are always a bit messy — take hot-and-cheesy pizza, sauce-laden barbecued chicken, and double-decker burgers for instance. If a speck ends up on your cheek, no worries. Delicately wipe it off. If you aren’t aware of it, and your companion points it out, wipe it away with a good-natured laugh and a “thank you!!” When your dinner date is the one with a little stray sauce on his or her face, a simple “you’ve-got-a-little-yummy-right-here” will let them know in an amusing embarrassment-free way.

by Rita Mauceri and Elycia Rubin

Man hacks video game to propose to girlfriend

You’re probably accustomed to seeing big-screen proposals at ball games, in crowded restaurants, and scrawled across the sky by aircraft. But popping the question by hiding a message in your intended’s favorite computer game is rather more unusual.

However, for computer programmer Bernie Peng, it obviously seemed like the perfect idea. He spent a month reprogramming his girlfriend Tammy Liu’s favorite video game, gem-matching hit Bejeweled, so that it would display the all-important message when she reached a certain score. As Peng told Newark’s Star-Ledger: “I thought it was pretty cool, in a nerdy way.”

Did she agree? Fortunately for Peng, she did, and the pair plan a September wedding. Popcap, the company responsible for Bejeweled (and consequently untold hours of lost productivity in offices around the world) is flying the couple out for a Seattle honeymoon, and supplying copies of Bejeweled to hand out as wedding favors. A word of advice to any guests, though: don’t sit next to two other people wearing the same color, or all three of you will vanish.

By Mike Smith

Why beautiful women wed less-attractive men

Women seeking a lifelong mate might do well to choose the guy a notch below them in the looks category. New research reveals couples in which the wife is better looking than her husband are more positive and supportive than other match-ups.

The reason, researchers suspect, is that men place great value on beauty, whereas women are more interested in having a supportive husband.

Researchers admit that looks are subjective, but studies show there are some universal standards, including large eyes, “baby face” features, symmetric faces, so-called average faces, and specific waist-hip ratios in men versus women.

Past research has shown that individuals with comparable stunning looks are attracted to each other and once they hook up they report greater relationship satisfaction. These studies, however, are mainly based on new couples, showing that absolute beauty is important in the earliest stages of couple-hood, said lead researcher James McNulty of the University of Tennessee. But the role of physical attractiveness in well-established partnerships, such as marriage, is somewhat of a mystery.

The new study, published in the February issue of the Journal of Family Psychology, reveals looks continue to matter beyond that initial attraction, though in a different way.

Supportive spouses

McNulty’s team assessed 82 couples who had married within the previous six months and had been together for nearly three years prior to tying the knot. Participants were on average in their early to mid-20s.

Researchers videotaped as each spouse discussed with their partner a personal problem for 10 minutes. The tapes were analyzed for whether partners were supportive of spouses’ issues, which included goals to eat healthier, to land a new job and to exercise more often.

“A negative husband would’ve said, ‘This is your problem, you deal with it,’” McNulty said, “versus ‘Hey, I’m here for you; what do you want me to do?; how can I help you?’”

A group of trained “coders” rated the facial attractiveness of each spouse on a scale from 1 to 10, with the perfect 10 representing the ultimate babe. About a third of the couples had a more attractive wife, a third a more attractive husband and the remaining partners showed matching looks.

Trophy wives

Overall, wives and husbands behaved more positively when the woman was better looking.

The finding “seems very reasonable,” said Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at MIT’s Program in Media Arts and Sciences and Sloan School of Management. “Men are very sensitive to women’s attractiveness. Women seem to be sensitive to men’s height and salary,” said Ariely, who was not involved in the recent study.

In couples with more attractive husbands, both partners were less supportive of one another. McNulty suggests wives mirror, in some ways, the level of support they get from husbands.

“The husband who’s less physically attractive than his wife is getting something more than maybe he can expect to get,” McNulty told LiveScience. “He’s getting something better than he’s providing at that level. So he’s going to work hard to maintain that relationship.”

Men who are more attractive than their partners would theoretically have access to partners who are more attractive than their current spouses, McNulty said. The “grass could be greener” mentality could make these men less satisfied and less committed to maintain the marriage.

Physical attractiveness of husbands is not as important to women, the researchers suggest. Rather, wives are looking for supportive husbands, they say.

So it seems the mismatch in looks is actually a perfect match. “Equitable is unlikely to mean the same on every dimension,” Ariely said during a telephone interview. “It just means that overall two people make sense together.”

By Jeanna Bryner LiveScience Staff Writer

Yours, Mine or Ours?

You’re sharing a bed. Now, for the hard part: can you share your stuff?

Anne and RJ have bought a house and had a baby together. They share a bed, a bathroom, even a toothbrush when necessary. And yet, until a few months ago, their 200-plus CDs had remained strictly separate — his Bruce Springsteen on one shelf, her Brad Paisley on another. Marrying each other, it turns out, didn’t automatically mean marrying their stuff.

Almost every couple we’ve talked to can relate. They may have cosigned a mortgage or even combined their DNA — but consolidate their books or music or art or furniture? That’s a big commitment!

But it’s one worth making. A joint MasterCard account may signal to the world — or at least your creditors — that your finances are intertwined. But your books mingling on the shelf (or your Saarinen side table snuggled up to his Chippendale sofa) are an everyday reminder that you’ve meshed as a couple.
Navigating the mine-field

What’s so difficult about turning his and hers into ours? For some couples, the issue was that the possessions in question were deeply personal. Stuart, a friend who’s a former book editor, has an emotional attachment to his library — so much so that even an emotional attachment to his wife, Patti, couldn’t persuade him to integrate their books for the first three years they lived together. “Books were my thing,” Stuart says. “Before we were together, I moved six or seven times in a four-year period, and my books were a part of me that stayed with me as I moved.” Combining Patti’s books with his would have been like pasting her baby pictures into his family album. Instead, she moved in her own bookcase intact.

Stuart and Patti did eventually marry their libraries. But wisely, Patti didn’t force the issue. When one partner has qualms about a wholesale blending of belongings, a smaller, symbolic merger can be a way to signal togetherness without trampling anyone’s feelings. On a certain shelf in their dining room, Patti and Stuart keep a group of volumes they consider special to them as a couple — mutual favorites, books they first read when they were dating, gifts to each other, or that they received jointly, beloved titles from childhood.

It’s a collection that symbolizes their relationship as much as their reading taste — and as a meaningful gesture, it far surpasses simple co-shelving.
The taste test

Sometimes, what makes a merger bumpy isn’t so much a question of emotions as a clash of aesthetics — particularly when it comes to collections of art or furniture. (Though we did hear from one husband who was reluctant to house his wife’s well thumbed paperbacks among his pristine hardcovers.)

For Wendy and Jim, it was the art. After moving into a three-story house in New Jersey, they finally had plenty of wall space. But Jim’s maps of Ireland and depictions of famous military invasions didn’t live comfortably beside Wendy’s arty black-and white photographs and oil portraits she had painted herself. “They looked disastrous hung in the same room,” Wendy says. “Much less on the same wall.”

So most of the art stayed bubble-wrapped — and most of the walls, bare. It might sound like a head-in-the-sand approach to merging, but in fact, by not insisting that their collections be integrated, Wendy and Jim left room for a new, mutually pleasing one to develop. They started with installations that were easy enough to agree on: photos of their two kids along a hallway, their son’s artwork tacked up in the playroom. Adorning their home’s walls suddenly felt like fun, and they found themselves eyeing new paintings and photographs they might like to acquire — as a couple. Ironically, as they begin to fill the house with this new, mutual collection, small groupings of his maps or her oil paintings no longer cause such a huge visual disconnect, bridged as they are by common ground.
Orderly conduct

But what do you do when what’s undermining a merger isn’t the stuff itself, but the system for organizing it?

What seemed to work best for the couples we talked to was letting the more meticulous scheme govern — with the understanding that occasional insurrections must be tolerated. An example: though her husband, John, would be fine with a looser arrangement, our friend Laura, organizes their CDs alphabetically within genre: rock A-Z, comedy A-Z, classical A-Z. The exceptions, she says, are quite simply “anything one person cares a lot more about.” So though some of John’s Peter Gabriel albums should, according to the system, be filed in rock and others in world music, they stay together. As Laura points out, John is the only one who’ll be listening to them — and so he’s the only one who will need to locate them. “We don’t make theory more important than practicality,” she says. “There’s no ‘My logic is better than yours so you must apply it to things I won’t use!’”

The same is true with Patti and Stuart, who did eventually merge their books — once Patti, a random shelver, capitulated to Stuart’s precise alphabetical scheme. The bookshelves start in the sunroom (Dorothy Allison through Aldous Huxley), continue in the living room (John Irving through Tom Robbins), make a leap to the master bedroom (Philip Roth followed by J.K. Rowling followed by … well, you get the point.) “I ceded all control,” Patti says wryly. Et voila! Bibliophilic bliss. But there are some books — Patti’s vast number of reference works, for example — that are exempt from the system. And it’s those little idiosyncrasies that turn the collection from his into theirs.
A melding of the minds

Of course, the very best mergers are those that come about organically, even when it’s a glacial process. Take Anne and RJ’s formerly segregated CDs, now assimilated into four large CD binders. When they met, country music was something Anne inflicted on RJ. Now he knows every word to “All My Ex’s Live in Texas.” And as he began reaching for Anne’s CDs as often as he did his own, their personal possessions began to feel like joint property. No, not every single one — they will never truly co-own the Metallica CDs (his) or the Indigo Girls albums (hers). But when one of them brings home the latest George Strait, they consider it theirs.

By Lauren and Anne Purcell