Solving the male apology deficit

Look, I’m not a big fan of making a big deal about male/female differences.  We are much more similar than we are different.  (More and more people are coming around to this view.  Just today in an interview in today’s NYTimes magazine Martha Stewart said, “I don’t think in a male or female way. I don’t differentiate between male and female. I never have.”)  But still, it seems to me that there is one area where men stand out: they don’t seem to like to apologize.  Apologies for men are like male menstruation: a guy will bleed, but you have to force it out of them.

At least that is the way it seems.  Has anyone ever counted?  Maybe it only seems that way because women are always pointing out so many things for men to apologize for.  Maybe men apologize a lot; they just have trouble getting ahead of the screw-up curve. 

Anyway, on the assumption that men don’t apologize much, I’ve got three theories why this is so. (more…)

Understanding the so-called “mid-life crisis”

In our book When Good People Have Affairs we talk about the issue of the mid-life crisis.  That’s what many people think is to blame for affairs.  It’s not so much a way of letting the cheater off the hook—“He wasn’t responsible; he was crazy!; he was having a mid-life crisis!!”  It’s more an unwillingness to look at the relationship as the source of much of the difficulty.  In fact, it’s only a mid-life crisis affair if distress over aging is the main reason for having an affair a person wouldn’t have had otherwise.  And so the mid-life crisis affair is one of the rarer of the 17 different kinds of affairs we talk about in When Good People Have Affairs. 

Still, talk about affairs leads people to wonder about the whole issue of the mid-life crisis.  And that’s why we got this question from a journalist yesterday. 

Q:  As a contributing editor of a popular magazine, I’m working on an article about how to survive your partner’s crisis (midlife crisis, quarterlife crisis, or other crisis).  You thought everything was fine, but now your partner has doubts about everything in his life, including your relationship.  What can you do as a partner?  How long should you be supportive and understanding, and when is it time to set clear limits?  How can your relationship survive, and how can you stay sane while your partner is losing his/her mind? (more…)

Ripped from the headlines!:  Reporter interviews Mira yesterday

Mira was interviewed by a journalist yesterday.  The subject, as so often in these trust-challenged times, is When Good People Have Affairs.  And here’s what we think is the best quote.  Mira said, “For many people, only an affair has the ability to change the most desiccated landscape on the planet: the inner landscape where hopes of love and romance and passion and connection feel as if they’ve dried up and gone away forever.”  Now here’s the raw Q and A:

Q:  Your advice is extremely reasonable, and very much the voice of the therapist. Do you think that people would be able to distinguish between your 17 types of affairs? When you’re madly in love, it’s often so hard to see reason… (more…)

A smart reporter asks some smart questions

Every once in a while we run into a really on-the-ball journalist who asks good questions, reminding us that the source of the best journalist is informed curiosity.  This was one of those times.

Q:  Do you think that nowadays people split up to soon? Why do you think that? (more…)

The European press chimes in on our time-starved lifestyle

Think of it like this:  If Europeans are suffering from working too hard and not having enough time for their relationships, then we must have it really bad.  Well, they are.  And so here are some quite intelligent questions from a Dutch reporter about this whole issue. 

Q:  Why do you think that making time for your relationship is the first thing that suffers when couples are under time pressure? (more…)