Wordonmind

  We’re told at a very young age we’re supposed to meet and fall in love with our soulmate, marry, live in a home with a white picket fence and have at least two kids and a dog. Fairy tales in books and in the movies paint a picture of a life happily ever after where our dreams all come true. Because we’re given such an idealized image of what our adulthood is supposed to look like, we think we have to follow a certain path in order for everything to perfectly play out. If we deviate from this path, things are likely to fall apart. So, we set out with a plan to find a fairy tale partnership and set the bar high. We’re looking for that perfect Prince Charming to magically appear. Well, if you haven’t noticed, life doesn’t always go as planned. And, people aren’t perfect. So, while we can have an idealized understanding of what our happily ever after should look like, we have to be adaptable and accepting of real-life complications. And, our expectations have to jive with this. When ...

  Jason Momoa and wife Lisa Bonet made headlines last week when Momoa recalled   how he was a "nervous wreck"   when he initially asked Bonet out on a date. Momoa was just 26 years old at the time, and approaching Bonet, who is 12 years his senior, was intimidating. “ ... When you meet someone you’re completely infatuated with and then find out she’s amazing, intelligent, and funny and she’s a goddess and you’re a degenerate,” he told  Men's Health . Momoa worked up the nerve and the two have been together since. What is it about older women? It still seems more common for men to seek out younger women, but one of TODAY's most-read stories continues to be this post on why younger men fall for older women. We've celebrated the long-term relationships between actor Hugh Jackman, who is 13 years younger than wife Deborra-Lee Furness. Then there's French President Emmanuel Macron, and his wife Brigitte, who is 24 years older. But it's not only younger famous m...

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when someone says NO? An emphatic NO. Anger, despair, sadness, shock? A mix of them all, maybe? Marriage and family therapist John Amodeo Ph.D., writes in Psychology Today, the human brain when faced with rejection falls apart because “it is one of our deepest human fears”. We all have a biological inclination to belong – to a family, a peer group, a community, society at large. And fearing rejection from any of these groups makes us paranoid. Amodeo explains why: “Rejection confirms our worst fear: that we’re possibly unlovable or have little value. When these fear-based thoughts keep spinning in our mind, we become agitated,” he says. As cases of spurned-lovers-turned-killers become almost everyday news in India and beyond (see box above), the next logical question that comes to mind is, do men and women view and experience rejection in different ways? Yes, says sociologist Shiv Visvanathan. “To a certain extent men don’t expect women to...