In the 15 years we’ve been together, my partner Gary has done maybe seven things that have irritated me.* On average, that’s about one irritation every other year: in other words, kind of amazing. And so, when “Irritation #8” came along last week it took […]
All posts tagged: relationships

Remember Why You Like Me?
After a long job-seeking rejection streak, one of organizational psychologist Robert Cialdini’s clients started asking one simple question at the beginning of a job interview which immediately ended his rejection streak. This person went on to get better jobs in his next three interviews by […]

Our primal relationship with numbers
Judging from how many articles there are out there with headlines like, “The 8 Top Anti-Inflammatory Foods for Anxiety” and, “The Only 5 Things You Need to Live a Good Life,” we appear to be in love with numbers. We just are. In fact, they […]

The next thing
When a friend’s engineer husband decided to go back to school to become a lawyer, for some reason I couldn’t get over his decision to dive into three grueling years. This sounded just awful to me — they had two young kids at home. And […]

Setting the stage, part 1
Philip Henderson, you don’t know it but you walked across my stage and initiated the climactic turning point the plot of my play hinged upon, the one I’d been reaching and reaching for these past 12 years. Alas, this starring role came at a price, […]

Welcome to my mountain, part II
I committed my first cruelty at the innocent age of 4. And I knew it. We were a team almost from the get go, Amy and me. In the 4-kid ABBA rhyme scheme that was our family pattern, we were the tight middle core — […]

Fancy foreign car
Make no mistake. Being me doesn’t come cheap. Wait, I can’t bear it. Starting off like that…Because my childhood didn’t endorse obsessive self blabbery, I just can’t bear not to step outside this story — yet one more story about me — for one moment, […]