Category Archives: Relationships
Jennifer Garner's Friends Give Her Dating Advice (EXCLUSIVE) – Life & Style Weekly
Who’s better to give you advice on guys than your best friends? Jennifer Garner is new to the dating game after being married to Ben Affleck for 13 years. Prior to her first date with her new boyfriend, Cali Group CEO John Miller, sources exclusively reveal to Life & Style magazine that her friends gave her the rundown on what she should do or not do during their date.
According to an insider, the advice her friends gave her varied from conversation topics to her outfit choices. It looks like her besties have her covered because let’s face it, dating can be scary, especially after so many years.
“They told her, avoid talking about Ben Affleck, don’t spend all night discussing the kids and most importantly, no more mom jeans!” revealed the insider. While abstaining from talking about your ex should be a given, we’re glad her friends clarified. In regards to mom jeans, we’re sure the actress could rock it, but why not play it safe on the first date with a flirter outfit? Jen may not be 30 anymore, but something tells us she’s still ~flirty and thriving.~
“They just want Jen to let loose and get back in touch with her sexy side. Fortunately, John likes the whole Jen package,” added the source. While her friends want what’s best for Jen, it looks like they won’t have to work too hard, considering these two are super into each other.
Jen and her businessman beau have reportedly been dating for about seven months now and according to Radar Online, friends believe this union will be beneficial for Ben and help him to move on from his relationship with Jen. “It’s good for Ben. Friends really think this will give him closure and freedom,” a source told the outlet. Here’s to new beginnings!
For more on this story, pick up the latest issue of Life & Style Weekly, on newsstands now!
How To Be A Better Husband – AskMen
Marriage is complicated. Let’s not mince words.
Sure, the concept is great — find someone who makes you unbelievably happy and spend more time with them than anyone else for the rest of your lives — but that also sounds like what a child would come up with as a recipe for happiness.
There’s a reason fairy tales wrap up with “and they lived happily ever after” without actually getting into the details: Because in truth, marriage is hard, and messy, and no marriage is happy forever. If you’re really going to be with this person for the rest of your natural lives (and, spoiler alert, your odds in today’s marital climate aren’t great) that means, in all likelihood, four-plus decades of living together.
For anyone familiar with the concept of “living together” (looking at you, anyone who’s ever had a family or a roommate) you’ll know that never getting mad at that person is a tall order. Throw in kids, a mortgage, health issues, the inevitable vagaries of chance, and the phrase “your sex life,” and you’ve got a recipe for not just some bad days but hell, some bad years.
If you want to make your marriage work, you’ve got to be committed, and, no lie, good at it. That’s right, from a certain angle, being a husband is a kind of job. Most people are definitely not qualified for your particular role; you have more responsibilities as you stay there longer, and if you don’t have a good relationship with your boss, you’ll go insane.
OK, the analogy got a little depressing! Let’s segue on to the better-husband tips:
1. Be Curious
Is there anything more deadening to interest than uncuriousness? Whether it’s a friend not asking you questions about yourself over coffee or a boss not giving you opportunities to prove yourself at work, finding out that someone doesn’t know what you care about and doesn’t really care is a pretty big bummer.
Don’t let that dynamic establish itself in your relationship — ask your spouse questions and actually listen to the responses. Try to remember what it was like when you first met and you were desperate to learn more about each other — no matter how well you know each other, there will still be things you haven’t figured out yet.
2. Be Consistent
Everyone knows about the stereotype of this kind of bad husband — loving and doting one minute, raging the next, or absent, or simply blasé. No one can be perfect 100% of the time, but one of the best traits a person can have in a long-term situation is reliability.
Put in the work to be the best version of yourself day in and day out, not just on Valentine’s Day and when the in-laws are over. Occasional grand sweeping romantic gestures are great, but they don’t paper over weeks of skipping doing housework or cutting comments about how dinner tasted. Show up — even when it’s not glamorous.
3. Be Romantic
At the same time, don’t get so caught up in being a good guy when it comes to the little things that you forget to ever try to take your significant other’s breath away. It doesn’t have to be the traditional vision of romance (see: cards, candlelit dinners, chocolates, bouquets of flowers); what it should be is tailored to the things that make your spouse’s heart beat faster, and out of the ordinary.
Set aside time here and there to show that you care and care passionately, in a way that doesn’t necessarily benefit you at all. Act like you’re trying to audition for the role of husband (or boyfriend, or lover, or first date) all over again, and see what kind of reaction you get.
4. Be Sexual
This one is hard. If it wasn’t, there wouldn’t be all the self-help books, advice columns and couples therapists that there are on this planet. No paragraph-long bullet point in an advice listicle is going to make this easy, so I won’t try. But know this: Sex is an important and necessary part of passion for most people, and sexual unhappiness and frustration leads to the end of a lot of relationships.
If you’re going to be a good husband, you’ll need to take your partner’s sexual self seriously — their wants, their don’t-wants, their fears, desires, past, present and future. What that looks like will be different for every couple, but the one thing you shouldn’t do is let your sex life die a quiet and unremembered death while you pretend everything is fine because you’re too afraid to be honest and uncomfortable.
5. Be Apologetic
You don’t have to conduct a scholarly study of the book of Genesis to know that erring and then regretting it has been pretty hard-baked into human culture since time immemorial. Lots of relationships sour because one or both parties are unable to confront their regret in a vulnerable way.
When you screw up (and oh boy, you’ll screw up) make a point to apologize for it. Don’t just try to get back into your partner’s good graces by playing nice, don’t just hope they’ll forget, and definitely don’t try to pretend like they’re crazy for being mad. Own your mistake. Have the tough conversation where you say sorry, and on top of that, say why you’re sorry, why what you did was hurtful and wrong, and how you’ll work to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
6. Be Honest
Lying is easy, and it’s something that lots of couples fall into, because honestly, you do need to lie at least a little bit in most relationships, romantic or otherwise, to make sure both partners are happy. The tricky bit is when you start lying consistently, and about important things. That means you’re afraid of tell the truth, which means you have a Serious Relationship Issue in the mix.
A lot of the time, lying functions to buy you time on a conversation you don’t want to have just yet, but if you do too much of it, all those conversations are going to become more serious, harder to navigate, and might come crashing down on you all at once. Don’t back yourself into a corner with a giant web of fibs and white lies and half-truths. If you’re serious about making the marriage work, you can get through a tricky conversation here and there.
7. Be Open
A lot of people think they can get away with just being honest but without being open. That’s a bad move, because telling the truth when confronted but hiding it otherwise is its own form of lie. Men are often taught as boys not to be vulnerable and not to open up about stuff. But not being open with the person you’re supposed to be closest to in the world is the kind of thing that makes it hard to genuinely trust someone. How would you feel to learn your partner had been keeping secrets from you?
It’s OK to struggle with being open, but a good husband will acknowledge his struggles in that regard and try to work on them, rather than just keeping a lid on it and trying to look rugged and stoic. If you’re struggling, or feeling things, or thinking about something constantly, you should be able to talk to the person you married about it.
8. Be Generous
When they see the word “generous,” many people will imagine a well-to-do person picking up the check at dinner, foisting expensive gifts on people and donating large sums to charity, but at its core, generosity is just going out of your way to be kind. That’s something that will bolster almost any relationship, let alone marriage, but your marriage is your most important relationship, so it’s the one where you should be most generous.
Devote time, effort and care to your spouse’s happiness. Buy things for them, do things for them, make compromises and sacrifices when you need to. Show them in concrete terms that their happiness and wellbeing are important to you, and you’ll be earning the same treatment in return.
9. Be Selfish
A lot of good-husband advice is about how to act in relation to the person you married. But it’d be foolish to act like every guy is just a giant fount of giving and selflessness. The truth is, if you’re not taking care of yourself, you’ll never be able to be the husband you want to be. If you need things — like affection, or alone time, or to hang with your friends, or to pursue certain passions — don’t keep quiet about them in an attempt to be the perfect husband who never makes demands. You’ll slowly frustrate yourself and hate the marriage.
As much as you should be generous with your time and energy, make sure you save some of it for yourself, too, so you can be happy on your own terms, and wake up excited to tackle the day, rather than resentful of all that you’ve sacrificed for your partner.
10. Be Surprising
If there’s one thing the whole marriage concept hinges on, it’s time. As in, you should have a lot of it. As in, you should spend a lot of it in each other’s company. It’s easy to fall into ruts after one year with the same person, let alone 5 or 10 or 20; and the dynamics you’ve established will soon come to feel like comfortable molds you are your partner are hibernating in.
But part of enjoying yourself in life is trying new things every now and then, and you should apply this principle to your marriage, too! If every single day and week and month feels kind of like the one before it, it might be time to shake things up a bit. This doesn’t mean drop tickets to a Caribbean cruise on the table one night at dinner without warning; it just means look for opportunities to do something new together that you’ll both enjoy that’ll feel like a break from the ordinary.
Putting your tried-and-true dynamic to the test in a fun new situation could be a great way to get back that feeling you had when you first fell in love — that feeling of excitement, and newness, and possibility.
Parents strongly disapprove of teen daughter’s anniversary trip with boyfriend – Detroit Free Press
Adapted from a recent online discussion.
Dear Carolyn: My boyfriend and I are both 19, and we’ll be having our five-year anniversary this summer. We’ve dated long-distance the entire time. To celebrate this milestone, we are going on an overnight trip.
My parents strongly disapprove of this. I told them about the trip immediately after I booked it and have been honest throughout the process, but this seems to cross a line for them. They’ve always been very protective of me and my sisters, but I don’t know why this in particular is so hard, because I’ve traveled on my own internationally and my boyfriend stayed with me for a weekend at college.
I feel my boyfriend and I have proven ourselves to be in a mature and healthy relationship, but my parents still don’t like that I’m dating someone on principle.
Recently, my mother told me that if we go on this trip, we will be jeopardizing my boyfriend’s relationship with her and my dad for the long term. Every adult I trust besides my parents (rabbi, therapist) has told me it’s OK for us to take this trip, and I don’t like that my mom threatened my boyfriend, but at the same time I love my parents and I don’t want to make things difficult – life is tough as it is. Should I go on this trip, or keep the peace?
– Trouble With Travel
Read more:
I think you’ve got a tough choice there.
And I think 19 is a good age to take on a tough, adult decision, one between two things that each will cost you something you value. The only thing you can do is figure out your values and priorities, rest your decision on them, and accept the consequences.
Whatever you decide, it’s generally good policy not to cave to emotional threats.
Dear Carolyn: My husband and I each do the chores we sort of enjoy, or, at least, don’t entirely hate, and the workload seems pretty evenly divided. However, I’ve noticed a lot of these chores seem to fall along traditional gender roles.
Our 3-year-old already seems to think daddies don’t cook and mommies don’t drive. We don’t need to blow up our whole system, do we? Are we teaching outdated ideas?
– Gender Role
No and no. It works. And that’s all you need to say: “It came out that way in our family, but all families are different.” Repeat till it verges on self-satire and you’ll be fine.
Hi, Carolyn: I have a good problem to have, but one I’m still struggling with. After a divorce and more than a decade of basically being single, I’ve unexpectedly started seeing an old friend, and it’s amazing. I have no doubt that our relationship is real and very healthy. It’s more the idea that something so unexpectedly good has happened to me, so I vary between disbelief, shock and happiness. Without complaining, my life hasn’t been very easy, and I guess I feel like I have to work extra hard for the good things in my life. How do I get over the feeling that I don’t deserve this happiness?
– State of Disbelief
If you don’t, then who does? Real question, not rhetorical.
Congratulations to you both.
Email Carolyn at tellme@washpost.com, follow her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/carolyn.hax or chat with her online at noon Eastern time each Friday at www.washingtonpost.com.
Read or Share this story: https://www.freep.com/story/life/advice/2018/11/27/teen-dating-trip-boyfriend/2067272002/
Explaining The He's Not Your Man Meme – AskMen
Trending News: The He’s Not Your Man Meme Is Giving Women Awful Dating Advice
Ladies, your man might not be who he claims to be. At least, according to a meme that’s been bouncing around Twitter all week.
According to Know Your Meme:
“He’s Not Your Man is a bait-and-swich snowclone in which a post begins by suggesting that if “Ladies, if your man” does certain things, he’s not “your man.” However, over the course of the listed things, it’s clear the poster is talking about someone highly specific, leading to the punchline, “He’s not your man. He’s X.”
Related: There Are Five Levels Of Cheating – How Far Have You Gone?
It all started on November 22 with this tweet:
Ladies, if he:
– only responds after you double text
– doesn’t care about your snap streak
– refuses to shave
– is a staunch abolitionist
– returns to Ohio after serving only one termHe’s not your man. He’s 19th president Rutherford B Hayes
— Kyle ? (@KylePlantEmoji) November 22, 2018
Over the last week, some pretty hilarious renditions of the tweet have been circulating.
Ladies, if he:
– is always late
– never shaves
– eats 10% of his weight a day in plant matter
– leaves you every winter for warmer watersHe’s not your man, he’s a manatee.
— Sassparilla (@Megatronic13) November 25, 2018
Ladies, if he:
– ████████████████████
– ████████████████████
– ████████████████████
– ████████████████████
He’s not your man. He’s a #FOIA response.— JPat Brown (@resentfultweet) November 26, 2018
Ladies, if he:
– never responds to your texts
– has never liked your tweets
– wears black
– shot a man in reno just to watch him die
– ain’t seen the sunshine since he don’t know whenHe’s not your man. He’s Johnny Cash
— brittany daniels (@bdmx__) November 25, 2018
Ladies, if he’s:
-perfect
He’s not your man. He’s Gritty
— Charlotte Wilder (@TheWilderThings) November 26, 2018
ladies, if he:
– never texts you back
– always interjects with unsolicited advice
– reads your personal documents
– constantly tries to help you format paragraphs
– is a sentient paper cliphe’s not your man. he’s clippy the microsoft word office assistant
— #1 Rachel (@rachel) November 24, 2018
Ladies, if he:
-Is skinny
-Speaks in the third person
-Loves shiny things
-Talks to himself
-Wakes you up to the sound of him whining for My Love, and My PreciousHe’s not your man. He’s Gollum. pic.twitter.com/3CgRLgK9lT
— Warner Bros. (@WBHomeEnt) November 26, 2018
But ladies, we all know that if he grooms properly, buys you amazing things, is well read and traveled…he’s not your man, but he can be if he reads AskMen.com.
