Originally challenged by Nathan Jackson, 23, who claims that the legal status of his parents marriage is the only thing keeping them in the same house, Loveless Marriage has been a part of the marital institution since its legal conception in the early 1600s. Mr. Jackson has repeatedly argued that his parents could “finally move on with their lives, start dating again, maybe enjoy some semblance of happiness if their marriage was just illegal… Instead, they sleep in separate rooms, bicker about which laundry detergent to buy, and complain that the other’s TV is too loud.”

Jackson, the youngest of three sons, saw his parents’ marriage as “loveless” only after he graduated college, at which point he  immediately began fighting to ban the lawful wedding of a man and a woman who sigh in disappointment every time the other enters a room. Says Jackson, “It destroys the sanctimony of marriage – an institution that is supposedly based on love!”

The Supreme Court argued that nowhere in the constitution does it explicitly state an opinion on marriage between two people who despise each other. Justice Roberts explained that it doesn’t matter “whether that resentment has built over years of marriage or was there before the marriage started, but the couple thought having a couple kids would fix it. This is a legal bind and there is no precedent to ban it.” Justice Clarence Thomas, a member of a Loveless Marriage himself, was quoted as saying: “America shouldn’t be making rules about how to live our lives. I hate my wife. Every time I take a shit, I find that shit more attractive than my wife. But does that mean that I shouldn’t be allowed to be married to her? Not the America I live in.”

Meanwhile, couples across the Midwest have rejoiced quietly in separate rooms as they eat their TV dinners and stalk the person they dated in high school on Facebook.

The post Supreme Court: Loveless Marriage Still Legal appeared first on The Faster Times.

The first movie I saw in a theatre was Disney’s Cinderella. There I sat, mostly bangs and limbs, mouth agape at the colossal screen before me. I studied Cinderella before I was ever taught to study: her graceful lilt; the twirl of pretty feet; dainty fingers kissing just so. A nod to naïveté, this belief that I, too, would soon find a Happily Ever After — with a dashing prince! and costume changes! and white horses!

My disillusionment with romance began in that moment, in Small Town, California circa 1987. The beginning of the end.

Then I went to school. I learned about grammar, of comparative and superlative adjectives. From the word happy, there is happier; happiest. There is also the “un” prefix, to derive the adjective unhappy.

I would come to think that Cinderella – during times like parents’ divorces, the deaths of best friends and ex-boyfriends, and break-ups from boys who were “unhappy” — should come with a warning label. Or be Rated “G,” for general inaccuracy.

The question, then, is how do we dispel the spell of fairy tales?

For as long as girls have floated on their daddies’ shoes, the elusive Happily Ever After has been a perennial must-have. When should, or can, we learn that bliss is only tangentially connected — or perhaps entirely disconnected — to some swept-off-your-feet love?

I’ll be the first to admit: I am wedded to the idea of becoming a Mrs. So-and-So. This often blindsides my better judgement, and I have been quick to believe that any boyfriend, especially as the years close in, could be The One. I’ve tried to shoehorn the wrong relationship into that glass slipper — accumulating emotional blisters and a bad limp along the way. I forget to ask, “Is it love I feel, or just attachment to someone who has grown familiar?”

My 28-year-old girlfriend was over at my apartment a few weeks ago, she of the Rosario Dawson beauty and law degree. Stretched out on the couch, a glass of rosé perched on the armrest, she listlessly tinkered with Pandora on my iPad. “Mama,” she said to me, “I’d rather be in a bad relationship than no relationship at all. I am sick of being single, I just want to be a plus-one.”

I commiserated. Her thoughts have been mine, in moments when I’ve felt pressure to have the career, the love, the life — “pouf!” — all appear by age 30.

In Cinderella, a fairy godmother appears in moments of despair and provides repose. In reality, if we weep on a bench because of some missed opportunity, no one appears to save the night. We learn the hard way. Sometimes what we learn is subtle; sometimes it’s of the palm-smacking-forehead order. Whatever it is, whatever stage of (un)happiness we learn it in, it’s empowering to know each triumph and mistake was ours to make.

The French painter Frederick Frieseke once said, “The key to your universe is that you can choose.” You can choose to cry about it, or not. To share pillows with the wrong person, or not. To make the right decisions, especially those that eclipse the wrong ones, or not.

You can choose to be a plus-one, or just a perfect-one. Uncompromising — and quite possibly, happy.

A few days ago, I was having dinner with said girlfriend, a few blocks down from her newly purchased one-bedroom on the Upper East Side. “I used to think turning 30 and not being in a serious relationship would be awful,” she said. Then, smiling broadly to reveal gleaming white teeth, showcased by her take-no-prisoners cherry lipstick: “Now I think, if it happens when I’m 33, or when I’m 50, so be it. I’ll still be thrilled.”

Your story may not be the stuff of golden binds. Your story can unfold slowly, or unfurl awkwardly. It can stay in the prologue for longer than you’d like.

However it happens, here’s to reinventing the fairytale romance. It won’t happen in a running time of 80 minutes, it won’t be a path lined in rose bushes (peonies are better, anyway) — but it will be uniquely yours. And that’s worth the wait.

In the meantime, have a romance with your friends, your parents, with passing strangers.

Have one, with yourself.

Follow Jeanine Celeste Pang on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@jcpthatsme

The post Reinventing Happily Ever After appeared first on The Faster Times.

What is it about the words “naked” and “therapy” being forced to sit calmly next to each other that drives people so crazy?

On April 19, 2012, I was accepted as an artist into the West Chelsea Artists Open Studios (WCAOS), which is happening this weekend. On May 1, 2012, I was removed from the event by the director, Scotto Mycklebust. The removal came after I submitted the image you can see here as my feature art for the event’s promotional materials. I was told in an email from the director that I was being removed because my art was an “ad” and that I am a “commercial entity” and “not an artist.”

As you can read here I was essentially booted because Mr. Mycklebust assumed that my placing my url – TheNakedTherapist.org – on my art meant that I was one of those entities (I imagine he’s met one) that “take advantage of this free event to promote their own businesses.”

Problem is, TheNakedTherapist.org is not my Naked Therapy practice website. That’s at SarahWhiteTherapy.com. TheNakedTherapist.org was going to be the location for a web-based performance piece I planned on doing as part of my Open Studio event. So it’s an art site, not a business. Further, I have a series of pieces in which I use my url as a symbol in my art, along with some other parts of my artistic vocabulary, including my body, Internet icons, and photos of men. So why was I “promoting my business”?

I think there are basically three issues here.

On the issue of ads vs. art…

So, what’s the difference between an ad and art? To answer that, I’ll first ask some questions (since I am, after all, a therapist). If an artist signs his paintings, does that render them illegitimate acts of self-promotion, i.e. ads? If a performance artist sends in her face as her feature art for a festival, is she submitting a piece of self-promotion, or art? If Damien Hirst placed TheRichestArtist.org on an orange field, would it sell as art? How is the use of my face and my url any different than Keith Haring using the exploding dog or Murakami using Mr. DOB?

Fact is, I actually take Mr. Mycklebust’s assertion that he removed me from WCAOS because he thought my art was “promoting my business” as being an accurate statement of how he felt, but I also find it to be the exact issue that is so troubling. And it’s troubling because I believe that I was removed because what I do for a living is considered by some to be illegitimate and illegitimizing; because I am a woman using the performative body provocatively, positively and unironically inside and outside my art; because some in the art world have yet to recognize the realities and modalities of the 21st century in which the Internet deeply blurs the lines between self-promotion, commerce and art; and because I am not yet a “famous” (i.e. “money-making”) artist. All of these reasons for my removal point out some very interesting and unwritten rules and assumptions and even prejudices in the art world and our society that need to be discussed and considered, as they are being here.

On the issue of commercial entity vs. artist…

I am a practicing artist. That is why I was accepted into WCAOS. For over a decade I have been a photographer whose work centers on themes of desire, body, sexuality, visibility, catharsis, Americana, e-connections and the forbidden. For the last two years I have been creating art in conversation with my Naked Therapy practice, which focuses on arousal, display, transient spaces, the Internet, the cultural quotidien, relationships, aspiration and the interplay between mentalities.

I put the phrases “Naked Therapy” and “The Naked Therapist” on my art as a political statement. I have been censored and banned from Facebook, Master’s programs, licensing institutions, and now an “open” arts festival. Why? Simply because of those words. That’s why I put them on my art. To call attention to them, to rouse and challenge the emotions they cause, and to stand up for what I believe in…therapy (and art!) that accepts and engages eros.

Despite initially accepting me as an artist who he knew practiced Naked Therapy, it would seem that as I started requesting to be identified as who I am – Sarah White, The Naked Therapist – Mr. Mycklebust began to feel that my practicing Naked Therapy, along with my desire to include it in my identity as an artist and my artistic work, meant I didn’t have the right to call myself an artist. I find this deeply troubling as well. As I mentioned above, it implies that if a woman uses the performative body provocatively in her professional life, she is delegitimized from using it in her art. My art is informed by the Internet, by performance art, and by commercial activities, which I don’t believe should take away my “right” to call myself an artist.

On the issue of censorship vs. freedom…

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp tried to enter a urinal as a piece of art into the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. Entitled “Fountain,” it was rejected by the committee, even though it was stated in the rules of the exhibition that the event would accept art from any artist who paid the fee.

In 2012, I tried to enter an image that montaged a photo of a man, a photo of myself, and one of my url’s into the West Chelsea Artists Open Studio. I was then removed from the event by the director, even though it was stated on the application that the event was “open to all West Chelsea artists.”

Duchamp said the urinal was art; I say I am art.

You decide…

And there are two ways you can do that. Comment below, or come to my Independent Open Studio on May 13 from 4 – 8 pm at the Hôtel Americano in Chelsea (518 West 27th Street, NYC) being held in protest of my removal from the WCAOS. At that event I will show my work and host an open discussion forum on the issues of ads vs. art, commercial entity vs. artist, and the professional segregation of women who use the performative body provocatively.

The post Am I Not Art/ist? appeared first on The Faster Times.

Hear the news? Next to friends and family, online dating is now the second most common way to meet your mate. Now, some of you might be thinking, “Ugh! When will this insipid e-xodus into virtual non-reality stop? First we upload our libidos and sex goes cyber. Then a ‘friend’ becomes someone you accept or decline with a click. Now the wonderful mating dance is nothing but scrolling through personals and sending out pasted pleadings to likely matches. The Internet is the new opium, the world’s waiting to be asked to dance, and if we wanna really get it on we’ve gotta turn it off!”

But hold on a minute. While I’ll freely admit that it’s awfully enticing to fritter away far too much of our personal potential surfing around in a state of useless distraction, I’d like to point out that we often don’t know what something does for us until we stop obsessing over what it’s done to us. Yes, the Internet has ushered in some quite degrading, if not destructive, ways for us to blow our precious time, but to paraphrase McLuhan, the medium is a mirage. An incredibly alluring, accessible, and anonymizing mirage, but a mirage nonetheless. If you don’t look at it, but through it, you’ll see that it’s not there. It’s merely a figment of our infatuation.

And as such, it’s a wonderful thing. It’s a reference library. It’s a gaming world. It’s a community meeting. It’s a political movement. It’s a family reunion. It’s an information booth. It’s a soapbox. It’s a fan zine. It’s an art gallery. It’s a performance space. It’s an awesome singles bar. It’s a fundraising opportunity. It’s an emotional vent. It’s a personal broadcasting channel. And now, it’s the second most common way we find that most important and instinctual of all needs: love.

So I say it’s time to remove the angst over Internet usage, because too much of a good thing may be a bad thing, but it never gets to be a good thing if all you worry about is if it’s a bad thing! Let’s stop feeling guilty, and start feeling giddy, for hanging out online. Let’s realize that it’s not what you’re doing, it’s what you’re doing it for. If you’re spending 50% of your life in the cloud, stop beating yourself up and start patting yourself down: Why am I doing this? What am I getting out of this? How is this making the most of me? Because as long as you plug what’s real about yourself into what you’re doing, then what you’re doing is real, even if it’s virtual.

On February 6, 2012, the second place matchmaking status of online dating was announced. So I say we make that Internet Appreciation Day. On that day we’ll all throw out our “shoulda woulda coulda” about how much we’re on the web and toss ourselves guiltlessly into the cyber sea. We’ll revel in all the files we download, the comments we post, the blogs we read, the friends we accept, the tweets we blast, and the love letters we send to available members, and when we’re done, we’ll log off and fall into the arms of our friends and family, who, need I remind you, are still, and will probably always be, Number One.

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On trips to Florida, Arizona, Maine, and Hawaii over the last couple years they’d spent a large portion of the time eco-tourizing – hiking, canoeing, camping outdoors. It’s what they like to do. It gets them close to beautiful and remote natural places, invigorates their bodies, and provides them with a challenging, immersive experience that they can share together.

He first noticed the phenomenon I’m going to describe in Florida. They’d just come out of the Everglades, where they’d experienced an incredible plethora of plant and animal life, the most exciting of which was a lagoon full of manatees. As they kayaked quietly in circles, the giant sweet sea cows rolled about beneath them, coming up occasionally for air. He said it was amazing to be so close to these fragile, massive, peaceful water mammals.

That night, they made love in their tent, and there was something new about it. Neither of them mentioned it during sex, but afterward, as they lay together talking, she mentioned that she felt like sex had been somehow different, and he said, “Yeah, I felt like a manatee.” They went on to discuss how there’d been a different vibe, pace, breath, motion between them that was informed by the natural world they’d just been immersed in. They were somehow channeling this world into their own sensuality, and it was completely thrilling.

And the same thing happened in the next three locations. In Arizona, in a remote slot canyon surrounded by granite walls, saguaro cactus, and scrambling lizards, they had sex that just somehow felt completely infused with the mysterious desert surroundings. In Maine, canoeing on the wild Allagash river, with its bald eagles, beavers, and glorious foliage, they had sex that felt riparian, aquatic and vast. They soared and swam through each other like the creatures they’d seen along the route. And in Hawaii, sleeping on remote beaches, eating guava and oranges right off the trees, and frolicking in the water falls, their sex was full of the energies, flavors and motions of waves and fruit and fresh rushing water.

Now, one could certainly say that this was all in their heads, but isn’t that the point? These natural surroundings had gone to their heads (and their bodies) and they had changed the way they moved, felt, related, and, inevitably, behaved sexually with each other. Without these natural places, they would probably never have experienced such sensual revolutions.

And that’s what I told my client. I assured him that I thought the synaesthetic experiences they were having were perfectly normal, and quite beautiful, and I told him that he’d enlightened me to something in my own life. His story had shown me why I am an avid environmentalist. Biodiversity is sensual diversity, is spiritual diversity. With every ecosystem we preserve, we preserve an opportunity for our minds and bodies to experience a different reality and to share different sensations with each other. Deforestation, species and habitat loss, and the mono-culturing of nature is robbing us of our very selves. For after all, we are to a great extent what we are in, and if all we are in are homogenized, de-naturized places, it’s not just great sex we’ll miss out on. Our lives will become vastly less interesting as our minds and bodies lose their input from the wonderfully diverse world of nature. And that would be a tragedy of planetary proportions.

The post The Erotics of the Environment appeared first on The Faster Times.

Dear Leigh Stein,

I have other problems, but the problem I’m writing you with today is this: I hate my neighbor. For 6 years I have lived abover her. She blasts (BLASTS) her TV all day and all night as well as keeps radios going in other rooms of her apartment at the same time. She plays a radio stationed at her front door to, what, keep bad spirits away? I believe she gets high on noise. She lives alone. She is surly and has been taken to court by 1) other neighbors for harassment 2) the condo association for not paying common charges. Unfortunately, I own my apartment and can’t sell it because of the wretched housing market. Unfortunately, I own my apartment and must pay not only my own but her common charges. Our maintenence fees keep going up because she never intended to pay the fees and now owes more than $30,000 in back payments. She doesn’t answer the door when the police come to try to make her turn down her noise. She is broke and can’t pay the fines that keep mounting against her. She ain’t going anywhere. My 3 year old daughter hears her thumping and raging in the night every night. I’m feeling murderous. Help.

Stuck in Jersey City

Dear Stuck,

I see two ways this could go: revenge or resignation.

If you choose revenge, I would suggest getting your three-year-old involved, collecting small bugs that can be released under the door of your nemesis. You could also cover your daughter’s hands in red finger paint, and allow her to stamp her tiny paws all over the neighbor’s door in the dead of night. Basically be a nuisance, and when her radio shatters your life, take comfort in the fact that you are getting her back.

If you choose resignation, take comfort in the fact that, unlike her, you’re not going deaf. Spend more time outdoors. (Even in New Jersey, spring will come eventually.) Go all out Emily Dickinson on her ass, and lower baskets of cookies out of your window to hers. When she blares her TV, tell your daughter that the sad lady is at it again, and make up a song about it. Sad lady, sad lady, what do you see? Slip paper cranes of peace under her door.

Whatever you do, know that you are setting an example for your daughter on how to deal with crazy people. Either she will grow up to be a bitchin’ killer like Saoirse Ronan in the film Hanna, or a saintly beauty like Lady Sybil Crawley on Downton Abbey, who’s been on my mind a lot lately because I just lost two weekends of my life to this show.

Best of luck, Leigh

Illustration by Grace Do

The post The Fallback Plan for Nightmarish Neighbors appeared first on The Faster Times.

No, I’m not trying to start some “spread the peace” movement, though that would be a wonderful byproduct. Rather, I pose this challenge to help you see that all the hate you feel for someone who’s “done you wrong,” all the disgust you hurl at your neighbor’s “lifestyle,” all the scorn you pile upon those who seem “different,” all this loathing might be a gateway drug to higher forms of love, and if you embrace the object of your disfavor you may discover one of life’s most transformative realizations: we can’t know what someone does for us until we stop obsessing over what they’ve done to us.

Take the case of George, one of my clients. As soon as his kids fly the nest, his wife starts openly cheating on him. She calls him on the phone and lets him hear her having sex with her new boy toy. She refuses to make love with him because she claims he can’t compare to what she’s getting from the newbie. And she constantly tells him that were he a real man, he’d leave her. So what do I tell George? Leave the bitch? No. I tell him to write a love note to his wife’s new stud muffin, letting him know how grateful he is that he’s bringing pleasure back into his wife’s life.

Does he do it? Yep. Does it help him? Big time. Because, deep down, George loves his wife’s new playboy. He’s been feeling inadequate for years. His marriage had become sexless long ago. He had stopped seeing his wife as alluring. But her infidelity (a misnomer for what is in fact often an act of deep and desperate faith in the potential of a relationship) roused his dormant emotions and made him feel excited again!

So what does he do with all that excitement? Something truly brave. He embraces the cuckold lifestyle. Yes, in one of the more productive reaction adjustments of the modern age, being a cuckold, which for centuries was cause enough for a man to murder his wife (e.g. Othello), is now a growing fetish in which a man gains sexual gratification from his partner having intercourse with other people. That’s right. George and his wife are not only having sex again, but he’s also enjoying the experience of watching her make it with his rival. His world has been blown wide open, he’s exploring new erotic horizons, and he’s feeling better than ever. Happy Valentines Day, Mr. Other Man. I love you!

Now if only I can get Rick Santorum to send some candy hearts to Dan Savage

xoxo

Sarah White The Naked Therapist SarahWhiteTherapy.com

The post My Valentine’s Day Challenge appeared first on The Faster Times.

The fear of being turned into a utility has become endemic in the last decade. As the internet surrounded us with more and more widgets and toys to use the suspicion that we might be turning into some reduced plug-in for an advertising empire intensified. Not coincidentally, a culture of sarcasm appeared, debunking the self-evidently false personae of those who appeared to us through the media as discarnate apparitions. Gawker hurled stink bombs at celebrity, feeding the impulse to immediately interpret in the worst possible way the sometimes bizarre and sometimes humiliating things a person might do or say. The Daily Show and The Onion satirized the mannequin artifice of the news-making industry, as well as the ghastly veins of thought that could slip past a person’s eyes when framed with the right vernacular.

Yet, we can’t honestly say this is an age when we suddenly became aware of the media’s superficiality. Shakespeare never tired of questioning whether daily life was itself a theatrical hedge maze; George Bernard Shaw invented Eliza Doolittle as a reminder of our susceptibility to manipulation through carriage and appearance. And once the thrill of seeing moving images from far away places wore off, most people carried a pinch of skepticism about things they saw in film and television. Whatever was happening in front of the camera, there was always something happening behind the camera that went unseen.

No, this is not an age of media awareness but one of self-reflexive anxiety wherein we have begun to fear the media’s capacity to distort us against our will. The scandals and indignities are fueled by a secret fear that we would appear just as bizarre, inadequate, grotesque, or pathetic when transformed into a keyhole miniature. As we have begun to leave a caricatured trail of ourselves across the world’s server farms, enmity and paranoia have sprung up alongside the realization that the formerly anonymous me-and-you are also visible in these warping pools of coerced hallucination. It is as if we are watching ourselves become ghosts, and it is scary.

This effect has an eerie socio-political mirror, with the entrapping net of social fantasy selves coinciding with a decade of jobless stagnation in which corporate productivity accelerated to the financial diminution of most, a circumstance which was covered over by a slackening of lending standards. The compulsion to see one’s self as a thing that could be reinvented in a new hub or home, one’s consumption affiliations carefully curated to deliver an impression of desirability was widespread. In context, it was a compulsion that we could not honestly have acted on without accepting on some level it was self-deception. At a certain point the credit-leveraged effort to remake ourselves becomes a ploy that is more about manipulating other people into accepting our hollow coquetry as truth.

When we find in the media a tool to humiliate others for having been disingenuous in the creation and curation of their personae we cheer the loudest, unironically, and en masse. This burbling vitriol only further desocializes us. Paradoxically, our sneering indignation makes social networks seem less intimidating places to experience friendship and company. A recently published study from the University of Waterloo measured the self-esteem of a group of college students using a questionnaire. They found that those who had the lowest self-esteem were most likely to think of Facebook as their preferable way to socialize, giving them more control over their identities and statements.

A selection of 10 status updates from these low self-esteem candidates were shown to an anonymous group of evaluators and compared against those with higher self-esteem, who tended to view Facebook as less ideal than face-to-face interactions. The lower self-esteem subjects’ status updates were rated as the least likable and most off-putting. In essence, those most susceptible to taking Facebook as an ideal way of socializing are those least likely to appear likable through its exaggerated lens.

We could consider the rapid growth of Facebook as a parallel to the credit economy that reached a bursting point in the the mid-2000s, an environment that encourages anti-social behavior by making the implements of identity creation cheaply available. After the subprime collapse decimated the American economy in 2007, divorce rates dropped, as did the number of new marriages per year. Likewise the number of births dropped alongside the falling employment percentages, according to the 2009 U.S. Census. If marriage and parentdom are the two most fundamental identity shifts a person can make in society, the declining economy made people much more reluctant to commit to major social changes. Another study from Scott Hankins and Mark Hoekstra, “The Effects of Random Income Shocks on Marriage and Divorce,” found that women who experience positive income shocks were six points less likely to marry during the following three years.

The suggestion that marriage, the metaphorical standard bearer of our most commonly repeated social ideal–love is all you need–depends on money and circumstance as much as it does affection and magic will not surprise anyone. We know we are lying to ourselves when we talk about lifelong monogamous relationships as the optimal affirmation of civilized society. Certainly, life-long monogamous relationships are possible, but the idea that they are optimal, that the costs are outweighed by the innumerable benefits, which cannot be translated into a currency transaction without being desecrated, seems undercut whenever the flow of life-changing accoutrements is made freer. The trick of marriage is not to fall in love, but figure out a way to keep the love you have for a person from being crushed in the social vice of the institution itself–to participate in the marriage while admitting that, no matter how dramatically it might change your outward appearance, it does not make you a different person in essence.

Or rather, the security of having declared your identity, through a vow, or a carefully selected profile image is only temporary, an act whose comfort begins to dissipate almost as soon as we have finished it, requiring a constant stream of magical thinking to maintain. Is there any way to not respond with anger and mistrust, then, when someone brings up the fact that Facebook is using us? Our spouses are using us too, and the children perhaps most of all. But wasn’t that part of the agreement from the outset?

I’ll use you, you’ll use me–but let’s both agree to never let that compromising fact become the primary characteristic of our relationship. The more we recoil from the awkward truth of our circumstances, the more we try to smooth over our own self-images with objects we’ve taken on-loan, the more vulnerable, we become, guilty, secretly expecting the worst to happen at the first utterance of a simple truth that no one could deny having known from the start. Sell my Internet searches to advertisers, surveil my hodgepodge of pictures, decontextualized quotes, and social froth and draw from it whatever conclusion you’d like. You’re wrong about almost everything, it shows in your banner advertisements, and every other stab out into the ether you make, straining to make a sale before you’ve even said hello.

*Images via weelakeo

** “Facebook is Using You” via New York Times “Facebook Is Not Such a Good Thing for Those With Low Self-Esteem, Study Finds” via Science Daily “Household Formation: Divorces, Births Correlated with Unemployment Across States” via Rortybomb “Home Economics: Marriage Rates and the Lottery” via Slate

The post Your Spouse is Using You: Facebook and the Effects of Unemployment on Divorce appeared first on The Faster Times.

Of course, it’s not perfect. He still can’t ejaculate in America. And you do love piloting his zeppelin, watching him smoke and Bing himself. But is this going too fast? Jesus, he let you into his creative process: he takes notes while you play Twister by yourself in a ballroom. Isn’t that a little intimate? You don’t know. It’s only been 52 days. He dated Amber for 3 months before they went to church.

You two will make it 3 months. You’ll make it an eternity. He’s confident, he’s Shakespearean, his stomach’s not that weird. Maybe everything is fine.The nightclubs, the foursomes with Evanescence–it’s all a dream. But you just want to chill with him.

So on February 14th, you’re making your move. Snuggling with Kanye. Eye contact, laughing–eating way too many goldfish! Finally. A chance to take things slow, as slow as his rapping.

This is how you do it. You need to hang up your outfit immediately, after reading this. Iron your Garfield sweatpants, and look for an extra large tee shirt with lots of spirals. You are gorgeous, everyone’s gorgeous, but not today. Yes, you kind of like your new hairdo–you weren’t going to attend his Bald Party with hair. But rummage his trash and find a sweaty wig from one of his old videos: Hey Mama copper, perhaps, or carrot red from Jesus Walks.

Now it’s time to organize the Valentine’s Day duffel bag. You’re going to have to wake up early, maybe shower, and drive to his place, so pack ahead to save precious love time. Remember the Intimacy products he doesn’t have at his place. Sure-fire love-tools include Mad Libs, platinum grill cleaner, and Katherine Hiegl DVDs. Only the good ones–no guilty pleasures!

Ring the doorbell, and when he opens the door, smother him with farts. This is a day of comfort: about showing him who you are on a spiritual level. You can even tell him what you thought about Watch The Throne. (If he plays it, turn it off, and replace with Gregorian Monk chants.) “Happy Valentine’s Day, Yeezy!” you’ll exclaim, and he will catch your jump-hug in a lover’s surprise. He was getting ready for later, he’ll say with mammoth-bone tweezers in hand.

“I made reservations for underwater dinner,” he says. But you tell him what you want.

What do you want?

What would make you happy, happy for a while?

Slowing down.

Close the curtains, and put on your socks. Look at him in his glossy brown eyes. “Today is special,” you promise, “because we don’t have to act special. Let’s just have a blah day!”

He looks down, he bites his lip like a schoolboy. It’s a major test. Can love be exhilarating on the couch? Is love with Kanye West, love? You’re thinking to yourself. He looks up.

“27 Dresses.”

Lana Del Rey is Waiting in the Truck

Cynthia Nixon Makes Gay Choices

Here’s One For The Trending Pakistani Whale Shark

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Dear Leigh,

I want to learn all about meter and form, but I have a short attention span, so do you know of any good places to eat around here (Pasadena, California?) Also, your author photos are very nice, I like overalls. (I think those are overalls) Sometimes, I want to be a girl, because girls are nice looking. (Relevant information: I’m a boy.)

What should I do?

Sincerely, Anonymous (Boy)

Dear Boy,

Celiac Disease is a serious health disorder that affects at least 1 in every 133 Americans. For many of us, living in the treetops a la Swiss Family Robinson has always been a dream, but as the middle class vanishes in a plume of car exhaust we must contend with the reality of just visiting trees on the weekends. “Sorry you were born the wrong gender,” my nana used to say, unknowingly giving me the title for my new memoir. Take heart and be not discouraged. Every time you see an adult in overalls, you have a new character to add to your roman

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