relationships

As one who last professed true love in the previous century, it's hard for me to understand why people post cute, cuddly messages about their nearest and most expensive on Facebook.

You know the sort of thing: "My gorgeous wife just bought me a red toothbrush." Or: "My new boyfriend's smile makes my heart sing like Engelbert Humperdinck."

It's hardly: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight."

Still, I … Read more

Trust never comes easy, even in the strongest of relationships.

Your lover can tell you she loves you and wants to elope with you one minute; then insist you're surplus to requirements the next.

So when you (or your loved one) disappears to CES or some other vast conglomeration of humanity, bad things will likely happen.

To prove this careworn point, might I offer a new survey in which 94 percent of Americans declared that bad things happen at conferences and trade shows?

You might detect a certain potential slant in this research, as it was performed on behalf … Read more

My engineer friend, George, got brutally stood up the other day.

"How did you react?" I asked, trying not to contort my face in fear, as he can get emotional.

"Well, I de-friended her on Facebook," he said. "She's dead to me."

It turns out he may be one of the healthy ones. Because Facebook is where all of love's stages are enacted. And one of those stages comes straight after the breakup. It is the stalking stage.

A master's candidate at Western University (which I don't think offers a master's in Love Studies) decided to examine the extent to which former lovers cannot let go, in the socially networked sense. … Read more

So many have experienced the pain.

She tells you she's leaving. She tells you she's taking her pots, her pans, and all her "Twilight" tomes.

You weep. You plug Nilsson's "Without You" into your ears on permanent play. If it's frightfully unexpected, your insides demand revenge.

One of the less good ideas, though, is to post nude pictures of her on his Facebook page. I mention this merely because an Australian man just got 6 months in the clinker for being something of a hurt stinker.

Ravshan "Ronnie" Usmanov, 20, … Read more

A friend of mine revealed to me at the weekend -- after the second glass of wine -- that he had broken up with his girlfriend.

The moment of truth had come when she looked up at him in bed, stared deep into his eyes and said: "The data I'm getting from you is that the experience was imperfect."

He made his draconian decision because he found this dialogue unromantic. The truth is, though, that she might merely have been a datasexual. (Well, she is a banker.)

I am indebted to DataThink for revealing that this term … Read more

Social networks don't cause trouble. It's just that they sometimes make it so that trouble escalates more easily.

This seems to be true in the case of Chou You-huang, a 34-year-old Taiwanese man who allegedly discovered his wife had a Facebook friend who was male and a little flirty.

As Agence France-Press tells it, Chou managed to contact the Facebook friend, Chuang Shih-chang. He asked Chuang, a 40-year-old gift shop owner, for a meeting, which allegedly took place at 2 a.m. last Saturday.

Chou reportedly didn't appear alone. He allegedly had two friends with him who … Read more

When he looks for lovers, my great engineer friend George relies on data. They need to have blue eyes, blond hair, an appreciation for fine dining and an IQ (and height) just two points below his.

Oh, and the lover must be a woman. Facebook's COO, Sheryl Sandberg, however, has declared that women should not marry George, except in exceptional circumstances.

For she is adamant that women should marry women. The reason is very simple: the data says so.

In an interview for the PBS/AOL "Makers" series, Sandberg didn't quote the source of her data … Read more

In human relationships, nothing should surprise. Indeed, the only extreme reaction ought to be disappointment.

This is what I feel after I learned from the excellent Beaver County Times that a man is being accused of placing a transmitter beneath his wife's bed.

His purpose was allegedly to discover if she was having sex.

The more alert among you might have noticed the phrase "his wife's bed." This would suggest either that the gentleman in question and his wife had an agreeable but separate sleeping arrangement. Or that there was trouble beneath their roof.

It seems … Read more

I woke up this morning, dreaming of the In-N-Out Burger that will be my Valentines meal, to discover serious accusations about love's labors lost.

In a quite pulsating treatise on CNN.com, experts were blaming an increase of one-night standing on technology.

Yes, apparently it creates sexual tension. Apparently, technology encourages you to offer sexual banter even before the first date. So, by the time you encounter the person in real life, you've already created the preconditions for a bedtime ending.

Verbal and romantic intimacy is being sacrificed on the altar of truncated messages, delivered with staccato urgency.… Read more