The dating website for adulterous affairs is planning to float in London. Here are all the dirty details

Ashley Madison. Is that some kind of shoe designer?

A sensible guess, but definitely wrong. Ashley Madison is a dating website aimed at people who are already married. The service brands itself as “discreet”, and simply picked two popular American girls’ names as the company name.

Wait, so they’re a dating service for adultery? Isn’t that immoral?

The company motto is: “Life is short. Have an affair.” The website offers affair guidelines, with advice on how to cover your tracks.

So yes, it’s immoral.

In its defence, the chief executive Noel Biderman says that someone wouldn’t go to Ashley Madison unless they were already planning on having an affair. The website simply means that they won’t cheat with a colleague or close friend. We should see the company as “a safe alternative,” he says.

What have Ashley Madison done now?

Nothing to do with broken hearts. Ashley Madison plans to float on the London Stock Exchange this year.

We don’t want such depraved companies here. Send them away.

This isn’t Singapore. In 2013, Ashley Madison had to abandon launch plans there after they met with staunch opposition. But the Canada-based company decided London was the best place for an IPO because of Europe’s relaxed approach towards infidelity.

This is England, not France.

Perhaps the figures will persuade you. Ashley Madison made $115m (£77m) last year and is worth $1bn (£670m). The company aims to raise $200m (£135m) from an initial public offering, which it will use to expand internationally.

Surely there can’t be that much demand?

Think again. There are 1.2 million people signed up to Ashley Madison in the UK, which is equivalent to around five per cent of the UK’s married population. It currently has 34 million members in 46 countries around the world, including South Africa, Japan and South Korea. Ashley Madison is planning to launch in Russia, Ukraine and the Baltic states later this Spring.

Sounds like the world’s worst kept secret. How long has it been around for?

Ashley Madison has been helping adulterers unite since 2001.

And how does it actually work? I’m asking for a friend.

Users don’t pay a subscription to search, but have to pay to send other Ashley Madison members messages or virtual “gifts”.

Each profile explains what they’re looking for, which can be specific as, “bubble bath for two, gentleness, sensual massage” and far more explicit examples, which we won't mention here. Users also state whether they’re looking for a cyber affair, long-term relationship or short-term fling. Around 70 per cent of members are men – no surprise there.

Ashley Madison will make sure nothing incriminating comes up on your credit card bill, and members are free to chat and arrange meetings themselves.

Thanks for that. I’ll tell my friend.

You don’t have to be so po-faced about it. As Noel Biderman told The Telegraph five years ago: “I can’t worry about people thinking I’m a ghoul, because I’m pretty sure that history will treat me differently. It’s 2010, people: time to redefine morality.”

This article was written by Olivia Goldhill from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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NOW WATCH: 5 subliminal sex messages hidden in ads for wholesome brands

In the 1990s, sculptor Matt McMullen designed a mannequin to give clothing stores something more flexible and attractive than your standard mall dummy. 

McMullen, who was documenting his progress on his website, started getting emails from people who weren't looking to use the dolls as retail accessories, but in their personal lives, asking if they were “anatomically correct.”

At the time, they weren’t. But McMullen recognized a growing market of customers and adjusted his mannequins to fit his new customers’ desires. The RealDoll was born. 

Today, McMullen’s company, Abyss Creation (NSFW), sells around 400 dolls per year. They're often referred to as "sex dolls," although they are not always used for sex.

Photographer Benita Marcussen recently met with a number of doll owners to understand the strange obsession. She found that doll owners tend to be extremely protective of their dolls, treating them with respect reserved for lovers, friends or cherished possessions. 

Marcussen's work was recently featured by Vocativ, but she has shared a number of the photos with us here.

The community of “real doll” enthusiasts is large and growing. DollForum.com, a network connecting aspiring and active doll owners, has over 40,000 users. The users can share experiences and pictures of their dolls or buy and sell new and used dolls.

Source: Doll Forum (NSFW)

Everard, shown here, owns a total of eight bodies, plus four extra faces. He has collected dolls for years. Like many doll owners, he is meticulous about his plastic friends, dressing them up with clothes, accessories, and makeup, and often treating them like “goddesses” and lovers.

Everard likes to take Rebekka and June to his backyard for photo shoots. His neighbors tend to go inside when he brings the dolls out. He has had only one relationship with a real woman and says that he has difficulties understanding them.

Financial arguments are some of the most difficult for couples to overcome, according to recent research from Kansas State University.

Meanwhile, the top predictor of divorce, by far, is the number and severity of money arguments a couple has during their relationship.

These revelations come from researcher Sonya Britt, the school's assistant professor of family studies and human services, who conducted a study on 4,500 couples as part of the National Survey of Families and Households.

As Britt discovered, arguments over money tend to be more intense than other types, thus harder for couples to move on from. And surprisingly, Britt's findings also showed that it doesn't matter how much money couples make; the results stayed the same across the board.

"In the study, we controlled for income, debt, and net worth," Britt noted in a press release. "Results revealed it didn't matter how much you made or how much you were worth. Arguments about money are the top predictor for divorce because it happens at all levels."

The fact that money troubles are the biggest predictor of divorce is pretty bad news for unmarried couples who are already having issues. However, some of the biggest financial red flags aren't always apparent until you actually get married, combine your finances, and merge your lives into one.

That's why it's important to gauge your partner's financial intelligence before you put a ring on it. Fortunately, there are some red flags you can see a mile away if you're actively looking for them.

Here are seven signs your boyfriend (or girlfriend) is seriously bad with money:

He's always running short on cash by payday.

When your boyfriend or girlfriend is chronically short on cash, that's your first red flag. Not only does it signify that they are struggling with a paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle, but it could mean that they don't have an emergency fund as well.

Of course, this doesn't necessarily spell financial disaster. A 2014 study from the Brookings Institute concluded that around one third of American families live paycheck to paycheck, with 66% of those families falling solidly in the middle class.

The key may be figuring out whether he is determined to break the cycle — or perfectly happy to be squeaking by in perpetuity.

If he's living paycheck to paycheck with a lavish standard of living, that might tell you that he doesn't see a problem. Meanwhile, if he's running low on cash while he works toward a better future, that might be perfectly forgivable. It's up to you to decide.

He can't keep a job.

In a poll of 925 single women conducted by dating service It's Just Lunch, 75% of women admitted that they had no interest in dating a man who was unemployed. That's certainly understandable, but what if it's only temporary? With the job market in a constant state of upheaval, it's pretty easy to see how an otherwise reliable man or woman could occasionally spend some time bouncing in between jobs.

The real problem occurs when the person you're dating is chronically unemployed and willing to walk away from the job they have for the smallest of reasons. Since most people would prefer to date and ultimately marry someone who can contribute to the family finances on a regular basis, this is definitely one red flag to watch out for. If he's unemployed temporarily, let it go. But if he's unemployed constantly, or worse, not even looking for a job, run and don't look back.

His credit is ruined … and he doesn't care.

I once dated a guy who had thousands of dollars in credit card debt that had just made its way to collections. Around the same time I realized this, I also learned that he had inherited an antique car that was worth around $12,000. Seeking a solution, I suggested he sell the car, which was really his only item of value, and pay off his debts once and for all. He balked at the idea. "I'm never selling that car," he said. "And I'm never paying off those credit cards either."

This, my friends, is the sign of someone who doesn't care about their credit — and won't care about yours either. When you date someone with ruined credit and no motivation to repair it, you're basically saying that you'll take responsibility for all financial matters that require a good credit score in the future — whether that's buying your first house, taking out a loan for the family car, or borrowing money to start your own business.

If your partner is actively trying to repair their credit, then that's an entirely different story. You can fix bad credit if you work hard enough, but you can't fix indifference.

He has a penchant for debt.

Sure, plenty of people have already ruined their credit, but there's a flip side to that. An entirely different group of people are deep in debt but perfectly capable of making their enormous monthly payments on time.

Although this problem may not be as easy to spot, it could still pose its own share of problems. For example, what happens when your future spouse is perfectly fine with taking on a $700 car payment? What happens when they think it's a swell idea to take out a $30,000 loan for a boat? What do you do when they want to take out a mortgage at the very cusp of what you can "afford?"

This is why finding a partner who pays their bills is only half of the battle. If you don't want to end up working until you're 80, you also need to weed out those who are willing to live their entire lives in debt. Also important to consider is where you live and how that affects your own liability for your spouse's debt. If you live in a community property state, for example, most debts incurred by one spouse during the marriage are owed by both of you. Consider yourself warned.

He's not saving for retirement.

If your boyfriend or girlfriend works at a medium-size employer or larger, chances are good that they have a company-sponsored 401k plan, and maybe even a company match. As most of us know, that company match can add up to a whole lot of free money over time, and that's especially true when you add in the magic of compounding and give it 10, 20, or 30 years to grow.

Unfortunately, some people will never take advantage of this perk, nor will they care to hear about it. As crazy as it sounds, an alarming percentage of people aren't saving for retirement at all. According to a national poll accompanying Bankrate's monthly Financial Security Index, a full 36% of Americans fall into that category. Imagine marrying someone only to find out that they had no intention of saving for retirement during their lifetime. How would you handle that?

No matter what, it's much easier to deal with this situation before you walk down the aisle. If it's early enough, you can fix it. If he doesn't want to, you might have to consider what it would really be like to retire alone.

He's overly generous.

Remember my boyfriend who had debt in collections? Yeah, that one. Unfortunately, that wasn't his only problem. When we first started dating, I was in awe of his generosity. Not only was he cute, but he was the type of guy who would buy a round of drinks for all his friends at the bar or offer to pick up the dinner tab on a double date.

Of course, that's all fine and dandy when money isn't an issue. But I obviously had a different take on his spending once I realized he was deep in debt.

The bottom line: Dating someone who is generous might be good for your soul. Meanwhile, dating someone who is simultaneously generous and broke is not quite as fun. Sometimes learning to spot the difference is the hardest part.

He can't balance his checkbook.

Here's a funny story — I once knew someone who could not balance his checkbook. No matter how hard he tried, he would constantly overdraw his account for small amounts. In fact, I vividly remember hearing him say he paid a $35 overdraft fee after buying a McDonald's value meal without checking his account balance first. That's one expensive cheeseburger.

It's funny to laugh about it now, but that's only because it didn't happen to me. Can you imagine being legally bound to this person?

We all know that balancing a checkbook is simple math. You add in your deposits and subtract your debits; it's as simple as that. Bouncing checks and overdrawing an account is just a symptom of a bigger problem: the fact that he's irresponsible. And if you couple up with him for good, you might just find that the bigger issue, his lack of responsibility, carries into other areas of your life as well.

When your boyfriend is bad with money

Finding out that the one you love is bad with money might be heartbreaking, but don't despair — at least not yet. It's possible that his financial problems are simply the result of his lack of financial education, and if you could get him to make some changes, things would be okay.

Some things are easier than others to fix. For example, if he isn't saving for retirement, he can start today. Or if he has terrible credit, he can work diligently to pay off his debts and get on the right track. Meanwhile, the fact that he's living paycheck to paycheck shouldn't necessarily scare you off if it's for good reason.

The biggest red flag to watch out for is someone who just doesn't care. Not only is he awful with money, but he has no intention to improve his situation or even try. He's the one you should watch out for because, with him, your entire life might end up being much more stressful than it needs to be.

Love may be blind, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to turn a blind eye to your partner's money woes. And the biggest thing to remember is this: When you tie the knot, his problems will be come yours much quicker than you think.

SEE ALSO: 6 money lies that can destroy your relationship

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Back in the 1920s, only 5% of Americans lived alone. In 1970, it was still less than 6%.

By 2013, it was 23%.

Not getting married is even more widespread. Over 50% of American adults are now single, compared with 37% in 1976. 

But as as Kate Bolick, the author of "Spinster: Making A Life of One's Own," tells Business Insider, America remains obsessed with coupledom —meaning there's little in the way of advice out there for people who want to be contentedly single. 

"All of us grow up with the expectation that we'll get married," says Bolick, who's a contributing editor for the Atlantic. "Society is organized around marriage, and the expectation is more pronounced for women."

In "Spinster," out in hardcover this week, Bolick weaves together her own adventures in solitude with a history of single women in American culture, notably profiling New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Edith Wharton. 

Bolick shared with us some of her best advice about being single.

Be intentional.

"Living alone requires really getting to know yourself, figuring out what you need in order to feel strong and healthy and happy," Bolick says. "There's no set prescription for what each of us needs; we have to figure it out. For me, there was a process of learning to be more conscientious with my time, so that I was creating a more purposeful solitude that felt nourishing."

While that figuring it out is a very individual process, the research on well-being suggests two interrelated paths: experimenting with different pursuits and reflecting on what was helpful.  

Accept that there will be loneliness. 

"If you're living alone, loneliness is a real thing," Bolick says. "There's nothing shameful about it — some loneliness can and should be withstood, and it exists within couples as well. It's an emotional state like happiness or fear. It's temporary unless it's not addressed. Don't be afraid of loneliness, but also be mindful of what kind of balance you need between solitude and socializing."

As a Buddhist might say, loneliness is something that will almost certainly surface in your mind when you're living on your own — and will almost certainly depart. The key is to observe it rather than be upset by it. 

Be in a space that you love.

"For me, it's been so important to find a physical space that I love," Bolick says. "My apartment, I find it to be beautiful, though somebody else might not. It's very old, it doesn't have luxury conveniences, and I would not mind a washer-dryer or a dishwasher — but there is something about the space that is very beautiful and calming to me. It is a haven that I come home to."

In other words, find your own feng shui. 

Take care of your friendships. 

"The idea of the 'friend tribe' was first written about in the early '90s," Bolick says. "It was shown to us on 'Seinfeld' and 'Sex and the City' — it's the celebration and romanticization of adult friendship."

Social science has found friendship to be crucial for coupled up and single people alike. Everything from our self-reported levels of happiness to the size of our waistlines is associated with the friends we have. Taking care of those friendships requires making people feel like they matter— like by asking them for favors, for instance. 

"Since the age of marriage has been rising, friendship has taken on a more essential role," Bolick says. "Our friends have become a much more integral part of our well-being." 

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More than half of American adults are single. 

According to the US Census, 53% of singles are women, 47% are men. 

But the way American culture treats single people of the different genders is — unsurprisingly — different. 

To Kate Bolick, author of "Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own," it has a lot do with pressures around marriage. In "Spinster," Bolick traces the place and status of single women in American history.

While everybody grows up with the expectation that we'll one day get married, she says, the pressures are a lot more pronounced for women, and there's a lot more fear involved.

"I think that women tend to feel that they have less choice, that it’s something they have to do, and don't have control over when it will happen," she tells Business Insider.

Then there are guys.

"When it comes to men, from what I've witnessed, men tend to hit 'marriage o'clock' around their early 30s, where they just decide that it’s time to get married, and marry whoever they're dating," Bolick says. "So they have a much more relaxed attitude toward marriage; it's something that they'll do when they're ready and they feel like it, and women don't have as relaxed a relationship to the idea of marriage." 

You can also see it in the words we use for singles — bachelor and spinster.

In "Spinster," Bolick unpacks the differences.

Here's the history of bachelor:

Bachelor originally referred to men of inferior status in professions so demanding they precluded marriage. In thirteenth-century France this meant, for instance, a theological candidate who held merely a bachelor's degree instead of a master's.  

Around 1300 the word crossed into English to describe low-ranking knights. Much later, Victorian matchmakers appropriated the term and added eligible, for an unmarried man blessed with financial and social inducements, and confirmed, for any who wanted to remain that way. By the late nineteenth century the term had neutralized to simply mean "unmarried man," as it still does today.

And spinster:

[Spinster] originated in fifteenth-century Europe as an honorable way to describe the girls, most them unmarried, who spun thread for a living — one of the very few respectable professions available to women. By the 1600s the term had expanded to include any unmarried woman, whether or not she spun. 

Not until colonial America did spinster become synonymous with the British old maid, a disparagement that cruelly invokes maiden (a fertile virgin girl) to signify that this matured version will never outgrown her virginal state, and is so far past her prime that she never will. 

At a time when procreation was necessary to building a new population, the biblical imperative to "be fruitful and multiply" felt particularly urgent, and because only wives, of course, were allowed to have sex, the settlers consider solitary women sinful, a menace to society. If a woman wasn't married by twenty-three she became a "spinster." 

If she was still unwed at twenty-six, she was written off as a hopeless "thornback," a species of flat spiny fish — a discouraging start to America's long evolution in getting comfortable with the idea of autonomous women. 

Other cultures are even more brutal to single women. In South Korea, for instance, women who die without ever being married become Cheonyeo gwishin, or maiden ghosts — since they never served their purpose in life of winning a husband. 

While not quite as intense as in Confucian societies, the historical legacy in America is that the right role of women is to serve her parents, husband, and children. Because how else would the colonies have enough humans to continue to exist? While the pressure isn't as acute as it was in the 18th and 19th centuries, 21st century women still feel a greater pressure than guys to get hitched — though singles are increasingly able to create meaning in their lives beyond those primary relationships. 

SEE ALSO: 4 things single people should know about living alone

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It's called a "marriage squeeze." 

It's what happens when cultural norms and state policies combine in places like China and India to make the birthrates of boys greatly outpace those of girls.

Then, when those boys come of age, there aren't enough would-be brides to go around. 

This is a huge problem for at least two reasons:

• Historically, heterosexual marriage is seen as a necessary part of being included in society in these two countries.

• As the New York Times reports, having "a shortage of marriageable women, results in higher rates of crime, including rape, committed by young unmarried men."

The squeeze stems largely from years of sex-selective abortions. In China, the one-child policy forced the abortions and in India, increasing availability of prenatal screening and a preference for boys contributed to the imbalance.

Where there isn't sex-selective abortion, infant girls are killed.

Today, the imbalance is pretty profound: 

• According to a 2013 BBC report, there are 20 million more men in China then there are women.

• According to that same report, more than 33% of men aged 25 to 29 in China are unmarried, and about 20% of women are unwed. 

• According to 2011 census data, there are 37 million more men than women in India.

And as data collected by the Economist shows, the imbalance is getting even more extreme:

• From 2010 to 2015, China's birth ratio was 116 boys to 100 girls, India's was 111 to 100. The natural rate is 105 to 100. 

• If births rates were normal, China would have 66 million more girls born in 2010. For India, it would have been 43 million. 

• In 2050, India will have an estimated 30% more men looking to marry than single women. In 2055, it will be the same.

• In China in 2050, there will be an estimated 186 single men looking to marry for every 100 single women. For India in 2060, there will be 191 single men looking to marry for every 100 women.

Because of this imbalance, a "marriage queue" starts to develop.

Again, the Economist explains: 

At stage one, a cohort of women reaches marriageable age (say, 20-24); they marry among the cohort of men aged 25-29. But there are slightly more men than women, so some members of the male cohort remain on the shelf. Later, two new cohorts reach marriageable age. This time, the men left over from the previous round (who are now in their early thirties) are still looking for wives and compete with the cohort of younger men. The women choose husbands from among this larger group. So after the second round even more men are left on the shelf. And so on. A backlog of unmarried men starts to pile up.

Since men in India and China tend to marry women who are younger than them or have less education, professional, educated women in Mumbai and Shanghai have more trouble finding a husband — provided that they're interested in such a thing. That creates an increase in the number of single women age 27 or older, who in China are unhelpfully called sheng nu, or leftover women. 

The increase of women's status in society pushes the trend even further. 

As can be seen across the globe, the more educated and higher status women become, the more likely they are to put off marriage or avoid getting hitched at all. In the United States, the average age of marriage for women is 27 and 29 for men, both all-time highs. In Europe, the average age of marriage for women is even higher: 32 years old in Sweden, 31 in France and Ireland, and 30 in Italy. In the richest parts of Asia, the average age of marriage is going up, too: In Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong, the average age of first marriage for women is 29 to 30. 

With all these trends combining, marriage in China and India is becoming ever-so-slowly more like marriage in the United States — optional.

SEE ALSO: The biggest difference between single women and single men in 2015

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Every year, a little over 2 million American men lose their bachelerhood. 

What is this word, bachelor?

The history is pretty loaded.

In "Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own," cultural critic Kate Bolick lays out ot:

Bachelor originally referred to men of inferior status in professions so demanding they precluded marriage. In thirteenth-century France this meant, for instance, a theological candidate who held merely a bachelor's degree instead of a master's.

Around 1300 the word crossed into English to describe low-ranking knights. Much later, Victorian matchmakers appropriated the term and added eligible, for an unmarried man blessed with financial and social inducements, and confirmed, for any who wanted to remain that way. By the late nineteenth century the term had neutralized to simply mean "unmarried man," as it still does today.

The term got its first recorded mention in regard to a single dude in "the Canterbury Tales" by Geoffry Chaucer, surely the coolest book to be published in 1475. Not unlike the descriptions attached to bachelors today, Chaucer describes the Squire, the bachelor he mentions, as "lusty." 

In 1903, British scholar Alfred W. Pollard explained the bachelor thusly: 

'Bachelor' in Chaucer's time meant not merely an unmarried man, but distinctively a probationer for the honour of knighthood, or young knight. So Cambuscan in the Squire's Tale is said to have been "Yong, fressh and strong, in armes desirous As any bacheler of al his hous." In like manner a Bachelor at the university was a probationer for the full degree of Master.

So in multiple cases, a bachelor is a (usually) young man who's yet to come to full fruition — a squire before becoming a knight, an undergraduate before becoming a graduate, a single young buck before a committed married man. 

Perhaps that's why the French expression for bachelor party is so lyrical and extreme: enterrement de vie de garçon, or "the burial of the life as a boy."

SEE ALSO: 4 things single people should know about living alone

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Scott Barry Kaufman, the Scientific Director of the Imagination Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, stopped by Business Insider to explain the results of a recent study he and a group of colleagues conducted about what types of traits people find most and least attractive. 

Produced by Alana Kakoyiannis. Camera by Jason Gaines.

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In her new book "No One Understands You and What To Do About It," Heidi Grant Halvorson tells readers a story about her friend, Tim.

When Tim started a new job as a manager, one of his top priorities was communicating to his team that he valued each member’s input.

So at team meetings, as each member spoke up about whatever project they were working on, Tim made sure he put on his “active-listening face” to signal that he cared about what each person was saying.

But after meeting with him a few times, Tim’s team got a very different message from the one he intended to send. “After a few weeks of meetings,” Halvorson explains, “one team member finally summoned up the courage to ask him the question that had been on everyone’s mind.”

That question was: “Tim, are you angry with us right now?” When Tim explained that he wasn’t at all angry — that he was just putting on his “active-listening face” — his colleague gently explained that his active-listening face looked a lot like his angry face.

To Halvorson, a social psychologist at Columbia Business School who has extensively researched how people perceive one another, Tim’s story captures one of the primary problems of being a human being: Try though you might to come across in a certain way to others, people often perceive you in an altogether different way.

These kinds of misunderstandings lead to conflict and resentment not just at work, but at home too. How many fights between couples have started with one person misinterpreting what another says and does? He stares at his plate at dinner while she’s telling a story and she assumes he doesn’t care about what she’s saying, when really he is admiring the beautiful meal she made.

She goes to bed early rather than watching their favorite television show together like they usually do, and he assumes she’s not interested in spending time with him, when really she’s just exhausted after a tough day at work.

Most of the time, Halvorson says, people don’t realize they are not coming across the way they think they are. “If I ask you,” Halvorson told me, “about how you see yourself — what traits you would say describe you — and I ask someone who knows you well to list your traits, the correlation between what you say and what your friend says will be somewhere between 0.2 and 0.5. There’s a big gap between how other people see us and how we see ourselves.”

This gap arises, as Halvorson explains in her book, from some quirks of human psychology. First, most people suffer from what psychologists call “the transparency illusion” — the belief that what they feel, desire, and intend is crystal clear to others, even though they have done very little to communicate clearly what is going on inside their minds.

Because the perceived assume they are transparent, they might not spend the time or effort to be as clear and forthcoming about their intentions or emotional states as they could be, giving the perceiver very little information with which to make an accurate judgment.

“Chances are,” Halvorson writes, “how you look when you are slightly frustrated isn’t all that different from how you look when you are a little concerned, confused, disappointed, or nervous.

Your ‘I’m kind of hurt by what you just said’ face probably looks an awful lot like your ‘I’m not at all hurt by what you just said’ face. And the majority of times that you’ve said to yourself, ‘I made my intentions clear,’ or ‘He knows what I meant,’ you didn’t and he doesn’t.”

The perceiver, meanwhile, is dealing with two powerful psychological forces that are warping his ability to read others accurately. First, according to a large body of psychological research, individuals are what psychologists call “cognitive misers.” That is, people are lazy thinkers.

According to the work of the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, there are two ways that the mind processes information, including information about others: through cognitive processes that Kahneman calls System 1 and System 2. These “systems,” which Kahneman describes in his book "Thinking Fast and Slow," serve as metaphors for two different kinds of reasoning.

System 1 processes information quickly, intuitively, and automatically. System 1 is at work, as Halvorson notes in her book, when individuals engage in effortless thinking, like when they do simple math problems like 3 + 3 = 6, or when they drive on familiar roads as they talk to a friend in the car, or when they see someone smile and immediately know that that person is happy.

When it comes to social perception, System 1 uses shortcuts, or heuristics, to come to conclusions about another person. There are many shortcuts the mind relies on when it reads others facial expressions, body language, and intentions, and one of the most powerful ones is called the “primacy effect” and it explains why first impressions are so important.

According to the primacy effect, the information that one person learns about another in his early encounters with that person powerfully determines how he will see that person ever after.

For example, referring to research conducted about the primacy effect, Halvorson points out that children who perform better on the first half of a math test and worse on the second half might be judged to be smarter than those who perform less well on the first part of the test, but better on the second part.

The two students would have performed objectively the same, but one would benefit from the way the primacy effect biases the mind. “The implications of findings like these for late bloomers,” Halvorson writes, “or anyone who struggles initially only to excel later, are terrifying.”

In comparison to the biased and faulty System 1 style of thinking, System 2 processes information in a conscious, rational, and deliberative manner. System 2 is at work, for example, when an individual does more complicated math problems, like algebra, when he is driving on foreign roads, or when he is trying to figure out what his supervisor meant when she left a cryptic note on his desk saying “call me immediately.” Unlike System 1, where thinking is automatic and effortless, System 2 thinking is effortful.

The important point about System 2 is that it can correct System 1 by evaluating, for instance, whether the first impression recorded by System 1 — that Johnny is bad at math — should continue to determine how the perceiver sees Johnny. If there is overriding evidence saying that the first impression needs to be updated — Johnny is scoring consistently well on his other math tests — then the perceiver can engage in System 2 thinking to update his impression of Johnny.

But System 2 demands a lot of effort and mental energy. According to Halvorson, people have to be really motivated to engage in System 2 thinking. For example, the teacher might only feel the need to reevaluate Johnny’s performance after Johnny or his parents complain that he’s not being graded fairly or if Johnny has suddenly and unexpectedly emerged as the star of the class.

Halvorson points out that because most people are cognitive misers, content to trade off speed for accuracy in thinking about others, perception usually ends with System 1.

These two systems of reasoning lead individuals to perceive others in two distinct stages — a fast but flawed stage, and a reflective and deliberative stage. One study by the psychologist Dan Gilbert of Harvard University and his colleagues sheds light on how perception occurs in two phases.

Participants came into a lab and watched seven video clips of a woman speaking to a stranger. In five of the clips, the woman appeared to be stressed out and anxious. Though the video was silent, there were subtitles indicating the topics that the woman and the stranger were talking about.

Gilbert and his colleagues wanted to see what the research subjects thought of this woman’s personality. In one condition, participants were told that the woman and stranger were talking about neutral topics for all seven clips, like restaurants and books.

In the other condition, participants were told that in the five clips in which the woman appeared anxious, she was talking to the stranger about touchy subjects, like sexual fantasies, personal secrets, and life failures. Gilbert also asked some of the participants to memorize the discussion topics that appeared in the subtitles. The point of that task was to keep those participants mentally busy so that they could not enter the second phase of perception, which corresponds with Kahneman’s System 2.

At the end of the experiment, the participants were asked whether or not this woman was an “anxious person.” When the participants were not distracted by the memorization task, they rated her in an expected way: They thought she was anxious when she was discussing neutral topics and acting stressed out, and they rated her as not anxious when she was discussing stressful topics and acting stressed out.

These research subjects were able to enter the second phase of perception by taking the woman’s situation into account. Anyone asked about her sexual fantasies would likely feel uncomfortable. But those who were kept mentally busy came to a very different conclusion about this woman’s personality. Regardless of what situation she was in, they concluded that she was indeed an “anxious person.” For these people, acting anxious equaled being anxious.

Perception is also clouded by the perceiver’s own experiences, emotions, and biases, which also contributes to misunderstandings between people. As Halvorson puts it, everyone has an agenda when they interact with another person. That agenda is usually trying to determine one of three pieces of information about the perceived: Is this person trustworthy? Is this person useful to me? And does this person threaten my self-esteem?

How a perceiver answers those questions will determine whether she judges the other person in a positive or negative way. Take self-esteem. Researchers have long found that individuals need to maintain a positive sense of themselves to function well.

When someone’s sense of herself is threatened, like when she interacts with someone who she thinks is better than her at a job they both share, she judges that person more harshly. One study found, for example, that attractive job applicants were judged as less qualified by members of the same sex than by members of the opposite sex. The raters who were members of the same sex, the researchers found, felt a threat to their self-esteem by the attractive job applicants while the members of the opposite sex felt no threat to their self-esteem.

Given the many obstacles to accurate perception, what do people have to do to come across they way they intend to?

One study hints at an answer. In the study, published in 1998 in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, research subjects came into the lab to conduct a mock negotiation with one other person. Each party chose a specific goal for the negotiation, like “gain the liking of the other person” or “hold firm to my own personal opinions,” which they went into the negotiation trying to achieve, but weren’t necessarily trying to reveal to the other person.

After the negotiation, each party was asked what the other person’s goal was, which was an indication of how transparent the other person was. In the study, research subjects only guessed the goal of their partner correctly 26 percent of the time. Meanwhile, more than half of them thought that they were clearly relaying their goals and intentions to the other person. The lesson of this study is that people may think that they are being clear, but they’re not.

“If you want to solve the problem of perception,” Halvorson says, “it’s much more practical for you to decide to be a good sender of signals than to hope that the perceiver is going to go into phase two of perception. It’s not realistic to expect people to go to that effort.

Can you imagine how exhausting it would be to weigh every possible motivation of another person? Plus, you can’t control what’s going on inside of another person’s mind, but you can control how you come across.”

People who are easy to judge — people who send clear signals to others, as Halvorson suggests people do—are, researchers have found, ultimately happier and more satisfied with their relationships, careers, and lives than those who are more difficult to read.

It’s easy to understand why: Feeling understood is a basic human need. When people satisfy that need, they feel more at peace with themselves and with the people around them, who see them closer to how they see themselves.

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Bella DePaulo argues that you’re “socially single” if you’re sexually or emotionally involved with someone but the two of you don’t consider yourself a couple, or don’t meet society’s definition of coupledom (which ranges from exclusivity to cohabitation).

Further, you’re “personally single” if you think of yourself as single, even if you’re coupled.

That her definitions apply to men and women alike might seem to suggest that the single experience is the same regardless of gender.

But the old-fashioned synonyms that remain in circulation indicate otherwise.

Bachelor originally referred to men of inferior status in professions so demanding, they precluded marriage.

In thirteenth-century France this meant, for instance, a theological candidate who held merely a bachelor’s degree instead of a master’s.

Around 1300 the word crossed into English to describe low-ranking knights.

Much later, Victorian matchmakers appropriated the term and added eligible, for an unmarried man blessed with financial and social inducements, and confirmed, for any who wanted to remain that way. 

By the late nineteenth century the term had neutralized to simply mean “unmarried man,” as it still does today.

The term spinster follows an inverse trajectory.

It originated in fifteenth-century Europe as an honorable way to describe the girls, most of them unmarried, who spun thread for a living—one of very few respectable professions available to women. By the 1600s the term had expanded to include any unmarried woman, whether or not she spun.2

Not until colonial America did spinster become synonymous with the British old maid, a disparagement that cruelly invokes maiden (a fertile virgin girl) to signify that this matured version has never outgrown her virginal state, and is so far past her prime that she never will.

At a time when procreation was necessary to building a new population, the biblical imperative to “be fruitful and multiply” felt particularly urgent, and because only wives, of course, were allowed to have sex, the settlers considered solitary women sinful, a menace to society.

If a woman wasn’t married by twenty-three she became a “spinster.”

If she was still unwed at twenty-six, she was written off as a hopeless “thornback,” a species of flat, spiny fish—a discouraging start to America’s long evolution in getting comfortable with the idea of autonomous women.

During the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, of the nearly two hundred people accused of witchcraft—all of them from the little farming villages and seaside towns I grew up among—the majority were adult women at the fringes of society, whether poor single mothers or widows whose wealth inspired jealousy.3

Indeed, I was raised in spinster territory.

Throughout the nineteenth century, New England harbored more single women than anywhere else in the country, with the highest proportion in Massachusetts, which had more than double that of the American population as a whole.

This was largely because of the massive losses sustained by the Civil War, which of course ravaged the whole country; historically, wars create a radical spike in the single female population. (In ancient Rome, repeated military campaigns so drastically depleted the pool of marriageable freemen that some single women tried to marry slaves, to much public resistance.)

But other factors—the bruised postwar economy, which made it difficult for men to professionalize and marry early; a regional commitment to intellectual and literary pursuits, which extended to women—created a social atmosphere in which single women were allowed, a little bit, to flourish.

Few people, if any, seriously use the term spinster today, and yet we all agree on what she is.

Oxford English Dictionary: “An unmarried woman, especially an older woman thought unlikely to marry”; American Heritage Dictionary: “Often offensive. A woman, especially an older one, who has not married”; the dictionary on my MacBook Air: “An unmarried woman, typically an older woman beyond the usual age for marriage. Usage note: In modern everyday English, ‘spinster’ cannot be used to mean simply ‘unmarried woman’; it is now always a derogatory term, referring or alluding to a stereotype of an older woman who is unmarried, childless, prissy, and repressed.”

Only Black’s Law Dictionary offers a neutral definition: “The addition given in legal proceedings and in conveyancing to a woman who has never been married.”

Notes

1 Today the federal age of consent, which applies to sexual acts that involve travel between different states or countries, is sixteen, which also holds in thirty-one states; of the remaining states, eight set the age at seventeen, and ten at eighteen.

2 When servants became common, so did neologisms that likewise doubled for occupation and marital status: the German magd, the British maid. In the nineteenth century, when single women recently immigrated from Ireland dominated America’s domestic workforce, the popular Celtic girl’s name Bridget became the generic term for any Irish female servant.

3 Of the tens of thousands executed for witchcraft in central Europe from 1450 to 1750, three-quarters were widows over fifty who lived alone. Which is to say: their crime was the audacity of existing without a husband.

Copyright © 2015 by Kate Bolick.  From SPINSTER: Making a Life of One’s Own, published by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, New York. Reprinted with permission. 

SEE ALSO: 'Bachelor' doesn't mean what you think it means

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Men just want sex more than women. I’m sure you’ve heard that one. Stephen Fry even went as far as suggesting in 2010 that straight women only went to bed with men because sex was “the price they are willing to pay for a relationship”.

Or perhaps you’ve even heard some of the evidence. In 1978 two psychologists, Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield, did what became a famous experiment on the topic– not least because it demonstrated how much fun you can have as a social psychologist. Using volunteers, Clark and Hatfield had students at Florida State University approach people on campus and deliver a pick-up line.

The volunteers always began the same “I’ve noticed you around campus. I find you to be very attractive”, they said. They varied what they said next according to one of three randomly chosen options. Either “would you go out tonight?”, or “will you come over to my apartment?”, or “would you go to bed with me?” (if these phrases sound familiar, it may be because they form the chorus of Touch and Go’s 1980s Jazz-pop hit “Would You Go To Bed With Me”– probably the only pop song whose lyrics are lifted entirely from the methods section of a research paper).

In Clark and Hatfield’s research, both men and women were approached (always by volunteers of the opposite sex). The crucial measure was whether they said yes or no. And you can probably guess the results: although men and women were equally likely to accept the offer of a date (about half said yes and half said no), the two sexes differed dramatically in how they responded to the offer of casual sex. None of the women approached took up the offer of sex with a complete stranger. Three-quarters of the men did (yes, more than were willing to just go on a date with a complete stranger).

A matter of interpretation

But since this experiment, controversy has raged about how it should be interpreted. One school of thought is that men and women make different choices because of different sex drives, sex drives which are different for deeply seated biological reasons to do with the logic of evolution. Because, this logic goes, there is a hard limit on how many children a women can have she should be focused on quality in her sexual partners – she wants them to invest in parenting, or at the very least make a high-grade genetic contribution. If she has a child with the wrong partner, she uses up one of a very limited number of opportunities to reproduce. So she should be choosy.

A man on the other hand, shouldn’t be so concerned about quality. There’s no real limit on the number of children he can have, if he has them with different women, so he should grab every sexual opportunity he can, regardless of the partner. The costs are low, there are only benefits.

This evolutionary logic, relentlessly focused as it is on reproduction and survival, does provide a consistent explanation for the differences Clark and Hatfield observed, but it isn’t the only explanation.

The problem is that the participants in this experiment aren’t abstract representatives of all human men and women. They are particular men and women from a particular place and time, who exist in a particular social context – university students in American society at the end of the 20th century. And our society treats men and women very differently. So how about this alternate take: maybe men and women’s sex drives are pretty similar, but the experiment just measures behaviour which is as shaped by society as much as biology.

Taking out the social factor

This month, new research published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, gives a vital handle on the question of whether women really don’t want sex as much as men do.

Two German researchers, Andreas Baranowski and Heiko Hecht, replicated the original Clark and Hatfield study, but with some vital changes. First they showed that the original result still held, even among German university students in the 21st century – and they showed that it still held if you asked people in a nightclub rather than on campus. But the pair reasoned that one factor in how women respond to invitations to sex may be fear – fear of reputational damage in a culture which judges women’s sexual activity differently from men’s, and fear of physical harm from an encounter with a male stranger. They cite one study which found that 45% of US women have experienced sexual violence of some kind.

So, in order to find out if women in these experiments were held back by fear, they designed an elaborate cover scenario designed to make the participants believe they could accept offers of sex without fear of anyone finding out, or of physical danger. Participants were invited into a lab under the ruse that they would be helping a dating company evaluate their compatibility rating algorithm. They were presented with ten pictures of members of the opposite sex and led to believe that all ten had already agreed to meet up with them (either for a date, or for sex). With these, and a few other convincing details, the experimenters hoped that participants would reveal their true attitudes to dating, or hooking up for sex with, total strangers, unimpeded by fear of what might happen to them if they said yes.

The results were dramatic. Now there was no difference between the dating and the casual sex scenarios, large proportions of both men and women leap at the chance to meet up with a stranger with the potential for sex – 100% of the men and 97% of the women in the study chose to meet up for a date or sex with at least one partner. The women who thought they had the chance to meet up with men for sex, chose an average of slightly less than three men who they would like to have an encounter with. The men chose an average of slightly more than three women who they would like to have an encounter with.

Men are from Earth – and so are women

The study strongly suggests that the image of women as sexually choosy and conservative needs some dramatic qualification. In the right experimental circumstances, women’s drive for casual sex looks similar to men’s. Previous experiments had leapt to a conclusion about biology, when they’d actually done experiments on behaviour which is part-determined by society. It’s an important general lesson for anyone who wants to draw conclusions about gender differences, in whatever area of behaviour.

There was still a gender difference in this new experiment – men chose more partners out of ten to meet up with, but still we can’t say that the effect of our culture was washed out. All the people in the experiment were brought up to expect different attitudes to their sexual behaviour based on their gender and to expect different risks of saying yes to sexual encounters (or of saying yes and then changing their minds).

Even with something as biological as sex, when studying human nature it isn’t easy to separate out the effect of society on how we think, feel and act. This new study gives an important update to an old research story which too many have interpreted as saying something about unalterable differences between men and women. The real moral may be about the importance of completely alterable differences in the way society treats men and women.

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Genghis Khan married his wife when he was 16 and together they had four kids.

Today, geneticists estimate that 16 million men in Asia (that's 1 out of every 200) are direct descendants of Khan.

Now, I'm not saying Khan cheated on his wife or anything. After all, I wasn't there.

But Khan is on the historical record claiming that his absolute favorite thing in the world, aside from murdering his enemies and stealing their horses, was to rape their wives and daughters.

And considering he conquered all of Asia and half of Europe, it's safe to say that's a lot of wives and daughters.

I mean, historians estimate that he was responsible for over 40 million deaths. That was 11% of the world population back then. Genocide is hard and stressful work. So yeah, if he wanted to sneak a little (forced) nookie in on the side, who was going to stop him? 1

But get this, Genghis Khan wasn't the only man to ever cheat on his wife. I know, I know. It surprised me too. But it turns out that infidelity is actually not uncommon in both men and women. In fact, surveys estimate that almost one-fourth of all marriages experience infidelity at some point. And that's just counting the people who answered honestly or found out about it. 2

I get a lot of email these days. People tell me all about their lives and sometimes ask me questions. Dad doesn't talk to me anymore. My friends think I'm a nerd. What do I name my dog? Hi, will you marry me?

A lot of these emails involve people's relationships. And a lot of these relationships are about as healthy as the Ebola virus. Cold, distant, loveless, and flesh-eating. I get to hear the stories about the heartbreak and loneliness, the lying and cheating, and the pain. Always the pain.

Inevitably these emails always end with some form of the same question: "Why?" Why does he/she do this to me? Why does he/she not care anymore? Why won't he/she change?

The algorithm for staying faithful

Tolstoy said that all happy relationships are the same, but each unhappy relationship is unique in its own way. 3 I suppose that's true. But I do think the question of fidelity, of why some people choose to remain faithful and others do not, is fairly straightforward and easily answered.

I find that it's very hard for most people to be logical about infidelity. They start raging all over the place and throwing people's s--- out on the lawn. Or they get so sad and hurt that they can't look at the situation reasonably and see all of the warning signs stretching out miles behind them.

So let's break this down logically. I know algorithms aren't exactly romantic or sexy. But then again, neither is cheating. So f--- it, you get an algorithm.

Self-gratification > intimacy = cheating

1. As humans, we all have a natural desire for self-gratification. Good food. Good sex. Little work. Lots of sleep. Porn and video games and corn flakes.
2. As humans, we also all have a natural desire for intimacy and to feel loved by somebody else, to feel as though we are sharing our lives with somebody.
3. Unfortunately, these two needs are often contradictory. To achieve that intimacy and love, you have to sacrifice your own self-gratification at times. And to achieve self-gratification, you often have to sacrifice some love and intimacy. This can be as simple as watching a movie you don't really like or attending some boring work party you don't care about. But it can also be deep and complex, like being open about your fears and insecurities to your partner or making a conscious commitment to be monogamous with that person for an indefinite amount of time.
4. If a person values self-gratification more than the intimacy they gain from a relationship, then they will stop sacrificing for the relationship and are likely to end up cheating. If a person values the intimacy they gain from a relationship more than self-gratification, then they will willingly sacrifice some of their self-gratification to remain faithful.
5. Think of it like a scale. On one side you have self-gratification and on the other you have intimacy. If at any point the self-gratification side outweighs the intimacy side, well, then you get a cheater.
6. There are two ways this can happen. The first way is that a person is just shallow and selfish and needs to be gratified constantly. The second reason is that the relationship is failing to provide sufficient intimacy and desire.

Let's unpack these two reasons separately.

Reason #1: An oversized need for self-gratification

In my eyes, the definition of maturity is the ability to defer self-gratification in favor of more important long-term goals.

You don't masturbate at work because that would get you fired. You don't eat chocolate cake for breakfast every morning because that would give you a heart attack by the age of 32. You don't mainline heroin straight into your eyeballs before picking your kids up from school because, well, do I really have to explain that one?

Sure, these things feel nice, but you have larger and more important concerns and you're able to defer your own gratification to meet those concerns.

This is called "maturity." It's called "being an adult." It's called "not being a f--- up."

Cheating falls under the same umbrella here. Sure, it may feel good to rub your genitals all over that beautiful stranger, but a mature person is capable of stepping back and deferring their gratification in favor of a more important life-long commitment.

Self-gratifying cheaters come in two flavors: miserable over-compensators and people in power.

The miserable over-compensators are constantly focused on their own gratification because they feel so miserable about themselves that they need to make themselves feel good to cover it up all the time. Chances are that if your cheating deadbeat of an ex-boyfriend/girlfriend is a miserable over-compensator, cheating isn't the only destructive self-gratifying behavior they pursue. They may be a heavy drinker, a hard partier, a drug user, or a social climber.

Or they may just try to take over the world.

The people in power are just that, people in high positions of power. 5 They're Genghis Khan. Or more recently, Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger. They are people who don't have anyone to say "no" to them or those who don't face any real tangible repercussions for their actions.

But these don't just need to be people with social power. These can be people who are given complete power over the relationship, people who are shown no repercussions for their actions by their partners. Yes, you can unwittingly enable your partner to cheat on you. Which brings us to the second reason.

Reason #2: The lack of real intimacy 

It's not rocket science to say that the likelihood of infidelity in a relationship is directly proportional to how miserable the relationship is.

The problem is that many people don't recognize the misery in their own relationships. They come from a family full of miserable relationships and/or have a long history of miserable relationships, so to them, it's not even miserable, it's just normal.

Then they get surprised when wifey is f------ the milk man. Everything was so good, what happened?

No, it wasn't so good buckeroo. Let me explain why.

Look, there are two relationship patterns that usually end up with somebody cheating. Both involve poor boundaries. And both create an illusion that "everything is great," when really it's a festering pile of cow s--- with big red hearts painted on it.

The first situation is when one partner feels as though they "do everything" for the other partner. They take care of them, give them everything they want, and in some cases support them. The person feels like a goddamn saint and then what happens? They get cheated on.

The reason this is actually a toxic situation is that when you do everything for your partner, when you take care of all of their problems and show them that no matter what happens you will always make it better for them, you show them that there are essentially no repercussions for their actions.

They lose their job because they were masturbating at the office again and you decide to support them. Then they spend the next six months loafing around on your couch while you tirelessly send out their resume for them. What makes you think they're going to change? What makes you think they will ever stop and question their own behavior?

If you had a dog that continuously pissed on your rug and every time you just cleaned up the rug because OMIGOD I LOVE HER, why would the dog ever stop pissing on it?

That's what happens when these people cheat on you. You're actually surprised when you've been tolerating and enabling the exact behavior that led them to cheat all along. No, it's not your "fault," but you sure as s--- weren't helping the matter.

Believe it or not, a healthy and loving relationship requires that people say "no" to one another on occasion. It requires that each individual stands up for themselves and their needs. Because only then can two people, as self-respecting individuals, discuss what will work and what won't work for them in a relationship.

The other situation where cheating always ends up happening is when one partner is insanely possessive and jealous.

Let me ask you this, if you were dating somebody who regularly looked through your phone without permission, demanded to know where you were at all times, got rips--- pissed off every time you went out with your friends without him/her and screamed at you until blood vessels popped in their face if you go a single day without calling or texting, why wouldn't you cheat? 6

I mean, this person is essentially treating you like you already cheated, even though you did nothing wrong. So why not cheat? It won't get any worse.

And that's exactly what happens. "Well, my husband yells at me every day anyway, and now that I'm with my friends and we've have had a few apple-tinis, I realize I haven't been happy with him in about a year, so yeah, why don't I kiss this cute guy hitting on me right now? He's actually nice to me. And I'm going to get yelled at when I go home anyway. So why not?"

And boom, the milkman strikes again.

Possessive/jealous behavior communicates extreme insecurity and a lack of self-respect. How can your partner respect you if you are incapable of tolerating any sort of discomfort in the relationship whatsoever?

True sexy confidence comes not from fighting for self-gratification, but rather from being comfortable with deferring gratification. Which brings us to …

How to prevent your a-- from getting cheated on

Step 1: Do not date somebody who cannot defer self-gratification well.

This goes without saying, but don't fall in love with the first person who looks at you without grimacing.

Look, dating a self-gratifier can be awesome, as long as you continue to gratify them. But you need to learn to look past the feel-goods and look at how this person actually lives their life. Are they capable of making sacrifices for those around them? Are they impulsive? Does their life appear to be filled with unnecessary drama? Do they take responsibility for their actions?

The problem with people who base their lives around their own gratification is that they often appear confident to people who are anxious or insecure. I remember when I met my first girlfriend, one of the things I loved about her was that if she wanted something she just went and did it. I was so insecure and inhibited at the time that I thought this was an amazing display of confidence.

What I later found out was that it was actually an amazing display of self-gratification. As soon as she wanted another pair of genitals, well, there they were.

As I described in this article, true sexy confidence only exists when someone is comfortable with what they don't have. True confidence comes from being able to defer and give up one's own gratification and desires and take the appropriate actions when necessary.

The other issue with people who date self-gratifiers is that they think to themselves, "Well, he's so loving and happy when he's with me, why would he ever want to be with somebody else?"

Yeah, it's because he was dating you for the self-gratification, not the intimacy. So of course he loved being with you, as long as it was on his terms. As soon as you quit providing gratification for him, he went and found somebody else who did.

Step 2: Enforce healthy boundaries.

That means standing up for yourself. That means declaring what is and is not acceptable in the relationship both for yourself and your partner. That means sticking by those declarations and following through on them.

That means you recognize that you are not responsible for your partner's happiness nor are they responsible for yours. That you do not have a right to demand certain actions from them nor do they have a right to demand certain actions from you.

That means that they are responsible for their own struggles just as you are responsible for yours.

That means that you realize often the most loving and compassionate thing you can do for a loved one is allow them to deal with their struggles themselves.

The point of a relationship is not for you to have all of your life's problems fixed by your partner, nor is it for you to fix all of your partner's life problems.

The point of a relationship is to have two individuals unconditionally support each other as they deal with their own problems together.

Step 3: Always be willing to leave.

This comes up in a lot of my replies to those emails I get, and it often catches people off guard.

But a relationship is only as strong as each person's willingness to leave. Note that I didn't say desire to leave, but the willingness to leave. Every healthy relationship requires the occasional loving but stern "no." Otherwise nothing will ever change because there's no reason for it to change.

A wise friend of mine told me years ago that after two divorces the most important lesson he learned was that "the quickest way to kill a relationship is to take each other for granted."

A relationship is not an obligation. It is a choice. Made every day. It is a choice that says, "The intimacy we share is better for me than my own self-gratification." It is a choice that recognizes the short-term costs are worth the long-term benefits. It is a choice to appreciate what brought you two together in the first place. And then to let that keep you there.

SEE ALSO: A couples therapist explains the 4 relationship killers that end marriages

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Anyone who has ever worked in an office knows there's more to succeeding at your job than just doing the work itself. A big part of almost any position involves "relationship management"— in other words, knowing how to get along with different personality types.

But being a team player and navigating office politics can only take you so far. Even experienced employees can quickly feel like they're drowning in quicksand when working with toxic people.

"When you are dealing with a toxic personality, it's like being close to an electric fence — it can be hazardous to your health," says Linda Swindling, author of "Stop Complainers and Energy Drainers: How to Negotiate Work Drama to Get More Done."

While it's impossible to avoid all difficult people at work, learning to recognize common problematic personalities can be helpful, and in some cases, it can save your career. Once you know the type of person you're dealing with, it's easier to shift gears from "business as usual" relationship management to specific strategies that can minimize the damage such people can do to those around them when left unchecked in the office.

Here are telltale signs of three toxic types of people you may encounter in your company and how to deal with them most effectively:

1. Constant complainer. Negativity is draining and depressing, both for the person complaining and those around him or her. While there are certainly plenty of legitimate issues one might complain about at work, beware of people who seem perpetually dissatisfied and are constantly kvetching about issues at work that can't be changed.

While you may initially feel compelled to lend an ear, associating yourself too closely with this personality type can mark you as one of the same, according to New York-based clinical psychologist Michael Brustein.

"If you join in negative talk with the depressed complainer, other colleagues may notice your dissatisfaction and be repelled by you," he says. "If complaining continues, it won't be long before your supervisor or boss becomes aware, which could be drastic."

Instead of showing sympathy or chiming in, Brustein suggests trying to avoid constant complainers. "This often can be done simply by not complaining, since complaining is their major method of connecting and relating," he says. "If you cannot avoid them, be friendly and cordial, but keep the conversation light."

2. Boundaryless BFF. It's nice to have allies at work, and over time, some colleagues may consider themselves to be friends as well as co-workers. But when a peer or boss comes on too strong and quickly in the friendship department, see it as a red flag.

Certified etiquette instructor Callista Gould warns that when starting a job in a new workplace, the first person who wants to be your best friend may not be genuine. "Beware the office gossip who takes a personal interest in you," she says. "That person may be mining for information to be used against you."

Tara A. Goodfellow, managing director of Athena Educational Consultants, notes that the same type of "too close" personality can be seen in some supervisors who want to be pals with their direct reports, grabbing lunch every day and hanging out together after hours. "This has become more challenging with the oversharing of social media and more of a blended work philosophy," she says. "It can really strain the professional relationship over time."

To handle personalities who are too chummy at work, she recommends keeping your own boundaries strong by limiting the outside-of-work activities and including others in the plans, like by setting up a monthly full-team after-hours event.

3. Office bully. According to 2015 research by Connectria Hosting, more than half (55 percent) of all professionals surveyed have been bullied by a co-worker, and 65 percent say they have "dreaded" going to work because of a colleague.

While you may not recognize the signs of bullying in the office as easily as you do on the children's playground, bullying of adults is very prevalent and can damage a professional's esteem and performance quickly. The Workplace Bullying Institute describes bullying as "a systematic campaign of interpersonal destruction that jeopardizes your health, your career [and] the job you once loved." Common experiences include being constantly undermined in meetings and told your work isn't good enough no matter what you do, as well as being yelled at and ostracized by others.

WBI recommends a three-step target action plan to defend yourself against bullying. First, name this type of harassment for what it is — bullying or emotional abuse — rather than pretend it isn't happening. Second, take time off to recover from the effects of bullying before you launch your counterattack. Third, expose the bully to your employer using a business case based on the costs of bullying to the organization. This worksheet from WBI will help you determine these costs in language that speaks most loudly to employers.

"Unfortunately, co-workers and colleagues that could be hazardous don't come with a label," Brustein says. But knowing the personality types you're dealing with just may help you handle those in the "toxic" category before they hurt your career.

Robin Madell has spent over two decades as a corporate writer, journalist, and communications consultant on business, leadership and career issues. She serves as a copywriter, speechwriter and ghostwriter for executives and entrepreneurs across diverse industries, including finance, technology, healthcare, law, real estate, advertising and marketing. Robin has interviewed over 1,000 thought leaders around the globe and has won 20 awards for editorial excellence. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Healthcare Businesswomen's Association in both New York and San Francisco, and contributed to the book "Be Your Own Mentor: Strategies from Top Women on the Secrets of Success," published by Random House. Robin is also the author of "Surviving Your Thirties: Americans Talk About Life After 30" and co-author of "The Strong Principles: Career Success." Connect with her on LinkedIn or follow her on Twitter: @robinmadell.

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Emotional intelligence is the most powerful tool for success — not only in in romantic relationships, but business, too. In fact, the same rules for achieving your goals in business also apply to love.

Here are five practices that people with high EQs use to achieve success at both work and in their personal lives:

1. Follow actions, not words. 

When I hire someone, I don’t pay much attention to lip service about accountability or hard work. Instead, I screen for a solid track record — do they meet deadlines? Make calls? Close deals? What are they doing (not saying)?

In business and personal matters, talk is cheap.

2. Check yourself. 

We’re all emotional people, and sometimes little things can turn into unnecessarily big deals. emotionally intelligent people know how to push pause before making a perceived slight into a colossal deal. Did someone interrupt you in a meeting? Instead of stewing about it or plotting revenge, consider that the person is possibly distracted by personal issues at home. Maybe they felt scrutinized by their boss that day and was over-compensating with their boisterous presentation. Rise above it and give them the benefit of the doubt. It’s not always about you.  

The same rules apply to your romantic and business relationships. Everyone has bad days and everyone has their quirks. Just because your date doesn’t feel like dancing doesn’t mean she is embarrassed to be seen with you, or that you should never go out with her again. Take the incident for what it is and move on.

3. Keep the end goal in mind. 

Those who succeed in life and business keep an eye on the big picture. This means letting go of petty perceived slights and road bumps that present themselves each and every day. When you keep the end goal at the top of your mind, it is easier to negotiate with a difficult client, create successful, win-win partnerships, and focus your energy on what is most important — not getting sidetracked by petty annoyances and putting out little fires.

That goes for relationships, too. If a long-term committed partnership with your spouse is your top priority, then you are less likely to focus on the proverbial toothpaste cap conundrums that trip up so many couples. Even bigger issues such as differences in money management or raising kids are more easily negotiated when you are both focused on lifelong collaboration.

4. Cleanse out the toxins. 

Good business feeds off good energy — and negative people can destroy an organization. Entrepreneurs with high EQs know there are enough positive people in the world that there is no need to waste valuable energy managing the toxic ones. Sometimes even high performers are not a good fit if they are manipulative, combative or otherwise a negative force in the office.  

Ditto for your love life and business relationships. If someone zaps your energy or otherwise makes you feel bad about yourself, have the strength to move on. Emotionally intelligent people have little tolerance for others who are insincere (or downright lie), critical, needy or have addictive habits. There are some people who are better out of your life — or on the other side of the courtroom.

5. Stay connected. 

Just because a relationship ends doesn’t mean that you have to obliterate the bridge. Even if a deal falls apart on a sour note, emotionally intelligent people make all efforts to take the high road and keep the connection alive and positive. You never know when you may cross paths again — or need that person in the future.

Just because a relationship doesn’t last a lifetime doesn’t mean that you must part ways as enemies. More often than not relationships end because of differences or circumstances — not personal slights. When a bridge is still available, there is far more opportunity for you to enjoy richer experiences on nearly every level.

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I wrote a post titled 6 Toxic Habits that Most People Think Are Normal. It became very successful.

The post also helped a lot of people. Since writing it, it’s generated a staggering amount of thank you emails, and no less than 20 people notified me that it inspired them to end their relationships (or even in a few cases, their marriages).

It was the wake up call these people needed to finally let go and accept that their relationship was gagging them with a s---spoon every day. And they deserved better.

(So I guess I’m a home-wrecker. Sweet.)

But the article also elicited a lot of questions like, “So if these habits ruin a relationship, what habits create a happy and healthy relationship?” and “Where’s an article on what makes a relationship great?” and “Mark, how did you get so handsome?”

These are important questions. And they deserve answers.

Granted, I have far more experience screwing up relationships than making them work well, but I still wanted to take a stab at a “healthy relationship” post. I didn’t want to just make it a (yet another) “learn to communicate and cuddle and watch sunsets and play with puppies together” type post.

You can find those posts just about everywhere. And honestly, those posts suck. If you love your partner, you shouldn’t have to be told to hold hands and watch sunsets together. This stuff should be automatic.

I wanted to write something different. I wanted to write about issues that are important in relationships but don’t receive enough airtime. Things like the role of fighting, hurting each other’s feelings, dealing with dissatisfaction or feeling the occasional attraction for other people. These are normal, everyday relationship issues that don’t get talked about because it’s far easier to talk about puppies and sunsets instead.

And so I wrote this article. This is the first article’s bizarro twin brother. That article explained that many of our culture’s tacitly accepted relationship habits secretly erode intimacy, trust and happiness. This article explains how traits that don’t fit our traditional narrative for what love is and what love should be are actually necessary ingredients for lasting relationship success.

Enjoy.

1. Letting some conflicts go unresolved

There’s this guy. His name is John Gottman. And he is like the Michael Jordan of relationship research. Not only has he been studying intimate relationships for more than 40 years, but he practically invented the field.

Gottman devised the process of “thin-slicing” relationships, a technique where he hooks couples up to all sorts of biometric devices and then records them having short conversations about their problems. Gottman then goes back and analyzes the conversation frame by frame looking at biometric data, body language, tonality and specific words chosen. He then combines all of this data together to predict whether your marriage sucks or not.

His “thin-slicing” process boasts a staggering 91% success rate in predicting whether newly-wed couples will divorce within 10 years — a staggeringly high result for any psychological research. His method went on to be featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book Blink.

Gottman’s seminars also report a 50% higher success rate of saving troubled marriages than traditional marriage counseling. His research papers have won enough academic awards to fill the state of Delaware. And he’s written nine books on the subjects of intimate relationships, marital therapy and the science of trust.

The point is, when it comes to understanding what makes long-term relationships succeed, John Gottman will slam-dunk in your face and then sneer at you afterwards.

And the first thing Gottman says in almost all of his books is this: The idea that couples must communicate and resolve all of their problems is a myth.

In his research of thousands of happily married couples, some of whom have been married for 40+ years, he found time and again that most successful couples have persistent unresolved issues, unresolved issues that they’ve sometimes been fighting about for decades. Meanwhile many of the unsuccessful couples insisted on resolving f------ everything because they believed that there should be a void of disagreement between them. Pretty soon there was a void of a relationship too.

People like to fantasize about “true love.” But if there is such a thing, it requires us to sometimes accept things we don’t like.

Successful couples accept and understand that some conflict is inevitable, that there will always be certain things they don’t like about their partners or things they don’t agree with, and that this is fine. You shouldn’t need to feel the need to change somebody in order to love them. And you shouldn’t let some disagreements get in the way of what is otherwise a happy and healthy relationship.

The truth is, trying to resolve a conflict can sometimes create more problems than it fixes. Some battles are simply not worth fighting. And sometimes the most optimal relationship strategy is one of “live and let live.”

2. Being willing to hurt each other's feelings

My girlfriend is one of those women who spends a lot of time in front of the mirror. She loves to look amazing and I love for her to look amazing too (obviously).

Nights before we go out, she always comes out of the bathroom after an hour-long make-up/hair/clothes/whatever-women-do-in-there session and asks me how she looks. She’s usually gorgeous. But every once in a while, she looks bad. She tried to do something new with her hair or decided to wear a pair of boots that some flamboyant fashion designer from Milan thought were avant-garde. And it just doesn’t work.

When I tell her this, she usually gets pissed off. And as she marches back into the closet to redo everything and make us 30 minutes late, she spouts a bunch of four-letter words and sometimes even slings a few of them at me.

Men stereotypically lie in this situation to make their girlfriends/wives happy. But I don’t. Why? Because honesty in my relationship is more important to me than feeling good all of the time. The last person I should ever have to censor myself with is the woman I love.

Fortunately, I date a woman who agrees. She calls me out on my b------- sometimes, and it’s honestly one of the most important traits she offers me as a partner. Sure, my ego gets bruised and I b---- and complain and try to argue, but a few hours later I come sulking back and admit that she was right and holy crap she makes me a better person even though I hated hearing it at the time.

When our highest priority is to always make ourselves feel good, or to always make our partner feel good, then nobody ends up feeling good. And our relationships fall apart without us even knowing it.

It’s important to make something more important in your relationship than merely making each other feel good all of the time. The feel good stuff happens when you get the other stuff right. The sunsets and puppies, they happen when you get the more important stuff right: values, needs and trust.

If I feel smothered and need more time alone, I need to be capable of saying that without blaming her and she needs to be capable of hearing it without blaming me, despite the unpleasant feelings it may cause. If she feels that I’m cold and unresponsive to her, she needs to be capable of saying it without blaming me and I need to be capable of hearing it without blaming her, despite the unpleasant feelings it may generate.

These conversations are paramount to maintaining a healthy relationship that meets both people’s needs. With out them, we get lost and lose track of one another.

3. Being willing to end it

Romantic sacrifice is idealized in our culture. Show me almost any romantic movie and I’ll show you a desperate and needy character who treats themselves like dog s--- for the sake of being in love with someone.

The truth is our standards for what a “successful relationship” should be are pretty screwed up. If a relationship ends and someone’s not dead, then we view it as a failure, regardless of the emotional or practical circumstances present in the person’s lives. And that’s kind of insane.

Romeo and Juliet was originally written as satire to represent everything that’s wrong with young love and how irrational romantic beliefs can make you do stupid s--- like drink poison because your parents don’t like some girl’s parents. But somehow we look at this story as romantic.

It’s this kind of irrational idealization that leads people to stay with partners who are abusive or negligent, to give up on their own needs and identities, to make themselves into imaginary martyrs who are perpetually miserable, to suppress their own pain and suffering in the name of maintaining a relationship “until death do us part.”

Sometimes the only thing that can make a relationship successful is ending it at the appropriate time, before it becomes too damaging. And the willingness to do that allows us to establish the necessary boundaries to help ourselves and our partner grow together.

“Shoot myself to love you; if I loved myself I’d be shooting you.”

– Marilyn Manson

“Until death do us part” is romantic and everything, but when we worship our relationship as something more important than ourselves, our values, our needs and everything else in our lives, we create a sick dynamic where there’s no accountability.

We have no reason to work on ourselves and grow because our partner has to be there no matter what. And our partner has no reason to work on themselves and grow because we’re going to be there no matter what. It invites stagnation and stagnation equals misery.

4. Feeling attraction for people outside the relationship

Our cultural scripts for romance includes this sort of mental tyranny, where any mildly emotional or sexual thought not involving your partner amounts to high treason. Being in love is like a cult where you’re supposed to prefer drinking Kool Aid laced with cyanide to letting your thoughts wander to whether other religions may be true too.

As much as we’d like to believe that we only have eyes for our partner, biology says otherwise. Once we get past the honeymoon phase of starry eyes and oxytocin, the novelty of our partner wears off a bit. And unfortunately, human sexuality is partially wired around novelty.

I get emails all the time from people in happy marriages/relationships who get blindsided by finding someone else attractive and they feel like horrible, horrible people because of it. Not only are we capable of finding multiple people attractive and interesting at the same time, but it’s a biological inevitability.

What isn’t an inevitability are our choices to act on it or not. Most of us, most of the time, choose to not act on those thoughts. And like waves, they pass through us and leave us with our partner very much the same way how they found us.

This triggers a lot of guilt in some people and a lot of irrational jealousy in others. Our cultural scripts tell us that once we’re in love, that’s supposed to be it, end of story. And if someone flirts with us and we enjoy it, or if we catch ourselves having an occasional errant sexy-time fantasy, there must be something wrong with us or our relationship.

But that’s simply not the case. In fact, it’s healthier to allow oneself to experience these feelings and then let them go.

When you suppress these feelings, you give them power over you, you let them dictate your behavior for you (suppression) rather than dictating your behavior for yourself (feeling them and yet choosing not to do anything).

People who suppress these urges are the ones who are likely to eventually succumb to them and give in and suddenly find themselves screwing the secretary in the broom closet and having no idea how they got there and come to deeply regret it about twenty-two seconds afterward.

People who suppress these urges are the ones who are likely to project them onto their partner and becoming blindingly jealous, attempting to control their partner’s every thought and whim, corralling all of their partner’s attention and affection onto themselves.

People who suppress these urges are the ones who are likely to wake up one day disgruntled and frustrated with no conscious understanding of why, wondering where all of the days went and remember how in love we used to be?

Looking at attractive people is enjoyable. Speaking to attractive people is enjoyable. Thinking about attractive people is enjoyable. That’s not going to change because of our Facebook relationship status. And when you dampen these impulses towards other people, you dampen them towards your partner as well. You’re killing a part of yourself and it ultimately only comes back to harm your relationship.

When I meet a beautiful woman now, I enjoy it, as any man would. But it also reminds me why, out of all of the beautiful women I’ve ever met and dated, I chose to be with my girlfriend. I see in the attractive women everything my girlfriend has and most women lack. And while I appreciate the attention or even flirtation, the experience only strengthens my commitment. Attractiveness is common. But real intimacy is not.

When we commit to a person, we are not committing our thoughts, feelings or perceptions. We can’t control our own thoughts, feelings and perceptions the majority of the time, so how could we ever make that commitment?

What we control are our actions. And what we commit to that special person are our actions. Let everything else come and go, as it inevitably will.

5. Spending time apart

You see it all the time: the man who meets his girlfriend and stops playing basketball and hanging out with his friends, or the woman who suddenly decides she loves every comic book and video game her boyfriend likes even though she doesn’t know how to hold the XBox controller properly. We all have that friend who mysteriously ceased to exist as soon as they got into their relationship. And it’s troubling, not just for us but for them.

When we fall in love we develop irrational beliefs and desires. One of these desires is to allow our lives to be consumed by the person we’re infatuated with. This feels great. It’s intoxicating in much of the same way cocaine is intoxicating (no, really). The problem only arises when this actually happens.

The problem with allowing your identity to be consumed by a romantic relationship is that as you change to be closer to the person you love, you cease to be the person they fell in love with in the first place.

It’s important to occasionally get some distance from your partner, assert your independence, maintain some hobbies or interests that are just yours. Have some separate friends. Take an occasional trip somewhere by yourself. Remember what made you you and what drew you to your partner in the first place. Without this space, without this oxygen to breathe, the fire between the two of you will die out and what were once sparks will become only friction.

6. Accepting your partner's flaws

In his famous book The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera said there are two types of womanizers: 1) men who are looking for the perfect woman and can never find her, and 2) men who convince themselves that every woman they meet is already perfect.

I love this observation and believe it applies to not just womanizers, but just about anyone who consistently finds themselves in dysfunctional relationships. They either try to make their partner be perfect by “fixing” them or changing them. Or they delude themselves into thinking that their partner is already perfect.

This is one of those things that is not nearly as complicated as it feels. Let’s break it down:

1. Every person has flaws and imperfections.
2. You can’t ever force a person to change.
3. Therefore: You must date somebody who has flaws you can live with or even appreciate.

The most accurate metric for your love of somebody is how you feel about their flaws. If you accept them and even adore some of their shortcomings — her obsessive cleanliness, his awkward social ticks — and they can accept and even adore some of your shortcomings, well, then that’s a sign of true intimacy.

One of the best expressions of this idea came from Plato in the form of a myth. In his Symposium, Plato wrote that humans were originally androgynous and whole. There were no men or women. They felt no lack, no uncertainty, and they were powerful, so powerful that they rose up and challenged the gods themselves.

This posed a problem for the gods. They didn’t want to completely wipe out the human race as they’d have no one to rule over. But at the same time they had to do something to humble and distract humanity.

So Zeus split them in half. He split each human into a man and a woman and doomed them to spend their brief mortal existence wandering the world looking for their other half, the half that would make them feel whole and powerful again. And this wholeness came not from two perfections meeting, but two imperfections meeting, two imperfections that both complemented and compensated for one another’s shortcomings.

The artist Alex Grey once said that, “True love is when two people’s pathologies complement one another’s.” Love is, by definition, crazy and irrational. And the best love works when our irrationalities complement one another and our flaws enamor one another.

It may be our perfections that attract one another. But it’s our imperfections that decide whether we stay together or not.

SEE ALSO: 6 Toxic Relationship Habits Most People Think Are Healthy

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As long as monogamy has existed, so has cheating. What makes people stray from the ones they love? We wanted to find out specifically what drives men to be unfaithful.

We talked to a leading expert on the topic, M. Gary Neuman, a psychotherapist and the author of "The Neuman Method" and "The Truth About Cheating." Through his research, Neuman found that the main reason men cheat has little to do with sex or physical attraction.

Produced by Graham Flanagan. Camera by Devan Joseph.

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"Catfish: The TV Show" host and co-creator Nev Schulman stopped by to explain simple ways you can avoid being deceived by online love interests.

This process has become known as being 'catfished,' thanks to Schulman's popular MTV show, as well as the 2010 movie on which the show is based.

Produced by Graham Flanagan

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Esther Perel, relationship therapist and author of Mating in Captivity, offers her thoughts on when sharing something with your partner can do more harm than good. 

Produced by Alana Kakoyiannis. Camera by Jason Gaines.

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Whether someone's lying to you, hitting on you, or bossing you around, you can read their intent and emotional state in their body language — if you know what to pay attention to. 

According to UCLA professor Albert Mehrabian, 55% of what you convey comes from body language, 38% from the tone of your voice, and only 7% from the words you say. 

So how do read between the lines? We've compiled tips from Psychology Today, research journals, and other publications to help you understand what people are telling you, far beyond their words. 

Look for a lack of crinkles around the eyes to detect a fake smile.

Making a genuine smile — also known as a Duchenne smile — is nearly impossible to do on command. It's why family photos tend to look so awkward. 

The smile, it turns out, is all about the crow's-feet around your eyes. When you're smiling joyfully, they crinkle. When you're faking it, they don't. 

If someone's trying to look happy but really isn't, you won't see the wrinkles.

Raised eyebrows are often a sign of discomfort.

In the same way that real smiles shape the wrinkles around your eyes, University of Massachusetts professor Susan Krauss Whitbourne says worry, surprise, or fear can cause people to raise their eyebrows in discomfort. 

So if someone compliments your new hairstyle or outfit with their eyebrows raised, it may not be sincere.

If their voice goes up or down, they're likely interested.

Whether you know it or not, your vocal range shows your interest.

"Once a conversation begins, besotted women slip into sing-songy voices,"Psychology Today reports, "while men drop theirs an octave." 

Sometime in 2014, two famous men walked into a recording studio.

They were working on a rap album, but at this particular moment they were talking about marriage.

The first man was someone you would expect to be working on a rap album.

His real name was Olubowale Akintimehin, but he is better known as the hip hop artist Wale (pronounced WAH-lay).

The second man was someone you would never expect to be working on a rap album, the popular comedian Jerry Seinfeld.

Wale was partnering with Seinfeld for his fourth album, The Album About Nothing.

During this particular session, he brought Seinfeld into the studio to ask him questions, record their conversation, and hopefully grab a few soundbites for the album.

While working on a track called The Matrimony, Wale questioned Seinfeld about his thoughts on marriage. At first, Seinfeld talked about what it felt like to get engaged.

He explained the combination of excitement and nervousness and helplessness that made engagement feel like being strapped into a rollercoaster headed to the top of the hill where the marriage awaits.

Wale paused for a moment, looked at Seinfeld, and said, “So, even if you make plans you never think you’re really ready for marriage?” 

“No,” Seinfeld said. “It’s like any growth. You can’t be ready for it because it’s growth. It’s going to be new. You’re going to have a new life. You’re going to be a new person.”

You’re Not Ready for Growth

I like Seinfeld’s definition of growth. You’re not ready for marriage. You’re not ready to start a business. You’re not ready to move to a new city. You’re not ready for growth … and that’s exactly why it will make you grow. Start before you feel ready.

By definition, growth must be something that makes you feel unprepared and uncertain. If it was comfortable and easy, it wouldn’t be growth. It would be normal. It would be standard. It would be who you already are.

There will never be a perfect time to do something that stretches you. That’s true whether you are starting a marriage, having your first child, changing careers, or wrestling with any number of challenging goals. That’s not a license to be reckless and never think things through, but at some point you have to embrace the uncertainty because it is the only path forward.

You can’t be ready for true growth. That’s why it’s growth. All you can do is step into it with everything you’ve got.

SEE ALSO: Meet the San Francisco dating coach who earns up to $20,000 a month teaching introverted men how to be successful with women

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