Standing out online — and especially when it comes to online dating — means just being yourself.

And we have the math to prove it.

Hannah Fry, a mathematician at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis in London, explains the theory in her 2014 TED Talk and recently released book, "The Mathematics of Love."

When most people choose their online dating profile pictures, she explains, they tend to try and hide things they consider unattractive.

"The classic example is people who are, perhaps, a little bit overweight deliberately choosing a very cropped photo, or bald men, for example, deliberately choosing pictures where they're wearing hats," she says in her talk.

"But actually this is the opposite of what you should do if you want to be successful. You should really, instead, play up to whatever it is that makes you different, even if you think that some people will find it unattractive," she says.

OkCupid's cofounder Christian Rudder, who graduated with a degree in mathematics from Harvard, has been collecting data on the site's users for almost a decade and using it to study user behavior. His findings indicate that how attractive you are doesn't dictate how popular you are, and having people think you're ugly can actually work to your advantage.

In one voluntary section of OkCupid, you can rate how attractive you think other people are on a scale of one to five. By comparing the attractiveness scores of 5,000 female users with the number of messages they received in a month, Rudder found that the less-messaged women were usually considered consistently attractive, receiving scores clustered around a four out of five, while the more-messaged women often created variation in male opinion, receiving scores that ranged from one to five.

Simply put, the more men disagree about a woman's looks, the more they like her, especially when some men think they're ugly. Or as Fry put it in her book, "Having people think you have a face like a dog's dinner means you get more messages."

Fry draws on game theory in her talk to explain this phenomenon:

"Let's say that you think somebody's attractive, but you suspect that other people won't necessarily be that interested. That means there's less competition for you and it's an extra incentive for you to get in touch. Whereas compare that to if you think somebody is attractive but you suspect that everybody is going to think they're attractive. Well, why would you bother humiliating yourself, let's be honest?"

In the end, "the people who fancy you are just going to fancy you anyway, and the unimportant losers who don't, well, they only play up to your advantage," Fry says.

Watch Fry's TED Talk on the mathematics of love: 

SEE ALSO: This mathematical principle reveals the best way to get anything you want in life

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How do you get to crazy love — or get crazy love back when it’s gone away?

Forget the silly relationship books, let’s look at the real science and get some answers.

Here are 5 shortcuts to bonding deeply with a romantic partner:

1. No more boring date nights

No more dull dinners telling the same stories and hoping you have fun.

What’s at the root of seduction? Surprise. From my interview with Robert Greene, author of the bestseller, The Art of Seduction:

Seduction involves a degree of surprise, which is generally the first thing that disappears after you’ve been in a relationship, and why there’s no more seducing that goes on. Everything is familiar and you’re no longer surprised by the other person.

Couples don’t need more "pleasant" activities — you need more exciting activities to make sure you’re feeling the "butterflies" around each other.

Researchers did a 10-week study comparing couples that engaged in "pleasant" activities vs "exciting" activities. Pleasant lost.

Via "For Better: How the Surprising Science of Happy Couples Can Help Your Marriage Succeed":

Those who had undertaken the "exciting" date nights showed a significantly greater increase in marital satisfaction than the "pleasant" date night group…

Why would doing anything exciting have such a big effect on a relationship?

Because research shows we’re lousy about realizing where our feelings are coming from.

Excitement from any source will be associated with the person you’re with, even if they’re not the cause of it.

When I spoke to the top researcher of romantic love, Arthur Aron, he said the same thing:

After a while, things are sort of settled and there isn’t much excitement, so what can you do? Do things that are exciting that you associate with your partner. Reinvigorate that excitement and the main way to make them associated with the partner is to do them with your partner.

So no boring, lame date nights. Go dancing together or anything else you can both participate in as a couple. No documentaries — research says you should go see horror movies or suspense thrillers.

(To learn the 4 most common relationship problems — and how to fix them — click here.)

Okay, no more dull dinners. You’re taking tango lessons or going skydiving. Awesome. So how do you fix the nagging little problems in your relationship to take it to the next level? That’s easy … Don’t.

2. Don’t reduce the negative. Increase the positive.

We spend a lot of time trying to fix things in our relationships. Turns out we’ve got it backwards. Unless they’re critical, don’t focus on reducing the negatives. Couples thrive when they increase the positive things.

Via "The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work":

…an interesting new body of research suggests that how we support people during good times, more than bad times, affects the quality of a relationship.

Research shows trying to change people doesn’t work:

…when participants (N = 160) focused their relationship improvement attempts on changing the partner, individuals reported more negative improvement strategies, lower improvement success, and, in turn, more negative relationship evaluations… results suggest that targeting the partner may do more harm than good despite that relationship evaluations pivot on whether the partner produces change.

John Gottman, the #1 guy on making relationships work, says 69% of a couple’s problems are perpetual. These problems don’t go away yet many couples keep arguing about them year after year.

Via "The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work":

Most marital arguments cannot be resolved. Couples spend year after year trying to change each other’s mind – but it can’t be done. This is because most of their disagreements are rooted in fundamental differences of lifestyle, personality, or values. By fighting over these differences, all they succeed in doing is wasting their time and harming their marriage.

So ignore the bad. Increase the good stuff.

(To learn the four things that kill relationships, click here.)

So you’re not trying to fix what’s broken, you’re doubling down on the things that make you two happy. What else do you need to do?

3. Get to know them. Really get to know them

Couples who communicate are 62% more likely to describe their relationship as happy.

Via 100 Simple Secrets of Great Relationships:

In studies of marriages of various lengths, couples with a high degree of intimacy between the husband and wife—that is, couples who shared their innermost thoughts—were 62 percent more likely to describe their marriage as happy. – Pallen 2001

Emotional, personal information exchange promotes powerful feelings of connection. Asking and answering the right questions can create a lifelong bond in just one hour.

Via Sam Gosling’s book, Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You:

Arthur Aron, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is interested in how people form romantic relationships, and he’s come up with an ingenious way of taking men and women who have never met before and making them feel close to one another. Given that he has just an hour or so to create the intimacy levels that typically take weeks, months, or years to form, he accelerated the getting-to-know-you process through a set of thirty-six questions crafted to take the participants rapidly from level one in McAdams’s system to level two.

What happened in Arthur Aron’s lab when he had grad students ask each other these personal questions? Well, two of them ended up getting married.

No time for tons of questions? Share the best event of your day and have your partner share the best event of their day. And celebrate their successes. It works.

Here’s what Arthur told me in our interview:

Celebrating your partner’s successes turns out to be pretty important. When things go badly and you provide support, it doesn’t make the relationship good, but it keeps it from getting bad. Whereas if things are going okay and your partner has something good happen and you celebrate it sincerely, you’re doing something that can make a relationship even better.

But it’s not all talk. Research shows touching is powerful too. (Want something really powerful? Touch their face.)

And look into their eyes. It can make people fall in love. Seriously:

In two studies, subjects induced to exchange mutual unbroken gaze for 2 min with a stranger of the opposite sex reported increased feelings of passionate love for each other.

(For that list of questions that made people bond deeply in just an hour, click here.)

So you’re doing exciting stuff, focusing on the good things and really getting to know each other. What else should you spend time talking about?

4. Reminisce about the times you laughed

You don’t need to be together very long to do this. What made you two crack up on those initial dates? Bring it up and have another laugh about it:

…couples who reminisced about events involving shared laugher reported higher relationship satisfaction at the post-manipulation satisfaction assessment as compared to couples in the three control conditions. The effect was not attributed to positive mood induction as mood scores across groups were similar.

And here’s a bonus: more laughing means less fighting.

Via "100 Simple Secrets of Great Relationships":

When both partners in a relationship thought the other had a good sense of humor, 67 percent less conflict was reported than in couples where neither thought the other had a good sense of humor. – De Koning and Weiss 2002

The other thing to emphasize when reminiscing? Similarity. The single strongest predictor of marital well-being? Feeling the two of you are similar.

Believe it or not, even having similar fighting styles was a good thing. It was related to double-digit drops in conflict and a double-digit increase in satisfaction.

Via "100 Simple Secrets of Great Relationships":

While people may employ many different conflict resolution strategies in a relationship, when both partners use the same strategy they experience 12 percent less conflict and are 31 percent more likely to report their relationship is satisfying. – Pape 2001

(To learn the recipe for a happy marriage, click here.)

Okay, so you two are laughing. What’s the right perspective to take when you’re out together?

5. Pretend you’re on your first date again

On first dates we make an effort and effort draws people together:

In a follow-up study the researchers told participants to make an effort with their partners and then their enjoyment of the social interaction improved in line with their predictions. This suggests we can all have more fun with our partners and friends if we make an effort.

Studies show pretending time with a romantic partner was a first date makes it more enjoyable:

Across a series of studies, participants underestimated how good they would feel in situations that required them to put their best face forward… participants who were instructed to engage in self-presentation felt happier after interacting with their romantic partner than participants who were not given this instruction…

(To learn how to be a good kisser, click here.)

We’ve learned a lot. Let’s round it up and learn one more killer thing that can actually build a positive feedback loop in your relationship…

Sum up

To bond more deeply with a romantic partner make sure to:

• Kill the boring dates. Do new exciting stuff. Dancing, suspenseful movies, learning new things together.
• Don’t fix the negatives. Build on the positives. You can’t fix most problems. Double down on what works well.
• Really get to know them. Use Arthur Aron’s questions. And ask about the best part of their day, celebrate it, and share the high point of your day. Touch. Stare into their eyes.
• Reminisce about the times you laughed. Emphasize similarity.
• Pretend you’re on your first date again. Make an effort. Put your best face forward.

Want to diagnose how well your relationship is working?

Listen to the story you and your partner tell others about your relationship. John Gottman said it’s the #1 predictor of whether things are working.

Another trick is to hold their hand during stressful times and see how it makes you feel. Less stressed? Bingo.

The sad thing is that over time we often take the other person for granted. But you don’t have to.

By expressing gratitude, research shows you can actually create a positive feedback loop in your relationship:

…gratitude contributes to a reciprocal process of relationship maintenance, whereby each partner’s maintenance behaviors, perceptions of responsiveness, and feelings of gratitude feed back on and influence the other’s behaviors, perceptions, and feelings.

If you’ve got something good together, being grateful can make it even better.

Right now, share this post with your partner and tell them, "Thank you."

Isn’t that what we all want to hear?

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SEE ALSO: 5 simple tips for having better relationships at work and in life

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People lie everyday, so if you're concerned that your partner is hiding something big, you might be considering how to catch them.

Unfortunately, science can't tell you if your partner has been sleeping around, but it is getting better at spotting when someone is being deceptive. Follow the advice below to see if someone is cheating on you. 

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Even the briefest lull in a conversation can prompt some people to wonder: "Am I boring?"

The honest answer is that you're probably perfectly fascinating — but you can always become more so. It's a question of collecting new skills, knowledge, and experiences and learning how to share them with others.

To find out how to do that, we checked out the Quora thread, "How do I become a more interesting person?" and pinpointed the most practical advice. Read on for ways to capture people's interest and win their admiration.

1. Develop new skills.

One way to ensure that other people find you interesting is to make yourself helpful in any situation. That's why Quora user Anthony N. Lee suggests learning as many useful skills as you can, from web design to sewing.

That way, you'll always be the go-to person, whether a friend needs to create a website for her new business or a blanket for her baby niece.

2. Be curious.

One way to ensure that you're not interesting is by closing yourself off to differing opinions and viewpoints. Instead, you should actively seek out new ideas and experiences that will change the way you think and feel.

Sudhir Desai advocates being a "lifelong learner." He writes: "Keep an open mind, be curious. Allow for a complex world with multiple interpretations. Learn things to deepen and broaden your perspectives." 

3. Learn how to tell a good story.

Maybe you've amassed a ton of information and experiences — but if you can't communicate them to other people, you're sunk.

That's why Marcus Geduld says you should learn how to be a storyteller: "You don't just dump whatever is on your mind into the conversation; you purposefully shape it to make it interesting. … Start thinking of your life as a gift you can give to others. Wrap it in the finest paper you can find."

Geduld says that means you need to learn how to read your audience to see how long they'll be able to pay attention and tease your listeners with clues to the end of the story. 

4. Listen and show compassion.

A striking number of Quora users mentioned that one way to seem interesting is to be interested in others.

Writes Quentin Hardy: "Listen carefully to others, and try with some compassion to understand their motives and actions. Few of us are really good at this. Everyone becomes nearly infinite in their experience of life, if we listen to them with enough imagination. Working that out grows ourselves. Wondering if you're wrong helps, too."

5. Ask good questions.

At a party, you don't need to say much about yourself for people to believe you're interesting. Instead, engage them in deep conversation about their lifestyle.

"Ask thoughtful (not prying) questions, as needed, about them and their interests and priorities,"says Stephanie Vardavas. "Really listen to the answers. Follow up with more thoughtful discussion and necessary questions (again, not prying). By the end of the evening they will remember you as one of the most interesting people they ever met."

6. Say what you think.

Kat Li says people who don't opine on or disagree with anything can be boring.

"You feel like you can't really ever have a conversation with them," she writes. "You should try to say what you really think about some things, even if other people won't like it."

7. Follow your interests.

Instead of learning about a ton of dull topics just for the sake of being knowledgeable, pursue areas that you actually find stimulating. That way, you'll sound animated and engaging when describing them to other people.

"I don't think it's as much a matter of trying to be interesting as much as it is naturally following what you enjoy, being an avid student and collector of information that interests and excites you,"writes Renee Nay.

8. Read a lot.

If you have the time and money to travel the world, great. But even if you don't, you can still learn about different cultures and historical periods by reading everything you can get your hands on. Books, blogs, periodicals — expose yourself to as many new stories and ideas as possible.

"Read a lot — it opens up multiple new worlds to us,"says Chaitra Murlidhar.

9. Run with a different crowd.

Perhaps the real reason you don't feel interesting is because you're spending time with people who don't appreciate you. In that case, you should find a different community who understands how much you have to offer.

Writes Travis Biziorek: "Challenge yourself to meet new people, hang out with a different crowd, and experience people with different outlooks and views on life. I promise you'll find people that interest you and those that find you fascinating."

SEE ALSO: 12 Simple Ways To Be More Interesting

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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.

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Anybody who's been in — or out of — a relationship can tell you that they're full of miscommunications, misreadings, and other misunderstandings.

You say one thing, they hear something else. Better yet, you project motivations onto them, drawing out conclusions about their behavior that they can't even understand.

Thankfully, "Daring Greatly" author Brené Brown — whose Ted Talk on vulnerability has over 21 million views— has been through it.

As she talks about in her new book about resilience, "Rising Strong," a simple life-hack can help anybody in relationship be better understood.

"If I could give men and women in relationship and leaders and parents one hack, I would give them, ‘the story I’m making up,'" Brown told Tech Insider. "Basically, you're telling the other person your reading of the situation — and simultaneously admitting that you know it can't be 100% accurate."

It's a life-saver for a few reasons, she says: It's honest, it's transparent, and it's vulnerable.

According to Brown and the scores of interviews she did for "Daring Greatly" and "Rising Strong," vulnerability essentially provides the bandwidth for two people to relate and trust one another.

When you say "the story I'm making up," Brown says that it conveys "I want you to see me and understand me and hear me, and knowing what you really mean is more important to me than being right or self-protecting."

With those five words, you check the narrative in your head.

In "Rising Strong," Brown supplies a very vivid example of "the story I'm making up right now" in action.

One summer, she and her husband Steve took a long-awaited vacation with the kids in a lake in the Hill Country of Texas. The two of them go for a swim in the lake, and feeling taken with the deep joy of the moment, Brown says something very sweet — and very vulnerable — to her spouse.

"I'm so glad we decided to do this together," she says. "It's beautiful out here."

Her husband, she shares, is way better than her at putting himself out there, so she expected him to reply to her romantic bid with an equal force of affection.

But instead.

"Yeah, water's good," he replied.

She felt embarrassed, ashamed. And going against her conflict-oriented upbringing, she decided to make another bid for connection.

"This is so great," she said. "I love that we're doing this. I feel so close to you."

Again, deaf ears.

"Yep, good swim," he replied before swimming away.

Brown was nonplussed. This is "total horseshit," she remembers thinking. What's going on? I don't know if I'm supposed to feel humiliated or hostile.

Before they got out, she asked him to stop — saying that she kept trying to connect with him and he kept blowing her off.

Then, instead of being aggressive and self-protective, she opted for being kind. And she relied on a certain lifehack she learned in her research.

"I feel like you're blowing me off," she said, "and the story I'm making up is either you looked at me while I was swimming and thought, Man, she's getting old. She can't even swim freestyle anymore. Or you saw me and thought, She sure as hell doesn't rock a Speedo like she did twenty-five years ago."

After a little time, Steve replied. He wasn't being distant to spite her; he said that he had been trying to fight off a panic attack the whole swim.

He explained that the night before, he had a dream where he was with their kids on a raft when a speedboat came screaming toward them, and he had to pull all the children into the water so they wouldn't get killed by the raging vessel. He didn't even know what his wife was saying to him while they swam; he was just trying to concentrate on his swimming and make it back to the dock.

Suddenly, it made sense to her: People on the lake do tend to get drunk on boats, and everybody who grows up around water hears about tragic boating accidents. And he felt like she would think less of him for not being able to prevent one.

After a little more conversation, it became clear to both of them: Brené was stuck in a "shame story" that she wasn't fit or pretty enough for Steve, and Steve was stuck in a "shame story" that he wasn't strong or capable enough for Brené.

But with making the leap of vulnerability symbolized in the story I'm making up, they were able to let go of the narrative they were telling themselves about the situation and actually see one another's perspective.

Five little words. Big difference.

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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. 

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Toxic individuals are completely exhausting to be around and they can have a negative impact on your forward momentum.

Entrepreneurs need to remain laser focused — the distractions and stress that toxic people bring into your life act as unnecessary obstacles, so it is best to avoid them.

You probably know a few toxic people — they might work for you, you might be friends with some or you might even live with someone toxic.

The sooner you remove them from your life, the better. Here are eight toxic types of people you should steer clear of.

1. Those who are judgmental

Judgmental people will find a way to criticize anything and everything they come in contact with. You could take the time to explain something to them in great detail but it goes in one ear and out the other.

They come to their conclusions before they hear any facts — they don't listen well and are horrible at communicating. Asking for advice or feedback from a judgmental person is a complete waste of time.

Related: 12 Ways Successful People Handle Toxic People

2. Those who are envious 

Being an entrepreneur can be a very bumpy journey filled with highs and lows — while it's important to have a strong group of supporters in your corner during the low times it's also important to have supporters that are there to congratulate you when you hit the high points. Envious people will not be happy for you — ever. They feel that it should happen to them and nobody else. 

3. Those who are control freaks

Control freaks don't ever want to listen — they don't have to, because according to them they know everything and they know the best way to do everything. While this type of person can be a nuisance in your personal life, they are a complete nightmare to deal with in a business environment.

A successful business structure requires team members that will listen to and follow instructions. If you have control freaks on your team it can cause a "too many cooks in the kitchen" problem.

4. Those who are arrogant

Don't confuse confidence with arrogance — confident people inspire, while arrogant people intimidate and annoy. Someone with an arrogant attitude feels he or she is better than everyone around them. In a personal setting this can be annoying, while in a professional situation this can create an uncomfortable environment.

5. Those who are victims

The constant victim will always make excuses and blame others for their mistakes and wrongdoing. They are some of the most toxic people to be around — they will never accept responsibility and always point the finger, which causes a domino affect of the blame game in a work setting. Flush them out of your business and eliminate that headache. 

Related: 5 Ways to Tell If Your Workplace Is Really Toxic

6. Those who are Negative Nancies

Someone who is always negative will drain your positive energy immediately — they thrive on bringing everyone down around them. You will never receive any words of encouragement from a Negative Nancy. They will discredit every idea you have and instead of being supportive they will go out of their way to point out every possible way you could fail, rather than focus on possibilities and potential. They are a major energy-suck.

7. Those who are liars

To be successful you have to surround yourself with other successful individuals that you can trust and count on to be there for you. You can't trust liars and it's hard to count on them because you never know if they are lying or telling the truth. That type of uncertainty will wear you out quickly — eliminate them from your life and you won't have to wonder if you are being lied to.

8. Those who are gossipers

People gossip because they are insecure — they don't know how to separate fact from speculation and when truths get twisted, the wrong information is conveyed, feelings get hurt and enemies are born. Having a gossiper within your business can be very destructive — they are cancers and can quickly create a negative environment.

If any of these ring a bell, then there is a good chance you are being exposed to toxic individuals. You should consider removing them from the equation, allowing you to remain 100 percent focused on reaching your goals without unnecessary distractions. 

I vowed to remove all toxic people from my personal life and business in 2015, and by doing so I have created a much better environment for myself and my company.

SEE ALSO: 10 Toxic People You Should Avoid ​At All Costs

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Study after study has shown that laughing is good for the soul.

But now we know something else: sharing giggles with a romantic partner keeps the lovey-dovey feelings going, according to a study published in the journal Personal Relationships.

Laura Kurtz, a social psychologist from the University of North Carolina, has long been fascinated by the idea of shared laughter in romantic relationships.

“We can all think of a time when we were laughing and the person next to us just sat there totally silent,” she says. “All of a sudden that one moment takes a nosedive. We wonder why the other person isn’t laughing, what’s wrong with them, or maybe what’s wrong with us, and what might that mean for our relationship.”

Kurtz set out to figure out the laugh-love connection by collecting 77 heterosexual pairs (154 people total) who had been in a relationship for an average of 4 years.

She and her team did video recordings of them recalling how they first met. Meanwhile, her team counted instances of spontaneous laughing, measured when the couple laughed together as well as how long that instant lasted. Each couple also completed a survey about their relational closeness.

“In general, couples who laugh more together tend to have higher-quality relationships,” she says. “We can refer to shared laughter as an indicator of greater relationship quality.”

It seems common sense that people who laugh together are likely happier couples, and that happier couples would have a longer, healthier, more vital relationship—but the role that laughter plays isn’t often center stage.

“Despite how intuitive this distinction may seem, there’s very little research out there on laughter’s relational influence within a social context,” Kurtz says. “Most of the existing work documents laughter’s relevance to individual outcomes or neglects to take the surrounding social context into account.”

Kurtz noted that some gender patterns emerged that have been reported by previous studies. “Women laughed more than males,” she notes. “And men’s laughs are more contagious: When men laugh, they are 1.73 times more likely to make their partner laugh.”

There’s also evidence that laughing together is a supportive activity.

“Participants who laughed more with their partners during a recorded conversation in the lab tended to also report feeling closer to and more supported by their partners,” she says. On the flip side, awkward chuckles, stunted grins and fake guffaws all are flags that there may be something amiss.

This harkens back to a classic psychological experiment conducted in 1992, where 52 couples were recorded telling their personal, shared histories.

The team noted whether the couples were positive and effusive or were more withdrawn and tired in telling these stories, then checked in with the couples three years later. They saw a correlation in how couples told stories about their past and the success of their partnership: the more giddy the couple was about a story, the more likely they remained together; the less enthusiastic the couple was, the more likely the couple’s partnership had crumbled.

While there are cultural differences in laughter display—Kurtz says that Eastern cultures tend to display appreciation with close-mouthed smiles, not the heartier, toothy laughs that are more Western—there’s no question that laughter is important.

“Moments of shared laughter are potent for a relationship,” she says. “They bring a couple closer together.”

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While each relationship is unique, researchers have found some common, key traits of lasting relationships, such as kindness and generosity.

One of the biggest hurdles we face in any relationship is admitting when it is time for the next big step, whether it is moving in together, getting married, or separating.

So, we took a look at several big studies of lasting relationships and psychology and highlight some of the biggest signs that a relationship will last, keeping in mind that every relationship is different. Check them out in the graphic below:

READ MORE: Science says lasting relationships come down to 2 basic traits

SEE ALSO: A mathematical formula reveals the secret to lasting relationships

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For her new book "Rising Strong," social worker and bestselling author Brené Brown set out to determine what resilient people have in common. 

Her discovery, after many hours of interviews?

It's all about a "tolerance for discomfort," she says.

People who healthfully navigate firings, divorces, and other super difficult situations are able to do so because they're aware of their emotional worlds — which are often uncomfortable places. 

"What I'm talking about is an acceptance that our drive, this insatiable appetite for comfort and happiness, does not reconcile with who we are as people," she told Tech Insider in a recent interview. "Sometimes we have to do tough things and feel our way through tough situations, and we have to feel tough emotions." 

There's that word again: emotion.

Before the advent of "emotional intelligence" in the 1990s, emotions had a pretty bad reputation when it came to "serious" discussions about how people function. Emotion, and its adjective form emotional, were (and largely remain) derogatory charges to be levied at people when they're "irrational." It's also a fun disgusting way to belittle women when they're performing traditionally feminine behavior or men when they're doing the same. 

As in: You're being so emotional.

But here's the thing.

Despite an intellectual history that tells us "I think, therefore I am," contemporary neuroscience reveals that we're emotional beings first, thinking beings second. Down to slugs, caterpillars, and the most basic of invertebrates, animals emotionally respond as a way of navigating their environments, and humans are no exception. The thinking comes after.

It's part of our evolution, says Brown, whose Ted Talk on vulnerability has over 21 million views.

"It wouldn’t work if thought had the wheel — what you think of a dinosaur isn’t going to help you get away from it," she says. "Taking 20 minutes to think about whether or not you were prey wouldn't have been very adaptive."

Like behavioral economists show again and again, emotions drive thinking and behavior. They get the first crack at making sense of what's happening, Brown says; they're in the driver seat, with cognition and behavior riding shotgun. 

So when something difficult happens — a colleague shoots you an awful look at a meeting, a partner breaks up with you, you fail on a project — there's an emotional response. Before you can articulate why, you have the urge to punch somebody or devour a dozen donuts or hide in bed for a fortnight. 

And that's the spot where, Brown says, you need to wade into the discomfort of that reaction. You have to get curious about it, Brown says, and ask what is going on? what am I feeling? what's driving it? how am I responding to it? 

But this doesn't come naturally, she warns. Some brain hacks will help: write it on a Post It note, type it into your phone, send yourself an email with what happened. Then, over time, you can actually have enough notes on your own unhelpful behaviors so that you can spot the places where you participate in creating your own suffering before you act out those same destructive or avoidant behaviors for the zillionth time. 

Brown puts it simply: 

"Resilience is more available to people curious about their own line of thinking and behaving," she says. 

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Some experts estimate that 85% of your financial success comes not from your skills or knowledge but from your ability to connect with other people and engender their trust and respect.

Within seconds, everyone you meet forms an impression that largely determines whether they'll like, trust, and respect you.

Whether you're job-hunting or fundraising or leading an organization, making a good impression is absolutely critical. (No pressure, right?)

So whether you are looking to raise money for your company, or you are managing your team or leading your business, connecting to people and making a great impression is very important.

Here are some tips to help you win hearts and minds in 30 seconds:

1. Neutralize the fight-or-flight response.

The first few seconds of a first encounter are driven by instinctive reactions. Each person makes unconscious immediate appraisals that center around how safe they feel. Be mindful of your immediate signals, and make sure they could never be perceived as threatening.

2. Respect boundaries.

Be mindful of personal space and respect the boundaries of others. If in doubt, follow the other person's cues: if they lean in, you lean in; if they stand back, you do the same. Remember that concepts of appropriate personal space vary by culture.

3. Feed expectations.

In business, first impressions are frequently colored by expectations. We expect people to live up to the image we have created in our minds from their reputation, phone calls, emails, or texts. We expect consistency with that general image — and without it, we feel some degree of disappointment and confusion. It's not the time to surprise others with a new side of your personality.

4. Be mindful of body language.

It accounts for more than half of what others respond to initially — so it literally does speak louder than words. Hold yourself in a way that signals attention and an open heart, and keep a facial expression that combines authority with approachability and eye contact.

5. Stay positive.

The language of the brain is pictures, sounds, feelings, and to a lesser extent, smells and tastes. It's much more difficult to translate negatives into brain-friendly imagery than positives. Work to develop a positive explanatory style.

6. Keep control of your attitude.

The general energy you give off is one of the first unconscious things people respond to. If you're frazzled, project calm. If you're distracted and unenthusiastic, project positivity. (You'll not only make a better impression, but you can influence your own mood.)

7. Manage your moods.

People are drawn to warmth, enthusiasm, and confidence more than anger, arrogance, and impatience. Whatever is going on around you, manage your responses to get the best response from others.

8. Synchronize.

Make sure your words, your tone of voice, and your body language are all saying the same thing.

Mixed messages put off others, but consistency gives you clarity and credibility.

9. Use sensory language.

Activate people's senses, and mix up your imagery to make sure you hit their strength. Whenever possible, use descriptions of visual images, sounds, textures, motion, and feelings to add meaning to what you're saying.

10. Be curious, open-minded, and interested.

If you can get the other person talking and keep them talking, odds are they'll be drawn to you. Be interested and open-minded; ask questions that spark their imagination and ignite conversation.

11. Dress for success.

Find a personal style that represents who you are and the message you want to send about yourself. Look at your dress and appearance as packaging a product.

12. Have a personal statement.

Have a personal statement prepared and memorized so you can tell others concisely and eloquently what you do, what it means to you, and why it makes a difference. Think of it not as a sales pitch but an engaging and artfully crafted mini-presentation.

Work through these points and you should have a great first impression all lined up.

13. One final tip as you get out there:

Treat every connection you make as if it's the most important thing you've ever done. Because, frankly, you never know when it actually will be.

SEE ALSO: A social psychologist explains how to recover from making a horrible first impression

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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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MUMBAI (AFP) — A 91-year-old Indian "sexpert" whose popular tabloid column has drawn fans and critics with its straight-talking approach, provides a lifeline to readers in what remains a conservative society bereft of proper sex education.

And although most of his queries still come from men, Mahinder Watsa told AFP that more women are now seeking his daily dose of advice in the Mumbai Mirror.

"When I first started writing 'Ask the Sexpert,' almost none of the letters I received were from women, but now it's around 30 percent," said Watsa, India's leading sexologist, who gets about 80 queries a day.

"At the beginning women weren't so frank, but now they are expressing themselves in ways that they never used to. Women are becoming more open and saying, 'Well, if men can have fun, why can't we also?'" he added.

Watsa, an obstetrician and gynecologist by profession, has enlightened and entertained readers in India's financial capital for more than a decade with his words of wisdom, which are often funny as well as informative.

His matter-of-fact approach, including using words such as "vagina" and "penis" instead of common euphemisms, has helped fill a void in a country where sex education is controversial and often non-existent.

"There are many states in India which don't have sex education in schools, so young people are left all on their own and there is a lot of confusion," Watsa explained. "The point is, where do people get their knowledge from? Even today most doctors in India are not very experienced in dealing with sexuality problems."

Watsa pioneered the teaching of sex education through his work with the Family Planning Association of India before starting his column, but has faced opposition from conservatives in the country.

He said he had encountered "resistance" to his workshops in the early years of his career.

"In the beginning people would get very upset when I put up a slide of a penis showing it diagrammatically," he said. "But then they started to get used to it."

Watsa added that a couple of complaints had been made to the police about the Mirror column, claiming that "children had been reading it and getting wrong ideas."

'It's normal!'

But the nonagenarian has remained undeterred.

"People who read it are more knowledgeable about sex, which is very wise because you can get into a lot of trouble," Watsa said, referring to the risk of unwanted pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases.

He takes a caring tone with women's concerns but is renowned for his witty and sometimes sarcastic replies to certain readers' queries.

He also doesn't hesitate to give short shrift to some, particularly men asking how they can prove a wife-to-be has not had sex before.

"My family is demanding that I get married. How can I ascertain if the girl is a virgin?" read one question.

Watsa replied: "I suggest you don't get married. Unless you appoint detectives, there is no way to find out. Spare any poor girl of your suspicious mind."

"Sometimes you have to be a little harsh in how you say it and make them feel a little angry with you," Watsa explained. "When they feel angry, they start thinking, and when they start thinking, they start to improve."

The majority of the emails Watsa receives are from men expressing concerns about masturbation — whether it leads to hair loss is a common theme — and how to stop premature ejaculation.

Some letters are bizarre, such as the man who asked if it was OK to cheat on his wife with his pet goat, but Watsa insists the handful that are printed in the newspaper every day are genuine.

"A lot of people think it's made up, but I tell them that I can't even think of some of the questions that come in," he told AFP. "I've been doing this for a long time, so I can tell pretty quickly whether someone is trying to pull my leg."

The sex therapist has just released a book entitled "It's Normal!" and is something of a celebrity in Mumbai with his own Facebook fan page, but he's unperturbed by the fame.

"Nobody dislikes recognition, and when people comment on the column it's nice, but I'm too old to get carried away," said the sprightly Watsa, who turns 92 in February and has no plans to slow down.

"They say the column has a big following and sells the paper, so I'll continue for as long as the paper wants me to, unless I get Alzheimer's or something," he added, smiling.

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Some people instantly make us feel important. Some people instantly make us feel special. Some people light up a room just by walking in.

We can't always define it, but some people have "it"— they're naturally charismatic.

Unfortunately, natural charisma quickly loses its impact. Familiarity breeds, well, familiarity.

But some people have the ability to maintain real charisma over time. They build and maintain great relationships, positively influence the people around them, and consistently make people feel better about themselves. They're the kind of people everyone wants to be around … and wants to be.

Fortunately we can all be more charismatic, because charisma isn't about our level of success, or our presentation skills, or how we dress, or the image we project — charisma is about what we do.

Here are ways you can be more charismatic:

1. Listen way more than you talk.

Ask questions. Maintain eye contact. Smile. Frown. Nod. Respond — not so much verbally, but nonverbally.

That's all it takes to show the other person they're important.

Then when you do speak, don't offer advice unless you're asked. Listening shows you care a lot more than offering advice, because when you offer advice in most cases you make the conversation about you, not them.

Don't believe me? Who is, "Here's what I would do …" about: you, or the other person?

Only speak when you have something important to say — and always define important as what matters to the other person, not to you.

2. Don't practice selective hearing.

Some people — I guarantee you know a few like this — are incapable of hearing anything said by the people they feel are somehow beneath them.

Sure, you speak to them, but that particular falling tree doesn't make a sound in the forest, because there's no one actually listening.

Incredibly charismatic people listen closely to everyone, and they make all of us, regardless of our position or social status or "level," feel like we have something in common with them.

Because we do.

3. Always put your stuff away.

Don't check your phone. Don't glance at your monitor. Don't focus on anything else, even for a moment.

You can never connect with others if you're busy connecting with your stuff, too.

Give the gift of full attention. That's a gift few people give. That gift alone will make others want to be around you and remember you.

4. Always give before you receive — knowing you may never receive.

Never think about what you can get. Focus on what you can provide. Giving is the only way to establish a real connection and relationship.

Focus, even in part and even for a moment, on what you can get out of the other person, and you show that the only person who really matters is you.

Just give. Be remarkably giving. Don't worry about whether you will someday receive.

5. Don't act self-important …

The only people who are impressed by your stuffy, pretentious, self-important persona are other stuffy, pretentious, self-important people.

The rest of us aren't impressed. We're irritated, put off, and uncomfortable.

And we aren't too thrilled when you walk in the room.

6. … Since you know other people are more important.

You already know what you know. You know your opinions. You know your perspective and point of view.

That stuff isn't important, because it's already yours. You can't learn anything from yourself.

But you don't know what other people know, and everyone, no matter who they are, knows things you don't know.

That automatically makes them a lot more important than us because they're people we can learn from.

7. Shine the spotlight on others.

No one receives enough praise. No one. Tell people what they did well.

Wait, you say you don't know what they did well?

Shame on you — it's your job to know. It's your job to find out ahead of time.

Not only will people appreciate your praise, they'll appreciate the fact you care enough to pay attention to what they do.

And they will feel a little more accomplished — and a lot more important.

8. Choose your attitude — and your words.

The words you use affect the attitude of others — and they affect you.

For example, you don't have to go to a meeting; you get to go meet with other people. You don't have to create a presentation for a new client; you get to share cool stuff with other people. You don't have to go to the gym; you get to work out and improve your health and fitness.

You don't have to interview job candidates; you get to select a great person to join your team.

We all want to associate with happy, enthusiastic, fulfilled people. The approach you take and the words you choose can help other people feel better about themselves — and make you feel better about yourself, too.

9. Don't discuss the failings of others …

Granted, we all like hearing a little gossip. We all like hearing a little dirt.

The problem is, we don't necessarily like — and we definitely don't respect — the people who dish that dirt.

Don't laugh at other people. When you do, the people around you wonder if you sometimes laugh at them.

10. … But readily admit your own failings.

Incredibly successful people are often assumed to have charisma simply because they are successful — their success can seem to create a halo effect, almost like a glow.

The key word is "seem."

You don't have to be incredibly successful to be extremely charismatic. Scratch the shiny surface, and many successful people have the charisma of a rock.

But you do have to be incredibly genuine to be extremely charismatic.

Be humble. Share your screwups. Admit your mistakes and be the lesson learned.

And definitely laugh at yourself. When you do, other people won't laugh at you. They'll laugh with you.

And they'll like you better for it … and want to be around you a lot more.

SEE ALSO: 9 Things Incredibly Attractive People Do

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There's been a lot of talk lately about how dating apps like Tinder are ruining romance.

A recent Vanity Fair story claims these apps are responsible for a growing hookup culture, where anonymous sex has replaced traditional romance, because they give straight young men the impression that there's a surplus of available women.

But Tinder and its ilk (apps like OkCupid and Hinge) aren't entirely to blame, argues freelance journalist and former Fortune reporter Jon Birger in The Washington Post.

The Vanity Fair article quotes a psychologist who says that apps like Tinder contribute to "a perceived surplus of women" among straight men, which promotes more hookups and fewer traditional relationships.

However, "This surplus of women is not just 'perceived' but very, very real," Birger writes.

In his book DATE-ONOMICS: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game, Birger argues that the college and post-college hookup scene is a result of the gender gap in college enrollment.

About 34% more women than men graduated from American colleges in 2012, and the US Department of Education predicts this number will reach 47% by 2023. Among college-educated adults in the US aged 22 to 29, there are about 5.5 million women and 4.1 million men, according to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey.

"In other words, the dating pool for straight, millennial, college graduates has four women for every three men," Birger says.

Some research suggests that the gender ratio has a big influence on dating and marriage — women on campuses with more women and fewer men say they go on fewer dates but more sex, for example. A 2010 study of 986 unmarried, straight college women surveyed in 2001 found that women on campuses with more female than male students said they went on fewer conventional dates, were less likely to say they have had a college boyfriend, and were more likely to say they were sexually active than women from male-dominated campuses were.

The findings build on work by social psychologist Marcia Guttentag, whose book "Too Many Women? The Sex Ratio Question" describes how the balance of men and women has had a profound effect on society, from sexual norms to economic power.

When there's an excess of marriage-eligible men, research suggests, the dating culture — in which men are traditionally the active ones seeking partners, rather than the other way around — involves more romance, because men must compete for the attention of fewer women. But when the ratio is skewed toward women, as with the college grads in this study, romantic interaction becomes more about sex, because men are in high demand and don't feel pressured to settle down.

Birger says this can lead to women being more sexually objectified, while men "play the field."

A possible solution?

Another factor that makes dating difficult is that college-educated women today are less likely than ever before to marry men with less education than them, research suggests. (In the past, difference in education level was a less important factor in marriage.)

As Berger puts it, "New York City women looking for a match would be better off, statistically at least, at a fireman's bar in Staten Island than a wine bar on the Upper East Side." In other words, if women with a college education were more open to dating men without one, it would improve their odds of finding a date.

Of course, the same statistics that Berger cites regarding the uneven ratio of educated men to women in the dating world suggest that this is likely not going to happen anytime soon.

There's another reason working against the dating odds of straight, urban women: in LGBT-friendly cities like New York, Washington and Miami, a considerable fraction of the men are gay. Birger estimates that in Manhattan's straight, college-grad, under-30 dating pool, there are roughly three women for every two men.

Birger says the picture gets worse with age, because as people get older and get married, the ratio of available women to men gets even more skewed. For example, if you start out with a pool of 140 women and 100 men (all of whom are straight and monogamous), and half the women get married, the ratio of single women to single men rises from 1.4:1 to more than 2:1.

To solve that problem, Birger suggests that women seeking love in Manhattan leave New York, "which is one of the worst dating markets in the country for educated young women." If you are one of these women, his advice is, "Go West, Young Woman."

The odds are slightly better in the Western states of California and Colorado, which each have 20% more college-educated women aged 22 to 29 than men. By comparison, Illinois and North Carolina have 36% and 41% more such women, respectively.

In Silicon Valley, which is notoriously male-dominated, women have much better chances of snagging a man. Santa Clara county, for example, is the only populated area in the country where there are more male college graduates than female ones.

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SEE ALSO: Biological anthropologist: Tinder works because it mimics millennia-old human behavior

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In July, we published a list of seemingly trivial behaviors that people use to make judgments about your personality. 

The list got a fair amount of traction, so we decided to research even more ways people draw inferences about your personality. 

The following eight items are drawn from the original Quora thread, "What are the really small things that tell a lot about a person's psychology and personality?," as well as other research.

Read on to learn what captures people's attention when you first meet them.

1. How clean and tidy you keep your home

A recent British study found that it takes just 26 seconds for visitors to make judgments about you based on the state of your home. 

Apparently, people judge first with their nose: The scent of your home is the biggest factor in a positive impression. (We should mention that the study was sponsored by AirWick.)

Next is how cluttered the space is — people notice shoes and coats scattered about and piles of unopened mail.

2. Your selfie style

Research suggests that people will assume a lot about you based on your selfies. 

Usually, those assumptions are inaccurate — for example, being alone in a photo does not mean you're neurotic — but people are probably right to think that positive emotion in a selfie predicts openness to experience.

3. Your taste in music

Quora user Humaira Siddiqui says she judges people based on the type of music they listen to, citing a 2003 study on the topic. 

The study found that people who listen to "reflective and complex" music tend to be open to new experiences and politically liberal. Those who listen to "upbeat and conventional" jams are generally extroverted and athletic.

4. Your favorite color

Shivani Jha has a theory on what your color of choice reveals about your personality. For example, if your favorite color is red, she assumes you desire physical fulfillment; if your favorite color is yellow, she thinks you need logical order and value individuality.

Industrial psychologist Bernardo Tirado, PMP, breaks it down slightly differently. Writing in Psychology Today, Tirado says red-lovers are tenacious and determined, while yellow-lovers enjoy learning and find happiness easily.

5. Whether you're a dog or a cat person.

"People who do not like cats have control issues,"writes Joe Waldron, who also advises readers to "avoid women who like big dogs (really big, like sheep dogs). They are often not looking for long-term relationships."

Meanwhile, one study found that people who prefer dogs are generally more energetic and outgoing, while those who prefer cats tend to be more introverted and sensitive.

6. How worn your shoes are

Calvin Chik recommends checking out the soles of people's shoes for clues to their personality:

People who are less confident of themselves tend to lean forward more in their posture when standing or walking. They put more body weight on the balls of their feet, like getting ready to move fast.

People who are self-confident tend to lean back more. They have a larger proportion of their body weight on their heels than at the front of their feet.

Over time, their standing posture is reflected in the state of their shoes. A person who is perpetually walking on the balls of his feet would have the soles of his shoes more worn out at the front, while a more self-assured person may have the heels area worn out more.

7. How you treat animals 

According to Lorri Robinson, a person's attitude toward animals reveals a lot about them. 

"If someone has never met a stray they didn't speak to or pet (if the animal approached them in a friendly manner), that person is going to be naturally friendly and open," she writes. 

8. How long it takes you to ask a question

Even if someone doesn't say anything about himself in conversation, you can still learn about his personality. 

As Khaliana Schmitz says: "When meeting someone for the first time … see how long it takes for them to ask you a question in return. You'd be surprised how much this reveals in terms of a person being a 'giver' or a 'taker.' It will help you distinguish between 'people who like you' and 'people who like what you can provide them.'"

SEE ALSO: The best jobs for every personality type

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When psychologist Arthur Aron was a graduate student in the 1960s, he was looking around for something to study for his dissertation. But he didn't want just any topic. He wanted to find one "that people thought couldn't be studied scientifically and then prove that it could be," he said.

And then he fell in love — and that was all he could think about.

It was hard, at first, for researchers to take Aron's study of love and romantic relationships seriously. "Early on," Aron told us, "it was a topic on the margins." But it quickly became clear that it deserved a closer, more scholarly look.

"As we started persuading people we ought to study [love]," Aron told Tech Insider, researchers began to find something remarkable: "The single biggest predictor of human happiness is the quality of [a person's] relationships."

That's no trivial finding, with potentially huge implications for health and well-being. Several years ago, a major review on the topic concluded that "people with stronger social relationships had a 50% increased likelihood of survival [compared to] those with weaker social relationships."

The idea that we are drawn to other people and happiest when we bond with them is "very basic," Aron said. "We've become aware of just how central it is."

As the social psychologist Ellen Berscheidwrote in 2003: "It appears that we are innately inclined to form strong, enduring, and harmonious attachments with others."

But are such relationships really the key to happiness, as Aron asserts? Stacks of research suggest that they very well may be. One extensive review published by three of the leading scholars on happiness examined whether "happy people have better social relationships than their less happy peers." Indeed, they concluded, "our review reveals this to be one of the most robust findings in the literature on well-being."

But happiness and happy relationships are something of a two-way street: Are happy relationships really the cause of overall happiness, or are happy people just more likely to form happy relationships?

It's difficult to tease that apart, but we have some clues.

One study published in the Journal of Happiness Studies looked at more than 65,000 Norwegian mothers. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found, relationship satisfaction and life satisfaction were strongly linked. But it turned out that relationship satisfaction predicted changes in overall life satisfaction more than the other way around. "Having a satisfying romantic relationship," the researchers concluded, "is important for retaining and increasing future life satisfaction."(More studies are still needed in more diverse populations.)

There's little doubt, in any case, that our relationships are important, and that they have the power to shape our mood and feelings about the world in general. Take romantic love, for example. "It seems sort of frivolous, and yet it completely changes people's lives," Aron said.

It surely changed the life of Aron, who's now a research professor at Stony Brook University and a visiting scholar at Berkeley. Falling madly in love as a graduate student did more than just give him a topic for his dissertation and life's work.

That woman he fell for back in graduate school? She's now his wife — and a renowned psychologist in her own right.

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How can I start an interesting conversation?​ originally appeared as a question on Quora. Below we are republishing an answer from Julian Reisinger, founder of Love Life Solved.

The most interesting conversations aren't about news, or politics, or sports: They are about emotions. Advertisers have known that for decades and use it to sell more product.

No one buys a Rolex because they need one, they buy it because it makes them feel significant.

Do the same! Stop making people think and start making them feel and you will end up in the most interesting conversations – even with people you deemed boring before.

Here is how I learned to do it and how you can too.

Have an emotional opinion

"What do you think about the deforestation in the Amazon rainforest?" You probably won't have much of an opinion about topics like this unless you have concerned yourself with it before.

In school and especially later, in college and university, you learn to have an opinion on topics ranging from abortion to the war on drugs. But who ever taught you about emotional opinions?

I guess no one, but don't worry! I'll be your exchange teacher for a moment.

The whole process is laughably simple. Whenever something noteworthy happens in your life, ask yourself: How do I feel about this?

Let's practice with examples:

• You are about to start a new job: "I feel excited because this job poses new opportunities to my career, but I am also nervous because I feel like I have to prove myself."
• You just graduated from university: "I feel incredibly happy and proud but the feelings are bittersweet because I still have no idea what I want to do next."
• You reconnected with an old friend after 15 years: "At first it felt awkward because he was basically a stranger after all this time. But after a few minutes I could feel that what connected us in the past prevailed and we had the best time ever."

Tapping into emotion is not only key in love.

Now that you know how you feel, ask yourself how others might feel. E.g.,How could that make them feel? or How would I feel in this situation? It's basically verbalized empathy.

When someone tells you: "I think about moving to Germany," they don't want you to suggest cities with low crime rates and good health care. They want to tell you about their inner fights and why they feel they have to go.

Practice having and expressing emotional opinions and your conversations will become more interesting. Guaranteed!

Talk about passions

passion
ˈpaʃ(ə)n/
noun
1. strong and barely controllable emotion.

A special form of talking about emotions is when you or someone else talks about something they are passionate about.

Everyone has passions, sometimes hidden, but everyone has them.

It might be JavaScript, or cooking French desserts, or creating art from old tin cans. Whatever it is, find it and talk about it! It's a goldmine for conversations.

An example:

When a friend of yours tells you (or a group) that she went horseback riding and had an amazing time, don't ask, "Where did you go?", rather ask, "I have never done horseback riding. What makes it so exciting?"

I guarantee you that any person who is passionate about the topic will not only teach you a ton — in an interesting way — but will also like you more and feel closer to you afterwards.

In case you have no idea what the other person is passionate about, just ask: "What are you passionate about?"

This question alone will unleash a fascinating conversation.

3 reasons I love talking about passions:

1. It makes people speak with excitement which makes it interesting to listen.
2. You learn a lot of new things. E.g. Recently a friend took me and four other friends disc golfing. He explained the rules, showed us various techniques, and even managed to get us a steep discount at the course. All because we let him express his passion.
3. People will love you for it, and as a result they will want to be around you.

People who love sports are often passionate about it.

People are constantly crying out for attention to their emotions but seldom someone listens. Those who do are rewarded with lifelong friendship, exciting romances, and happy relationships. Keep that in mind!

Have fun practicing!

For more from Julian, check out Love Life Solved.

SEE ALSO: 9 ways to become a more interesting person

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A new relationship — whether personal, romantic, or professional — is a lot like buying a new car. Driving it off the lot is pure bliss.

As you look around, you can scarcely take it all in.

Everything smells, sounds, and looks terrific. You coast through weeks or months — maybe even years — of happy driving before you're aware of anything that needs fixing.

And like a car, when a relationship breaks down, it's overwhelming; you're left stuck on the side of the road wondering what went wrong.

A trained eye knows when a car is in trouble. From the sound of the idle to the color of the exhaust exiting the tailpipe, there are telltale signs of distress. The same is true of relationships, and you can be your own mechanic.

Researchers at the University of Washington discovered four clear indicators of relationship failure (dubbed "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse") so profound that they predict the future success of a relationship with 93% accuracy.

The researchers in Washington conducted their studies with married couples, and their accuracy rate for predicting divorce has held up for more than 14 years after watching couples interact.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

The Four Horsemen reveal problems for relationships of all types. They represent the counterproductive acts we can easily fall victim to when our emotions get the better of us.

As you read each of the Horsemen and consider its relevance in your relationships, remember that conflict itself is not a problem. Conflict is actually a normal and (ideally) productive part of two people with different needs and interests working together.

The researchers in Washington found that the amount of conflict between two people had no bearing on the success of the relationship. It's how conflict is handled that determines a relationship's success, and the Four Horsemen's presence means conflict is not being dealt with constructively or productively.

Follow the strategies provided for overcoming each of the Four Horseman, and your relationships are bound to be successful.

Related: 12 Ways Successful People Handle Toxic People

The 1st Horseman: Criticism

Criticism is not to be confused with delivering feedback or otherwise seeking improvement or change in another person. Criticism becomes, well, criticism when it isn't constructive ("This report is terrible.").

Criticism, in its most troubling form, focuses on the individual's personality, character, or interests rather than the specific action or behavior you'd like to see changed ("You are terrible at writing. You're so disorganized and tangential."). It's one thing to criticize without being constructive; it's another to go after someone for something they are unable to change.

Overcoming Criticism:

If you find yourself criticizing when you planned on being constructive, it's best if you don't deliver your feedback and commentary unless you've planned ahead. You'll need to think through what you're going to say and stick to your script in order to remain constructive and avoid criticism.

It's also best if you focus your feedback on a single specific behavior, as your reactions to multiple behaviors at once can easily be perceived as criticism. If you find that you cannot deliver feedback without generalizing to the other person's personality, you're better off saying nothing at all.

The 2nd Horseman: Contempt

Contempt is any open sign of disrespect toward another. Contempt often involves comments that aim to take the other person down a notch, as well as direct insults. Contempt is also seen in indirect and veiled forms, such as rolling of the eyes and couching insults within "humor."

Overcoming Contempt:

Contempt stems from a lack of interest in the other person. When you find that you don't enjoy or admire someone — perhaps there are things about him or her that used to be interesting or charming and now they've lost their luster — contempt can surface unexpectedly.

If your disinterest is unavoidable and the relationship is one that isn't going anywhere, such as a family member or coworker, then you need to focus on managing the relationship itself. People who manage relationships well are able to see the benefit of connecting with many different people, even those they are not fond of.

Common ground, no matter how small, is a commodity to be sought and cherished. In the immortal words of Abraham Lincoln, "I do not like that man. I must get to know him better."

Related: Why Leaders Lack Emotional Intelligence

The 3rd Horseman: Defensiveness

Denying responsibility, making excuses, meeting one complaint with another, and other forms of defensiveness are problematic, because they prevent a conflict from reaching any sort of resolution. Defensiveness only serves to accelerate the anxiety and tension experienced by both parties, and this makes it difficult to focus on the larger issues at hand that need to be resolved.

Overcoming Defensiveness:

To overcome defensiveness, you have to be willing to listen carefully to the other party's complaint, even if you don't see things the same way. This doesn't mean you have to agree with them.

Instead, you focus on fully understanding the other person's perspective so that you can work together towards resolving the conflict. It's critical that you work to remain calm. Once you understand why the other person is upset, it's much easier to find common ground than if you dismiss their opinions defensively.

The 4th Horseman: Stonewalling

Stonewalling is what happens when one person shuts the discussion down by refusing to respond. Examples of stonewalling include the silent treatment, being emotionally distant or devoid of emotion, and ignoring the other person completely. Stonewalling is problematic, because it aggravates the person being stonewalled and it prevents the two from working on resolving the conflict together.

Overcoming Stonewalling:

The key to overcoming stonewalling is to participate in the discussion. If you're stonewalling because the circumstances are leaving you feeling overwhelmed, let the other person know how you're feeling and ask for some time to think before continuing the discussion.

Maintain eye contact and a forward posture and nod your head to let the other person know that you are engaged in the discussion and listening even when you don't have something to say. If you stonewall as a matter of practice, you need to realize that participating in discussions and working together to resolve conflict are the only ways to keep your relationships from crumbling.

A version of this article first appeared on TalentSmart.com.

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