Marriage Minutes

If you sometimes feel that you are married to a stranger, you may be right! In a recent study, "The Closeness-Communications Bias: Increased Egocentrism among Friends versus Strangers," couples who live together tend to overestimate their ability to communicate. When polled these couples made claims like: "We think alike," "I can read his mind" or "We understand each other."

You tend to draw on intimate knowledge of a spouse or even a friend to make sweeping assertions based on an illusion of understanding him or her. However, many conflicts happen when someone close to you fails as a mind reader.

The basic premise of etiquette is to make you, your spouse and others comfortable with one other. It all hinges on respect, consideration and some good old common sense. But you would be amazed at how little some know about the most common everyday things. How well would you score on a courtesy pop quiz? Take a minute with your spouse and see how you both do when it comes to being respectful, not only to each other but also to those around you. Do you think you know more about being proper than your spouse? Print out two quizzes, whip out your number two pencil and see who comes out on top.

Spring makes me want to play and have more fun. Recently, I attended a health conference and confess that I was bored—more than usual. I don’t even think it was the speaker’s fault; I blame it on spring. Instead of taking notes, I sketched primitive-looking hearts and flowers. The message was clear: I called my husband and told him we had to make room for romance and suggested a getaway weekend.

Most everybody at one time or another has doodled in a notebook to the chagrin of many teachers who wrongly accused this student of not paying attention. What these teachers didn’t realize was that doodling helped

It’s not always easy to recognize when your guy isn’t telling the truth. Not every lie makes beads of sweat roll down his forehead or forces him into a rambling story; nor will his nose grow. But there are subtle cues that indicate he’s trying to fudge the facts. To help awaken your inner lie detector—and prevent dishonesty from floating in your marriage—we called in ex-CIA polygraph examiner Dan Crum, author of the new book, "Is He Lying To You?"

"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance." ~ Alan Watts

I can’t get this film out of my head. Watching it at 35,000 feet with the melting ice caps continually under my windows' view has cemented this new altered reality into my head. "Before the Flood," the 2016 documentary release by Leonardo DiCaprio in cooperation with National Geographic should be the talk of the day, instead almost everyone I mention it to hasn’t even heard of it. I remember when Al Gore’s "Inconvenient Truth" launched the ridiculous yet persistent to this day climate denial platform.

WASHINGTON (REUTERS) - The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the U.S. Constitution provides same-sex couples the right to marry, handing a historic triumph to the American gay rights movement.

The court ruled 5-4 that the Constitution's guarantees of due process and equal protection under the law mean that states cannot ban same-sex marriages. With the ruling, gay marriage will become legal in all 50 states.

When older men have stressed-out wives, their own blood pressure may go up, a U.S. study suggests.

While previous research has linked stress and bad relationships to elevated blood pressure, less is known about how these challenges affect both members of a couple, and how the spouses affect one another, over time.

For the current study, researchers evaluated about 1,350 couples once in 2006 and again in 2010 to see how each person’s blood pressure might change based on shifts in their relationship satisfaction or stress levels.