Category Archives: Celebrity Love

The lives of famous couples and families have unique stresses that fascinate their fans.

DNA Dating. Does it work?

Celebrity Love, For Couples, For Men, For Singles, For Women

Screen Shot 2015-04-10 at 11.04.58 AMCan your nose select a partner better than your heart? According to science, yes! The latest trend in dating is DNA Dating. Using a simple cheek swap siliva test, you can actually predict if you will have great sex and a long term, compatible relationship. The test is the brain child of a group of neuroscientists and geneticists in Toronto who are set to change the game of love. Their simple DNA test can help predict is a dating couple with have mad hot sex, a long relationship, better fertility and even healthier children. And it can help established couples understand their relationship better.

The test works like this: The magic genes identified by the Instant Chemistry test are the same ones that power our immune systems, and under normal dating conditions, women’s bodies are uniquely designed to pick up the scent and taste of a man who may be a good genetic match. They do this through close contact and kissing. It’s no wonder that women like to kiss more than men and couples who kiss a lot — presumingly because it is pleasurable — are linked to longer, more secure relationships.

Secondly, Instant Chemistry looks at the genes that surround serotonin up take in the brain, which indicate whether a person has wide or narrow mood swings. If two hot heads get together, relationships tend to be more rocky and can lead to break ups and divorce.

But today’s dating world is far from a “normal condition.” First of all, most women are on the birth control pill, creating hormonal changes that can gum up the ability to detect compatible immune systems in men. Secondly, since we modern humans practice such amazing hygiene and mask our smells with products, important pheromones are hidden. Finally, since we are exposed to a wide range of potential partners in crowded groups, it makes it harder to distinguish fit mates from not-so-great mates.

So today’s DNA Dating is a trend designed to reduce high divorce rates. Using solid mating science partners are choosing better, happier relationships. Would you like a DNA test with your partner? Go to InstantChemistry.com to find out more.

CBS’s Show “Mom” Reveals a Family Secret

Celebrity Love, Family, For Singles, For Women, Relationships

imgresSometimes social education is easier to digest when swallowed with a spoonful of comedy. The writer’s of the CBS sit-com “Mom,” (Thursday’s 8:30/7:30 central) are doing it again tomorrow night when a family therapy session provokes the spilling of a big-fat family secret. Hint: Allison Janney’s character lets the cat out of the bag and her daughter, played by Anna Feris, has to do some serious soul searching.

This isn’t the first time that “Mom” has tackled sensitive topics. The show has earned an Emmy a Golden Globe and the Television Academy honored them for “programming that creates awareness, enlightens, educates and/or positively motivates audiences.”  “Mom’s” risk-taking, humorous look at mental illness and substance abuse were only the beginning. Tomorrow evening’s episode looks at a topic close to my heart: the life of a family secret in relationships.

Perhaps the biggest lesson in the episode is the fact that a secret in intimate relationships is never really a secret. The reactions to hidden historic events take on lives of their own and create intergenerational relationship patterns. In other words, the elephant in the living room forces all family members to sashay around the outskirts of the problem without ever confronting it. Subsequent generations just emulate  the reactionary behavior, never knowing why. This is how trauma weaves it’s way through multiple generations.

My favorite way to illustrate intergeneration psychology involves a Holiday ham. A mother is teaching her young daughter how to prepare the family ham. The little girls asks why her mother cuts the end off the ham before roasting it. Her response is “that’s how I watched my mother do it.”

“But why?” says the little girl.

The two decide to call the grand-mother. “Grandma, why do you cut the end of the ham off before roasting it,” they ask. The grandmother, thinks for a bit and then says, “That’s how my mother did it.”

Still not satisfied, the little girl and her mother decide to call the very old great-grandmother. She is living in an assisted living facility but still has a good memory.

“Great-grandma,” says the little girl, “Why do you cut the end of the ham off before roasting it?”

The great-grandmother laughs out loud. “Because I only had one small pan and it wouldn’t fit.”

MOM AIRS ON CBS ON THURSDAYS 8:30/7:30 c

 

Taylor Swift’s Blank Space. An Attachment Disorder?

Attachment, Celebrity Love, For Men, For Singles, For Women, romantic attachment style,

imgresRecently a woman wrote me to ask my opinion of the “empowering” lyrics of Taylor Swift’s new single BLANK SPACE. She hoped it indicated that women as sexual aggressors demonstrates some sort of positive advancement in the current high supply sexual economy (the one that’s hurting women.) I was intrigued.

So I read the lyrics carefully. I read them three times. Then I watched the music video and my heart sunk.

The only thing female empowering about Taylor Swift’s Blank Space is the economic superiority she holds over her playboy. Otherwise she’s losing the mating game. Big time.

Blank Space is the story of a roller coaster love affair with a player. And it says more about attachment style than anything else. The song and video chronicle the abrupt female switch from infatuation to hate that comes when someone with an anxious attachment style meets someone with an avoidant attachment style.  In the video, Miss. Swift plays a gorgeous sex kitten living alone in an impossibly large English country manor. In drives her latest par amour, a young hot man whom she is smitten with and lyrically prophesizes “Look at that face. You look like my next mistake.” Then the two embark on a fantasy union — no courtship. Just cut to lust. But her stomach knows the truth as she repeats the chorus:

It’ll leave you breathless
Or with a nasty scar
Got a long list of ex-lovers
They’ll tell you I’m insane

The end is predictable. She sees another woman’s text on his iPhone (did Apple sponsor the video?) and goes into a female rage of rampage and destruction, the likes of which many, many women have fantasized about. She even attacks his car with a golf club in a not so subtle reference to Tiger Woods infidelities. Finally, Taylor kicks him out of her castle, only to see him coming back for more and the roller coaster begins again.

But this is no story of female empowerment. This is how an anxious attachment style plays out in relationships. Those who are prone to fear and pre-occupation in love relationships idealize love. They are, sadly, usually attracted to people who can’t give love back. In an effort to “make him love me,” they move way too quickly toward intimacy as a way to fuse the attachment. But it is all one big fantasy. Before long, real life steps in, (partly because the anxious attachers are vigilantly looking for threats of abandonment, checking iPhones texts, smelling shirts, etc.) With poor ego strength and an inability to tolerate thoughts of rejection, next comes the emotional flip. The partner who was all loving becomes the partner who is all hating. At that point, she can’t even see the good in him. She can’t tolerate holding the duplicity of her man, that all humans are good and bad. We all have strengths and faults.

The saddest message in the lyrics of Taylor Swift’s Blank Space, is that low self esteem is inevitable with repeated toxic relationships. Our traumatized heroine actually believes she is insane. In actually, she is a victim of some early life attachment injuries and replicating them in her adult life.

Bottom line: attachment injuries can be healed. Read more about how to heal attachment disorders here.

DR. WENDY WALSH IS AVAILABLE FOR TELEPHONE RELATIONSHIP COACHING. TO SCHEDULE, PLEASE CLICK HERE AND COMPLETE THE BOX ON THE LEFT. SHE’LL PERSONALLY RESPOND.

Screen Shot 2015-06-09 at 8.18.56 PM

WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT LOVE AND SEX? GET 50% OF MY ONLINE WORKSHOP “THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HUMAN MATING” USE PROMO CODE “LOVE 50” CLICK HERE

And, someone please tell that sweet angel Taylor Swift she should watch my video: WHY WE LOVE BAD BOYS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs5KpdlA_L8

Are you a Relationship Professional?

Celebrity Love, Find a Relationship, For Couples, For Men, For Parents, For Singles, For Women

imgresAre you going to iDate in January? It’s the world’s largest dating industry conference held at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas on January 20th-22nd. Attendees include online dating operators, dating coaches, matchmakers and other relationship professionals. We spend 3 days collaborating, networking, learning and sharing tips and secrets to growing our businesses.

This year, I’m thrilled to tell you that I will be leading a pre-conference seminar that is part “Love Science Pro: The Psychology of Human Mating” and part business strategy for matchmakers. Find out more here:

To register for my special pre-conference seminar on January 20th, go to the iDate 2015 registration page, and click on: ADVANCED BUSINESS STRATEGY FOR MATCHMAKERS AND DATING COACHES

Hope to see you there! – Dr. Wendy Walsh

 

Bill Cosby’s Sexual Time Warp

Celebrity Love, Uncategorized,

Screen shot 2014-12-01 at 7.10.07 PMI have been hesitant to write about Bill Cosby. News of the aging comedian’s sudden infamy as an alledged serial rapist has been throbbing in me with the dissonance of a wisdom tooth extraction — a necessary loss with a real pain. My dissonance has less to do with merging Bill Cosby the comedian with Bill Cosby the drug wielding sexual predator, and more to do with with the viewing of historical sexual practices through today’s lens. What would have been a dark footnote in our country’s history, listed alongside witch-burning and White House slave-owning, has become a modern-day public lynching. The cultural shift happened so fast that the old man hadn’t even taken his last curtain call. There’s a kind of discomfort when a historical villain is alive today.

And that’s my problem with this story. Taken in the context of the 1970’s sexual revolution, where a yet undefined female sexual freedom met with alcohol in dark places, how did we draw the line between sex and sexual assault? Surely in a different way than today.

Don’t get me wrong. The sexual rules needed to change. Unconscious women cannot give consent. There are real victims here. These were real crimes with longterm consequences. A betrayal by a revered colleague pitches and jabs through a victim’s love life. Emotional wounds scar like that. Victims can walk around for years looking no worse for wear until, in a critical moment, they morph into what boyfriends like to call “a crazy bitch” duking it out with relationship ghosts, zeroing in on mistrust in the most trustworthy places. Or worse, choosing pain over security because that’s what they know.

With awareness growing quickly, lawmakers have been scrambling to keep up. An increasing number of whistle blowing women in the media and men and women in law and politics are working to rewrite the rules of sexual conduct and draw hard lines in the sand. We’ll figure this out. Already California has passed a law whereby anyone engaging in sex on the campus of a State funded school must first obtain verbal or written consent. (Good luck finding a single definition of “sex.”)

The silver lining in all of this is that we’re finally talking openly about consent. We’re talking about sexual conduct. The rules are being clarified in the media. And we’re helping a new generation of “hard-on impaired” men understand the enormous differences in male and female sexuality. Because of this, many rapes will be prevented. And if a spoiled celebrity of an old man is our sacrificial lamb, then so be it. I’ll sit with my discomfort.