Tuesday Tunes: Gossip, 'Move in the Right Direction'

Check out the alternative pop groups new single ' Move in the Right Direction' below

A better audio only version here: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/song-exclusive-gossip-move-in-the-right-direction-20120508

Sharing on Facebook is as Good as Sex? What?!

If your not someone who updates their status on Facebook or twitter every few minutes, I'm sure you know someone who does. 


You know the types- posting what they just ate for breakfast, what the traffic looks like on their evening commute, a gift they just bought themselves or a vacation they just booked ( that's a year away). You know, people who like to over share. 


But what gets people off so much by over sharing?


Some researchers from Harvard University set out to answer this enigma. They looked at brain imaging scans to show how our brains react to sharing information about ourselves with others.


Now what they came up with will surprise and startle you.


They found that our brain actually responds to sharing information about ourselves in the same way it responds to the pleasure triggers we get from sex!


Shocking, I know. 


I mean listen, I'am all for the growing social world but for those 300 people that they conducted the study from.. word of advice.. get a life and get laid for God's sake! 


In another part their research they worked on what they called the 'Penny for your Thoughts' study to find out if people would pay money to share information about themselves with other people. According to their data study subjects were willing to go without 17-25% of their potential earnings if they could tell information about themselves to others.


People make a good living listening to other people share their thoughts, its called therapy, just get yourself a psychologist.


Diana Tamir, the lead author of the study says, "everybody can find some kind of value reward in having an audience or a sympathetic ear, regardless whether you do that behavior a lot or a little. It provides you with some sort of reward."


No wonder why Mark Zuckerberg  is so filthy rich, he single-handedly gave the same pleasure feeling you get with sex to 794 million users ( said to reach 1 billion in August).

A New Study asks an Old Question: Can Men & Women be "Just Friends"?

It's the age-old question, can men and women really just be friends?


The disputed 'When Harry met Sally' conundrum seems to always go back to the problem of attraction. A news study says that though these platonic relationships are plausible,  there is nearly always a portion of attraction between male and female friends. 


And if some guys wonder why they seem to hear the line "I just want to be friends" or " I think we're better off as friends" more than their female counterparts its because men report more sexual interest in their female friends than their female friends do in them and men are more likely to overestimate how romantically  interested their friends are in them.


Lead author in the study, April Bleske-Rechek says that although men and women want to be friends and have platonic relationships, that data she has collected shows that attraction can get in the way. 


April and her researchers sent questionnaires to 107 young adults asking whether they thought their cross-sex friendships were beneficial or burdensome- the results?


"Everyone was very positive about these friendships, ranking them as overwhelmingly beneficial."


However beneficial these friendships might be, attraction was named as an interference when it came to the relationships 5-times more than it was said to be a benefit and the more attracted someone was to a friend, the lower their satisfaction with their romantic partner. 


So what do we learn from this study? 


I can't help but think of the old Jimmy Soul song, " If you wanna be happy"...


If you wanna be happy for the rest of your life
Never make a pretty woman your wife
So for my personal point of view
Get an ugly girl to marry you

I know the concept may be a little different.. but bottom line.. girls are much better at having platonic friendships with men than men are.. and if your guy has a "best girl-friend" who looks like the next Kate Upton either keep your eye on her or tell him to get uglier girlfriends. 

Fifty Shades of Grey Finished...

The infamous erotic novel, Fifty Shades of Grey is still generating quite a buzz throughout the country. American Idol host, Ryan Seacrest has even caught the bug saying he is “obsessed”! Also adding that, “I think it can be a study book for a lot of people,” he told Access Hollywood.

The popular read has also invoked a stream of spoofs and parodies. Andrew Shaffer wrote  “Fifty Shames of Earl Grey” a satirical novel that stars a handsome and wealthy count, Earl Grey who buys businesses to capture the heart of another young college student.

"The hero is so fabulously rich that he buys up every company the heroine works for, including Amazon.com and Walmart, and he also has a private dinosaur island ... so they actually have sex on a dinosaur's back which is not something I have ever seen in a romantic novel before," Shaffer told Reuters.

And you don’t have to look far to find parodies on Youtube, Howard Neuthaler produced, “Christian Penetrates the Suburbs” saying he wanted to spoof the majority  of the people who actually read the book- the suburban mom.

But some people are just lucky enough to reap the benefits of the hot selling title without even trying… a 2011 young adult novel about a Lithuanian girl’s life in a Siberian labor camp got a boost in sales just by having a similar name, “ Between the Shades of Gray”. In just three weeks, the novel moved into the No. 5 bestselling children’s paperback on the New York Times list.

While all the hype continues to grow, I couldn’t help but feel a hint of disappointment when I finished the last page of book number three.

As in most trilogies, my favorite was the first book- the characters are all brand new and I was immediately drawn to Christian and wanted to know more about him and his dark secrets. By the second book, the plot thickens and I realize the book has more depth than just a story about love and kinky sex. By the third and final book I notice I'm reading in a slower pace, perhaps it's because I know it’s the last one or maybe because it is a tad bit slower than the first two. Either way the sex scenes are still as steamy and their relationship on a new and intriguing level. The ending was.. well it was, good. New and welcomed suspense draws you in as you wonder whether you will be satisfied with the finale. To be honest I could have done without the last couple of pages but E.L James revives herself with an interesting swap of narrators in the last few pages giving the reader a new and intimate look into the beloved and worshiped mind of Christian Grey.

But now that I’ve finished Fifty Shades what the hell am I going to read? What is going to capture and keep my attention like Fifty Shades of Christian Grey?

Without any time to research  I downloaded “Beautiful Disaster” by Jamie McGuire. The book has been out since last May but the synopsis gave me a glimmer of hope that this new novel might offer a Christian-like bad boy that I might enjoy reading about.


“The new Abby Abernathy is a good girl. She doesn't drink or swear, and she has the appropriate percentage of cardigans in her wardrobe. Abby believes she has enough distance between her and the darkness of her past, but when she arrives at college with her best friend America, her path to a new beginning is quickly challenged by Eastern University’s Walking One-Night Stand.”

I won't sway you one way or another but after reading some of the reviews I know I was intrigued enough to give it a try. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11505797-beautiful-disaster

I’ll let you know how it goes… Happy Friday

Exclusive Interview/ Part 3: Final words on Dates and Sex from VH1's Tough Love host Steve Ward

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Exclusive Interview/Part 2: VH1's Tough Love host Steve Ward on Trust, Cheating and Snooping

In part 2 of my sit down interview with dating guru, Steve Ward of VH1’s Tough Love, I wanted to tackle the topic of trust and all that it encompasses, i.e. Snooping, cheating and facebook stalking.

Steve confesses that he has been accused of being “cleverly honest”. Honesty and trust go hand-in-hand but Steve says there is a difference between a white lie and a red lie. A white lie being something harmless like telling an overweight woman she looks good in a tight dress versus a red lie that could be more hurtful like telling someone that you see a future with them when you don’t. I think we can all agree on those terms, but the fact is a lie is a lie and once you catch your man in any kind of lie can you still fully trust them or will you be plagued with doubt and suspicion? 

Newsweek recently reported that a man lies on average 6 times a day. “They say a lie of omission is the biggest lie of all.  So sometimes leaving out some details can be considered to be pretty dishonest too,” Steve said.

Cheating... Why do they really do it? Is it a Slip-up or just human nature?

STEVE: It’s not a matter of slipping up, it’s a matter that people in general want to feel wanted and needed. They have this desire to continue to accomplish- to accomplish sexually, to accomplish emotionally and to feel like your achieving something as much as possible even if it’s not really a significant milestone sort to speak.

At the end of the day, you never want to feel like you’re in some kind of routine. You never want to feel like your relationship is stale or stagnant. Sometimes people don’t feel the need to move on, they just feel the need to get a little variety, get a little more flavor and get a little spice- if not just to try it and experience it and then realize how much they prefer what they already have.

I do think a lot of people want to have their cake and eat it too, but I also think there are a lot of people who are just lazy about it and won’t put in the extra work and communication it takes to really make yourself happy.

Snooping… Checking his phone, ok sometimes or never do it?

STEVE: Depends on the state of your relationship. If you’re in a committed relationship, have at it. If you’re just seeing each other, you have no right, simple as that. If he’s telling you I’m not seeing anybody, I’m not doing anything behind your back, I’m committed. I trust you and you should trust me.

Trust means a lot of things, trust means I should let you be able to use my phone, go through it and not have anything to worry about, just as you should feel comfortable with me using your phone, and not having anything to worry about, it’s that give to get.  Here’s my phone, feel free to do what whatever you’d like with it – if you’re at that stage then it’s fine, prior to being in that- you have no right.

What if you do find something ‘flirty’ on his phone...Should you try to forget about it or approach him about it?

STEVE: Depends on how much it bothers you, I mean do you get away with doing flirty things yourself. Do you feel the need to let him know every time someone flirts with you or when you casually flirt with someone else? But I’ll be honest with you he probably imagines it going somewhere. He probably pleasures himself with the idea of it going somewhere, does he expect it to go anywhere, probably not but does he hope it would go somewhere, yeah probably so.  But at the end of the day who knows. 

Facebook stalking… Any positives to this?

STEVE: I just don’t think there is anything to gain. There is something to be said about ignorance is bliss. If you know what you’re going to see is going to upset you, then why even bother subjecting yourself to it. I think it’s a lose-lose situation. If you suspect something is going on and their doing something behind your back I think it’s ok to let the other person know that you got this feeling and describe how you think you got that feeling. If they get defensive anyway or distance themselves from you then they probably were doing something and are probably not looking for what you’re looking for or maybe they were kidding themselves and trying to convince themselves that they were when they really weren’t. 

Or they’re just a piece of shit and don’t care about lying behind your back and they think you’re on to them and will try to throw you off the scent ... there are a lot of people that go around doing things that they think aren’t wrong or not really consequential until they become consequential.

There are a lot of people that cheat and do some messed up things but now that we live in the world we live in and everything is traceable, people are getting caught a lot easier than ever. It could be happening more but our instincts are what they are. It’s just that they have more opportunities to cheat now but it’s also easier to follow them and find out if they are.

Ultimately you have nothing to gain by snooping, if you really value the relationship just be above board with everything – my whole philosophy is rooted in personal accountability, ask people to try to hold themselves in the same manner that they hold other people to.  

Stay Tuned for the final portion of my interview with Steve when we talk about decoding the # of days call back equation and Sex!

                                           Courtesy: VH1

Exclusive Interview: TV's VH1's Celebrity Match Maker, Steve Ward Weighs In..Part 1

Steve Ward is known as Mr. Match Maker extraordinaire. Host of VH1’s popular dating show Tough Love, Steve has used his smart wits and good looks to pair thousands of happy couples together. In his 4^th season of the highly successful series, Steve takes 8 dating disasters to New Orleans to whip them into shape in his O’ so friendly dating bootcamp.

I’ve known Steve for about four years now,  I met him after I booked him on a dating panel for a national morning show I used to work on. Tough Love’s first season hadn't hit the air waves yet, but I decided to give this fresh face dating expert a shot and pushed for his appearance on our morning show.

Straightforward and blatantly honest, Steve quickly won the approval of our executive producers and landed himself a weekly segment on the show.

But Steve didn't always steal the spotlight, back in high school he says he was short, chubby, annoying and not very well liked. It wasn't until he hit his growth spurt in college that he turned into the tall and charming man he is today. Though he boasts he dated a lot in college, he did experience heart break. Steve went through a harrowing car accident with his college sweetheart and although they tried to make it work, in the end he said they were both still really young and it just wasn't right. 

Steve only mentioned one other girl to have stolen his heart since college, but says it eventually ended from what he said was bad timing. This Tough Love bachelor isn't ready to get serious with anyone just yet, "Even to this day I don't think it's the right time in my life to settle down. I have absolutely way too much going on in my life," Steve said.

Steve strolled into the Soho Dos Caminos restaurant dressed casually in a leather like jacket and jeans. After a quick catch-up and some guacamole mixed with crab I digged in with my dating questions I compiled from my readers.

"I have a MAJOR theme of guys just NEVER calling me again after a few great weeks/months dating – no talk of relationships and I usually take it slow. Help"

STEVE: Well it’s the taking it slow part, they just get bored and don’t want to stick around. They’re not willing to wait for whatever you’re withholding and just grow tired of it and will move on to someone who is willing to put out quicker, emotionally, sexually, monetarily – you need to puts yourself out there. 

"What's the best way to approach your guy (who has had financial difficulties in the past) about moving in together? How can I make sure he won't make the same irresponsible mistakes  again?"

STEVE: He most likely will make the same mistakes again and if that’s a situation you’re going to go into knowingly then never has the expression been more true, ‘you made your own bed, now lie in it', so it’s a risk. It's probably why he can’t get credit or secure a loan or get a place on his own because he’s not a worthwhile credit risk, if you’re going to give him credit where no one else is you should expect him to default. 

"If a girl says 'I love you' first... what goes through a guy’s head? Is it bad for a girl to say it first?"

STEVE: No it just depends on how she says it and if she says it in the wrong kind of needy way and makes the guy think she’s expecting something in return- then that is going to make the guy uncomfortable. If you say it without expecting something in return then you mean it.  Saying I love you is just saying it, if you say it  because you want them to hear it and you want to hear it back that’s not what love is. Saying I love you is saying it, meaning it and not expecting the other person to reciprocate it.

 "One of things that bugs me, is my husband will never make out with me anymore!!! When we first started dating we would make out for hours, stop on street corners, in bars, ANYWHERE!!! I love the sex and the companionship, but sometimes I just want to feel like we are dating again, and make out like we just met! How do I get my husband to make out with me?!!!!! "

STEVE: Do something neither of you have you ever done before. If you’re both interested in scuba diving or were both interested in visiting someplace you’ve never been before, go an do it together. Find something that you both would enjoy doing together and make it new, make it fresh and then when you do that you'll reinvent the relationship, you’ll reinvent the chemistry.

"What is the best way to keep a guys interest after a dating a while?"

STEVE: Be cool. Just back off and be cool. Truly demonstrate that you understand them and know them and give them the space, the time or whatever they need because the fact is there are too many women that are carrying out their relationships with this expectation that it will end up somewhere- and guys don’t do that, we just don’t. If it ends up going there, great, but we don’t go into relationships thinking OK once we do this, then we’ll do this and then this will happen... Even the guys who are anal retentive and organized to a fault and plan everything out to a T don't. They may have an idea in their mind of where the relationship might be going, but it’s not like they have to get there in a certain time. It’s not like they have these tickets like the train is leaving the station- unless you as a woman make him feel that way and sometimes that’s enough to make them run and catch that train, but other times they’ll miss it and catch the next train that comes along.  Just depends on how much of a hurry they are to get to where you’re going – and if their not in a hurry to go where you’re going, then they’ll let that ship sail and let that train go by because they have no reason to speed up to catch it.

"Do long distance relationships work?"

STEVE: They are challenging over the long run. They can last in a short term basis. If you have to repeatedly experience gaps apart when you come accustomed to spending time together, its invariably going to make you feel emotionaly distant because you’re so used to that proximity and intimacy. So in order to make it work you have to find a way to make it intimate and close emotionally even though you’re not spatially as close as you would like to be.

"How do you find guys that are older to date i.e. as a mature 28 year old, should I be dating some 35?"

STEVE: Yeah 35 would be a great age for someone who is 28 because typically those guys are dating women that are 5 years younger anyway. The most important thing is that you’re in a similar life stage. If you know you’re ready for certain things that he may not be ready for then you’re doing yourself a disservice. I would suggest you end up really making it a point to spend time with the right people who are at the right point of life that you’re at.

"Why does dating involve game playing? Why can't dating be straight forward?"

STEVE: Because of emotions, people have emotions and we use rationalization as well as many other techniques to defend ourselves and our emotions.  So we do whatever it takes to get some sense of control in our lives.

Now stay tuned for Part 2 of my interview tackling topics like cheating and snooping!

                                       Courtesy: VH1