Fart walk

I stumbled across an episode of NPR's Life Kit podcast called “Why you should take a ‘fart walk’ after a meal.” Despite the edgy (for NPR) title, it ended up being stuff that Mom has been advocating for a while now: take a short walk after a meal to jump start your digestive process and help regulate your blood sugar. Another side benefit is to help you sleep better. The guidelines for a post-meal fart walk are simple and inviting—

• You don't need much: 5 minutes is enough, 15 minutes is great if you have the time.
• A casual (walking the dog) pace is okay; if you want to get in some cardio too, then you can up the pace to brisk.
• Start walking within 30 minutes after a meal.
• Walking is great after any meal but especially helpful after your biggest meal of the day, so usually dinner in the US. 

Photo by Marco Antonio Casique Reyes on Unsplash

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What you probably have backwards about romantic relationships

Photo by Everton Vila on Unsplash

The title of this 2024 paper by Iris Wahring and colleagues says it all: "Romantic Relationships Matter More to Men than to Women." I bet you had that one backwards.

 

The authors start with the widespread view that women are "more romantic than men, and romantic relationships are assumed to be more central to the lives of women than to those of men." But based on recent research painting a different picture, they propose that, relative to women, men actually (1) "expect to obtain greater benefits from relationship formation and thus strive more strongly for a romantic partner"; (2) "benefit more from romantic relationship involvement in terms of their mental and physical health"; (3) "are less likely to initiate breakups"; and (4) "suffer more from relationship dissolution." 

 

Why should romantic relationships be more consequential to men than to women? It's simple, really: "The basic mechanism [is] that men perceive less intimacy and less emotional support from their social ties beyond romantic partners." In other words, everyone needs intimacy and emotional support, but women can get that from their women friends and family members* while the vast majority of men are not getting enough of that while hanging out with their bros watching sports. So men have to turn to their female romantic partners to get the same kind of emotional support that women are getting from their other social relationships. Men, remember that when you're looking to make some new male friends.

 

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*One theory is that "women (relative to men) are more inclined to turn to others when distressed in a tending and befriending manner – that is, banding together with others for mutual support, resources, and protection," which causes "the release of oxytocin known to facilitate affiliation and emotional bonding with other people."

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Walk it out

Having a conflict with someone? Walk it out. That's the suggestion from a social psychology paper I like by three Columbia psychology professors.* Why would this work?

 

First, there are the intrapersonal benefits of walking. People evolved to think on our feet, so we generate more creative ideas while moving. History is full of stories of authors, scientists, and philosophers (like Darwin, Kierkegaard, and Thoreau) who professed to formulate their best ideas while walking. Nietzsche famously said that "all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking." How many times have you been stuck on a problem and hit on the solution after getting up and moving around? The authors cite various studies finding, for example, that participants were much more likely to generate novel, high-quality analogies when walking compared to sitting. That counteracts the narrowing of vision created by conflict. In addition, other studies have found that physical activity increases positive affect and lowers stress. If you're in a better mood and less stressed out, then you're going to be more receptive to working through conflict.

Conversation starters, Mom style

After a recent dinner, Brad complained that our conversations are always the same, that is, boring ("How's work?"; bad political news, etc.). There are plenty of conversation starters available on the internet, so I clipped some out and stuck them in a jar on our table for when the need arises.

 

The ultimate conversation starters are the 36 deep questions developed by social psychologist Arthur Aron and colleagues. Their now famous paper is titled "The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings." But the method they developed to generate "interpersonal closeness" is better known as the "fast friends" procedure. An article in the New York Times "Modern Love" series ("To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This") that went viral in 2015 described how the author and a "university acquaintance" fell in love going through the 36 questions together.

It never gets old

The book sale ends today, though it's long since been picked clean by the final half-price Sunday. This year, Cassie and JC came for the FotL member pre-sale on the Friday evening before the book sale's official start on Saturday morning at 10:00 AM. Everyone did pretty well, though Mom took the prize as usual with not one but two big bags of books. Mom didn't want to take the time to line her purchases up nice and neat, so you won't see her piles below. But here are photos of the stacks of books that Cassie, JC, and I picked up. Can you match the stack with the book buyer?

Attention is love

One of my favorite quotes conveying a principle to live by is from The Power of Fun by Catherine Price: "Our lives are what we pay attention to." She has explained elsewhere that what she means by this is that "when we decide what to pay attention to in the moment, we are making a broader decision about how we want to spend our time alive."

 

After I responded to this idea, I started seeing variations on the theme all over. In How To Know a Person, David Brooks wrote that "[t]he quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world." In The Good Life, Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz quote the French philosopher Simone Weil as saying, "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."

 

When Paul Met Karen

I recently started listening to the Love Factually podcast, which is one of the most "Paul" podcasts ever. The idea is that two relationship scientists — Paul Eastwick, who is a professor at the University of California, Davis, and Eli Finkel, who is at Northwestern — talk about famous rom-coms and tell you what they get right and wrong about how relationships actually work. I love that their substack [1] cites and links to all of the academic papers Eastwick and Finkel discuss in each episode, so I can read the science for myself if I so choose.

 

They discussed "When Harry Met Sally" in Episode 1, because where else would you start if you're doing a podcast about rom-coms? One of the things that movie gets right is that the lead characters start out as friends first (well, frenemies first really). Relationship scientists have mostly overlooked "The Friends-to-Lovers Pathway to Romance," say the authors of a paper with that name,[2] because friends-first initiation is much harder to study than dating initiation of a romantic relationship. [3]