Here’s your daily dose of sweetness: a couple in England who fell in love as teenagers writing letters back and forth during WWII is celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary this week. Geoff and Pat Bunyan, now 83 and 82, became friends in 1945 shortly before Geoff was deployed to fight in the war. Over the next several years (Geoff remained overseas after the war ended to “clean up the mess”), the two sent a whopping 600 letters to each other, numbering each one to keep track of them. Though the letters began with a friendly tone, as the two shared stories and opened up to each other, their correspondence took a more romantic turn. Soon, they were proclaiming their love to one another, looking forward to the day Geoff would return to England and they could be together. When Geoff finally returned home in 1948 — three years after he left! — he married Pat and the two of them bought a house together, which they still live in to this day.

I’ve been married all of 11 days now and, as if on cue, the day my husband (still very much getting used to saying that!) and I tied the knot, he stopped putting the toilet seat down. I ignored it at first, but by our first weekend together as a married couple, I couldn’t stand it any longer and said something to him about it. I made a jokey comment about his sudden change in behavior — more embarrassed than pissed at being such a cliché so early in our marriage. After over three years together, surely he must realize if there’s one thing I wanted to avoid in marriage it was being a cliché, but I suppose the lesson here is that that’s a lost cause for any married couple, even those of us who think we’re so “modern.” One cliché I will be able to avoid, though, is the terrible mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship so many women have. My own mother-in-law passed away long before I got a chance to meet her, and while I’d love to think we would have had a wonderful relationship — if her sons are any indication, she was a terrific woman and I hope she would have approved of me — the odds, apparently, aren’t in our favor.

Amy Wolfe, a 33-year-old church organist from Pennsylvania, is so in love with the magic carpet fairground ride, 1001 Nachts, at Knoebels Amusement Park, she plans to “marry” it and change her surname to Weber to symbolize her spiritual marriage to it. Wolfe suffers from objectum sexuality, a condition that makes her sexually attracted to inanimate objects. She first fell in love with the ride when she visited the park at 13. “I wasn’t freaked out, as it just felt so natural, but I didn’t tell anyone about it because I knew it wasn’t ‘normal’ to have feelings for a fairground ride,” she says. Ten years later, she began a “courtship” with 1001 Nachts, traveling 160 miles 10 times a year, and riding it over 3,000 times. She sleeps with its picture on her ceiling and carries around its spare nuts and bolts to feel closer to it. “I love him as much as women love their husbands and know we’ll be together forever,” she said. Yeah, that’s what she says now — wait ‘til she gets tired of picking up his dirty socks and putting the seat down every time he uses the bathroom!

The BBC did a documentary recently on others who suffer from objectum sexuality, including a woman in love with the Eiffel Tower, another in love with the Golden Gate bridge. Check it out above. [Telegraph]

What attracts you to a man the most — a sense of humor, a great smile, a hot bod, keen intelligence? Apparently, a lot of women get weak in the knees for men who do housework. A recent study from Oxford University examined “marriage and cohabitation rates” across 13 countries and “compared them to attitudes towards the roles of men and women at home.” After questioning “13,500 men and women aged between 20 and 45 from each country about gender, housework and childcare responsibilities,” researchers discovered that women are hottest for men “they believe they will help out with household chores and make an equal contribution towards childcare.” In countries where men are less likely to pull their weight at home, women are between 20-50% less likely to shack up with them. Dr Almudena Seville-Sanz, of the university’s Centre for Time Use Research, said: This study shows that in egalitarian countries there is less social stigma attached to men doing what was traditionally women’s work.’” After the jump see how the 13 countries included in the study rank on the “egalitarian index.”

The Rorschach test is in the news.  The entire 10 plates have been posted on Wikipedia and the controversy begins.  The ten plates have been kept tightly under wraps for years.  But now the copyright has expired.  So it is quite natural to wonder:  “Can a Rorschach test be used to determine marriage material?  Can it tell us about intimacy?  What about sex?” Continue reading...

If you have an extravagant wedding, you might be in debt longer than your marriage lasts. According to a U.K. financial management company, couples borrow an average of $42,000 to pay for their wedding. This can take 16 years to pay off with interest and everything, and the average marriage supposedly lasts 11.5 years! So, when it’s time for you to get divorced, you might end up divvying up debt, rather than assets. If you’re engaged, take the advice of our recently married Wendy and make your wedding more about memories than money. [Marie Claire U.K.]

The stress of going through a divorce looks like it takes a huge toll on your health. Divorced people are 20 percent more likely to have chronic health conditions like cancer and heart disease than people who’ve tied the knot and kept it tied. But if you think getting remarried is the best medicine, you’re wrong. Even those who get hitched again still have a 12 percent higher chance of getting a serious disease. Remarried folks also have mobility problems 19 percent more often when compared to those who’ve stayed married all along.

So what about the single folks?

God, I hate the term “date night” and I was pretty sure there wasn’t a lamer phrase in a relationship until I read this article about one couple’s “trash night.” Trash night, you see is the time, twice a week (Mondays and Thursdays), when Therese Borchard has sex with her husband. It also happens to be the night the couple takes their garbage to the curb, quite literally. Therese didn’t plan it that way, but tired of her husband’s “constant begging for sex,” she asked him: “What is the minimal number of times a week that you need sex in order to be satisfied?” He told her: “Twice. Absolute minimum.” And she replied: “Fine. You get Monday and Thursday. If you don’t beg any other night.” It was only later than it occurred to her that Mondays and Thursdays happen to be trash night in their neighborhood, the evening everyone hauls their garbage to the curb before it’s collected at 5 a.m. the next morning.

Frogs get a bad rep for that whole stealing-kisses-from-princesses thing, but in a West Bengal village called Madhya Baragari, Indian farmers are depending on the little green guys to bring rain. It’s monsoon season, but the rain just isn’t coming and instead the town has a drought. Their solution? Marrying two frogs, named after Ram and Sita, a mythological couple from the ancient Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana. The frogs get vermilion paint on their little heads and are held in the air in front of a traditional clay candle and married in front of the all the villagers. The local women fast before the event and then invite the river to give its blessing and join the wedding party. A local head councilman says, “We feted about 3,000 villagers and solemnized the marriage with every single ritual.” [Yahoo! News]

I wonder if the frogs have to get divorced if there’s a flood? I used to think I could make it rain before soccer practice by throwing ice cubes into the sky, but it was relatively ineffective, so I hope this method works better.

Since 20 percent of British couples getting married in a church already have children, and 44 percent of British children are born to unwed mothers, the Church of England is now offering a special deal: marriages and baptisms at the same time – for a cheaper cost. The two-for-one ceremonies are part of an effort to “woo people back to the pews and make the church more relevant and accessible to 21st century society,” according to The Guardian. A church spokesman told CNN this “is also a way to make the church more welcoming for unmarried parents and their families.”

My husband and I are married not because I said, “I do,” but because he said, “I’ll do it.”

While many fear that America is falling out of the marriage habit, and that, these days, all is bad in love and more, new stats show otherwise. Supposedly, 86% of women marry by age forty. This says something, considering that a 20-year-old article in Newsweek declared that “a 40-year-old single woman had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting married.” Ouch.

Bachelor and bachelorette parties have become synonymous with wild and reckless nights, the details of which are slightly obscured when describing it to significant others later. Movies like “Bachelor Party” and “The Hangover” paint the occasion as a shame-inducing free-for-all of alcohol and bawdiness, but it hasn’t always been that way. The origins of bachelor and bachelorette parties are remarkably tame when compared to the ones we know of today, so how did this once-low-key event get transformed into the craziest night of a groom- or bride-to-be’s life?

Coming from a divorced family, I have spent my life questioning the idea of a life-long commitment. Most of the adults I know have been divorced at least once, and of the couples who are still married, most of them (along with their kids) appear miserable. And so, while I would love to find a companion whose company I will enjoy “‘til death do us part,” I’ve learned from observation that this just might not be a realistic goal. And is it so horrible to think that maybe we weren’t supposed to spend our entire lives with one person? Is traditional marriage the best—or only—way?

With 11 days left until my wedding, the final countdown is in effect. Among the dozens of little things left on my to-do list, I’ve been thinking a lot about the things crossed off my to-do list long before I met my husband to-be — things that have made me a well-rounded, experienced woman ready for a lifetime commitment to another person. After the jump, 20 things every woman should cross off her list before getting married.

Before I got engaged, I used to think a couple’s truest test of compatibility and readiness for marriage was living together. What could be more of a test, I reasoned, than successfully sharing the same space, splitting the bills, and delegating household chores while still enjoying each other’s company and remaining sexually attracted to one another? That’s why, when my boyfriend proposed after nearly a year and a half of co-habitation, I didn’t hesitate in saying ‘yes.’ I’d lived with a boyfriend before — for over three years — and when that relationship eventually became more like brother-sister than boyfriend-girlfriend, I ended things and wondered if it was even possible for me to live with someone and continue loving him in the romantic sense. But then I met Drew and realized it was.

Being the modern, liberated, well-educated woman that I am, I never thought I would mind the man in my life going to a strip club. Years ago, I would even occassionally join my guy friends for an evening at a gentlemen’s club. It meant free cocktails all night, and have you ever seen the ladies’ room at a strip club?  The restrooms are girly bonanzas that range between the cosmetics aisle at a drug store to a miniature Sephora. Plus, strippers on their bathroom breaks have the best gossip. “Desperate Housewives”? “Days of Our Lives”? Child’s play in comparison.

This afternoon, I was at my parents’ house for a family friend get-together. I always enjoy these “parties” because they are both low-key and you are able to receive an update on the lives of people that you haven’t seen for years! But, slowly the conversation always dwindles to a certain sensitive topic, or one that I am incredibly passionate about. As a single young woman, I am also a huge feminist, and I get this certain itch in my chest when I hear statements that just don’t agree with my heart.

Bad news for human females, as well as female voles (they’re rodents similar to mice): Swedish scientists have discovered that a man’s reluctance to commit might be in his genes. We’re not exactly sure how scientists figured out rodents don’t like to marry, but hey, whatever.

It’s called the “334 version of the AVPR1A gene” and it is more prevalent in men who didn’t want to pair up. The leader of the study said further research is required to find out how possible genetic mutations may affect women and the bonding hormone, oxytocin, which “seems to influence female pair-bonding more.” We guess this means if you’re chronically single, unforch, it might just be biology.  [Times of London UK]

Did you know that over half of married women regret walking down the aisle with their husbands? If you said yes, well, then you know some disgruntled peeps. Just kidding! According to a recent survey of 35,000 women, happily ever after is only for the movies. Duh. While most women admitted they didn’t believe in a “soul mate,” a whopping 72 percent said they have considered leaving their husbands. But comparing those figures to the divorce rate, 20 percent of them are chickens who stick it out.  Worse yet, half of ‘em were also completely bored in the boudoir or couldn’t remember the last time they had any kind of freaky deaky fun.  Dang, if you can’t grab your husband and say, “Yum, yum, gimme some,” what is the point? Especially since 79% of those surveyed admitted a woman has got needs. Alas, I’m single and I thought it was hard to get laid, but marriage sounds worse…sigh. What is there to look forward to?