I am what you might call a “ball buster.” My ex-fiance’s dad always used to laugh when I would tease his son, taking him down a notch or two when he was being cocky or arrogant. He would say, “Man, you really know how to take his knees out!” His wife was similar in her approach, probably because her husband and my fiance—father and son—were temperamentally alike and could take (in fact, needed) the occasional—OK, frequent—ribbing.

When did I become the star of the Lifetime movie, “In Love With A Stranger”? (This movie does not exist yet, but it should.) Was this the way “General Hospital”‘s Elizabeth Webber felt when she found out her husband, Ric Lansing, had kidnapped Carly Corinthos and was keeping her locked up in a secret room in their house? Was this kind of betrayal what Janet Jackson was singing about on the song “What About?” How many songs, movies, and books have been penned about deception? Countless, I think. But there are two people I’ve been thinking about in particular, who seem like they would get what it feels like to find out you’d been lied to for years by the person you loved. They are Julie Metz, author of Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal, and my ex-fiance’s college girlfriend, who emailed me yesterday out of the blue.

Nazita Aminpour is suing Chase bank for telling her husband about her secret individual bank account with $800,000 in it. Aminpour had a joint account with husband David Shamash at Chase but kept her individual account a secret. Shamash found out about her secret account when a Chase employee cold-called to suggest he take his money out of that account and invest it in a different way. According to the suit Aminpour filed, Shamash started harassing her until she gave him $155,000 to invest in the stock market and to cover a margin call he had on his stock account. Aminpour says Chase violated non-disclosure laws and is asking the bank to pay her $155,000 plus legal fees. It seems pretty crazy that a woman would keep that much money a secret from her husband, but the bank had no business telling him about it. Do you think it’s OK for husbands and wives to keep secret money stashes from their significant others? [NY Post via Jezebel]

Here in the states, couples rarely admit to sleeping in separate beds, but across the pond not only do one in five couples avoid sharing a bed, they claim it improves their sex lives, too. An article in the Daily Mail tells the story of engaged couple Laura Mason and Colin Byers, both of whom are 28 and have slept in separate beds four of the last five years they’ve lived together. Citing sleep incompatibility as the reason for their separate beds — his snoring and warm body temperature keep her awake at night — they say their relationship and sex life improved when they stopped sleeping together: “We are just as close as ever. In fact, as soon as we made the decision, our sex life improved. We’d had a great sex life in our first year together, but having no sleep was making us too tired and irritable to crave that intimacy.”

Last month, I showed up at a party that my hubby, Andy, and I had been invited to, and I was greeted with silence. Now, I know I’m not that unpopular, so something had to be wrong. As I shrugged off my coat and people got back to mingling, my friend approached with a vodka tonic in hand. Passing it to me and trying to sound casual, she said, “So…where’s Andy tonight?” And then, in a stage whisper, “Is anything wrong?”

“The subject is one of the most common problems that besets marriages: the wife who is “not in the mood” and the consequently frustrated and hurt husband….First, women need to recognize how a man understands a wife’s refusal to have sex with him: A husband knows that his wife loves him first and foremost by her willingness to give her body to him.”

So writes Dennis Prager on TownHall.com. Prager argues that because of the way men identify love, women should have sex whether they’re in the mood or not.

Earlier this week, the guys on our IM gave their thoughts on high maintenance women, and I was really shocked to learn that men actually appreciate (at times) a physically high maintenance woman. Emotionally high maintenance women are another story all together. Now I consider myself to be a high maintenance woman, but not in the traditional sense. I like treating myself to mani/pedis and can spend hours in Sephora. And if shopping was an Olympic sport, I’d definitely win gold. But the thing is I like doing all this for myself. I don’t expect my boyfriend to do it for me. I do, however, expect him to wait for me while I get dressed for work or a date because I really don’t like to leave the house until I look and feel my best. Since I can dress in an hour and I don’t have my paws on his wallet, I think I’m really just an average girl with a slight case of high maintenance-osis. But I started thinking…if I really was crazy (let’s call it what it is), what would I do to show my high maintenance colors? After the jump find 11 ways to get in touch with your high maintenance side, too.

I’ve had a lot of practice at telling women that their boyfriends are cheating on them with me.

Sometimes it feels as if I’m a military representative knocking on the door of a newly widowed army wife. “Hello, my name is Lena. You don’t know me but I’m a friend of your husband’s. There’s something I have to tell you. You might want to sit down for this.” And then without me having to even say a word, she can already surmise that something is terribly wrong. The man she loves is dead, or at least, her relationship is.

According to CNN.com, 29% of people in relationships lie to their partners about their spending habits. Ha, we think 71% of people lie on surveys.  Everyone splurges every now and again! And when you share a bank account, you have to sneak around with some of your personal expenses. Men like to spend money on gadgets and porn, while women wad out cash at salons and retail stores.  But do you really want to fight about how you need your busted feet pedi-ed as much as he needs blonde bimbos to stream off the internets?  No way!  We say, in this economy, keep spending.  And save the lies for important things….like when you want to pretend you made dinner and throw out the take out containers. [CNN]