Tag Archives: psychology

Boomer and Bust

The love generation keeps on splitting up. Ah, capricious age!

For younger generations, who are getting married less often and later in their lives, the divorce rate keeps going down. It is Boomers (those who came of age in the 60s and 70s) who are tipping the statistics toward that notorious 50% mark.

Since these people have lived together a lot longer than I can say, I will reserve judgement. When Gen X hits their 50s they may go through a wave of divorce, too. It’s a side-effect of people living longer.

But. Does it not seem inevitable that the original “Me Generation” should be choosing freedom over sta(b)le relationships, even late in life when it’s probably a bad move financially?

What’s behind the uptick in Boomer divorce?

Perhaps it’s just a misguided, old-fashioned attempt to avoid the realities of the onset of old age and death. Sorry, can’t really figure out a way to sugar-coat that one.

Read along in Industry this month. Thanks to my parents for playing along, and not accusing me of intergenerational warfare, and to my brother for originally asking me to “Debunk this 50% divorce rate myth!”

Read Boomer and Bust at issuu.com

Games Worth Playing

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My latest column for Industry is up! Games Worth Playing: How a ritual based upon the I Ching can change the way we think about life and love

Perhaps readers are aware of the concept of the filter bubble: that with more and more tools to personalize online offerings, we are more in danger of seeing only the news we want to see. The term, while a nice coinage for the internet and indebted age, is not new. In relationships, too, we see what we want to see.

The bubble first grows in our heads, a fact I learned from a 3,000-year-old book
of divination called the I Ching, or the “Book of Changes.”

I’ll risk my reputation as a serious individual here to admit that, when it comes to relationship deciphering, I’m addicted to what could be considered a tool for magical thinking.

The New Girl: How Does Change Happen?

Chinese new year seems more suitable for making resolutions (or setting intentions, in the parlance of our time) than Jan. 1, post-holiday, when we are tired and overfed. In Industry‘s Jan/Feb issue (and its first Brooklyn edition!), I try to sort out how change actually happens.

The new year is a time for turning over a new leaf, they say. We all know how that goes, though. Some years are better than others. In real time, the future is a promise and the past a memory. Around this time of year, we do have a moment’s pause, a sense of the last year being over and the next not quite here. This moment in between may last only a day or two, as we scramble to tease the disparate strands of experience, integrating them into a larger story, “My Life,” (with chapters “My Love Life” and “My Career”) and reorient ourselves. Then, the portal closes up, and we are left in the middle again to muddle through.

Read the rest here: The New Girl: On the Thrill and Terror of a New Year

Red Flags

My latest column for Industry Nov/Dec. 2012 issue:

Red Flags …and all the things we’re worried about in relationships that are really not that big of a deal

An excerpt:

Maybe the writers of these one-size-fits-all relationship articles are trying to be helpful, but they are little better than hucksters selling us a panacea, that holy grail of the “right relationship.” We chase apocryphal fantasies, that outlier couple who knew each other only a short time before getting married, and who are happy thirty years later. But these ideas have little personal meaning for us. We haven’t earned those insights. As much as we’d like to be able to make rational decisions based on unbiased observations, relationships and our perceptions of them are pretty much the opposite of that: they are emotional, partial, and incomplete, and our love flows from some intangible source while our knowledge lags behind.

Read the rest here. Thanks!

Trial By Fire: How to Get to Know Each Other Better, Better

Summer is a season tailor-made to help you get to know each other…for better or worse. In Industry magazine’s May/June 2012 issue, Trial by Fire, I talk about the ways you can get to know your new love. People tend to be on best behavior at the beginning, and while it’s understandable and most of us act this way, it also makes it hard to tell if you really complement each other. So I advise to put the relationship through certain stress tests, and early. It can help you head off any problems, or see irreconcilable differences early on, before you commit.

Read it here: Trial by Fire.

If spring is the time of beginnings, renewal, and nurturing young growth, then summer is the duration, the maturing of youthfulness, with all the results–and trade-offs–implicit when infinite possibility actually chooses.

Summertime also contains within it a sense of the future. Gather ye rosebuds while you may; enjoy the summer (while it lasts). The blooming world seems to hold a certain nostalgia, both for other summers (too short, always), for childhood (and summers off school), and for the dread and anticipation of its end, of harvest time, when we finally can see what we’ve been growing all year.

Let me know what you think. Maybe this is playing with fire? (ha, see what i did there?)

Type Casting: Deep Cuts from the Land of Myers-Briggs Personality Test

My latest column for Industry is hot off the virtual presses. Read it here: Type Casting

I had taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test (MBTI) years before, but as my boyfriend had just done it at work I decided to do a retake. Not too long after that, I became obsessed with it. For an analyzer like me, personality tests offer a kind of cheat sheet for thinking about people, and are an interesting jumping-off place for exploring boundaries in relationships.

You can take the Myers Briggs here. Then come back and tell me your type, how it impacts your relationships, how you choose people, or any other observations.

Emily Johnson

Writer and Yoga Instructor