If you have ever felt bad about your body,  like you have too much cellulite, too many wrinkles and too many pounds, pimples, dandruff, a small chest, and ugly toes you are not alone.  Everyone in this culture suffers from what I call the body blues at some point in their adolescent and adult lives.  And the body blues can have a profound impact on your love relationship.  See Part 1 of this article to learn what you can do on your own to banish the body blues.

If you are in a couple, research on a number of “body imperfections” shows that in almost all cases the person with the “flaw” is more upset about it than his/her partner. Recently, I was a spokesperson for the National Psoriasis Foundation and was asked to give advice to people with this disorder. The studies of couples in which one person had moderate to severe psoriasis clearly showed that the person with the skin disorder was far more emotionally reactive than the partner.  So there’s an important lesson to be learned here: You are taking your imperfection far more seriously than your partner is. So take a step back and reap the benefits of being in a loving relationship.

Here are three simple exercises that are from a recent issue of my FREE weekly Dating Tips & Relationship Advice Newsletter. Click Here to subscribe.  Follow this relationship advice and you will be on your way to greater intimacy and fewer worries about your physical issues.

1. Partner Affirmation—Ask your partner for affirmations by having him/her highlight your features that he/she thinks are particularly attractive or beautiful.  Write out these partner affirmations in the form of statements like, Herb loves my gorgeous waist. Post them in a private place where you can read them often.  Share and affirm what you appreciate about your partner.  This exercise will help you with your positive thinking practice and bring you much closer together.

2.Be a Straight Shooter: if you don’t communicate your concerns about your body issues to your partner, he or she may think that the reason that you are acting distant or don’t want to be intimate has to do with them.  The result: often he or she feels rejected. So be open and honest about how you are feeling when you are down about your body.   This will give your partner a chance to be understanding and not hurt by your pulling back.   By the way, such sharing often leads to a wonderful physical encounter that occurs spontaneously!

3. Arrange Ten Minute Listening Sessions with your Partner: In these sessions, one person gets to talk, free associate, say whatever is on their minds while the other SIMPLY LISTENS with full attention. The listener does not speak. If the talker has a silent period, she/he should just say “Nothing is coming to mind.”  No matter what, use a clock and honor a full ten minute session—as if you were paying a therapist for their time!  When the speaker’s time is over, switch roles and let the person who’s been listening have their ten minutes to talk.  Using this exercise you can learn to have deep compassion and understanding for each other.

By practicing these three simple exercises, you can alleviate many of the psychological and relationship problems that are often caused by the body blues. For more ways on how to develop greater self-love and self-acceptance in your couple order a copy of my new book, Sealing the Deal: The Love Mentor’s Guide to Lasting Love. It comes with hundreds of dollars of FREE Bonus Gifts.

Diana Kirschner, Ph.D. is a frequent guest psychologist on The Today Show & author of the highly acclaimed new relationship advice book, “Sealing the Deal: The Love Mentor’s Guide to Lasting Love”  as well as the best-selling author of “Love in 90 Days.” Dr. Diana’s revolutionary work is the basis of her PBS Special on love. Connect with Dr. Diana through her FREE Relationship and Dating Advice Newsletter

In my new book, Sealing the Deal: The Love Mentor’s Guide to Lasting Love I describe Seven Natural Laws of Attraction. These are seven keys that underlie attraction in couples and keep passion and romance alive for many, many years. One of those seven Laws is this:

Decide that you are having an ongoing affair with your Beloved.

You’re wondering, what am I talking about? Well, if you want to set the stage for a win–win sexual relationship that is relatively cheating-proof, you must be creative and in a sense “the other woman.” You know, the one he’s having the affair with. Think it sounds crazy? Based on many years of experience with clients, students, and mentees, I know that practicing having an affair with him can lead to years of passion if he truly is the One. In order to conduct an ongoing affair with your man, practice physical touch, flirting, and sex play. In this excerpt we’ll only look at physical touch.

Acting like you are having an affair is a powerful relationship enhancer no matter how long you have been together. Here is the key principle:

Ask yourself: What would I be doing or saying if right now if we were having an affair? Then go for it!

What’s interesting about having an affair is that the partners are not automatically available to do the deed. The lingering touch, the sweet nibble on the ear, the deep French kiss may or may not go any farther. There is a playful novelty and uncertainty that drive up dopamine, the falling-in-love brain chemical that is synonymous with anticipation, excitement, and focus on the Beloved. Infatuation sizzles.

Make Physical Contact

Sex begins with physical contact. In fact, couples with great sex lives often are the ones you see holding hands and touching in public. As we’ve discussed, physical nonsexual contact creates oxytocin, the cuddle, bonding, and trust hormone. In order to amplify this even more, if he is receptive, hold hands, kiss, or stroke his face. His hands, lips, and face are all highly touch-sensitive areas! Gazing into his eyes also releases oxytocin and is an extremely powerful bonding move. In one study, strangers shared intimate details about themselves and then stared into each other’s eye for four minutes. Many reported being extremely attracted to each other. One couple in the study actually got married!

Trace the outline of his bicep with your finger or give him a mini massage on his neck and shoulders. Find out what kind of touch he enjoys: stronger, softer, or in between. You both will feel great as the oxytocin works its magic.

On the other hand, many men don’t like to be touched unless it’s on the playing field (why do they slap each other’s butts?) or in the sack. Yet they crave contact with us. And it’s often communicated in a strange way. Here’s a brief excerpt from an actual therapy session with a couple where the touching-versus-not-touching issue was threatening to destroy the relationship.

She: Greg never touches me unless it’s sexual.

He: I’m not a touchy-feely guy, but I love to be with you.

She: You sure have a funny way of showing it.

He: Doc, we were watching a TV show last night and were sitting together on the couch.

She: Tell her how you started a fight.

He: Well, it was nice and cozy and then Ellen left the room and just disappeared.

She: It didn’t seem to matter whether I was there or not. You weren’t paying me any attention.

He: What, are you kidding? I was really upset that you left.

        Okay. What is this man saying that she missed? Translation: I want to be in your space, your presence, because it feels like home. Now, obviously he needed to demonstrate more physical affection, but that was easy to achieve once Ellen got how much Greg loved being around her. She learned to be specific about the kind of touch she needed from Greg. The key is to ask for it in a positive and validating way, as in “I really love it when you [put your arm around me, play with my hair while I lie in your lap, rub my back—fill in the blank].” So from that day on when they watched their favorite shows or movies, she would curl up on him and he would touch her till she was purring. They even had more fun in bed.

    To learn more about the Natural Laws of Attraction, be sure to order Sealing the Deal: The Love Mentor’s Guide to Lasting Love.

Wishing you love,

Dr. Diana

Diana Kirschner, Ph.D. is a frequent guest psychologist on The Today Show & author of the highly acclaimed new book, “Sealing the Deal: The Love Mentor’s Guide to Lasting Love” (February, 2011) as well as the best-selling author of “Love in 90 Days.” Dr. Diana’s revolutionary work is the basis of her PBS Special on love. Connect with Dr. Diana through her FREE Relationship and Dating Advice Newsletter

When things go south in your relationship and you start arguing, it can easily cascade downhill and feel like all is lost.  There is nothing as painful as the disappointment and upset we feel when our  love relationship collapses into nothing but accusations, blame, angry attacks and coldness.    It is the worst feeling.  But I have great news!   There is a way to fight fairly so that both you and your partner can actually come together and both win!  In fact fighting fairly in this way is good for a couple. Couples that don’t fight are the ones that counselors worry most about.  Married couples who do not fight have double the divorce rate of those who do. Loving couples do air their differences.  But they know how to fight fairly so that they can come back together, even closer than before  (and the make-up sex is amazing!).  Here are six tips to help you get there in your couple:

1. Avoid Out-of-Control Anger. Anger and criticism lead to “flooding,” a stress explosion in which the heart beats more rapidly, blood pressure soars and adrenaline surges.  The whole body tenses up as fear, confusion and then more anger take over.  Reason goes out the window.  In experimental studies of conflict, even when couples are asked to calm down, men simply aren’t able to chill out while women can.  Keep in mind that your real foe is not your partner but this physiological stress reaction!  If anger swirls out of control use breathing, time out, or humor to defuse the situation.

2. Give Space as Needed. If your partner is the one who tends to get flooded with anger, practice giving him or her space in which to calm down.  Not in a cold rejecting way, but saying something like, let’s take a few minutes to have a breather so we can talk this through when we’re both clearer.

3.  Use Positive Shaping Talk. To avoid the angry stress reaction, it’s best to start a potentially charged conversation in a soft, sweet, or affectionate way with what I call Positive Shaping Talk.    Be warm and clear about what you really want or need from your partner. Not about what they are doing wrong.  So instead of, “You never pay attention to me!!!”  try saying, “Honey, I love it when you listen to me and it would be so great for me to be able to talk for five minutes while you just listen.”

Before we go to our next three relationship tips don’t forget to take advantage of  my FREE ongoing support: You can learn EXACTLY how to improve your relationship, fight fairly, keep the passion going and deepen commitment by subscribing to my Dating Tips & Relationship Advice Newsletter, absolutely FREE!  Click Here to get started now.

4. Repeat Your Partner’s Complaint. Often if your partner feels heard and understood, like their opinion matters, they can often let go of the issue, back down and reenter into an intimate connection.  Try repeating exactly what they are saying back to them.  Start by saying, “You feel.”   This can be very disarming!!!  So you suddenly might say to your partner, “You feel like I don’t appreciate how important sports are too you.”   This can stop the whole escalation to mutually assured destruction.

5.  Ask yourself, which is more important: to be right or to be close? In loving couples, who is right and who is wrong is irrelevant. Does it really matter that you win this argument or would you rather be having make-up sex or at least be lying in each other’s arms right now?

6. Use the “Take Two” technique. Make an agreement that either one of you can call out “Take Two” when a fight erupts and you can start your “scene” all over again, but from a loving place.  My husband and I use this technique regularly to interrupt any of our “stupid fights.”and it is very powerful! In my clinical experience this technique alone has saved many relationships from dissolving.

Healthy couples fight, but their fighting is less out of control and ends on a sweet note that carries them back to laughter, closeness and intimacy.  Practice these skills to come out of your anger and create a dialogue:

• In the midst of a disagreement, take a break, breathe, soothe or calm yourself.
• Try on the other person’s point of view. 
  
• Ask yourself honestly, do you need to back down or make an apology to your partner? 
  
• When you are fighting, which is more important, being right, or being close?
• And if your partner gets flooded with anger, practice using humor, giving them space or soothing them in some way so that they can calm down. 
  

It will be well worth it for the sake of your own happiness and theirs.

Diana Kirschner, Ph.D. is a frequent guest psychologist on The Today Show & best-selling author of “Love in 90 Days” (dating advice book)” out now in paperback (at Amazon) with a new chapter on “Dating Games Men Play.” Love in 90 Days was the basis of her PBS Special on love. Connect with Dr. Diana through her FREE relationship & dating advice newsletter.

In my dating advice for women series we have been looking at whether marriage is good or toxic for women.  Let’s look at the impact of marriage on psychological well-being or mental health.  Specifically, we’ll look closely at depression because it affects about 20 million adults in the U.S. alone and is therefore one of its most common diseases. The bad news here is that women are twice as likely as men to suffer from depression. Depression has been widely studied and has been found to correlate very highly with other markers of mental health.

Research done in the 1970s claimed that married women were more depressed than single women or married men. Is that still true today?  The short answer is, no.

In 2007, using data from the largest national studies ever done[i] researchers found that marriage reduces the blues in both men and women. Here’s the skinny:

1. In studies of those continuously married versus, those single or living together, researchers found that entry into marriage significantly reduces depressive symptoms in women (and men).
2. Those who were single and stable reported increases in depression over a five-year period while the married women did not.
3. Depression doesn’t seem to be a factor in who gets married. In other words, the problem of self-selection in experimental designs doesn’t appear to screw up the results.
4. In short, we now know that a stable marriage helps women ward off the blues. Other studies[ii] show that when we look at overall mental health, married women are emotionally healthier than singles.

What about the argument that marriage is better for men than it is for women?  We know that married men are far better off than single men.  Granted, men may benefit from marriage even more than women, but those differences can be accounted for by the nature of male single life: the bachelor tends to have more unhealthy habits and is less likely to have emotional social support than the bachelorette.  So when he marries, he steps up to a much healthier lifestyle.

Single women on the other hand, are not significantly different in their lifestyles than their married counterparts.  So where do married women suffer relative to singles?  In two areas: when they are in bad marriages or when they have kids.  It’s as simple as that.  Women in bad marriages report having trouble sleeping, not feeling OK and being more stressed than gals who say they are in a satisfying marriage. This is true even when studies controlled for being prone to depression or having kids. In other words a good marriage may contribute a lot more to a woman’s well-being than we previously thought. More on this later.

As to having kids, women with young kids have more stress than women without kids. Duh!  Oh, and they feel they have no time for themselves, for self-caretaking, so they report more stress.  Duh, duh!

If you’re looking to have kids, be prepared for a heck of a lot more responsibility and a more stressful life than being single without kids.  If you are married and one of those lucky few who have a house husband, you’ll have more responsibility outside the home and have the privilege of feeling guilty about being a “bad mom.”  There’s no winning here ladies—stress comes along with young kids and teenagers.  Of course, if you’re a single mother with kids, countless studies have shown that your stress level is much higher than marrieds with kids or singles with no kids.

Nonetheless, here’s the bottom line: Contrary to myth, a stable marriage tends to be emotionally uplifting for women. It reduces depression and improves overall mental health. Does it help men even more? Yeah, but what woman didn’t know that?

So stay tuned for more on this Dating Advice for Women Series!

Wishing you love,

Dr. Diana

Dr. Diana Kirschner ♥ Relationship advice from my heart to yours ♥

Diana Kirschner, Ph.D. is a frequent guest psychologist on The Today Show & best-selling author of “Love in 90 Days” (dating advice book)” out now in paperback (at Amazon) with a new chapter on “Dating Games Men Play.” Love in 90 Days was the basis of her PBS Special on love. Connect with Dr. Diana through her FREE relationship & dating advice newsletter.

[i] See R. G. Wood, B. Goesling & S. Avellar (2007) The Effects of Marriage on Health: A Synthesis of Recent Research Evidence.  This is a meta-analysis of 70 studies. Available at http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/publications/PDFs/marriagehealth.pdf

[ii] For a list of references contact the author.

So let’s say you’ve been following  my Dating Advice for Women, had “The Talk” and worked through the usual ups and downs of the commitment process. You’ve even gone so far that marriage looks like the next step and he’s willing, if not eager, to go for it.

But wait, as they say, there’s more! Is getting married in the 21^st century such a great idea for women?  My many friends (especially women) from around the world on www.youtube.com/lovein90days/ are constantly posting comments like “marriage is dying,” and that living together is “so much better.”  And there has been a global sea change where now more people are living together than are married. Plus, some studies have shown that singles with strong social support are basically as happy as married women in good marriages[i].

Then there are the skeptics who claim that marriage is a bad deal for women today.  For example, in her recent bestseller[ii], Elizabeth Gilbert quotes research which shows that married women are less successful, more depressed, less healthy and more likely to die a violent death than single women.  Citing what she calls the “Marriage Benefit Imbalance” Gilbert points out that, while women fare poorly, men actually benefit physically and psychologically from marriage.   Nonetheless, she winds up, like many other women, getting married herself by the end of her book.  Hmm.

In response to this controversy I decided to write a blog series in this Dating Advice for Women section of the website where I  look at the hundreds of studies conducted around the world on the impact of marriage on women’s mental health, longevity, lifestyle and marital satisfaction.   We’ll look at these areas one by one and see what the latest research shows.  Here’s a secret I learned when I got my Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology: To find more of the whole truth, don’t rely on one study or one author’s work, especially if there are others that contradict it. So while I admire Gilbert as a writer I have to say I’m disappointed that she relied on the work of one sociologist who did her research way back in the 1970s.

The “Marriage Benefit Imbalance” was first popularized in 1982 by Jessie Bernard in her book, The Future of Marriage[iii]. This work created a lasting myth that women do not benefit from marriage.  Bernard argued that there are two marriages: his and hers. She tried to prove this by showing: that women were unpaid for their parenting and domestic responsibilities and as housewives were not as valued as men are for their work outside the home; that men, by controlling the finances had power over women in marriage; and that married men lived longer than single men. Bernard also claimed that married women, on the other hand, did not live longer than single gals. In her comparison studies, she also said that married men reported they were happier than single men but also that they were happier than married women.

And the list of the supposedly toxic effects of marriage continued. Bernard claimed that more women than men are unhappy in marriage, so unhappy that they are depressed and have poorer mental health than single women. In short, Bernard believed that marriage was a good deal for men and not so kind to women.

Well, a lot has changed since the 70s.  Marriage is no longer the hallowed institution it once was.  Greater numbers of unmarried couples are living together; the age at first marriage is higher; more women are participating in higher education; have better paying jobs and brighter career opportunities; and greater numbers of women are choosing to become single mothers, either through adoption or insemination with donor sperm. Women are more independent all the way around.  So they need marriage less.  And yet, despite all of these advances, many women still want to get married.

Let’s face it: we all would agree that nothing is worse than an abusive marriage and that for many women single life works just fine, thank you.  But I think it’s worth understanding if marriage really is a bad deal for women and what marriage can and can’t do for you.

So stay tuned for this Dating Advice for Women Series!

And don’t forget  to get  my FREE ongoing support: You can learn EXACTLY how to Find,  Attract and Date terrific guys and create Lasting Love that is just right for you by subscribing to my Dating Tips & Relationship Advice Newsletter, absolutely free! Just Click Here to get started now.

Wishing you love,

Dr. Diana

Dr. Diana Kirschner ♥ Relationship advice from my heart to yours ♥

Diana Kirschner, Ph.D. is a frequent guest psychologist on The Today Show & best-selling author of “Love in 90 Days” (dating advice book)” out now in paperback (at Amazon) with a new chapter on “Dating Games Men Play.” Love in 90 Days was the basis of her PBS Special on love. Connect with Dr. Diana through her FREE relationship & dating advice newsletter.

[i] Contact author for references

[ii] E. Gilbert (2010). Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage,

[iii] J. Bernard (1982). The Future of Marriage.