Emotional Health

Crying

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Robin Weis, the same girl who brought us 8 years of dating data, tracked her crying patterns for 589 days, rating them on a scale from ‘a tear or two’ to ‘I am a crumpled pile of flesh’. She cried on 216 of those days. And I thought I cried a lot.

 Number of Cries Per Day

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She categorized each cry into 8 general categories, shown in the graph below. The mound of purple life-related cries on the left side was largely during a 10 week trip to Europe. A large proportion of her cries were breakup and relationship related, which included finding out her boyfriend was married. Yep, that’s bound to cause some tears. Check out her full post here.

Categories of Cries Over Time

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What I’ve found interesting

  • Relationships and breakups appear to cause a lot of negative emotions. It’d be interesting to see what a graph of positive emotions due to relationships would look like, though that would be harder to quantify. Crying generally has an obvious beginning and end, but how would you track your start of happy feelings and end of happy feelings as precisely?
  • Is travel-crying a thing? Robin mentions that almost 20% of her crying occurred while she was traveling solo. I had a similar experience recently when I was in South America. It can be particularly uncomfortable if you’re staying in a hostel and there’s nowhere private where you can just go and cry. Has anyone else experienced this?

As I’m taking my first steps into the world of online dating (I just signed up to OKCupid for the first time) it can be a little scary seeing the amount of angst relationships can cause. Might I be more comfortable staying safely single?

I hate to be yet another blog that touts the benefits of travel, but my experience with travel is relevant here. Even though I spent a lot of time being unhappy while traveling, overall it was a rewarding experience that enhanced my life and I’d do it again. As for dating, it’s a risk I’m willing to take.

 

How non-attachment changed my outlook on dating

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In An Introduction to Non-Attachment I described the basic idea of non-attachment. As promised, here’s the (belated) follow-up.

Even after creating this blog, the idea of dating still weighed heavily on my shoulders. So much of my imagined future depended on the success of my attempts at dating. If I spent all this time and energy trying to find a long-term relationship and still failed, what would that say about me?

The possibility of trying and still failing was scarier than doing nothing, so that’s exactly what I ended up doing: nothing. I felt stuck.

stuck again

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Do I light your fire? – By Pinky

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Here’s the latest from Pinky, who’s going to be a semi-regular contributor!

Valentine’s Day was last weekend. A day to to show your love and appreciation for that special someone. It is hard to forget Valentine’s Day what with all the commercialisation of it (chocolates, roses, 2 for 1 deals, the colour red is everywhere); but it is easy to forget to show the love and respect for one particular special person: You.

heart candle

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An Introduction to Non-Attachment

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I don’t know much about Buddhism and I’m not religious, but I completely support taking parts of religious teachings that speak to you and applying them to your own life, regardless of whether or not you accept their entire doctrine. This is what I’m trying out with the concept of non-attachment.

While writing this post, I tried to find a short YouTube video to explain non-attachment. I deeply regret it. All the clips featured soft-spoken, irritatingly calm people talking about how they received a “message from the universe” or had a “shift in planetary consciousness”.

Of course they included the obligatory close up shots of cherry blossoms set to a soundtrack of tinkling bells.

cherry blossoms

If this had been my first introduction to the idea of non-attachment, my reaction would have been RUN!!!

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Guest Post by Pinky

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Today’s post is the very first guest post for this blog, written by my very good friend, who I’ll call Pinky. Enjoy! 

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Don’t be in a Rut, Get a Haircut

Friends: Haircut?
You know the feeling you get when you need a haircut but you never get around to making a (much needed) appointment? And your friends keep making subtle hints (friend: do you think I need a haircut?). This is how people sometimes try to tell you that you need to do something. They will transpose the issue on themselves and ask you for an opinion with the hope that you will think “hmm, my friend thinks about getting a haircut… Maybe I need one too?”. That’s friends – they want to help you see the problem but they don’t want to tell you what to do.

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9 Things That Suck About Traveling

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Traveling

I’m in the middle of a several month trip through Latin America, traveling and attempting to improve my Spanish. While I’m “living the dream” and mostly having a good time, sometimes I’m not really enjoying it at all. Yet when you read the countless travel blogs and magazines, rarely do you see an honest portrayal of the parts of traveling that aren’t so great.

I’m guilty of this, too. Based on the pictures I post, my friends and family could assume I’m spending all my time at pristine beaches, exploring beautiful cities, or eating delicious meals, but the pictures don’t depict the times I was hopelessly lost and exhausted in those same cities or the sweltering humidity and relentless mosquitoes that go hand in hand with those beautiful beaches.

This post may seem to have absolutely nothing to do with dating or relationships, but bear with me. I have a point.

To do my part in dispelling the myth of the bliss-filled, problem-free vacation, here is my list of 9 things that suck about traveling:

  1. Sharing your bathroom, your bedroom, your kitchen and everywhere else with complete strangers all the time.
  2. Asking someone to repeat themselves 3 times in Spanish and still having no idea what they said.
  3. Craving a fresh salad, but being afraid of buying one for fear of the digestive consequences.
  4. Spending 15 hours on a bus, so long that your ankles swell up, leading you to believe you’ve contracted a rare tropical disease.
  5. When it seems like everyone in the hostel has made friends except you
  6. Waiting in line for 3 hours to get across the border at 5am.
  7. Having to wear a bathing suit around people who look good in bathing suits.
  8. Giving your taxi driver the address to your hostel in a new city, but he has no idea where it is, nor does he understand your broken translation of the directions.
  9. When it’s so humid that your clothes on the line don’t dry for three days, even though it’s 90 F (32 C) degrees outside.

I realize this entire list could be tagged under “first world problems”. Don’t get me wrong, I realize I’m lucky to be traveling. However, when people only share the good things, whether it’s about travel, relationships, marriage or life in general, our expectations for our own experiences are higher than they should be. It’s normal not to enjoy every moment of traveling. It’s normal not to be happy all the time. It’s normal to go through tough times in a relationship. But when our actual experiences are worse than what we think our friends went through, we feel like something is wrong with us or with our situation, when in reality, we never saw the full picture to begin with.

Sharing the whole story can be hard. I worry that I’ll seem whiny or ungrateful or I’ll be told to ‘just get over it’, but it’s come as a pleasant surprise for me that most of my friends seem to appreciate when I share both the good and the bad. Whether it’s about traveling or just about life in general, I’m learning to be a little more open. So far it’s been going well.

We’re All Hiding Something

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This TED Talk struck a chord with me. If you’ve been following this blog for a while, I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise that my “closet” was not believing in the Unification Church.

Years ago, I’d spoken to my parents about how I didn’t really believe in the church. Although, I was vague about it and didn’t go into details about what I did and didn’t believe, it still felt good to get it partially off my chest. But because I wasn’t direct, my parents held out hope that I’d change my mind – exactly like she says in the TED talk. For a while, they kept trying to match me with church guys, urging me to “just give them a chance”. At one point I snapped at them and said in no uncertain terms to “back off!”

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