I find your logic to be illogical. I don't care what kind of relationship you want to build (short of torturing the unwilling), I just disagree that high divorce rates or infidelity or sexual boredom has anything at all to do with the viability of monogamy.

As for hiccups, I figured out what they actually are, and why each "folk remedy" can seem to work.

Hiccups are muscle spasms. Of your diaphragm (no, not that kind).

So anything you do to force your diaphragm to hold still long enough to relax it again, will stop the hiccups.

Drinking slowly causes most people to hold their breath, and holding your breath often involves tensing and holding the diaphragm stiff as well. Same trick as the peanut butter.

You can think up any way you like, to hold your diaphragm still, long enough to break the cycle of spasms. What I usually do, is to start by roughly timing the hiccups. Then I take a deep breath, specifically to use to press down inside myself, on my diaphragm. I bend forward slightly while holding it, if need be. Then count through at least one full hiccup cycle, while mentally relaxing. If the first time doesn't do the trick, I simply repeat until it does. Usually takes no more than three tries.

Not entirely factual.

He got life because he directed his followers to kill, AND participated directly in the killings. And that last had nothing to do with "socialites," which you seem to think have less of a right not to be murdered than regular folks.


Overall, when it comes to the subject area of capital crimes, I've settled comfortably into being of two minds.

Logically, I want purely practical sentences. Such as "life until everyone agrees it's safe for this person to be free," in order to avoid freeing obviously psychotic people simply due to their time being up. And I agree that life without parole is cheaper both in money and in societal self-respect and comfort, than death.

Emotionally, I have seen a number of people who I would like to know were put to death somehow. Since I hate such people so intensely, that I can't believe that they would experience regret, even as they are being killed, I'd just as soon have them ignominiously erased.

"The purpose of learning is NOT primarily so that you can tell everyone else how to live."

Unfortunately, that reasoning boils down to "if your repression and mass murder is thorough enough, I'll pretend it isn't happening."

Just from a logical reasoning point of view, it's not a valid way to decide such things.

Especially since there have been cases in the planet's past of this kind of thing going on.

Hey, back off. He didn't say even a single anti-American word, and you have no justification for your attack.

He pointed out that counting up deaths and blaming them on an economic system, simply because they occurred while that system was officially what the people were in, isn't valid. Or if it is, that the death count for capitalism is vastly higher than for socialism/communism, for the simple reason that capitalism has been around much longer, and has been in sway in the vast majority of countries across the globe.

You're lucky the moderators here don't knock people out for posting insults as you have.

If you mean to ask, will any of the guys who start things off by asking for nudes, evolve into the thoughtful, mature, serious potential mate you came here for?

Oh my no.

I suggest you think of rude messages as an "easy sorting tool."

Instead of having to wait through a series of carefully phrased flattery,hoping that you wont have that horrifying "turned over pretty rock number three, at it was all worms and nasty insects" gross out experience, you can delete and block the "nudies please" guys right away.

Nope, I don't.

But as with lots of stuff, it isn't because I'm smart, or know what to do instead or anything like that.

I think I'm just lucky.

I was depressed a LOT when I was younger, and during holidays, the intense sense of obligation to perform in various ways for friends and family and society in general made most holidays excruciating. The only thing I liked, were the days off school or later, work.

Over time, I found various ways to reduce the stress, such as letting people know how horrible I was at gifts (not a skinflint, just abjectly terrible at scheduling when to do things for people), and ask them to just say what they wish someone would get them, out loud.

Mostly, I gradually realized that holidays weren't what they were fabled to be, as I thought when I was a kid. Frankly, only VERY few people really follow through with them in the complicated and dedicated way that I thought I had to back then.

Lots of people WATCH the traditional Christmas shows, but almost no one acts on the values and so on in them.

Partly it's because I got used to myself and my defects. It's a lot like not being able to play basketball well, and finally accepting that. I'm lousy at holiday celebrations, so when I do a mediocre job for the sixty-sixth year in a row, I actually laugh at myself, rather than go off on self-destructive self criticisms as I once did.

My personal deduction as to why so many people over the eons, have concluded that "asceticism" is a necessary step to achieve "holiness," is fairly simple. Most people, from the time they are very small and young, experience situations where they are trying to accomplish one thing, and find that some more intense experience (pain or pleasure) interrupts them, and carries them off course.

Ironically, asceticism itself, is such a distraction. A person experiences as intense a sensation from denying themselves experiences, as they do from having the experiences themselves; and if they believe that the pain of denial is more "important" or "holy" or "intelligent" than indulgence, then they will experience a sufficient boost to their egos for the self-denial, to turn it into a near religion unto itself.

Perhaps the fact that many indulgences that ascetics reject, tend to be inherently "messy" plays a big part. One rarely has to clean anything up, after a long bout of intellectual pondering, but things like sex and overeating always make a rather mucky mess (if you do it right). Thus again, on a very simple level, it's easy to see why someone might conclude that all things that make messes are "bad," and things that don't, are "good."

I struggled to learn history and philosophy for years, partly to try to understand things like rejection.

I seem to have always had an innate disposition to be annoyed by platitudes and sayings of various kinds. Probably because I could always sense that most of the time, when someone quoted some grand philosopher or even just a meme they got from the internet at me, all they were really saying was "hey, I really want to do something other than listen to you moan right now; take this, and run along, and tell me I'm wonderful for understanding."

So I ended up with just logical reasoning alone.

When I do get rejected (again), I look at why and how, and decide basically one overall thing: was I rejected for who and what I am, or only for who the other person erroneously thought I was? If it was for who I really am, then it's overall the logical thing for them to do, no matter how sad it makes me.

So I guess my philosophy of rejection is just that when it happens, it's just real life, finding it's own logical way along.

I look within myself, and I see that I want my life to consist of certain things. Many of those things are small, and most of them are unimportant to others at all, and just go together in a sort of pile to make up what I want my life to be about. So when I am rejected, it's best for me, since if I were still struggling to get along with someone who doesn't think I am worthwhile part of their life, I wont be able to do and be, any of what I actually am.

It doesn't make me feel wonderful, by any means. It just makes sense to me, so I don't feel the panic to rush off and try to "prove myself" to whomever, or to try to change myself to become other than who I am, to sort of "bribe" someone into hanging around with me.

Sorry if that's a bit on the rambling side. I've found that most really good "wise sayings," have a tremendously complex and subtle backstory to them, which is why so many of us have to go through hell, just to understand them.

Que sera, sera.

Sex isn't a need.

We're incompatible, obviously.

If you are looking for a possible scientific reason why something like that might happen, I can suggest one.

The dowser them self, senses the water, through subtle variations in the area due to the presence of the water. So they twitch their own hands accordingly.

I don't know, of course. I only know that it is always being discovered that our sensory mechanisms are more capable and subtle than we used to assume.

Who knows, maybe it has to do with the electric aspects of living beings.

In other words, there is probably no "remote control" involved. It's very direct sense and response.

This phenomenon is part of what eventually led me to recognize that the core drive of most humans, is to feel and think that they are on the right track, regardless of what that means.

Miserable people who want others to agree with their misery, are a prime example.

They seem happy to be miserable, because they are happy about thinking they are RIGHT to be miserable. Their misery confirms that they didn't misunderstand the world, even if they actually have done.

The worst way this affects the rest of us, is that some who have concluded that "the world sucks," use that conclusion to lift all restraint from themselves, and to allow themselves to behave abominably to the rest of us.

But again, the reason why some miserable people seem to be pleased to be miserable, is that they very much are pleased. In short, it boosts their ego, to feel correct, so they actually work to insure they remain miserable.

SparklingCrystal:

"Why did the puritans go to the US? Please enlighten me"

Primarily because they wanted to found a colony where they could be in charge, and dictate the religion of everyone there. All part of the idea of following a "pure" way of life, as they understood it.

Since they indeed wanted to get away from other people back home who didn't want to live as they said, and who were in charge of the government, it's possible to twist that around to say they wanted "the religious freedom to tell everyone else how to live." Not an uncommon enough urge, even today.

Ironically, one they got here, they started to figure out that they were all in agreement that the folks in charge back home were wrong about everything, that they actually didn't agree with each other all that much either. So several subgroups split off and started new "puritan" colonies further down the coast.

Lots of fanatic groups are like that. Left, right, religious, anti-religious, and so on. Recently, for example, the people who were having a GREAT time with each other, saying how superior they were to lots of other Americans, and calling themselves the Tea Party Movement, finally decided to form a real political party...but when they went to decide on actual principles for what to FAVOR, they discovered that it's easy to be unified about who you despise, but a heck of a lot trickier to unify behind what you support.

The main thing that is unfortunately true here, as regards education about the country's past, is that for the vast majority of Americans, it's never taught in any more depth than a cartoon story.

It isn't so much that it glosses over "bad things," as it glosses over EVERYTHING.

Most Americans do NOT know, for example, that the Puritans were NOT coming here for the sake of establishing religious freedom.

Or how there was a strong anti-war movement during EVERY war, even the "good" ones.

But again, it's not so much (anymore) that we teach our children lies, as that we teach them hundreds of years of history in the time it takes to read a chapter in a book, and no more. It HAS to be oversimplified, just to fit in the time allotted to it.

One problem we have all the time, especially in these days of internal rancor, is that lots of people grasp at relatively small true facts, to explain away very big problems or to excuse other very real facts that go the other way. That happens on all sides of the issues involved. It's based on the common misunderstanding (due to NO direct education in the country about how to reason logically) about what contradictory individual facts do and don't mean.

Lost of Americans think that if they can find a single instance where a GENERAL statement isn't true, that they've therefore proven that general statement entirely false. Which isn't correct, by the way. For example, the fact that most Africans who were brought into slavery in the US were NOT captured by American whites from the wilds of Africa (most were captured by other Africans), is sometimes emphasized to try to erase the fact that once here, they met a well established, government sponsored permanent third-class human status, especially in the slave states.

By the way, that label you were looking for, is "indentured servants." The people who were temporarily ALMOST enslaved to a single employer. As a child who knew what dentures were (from TV commercials) it was very confusing to read the word "indentured" I always immediately wondered if they were chained to the machines they used by their wired braces on their teeth or something.

Ya, I'm with Soulfie for the most part. I wont tell anyone else how to conduct their marriage.

When I was a kid, there was talk of this idea they called "open marriage," which as I understand it, boiled down to the idea that both people said they were married, and paid taxes like they were married, and mostly lived together like they were married, but regularly had sex with other people.

Not my cup of vodka, but if the people doing that have a good time and don't interfere with others, I'm fine with it.

The one thing missing from this opening post,is whether or not this married woman looking for a "girlfriend" has a mate who knows she's doing that, and is okay with it.

I intensely despise all cheating. As long as that isn't involved, I'm fine with whatever you like. Mostly.

I find that this is something that is on the list of "commonly and almost eagerly misunderstood" aspects of human romantic life.

There's some basic things that are true that most people don't even realize are influencing everything. One, is that most people want to be ABLE to assume all sorts of things are true. Because that's comfortable and easy. That's what we end up calling "cultural norms."

That desire to be able to assume stuff, causes secondary problems, because of another common human trait: the desire to be, and to be seen as, a valuable individual. That means that even as most people want everyone to follow the same norms, they also want to be able to do as they please themselves, to a large extent.

Finally, in the area of when to assume a dating pair is exclusive, it gets REALLY complicated.

The crucial point, is that while people want to be able to find the person they really want to be with, and rely on them, that desire means that unless they want to dedicate themselves to what gets called "sequential dating," where they choose exactly ONE person to do things with at a time, and only move on when they've given up on that first person, they will likely end up "dating" more than one person at a time.

And the key word there, is "dating."

If you meet someone for coffee and a chat, is that a "date?" I'd say not, but I've known people who do. That's why we can already see some people mentioning that the critical point to switch to being exclusive, is when sex begins to happen.

Something else that hasn't been mentioned yet, is the problem of fanatics. There are unfortunately in our world, people who are so intense and sensitive and demanding, that as soon as you speak to them in any way that isn't perfunctory, they will insist that you have crossed the line into their being able to control who you see and what you do, in order to even talk to them further.

With all that, my personal answer is that I do NOT agree that exclusivity must start before even the first "date." Real life, and real human interactions don't work that way, ever. I don't KNOW that I am, or could, "fall in love" with you, even before we meet face to face for a social interaction of some kind. That's fanatic thinking, there. Real life works, where I see you, and you see me, and both of us find each other's initial general impressions to be favorable. Maybe we could be friends. Maybe just business acquaintances.

Neither of us will know more, until we conduct some "social experiments." Those "social experiments" is what most people refer to as "dates." Am I going to commit to something approaching the level of a marriage, before even a SINGLE social experiment? Heck no.

I suggest that a different thinking about this is more logical. Forget "exclusivity" as the concept to focus on, and switch to
honorable and honest behavior." And really, we can't even begin to find out what each others' sense of honesty and honor is about, until we've met up and experienced each other in various social interactions.
So basically, I suggest we slow down on the "hard and fast rules" a bit with this.

Any number of songs. Lots of commercials and television shows. That sort of thing.

My most common tennis score.

hm. Well, maybe my attitude doesn't count, but I'm mention it just in case it's what you're looking for.

I personally have NEVER wanted just a "casual" relationship. Just not of interest to me.

For one thing, relationships of an intimate sort, always involve a tremendous amount of work, and emotional risk, in my experience, probably because I always tend to get personally involved. But who knows.

Anyway, due to having a very bad time of dealing with state governments in order to resolve my divorce, I'm not anxious to get married again, even if I do find someone to be very serious about.

But I'm certainly not interested in being in a "casual" relationship. I had my fill of those when I was very young, and never want to go anywhere near one again.