How to make
someone like you without them noticing
Use a hint of perfume so subtle that the other
person will not
consciously be aware of the smell.
As described when we explored how to get your man
to clean, the subtle smells can prime both thoughts and behaviour.
This vague scent will produce a positive
response in the other person (the olfactory system which processes smell is
very close to the limbic region in the brain which deals with emotional
processing) without them realising.
How to make
yourself more attractive to men
Wear a little red. Studies show that brief
exposure to this colour — again, below the level of consciousness — seems to
influence judgments of attractiveness.
Certainly in the monkey world, any flash of
red body parts in females represents a clear sexual signal to attract a mate,
and studies show the colour has a similar subliminal impact on humans.
So why not try a subtle flash of scarlet in
the form of a pair of shoes or scarf.
How to tell
if your marriage is heading for trouble
Ask your partner to talk about your early days
together: reminisce about how you met, your first date, the wedding
day . . . is theirs a story about ‘we’? Or is it a story about ‘you and I’?
When a marriage or
relationship is
unravelling, couples tend to recast their earlier times together in a negative
light, but when a
husband and wife talk about the early years as a joint
undertaking, there are positive signs that the marriage will work.
Listen out for whether your partner uses the
words ‘you’ or ‘your’ to describe the two of you. This could be a bad sign.
A study at the University of Pennsylvania
found that ‘you’ and ‘your’ are more often used to describe a relationship when
the focus is on creating psychological distance from the other person. But
highly committed partners tend to use ‘we’ pronouns more frequently.
How to have
a happy, successful relationship
Be wary of four bringers of relationship doom:
criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling.
These are some of the most destructive
patterns that can occur in a marriage or relationship, and studies show their
appearance can be highly predictive of whether a couple will last.
To be sure of a happy relationship you both
need to be less critical, much less defensive and you must avoid displays of
contempt at all costs (contempt not only casts doom on a relationship, it can
affect your health, making you prone to infectious illness).
So if one of you feels the urge to be
critical, use humour to soften the blow.
How to mend
a broken heart
Drowning your sorrows after a relationship
ends doesn’t work, and despite the old adage time — on its own — is not always
the best healer. Instead, over a few days write about your relationship and
what it meant to you.
On the first day focus on your time before the
split, on the second chart the time as the split was looming, and on the third
day concentrate on the aftermath of the split and how it all felt.
By writing down your thoughts and feelings in
this way, you will be exposing yourself to painful thoughts but, in doing so,
you will be decreasing the impact of these thoughts with a form of
desensitisation. You will also be coming to terms with, and making sense of,
these thoughts.
There is considerable evidence to show that
writing about your innermost thoughts is both physically and psychologically
beneficial, allowing a ‘release’ which reduces stress.
