relationships

When he looks for lovers, my great engineer friend George relies on data. They need to have blue eyes, blond hair, an appreciation for fine dining and an IQ (and height) just two points below his.

Oh, and the lover must be a woman. Facebook's COO, Sheryl Sandberg, however, has declared that women should not marry George, except in exceptional circumstances.

For she is adamant that women should marry women. The reason is very simple: the data says so.

In an interview for the PBS/AOL "Makers" series, Sandberg didn't quote the source of her data … Read more

In human relationships, nothing should surprise. Indeed, the only extreme reaction ought to be disappointment.

This is what I feel after I learned from the excellent Beaver County Times that a man is being accused of placing a transmitter beneath his wife's bed.

His purpose was allegedly to discover if she was having sex.

The more alert among you might have noticed the phrase "his wife's bed." This would suggest either that the gentleman in question and his wife had an agreeable but separate sleeping arrangement. Or that there was trouble beneath their roof.

It seems … Read more

I woke up this morning, dreaming of the In-N-Out Burger that will be my Valentines meal, to discover serious accusations about love's labors lost.

In a quite pulsating treatise on CNN.com, experts were blaming an increase of one-night standing on technology.

Yes, apparently it creates sexual tension. Apparently, technology encourages you to offer sexual banter even before the first date. So, by the time you encounter the person in real life, you've already created the preconditions for a bedtime ending.

Verbal and romantic intimacy is being sacrificed on the altar of truncated messages, delivered with staccato urgency.… Read more

Have you ever committed yourself to a lover? Has that lover ever turned on you, trodden on your commitment, and crushed your dreams of a white picket fence and perfect baking every Sunday?

Then please take a seat. For I wish to bring you the story of a man who was in that very position and decided he needed to buy himself something nice.

It just so happens that the something nice was a Halo suit of armor.

I am grateful to an emotional Reddit reader who sent me a link to Bygone Bureau, a culture and travel magazine that … Read more

Google negotiates with music labels, ultrabooks could add tap-to-pay, and Kobo copies Amazon by putting ads in its cheaper Touch e-reader.

Links from Monday's episode of Loaded:

These days, love comes, love goes, love doesn't necessarily even stay the night.

Do you need more proof of this sad and very modern truth? Oh, you do. Then please let me help you. A survey conducted by market researchers Lab 42 declares that 33 percent of human beings have broken up with their beloveds by text, e-mail, or Facebook.

Yes, Facebook.

You might imagine that I am talking about 13-year-olds. Because you definitely, surely have to be 13 to be on Facebook. Yet, no. This survey purports to offer the truths of 550 people older than 18--and, clearly, … Read more

These days, if you don't meet your date online, there must be something a little wrong with you.

There is a small cabal of humans, however, who are still uncertain as to whether someone you meet on, say, Facebook, mightn't be married. Or merely a hardened criminal.

I mention this dilemma because of the tale of 23-year-old Leah Gibbs, from Rhondda, South Wales.

The way The Daily Mail presents it, Gibbs met Adam Minton on Facebook and agreed to be his date. Her hope was that they would spend their first encounter watching a DVD at Minton's … Read more

Is it pride in pulchritude? Is it pressure from the opposite sex? Or might it even be that not so many people like to see men naked?

In an intellectually titled piece of research--"Let My Fingers Do the Talking: Sexting and Infidelity in Cyberspace"--Diane Kholos Wysocki, a professor of sociology and women's studies at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, and Cheryl D. Childers, a professor of sociology at Washburn University, create a snapshot that some might find intuitive and some might find depressing.

Their numerical conclusions appear clear: two-thirds of the women surveyed said … Read more

It started on Facebook. She looked into his two-dimensional eyes, ignored the fact that the game was called Mafia Wars, and decided that this might be love.

Oh, perhaps it didn't start with precisely those indications of love and foreboding, but I can tell you how it ended--with an $8,386.88 lawsuit for "misrepresentation, promissory estoppel, defamation of character, and intentional infliction of emotional distress."

All of us who read romantic novels must pay a debt to the Tri-City Herald, which dutifully recorded the progress and regress of a Facebook relationship between Cheryl Gray, 50, from … Read more