"Le Cri" by Auguste Rodin, Musee Rodin, Paris This morning my husband and I had one of our rare fights. He asked me if I had seen anything interesting during my online skim of The New York Times morning headlines. I began to describe my reaction to an Op-Ed piece written by Alexa O’Brien about Amazon’s use of the helper technology that shares her name, a reference to the Greek goddess who defends and protects. I was explaining what [...]
A Swedish proverb promises: “Shared joy is double joy; shared sorrow is half a sorrow.” Experiences of sharing — anything from a troubling dream to an ice cream cone — can show “I Love You” across cultures, gender, age. A two-year old will reach out her hand to offer a turn at a toy to someone she trusts and wants to see smile; a romantic relationship takes a step forward when one person offers a sip from his or her drink to the other [...]
To make us more aware of all the ways we can make love real, that we can show "I Love You" both with and without words, each Sunday I am posting a piece on PsychologyToday.com describing the what, how and why of another way to express love. Today's entry describes "Touching" and appears here. Please send me your own stories of ways you show love or feel it coming from someone else. I will keep track of them and [...]
Today, I am delighted to wish you a Happy New Year. May the year 2017 bring you excellent health, many joys, and the very brightest of discoveries. I am also delighted to share my first column for "52 Ways to Show I Love You", written for my blog on Psychology Today, "Life, Refracted". You can sign up to receive the column directly from Psychology Today on that page or on my own website. If you sign up to automatically receive [...]
Dear Reader, I have been neglecting this blog for weeks, ever since I began posting more scholarly or professional pieces as a regular column, “Life, Refracted”, on PsychologyToday.com. The links to those essays appear on this website, under “Articles and Essays”. How did this come about? In the spring of 2016, in support of Miracle at Midlife: A Transatlantic Romance, my publicist suggested I write “10 Things About Long-Distance Love”. Soon I realized that I had far more than ten [...]
Preparing to Pick up a Grandchild When my daughter was about seven years old, in those days long before seat-belts and the mandate to put kids in the back seat of the car, I wrote my first story. “God is alive and well and riding in the passenger seat” detailed the magic that happened in our relationship when driving from here to there, wherever “there” happened to be. Life was simpler then. The seemingly endless after-school and evening activities [...]
A recent local news release brought the story of Nicholas Doddo, a college student, who risked his own life to save that of another young man whom he had never seen before. Sitting in Friday evening traffic on the Tappan Zee Bridge, Mr. Doddo had suddenly realized that someone was racing headlong to the barrier with the intent of jumping over it to his inevitable death. Mr. Doddo’s instincts led him to leave his car, cross traffic lanes in [...]
A neighbor from the days when our children were small recently sent me the obituary for the woman who had lived next door. I had known Paula as the woman who gave out particularly treasured Halloween treats and who played the piano, sending musical beauty across our lawns when spring days led us to open our doors and allow screens to permit more transparency. I also knew that she had been an accomplished nurse and had continued to work at [...]