People tend to make sex more complicated than it needs to be. They overthink every little detail and end up making the experience less enjoyable than it could be. It is supposed to be fun and relaxing, not a source of stress!
One way to make it simpler is to focus on the pleasure you and your partner are experiencing. This means being present in the moment and enjoying every sensation. Another way is to communicate openly with your partner about what you like and don’t like. This way, there are no surprises, and you can both focus on making each other feel good.
By keeping sex simple, you can let go of expectations and the pressure to be perfect. Instead of worrying so much about what your partner wants, you can focus on giving your partner pleasure, and yourself. And when you’re relaxed, you can respond instead of thinking about it. This makes the experience more enjoyable for both of you!
Sex is a physical act, but it goes beyond the physical. It’s a way of saying, “I love you.” It makes you feel good. It helps you feel close and connected to your partner. It can be a wonderful expression of intimacy and love. I think that it is important because it is the ultimate form of intimacy between two people. It creates a bond between you that can’t be broken. So don’t overthink it! Keep it simple, and enjoy the experience.
So next time you’re feeling the love, remember to keep it simple! Focus on the pleasure, communicate openly, and let go of the pressure to be perfect. This way, you can relax and enjoy the experience. Sex is supposed to be fun, after all!
So next time you’re feeling stressed about your relationship, take a step back and remember that sex is supposed to be simple. Enjoy the moment and communicate with your partner. This way, you can make sure that both of you are always having a good time.
Lastly, don’t forget that sex doesn’t have to be perfect. If I could go back in time, I’d tell myself, “Kalyee, it’s okay if things aren’t perfect. Just enjoy the ride.” Life is too short to sweat the small stuff. So go out there and enjoy the simplicity of sex!
Until next time,
Xoxo,
Kalyee
^^^
Kalyee Srithnam is a 24-year-old writer, columnist, sometime-model and erudite chocolate fiend, who loves unicorns and writing content that helps people feel seen. Her column appears each Monday and Thursday.Follow her on Twitter.
We all want to be a good friend. By how do you walk the fine line between being supportive and being an annoying buttinski?
Here are a few tips:
1. Avoid giving unsolicited advice.
This is probably the number one way to get on your friends’ nerves. We all have that one friend who is always trying to tell us what to do, even when we didn’t ask for it. While it’s great that they care about us and want to help, it’s often stuff we’ve thought of and rejected, and we wish they’d shut up.
2. Mind your own business.
This goes hand in hand with number one. Just because you see your friend doing something you think is wrong, that doesn’t mean it’s your place to say anything. If they’re not asking for help, then butt out.
3. Be respectful of their time and space.
Your friend has their own life! You may think that since you’re such good friends, they should always be available to hang out or talk on the phone, but that’s not fair. Everyone needs some alone time, and if your friend is busy, don’t take it personally.
4. Don’t gossip about them behind their back.
OK, they’ve rejected your advice, and it ticks you off. So you get right on text and get in touch with a common friend, and you start venting about how wrong they are and how you don’t understand why they’re making that choice. STOP. That is not being a good friend. If you have something to say to your friend, say it to their face. Or shut up.
5. Respect their privacy.
You know something you shouldn’t know. They didn’t tell you. Now you want to help. Well, we have some news for you. If your friend wanted you to know, they would have told you. So don’t ask them about it, don’t bring it up, and for the love of gosh, don’t tell anyone else.
6. Avoid being judgmental.
If your friend is having a rough time, they need your support. But if all you can do is criticize, you’re not being helpful. Try to be understanding and compassionate, even if you don’t agree with their choices.
7. Don’t be a yes-man (or woman).
If your friend is messing up, or making a bad choice, don’t enable this behavior. Now, this doesn’t mean tell them what to do. But don’t actively help them ruin their life, or the lives of others. To be clear, this doesn’t mean you should betray their trust by blabbing to others what they’re doing. But you can gently steer them back on track without being preachy.
8. Hang in there during the tough times.
We all have our ups and downs, but a true friend will be there for us during the tough times as well. Sometimes this just means being quiet, supportive and present, nothing more.
9. Don’t try to fix them.
This goes back to unsolicited advice. Often, when we see our friends going through a tough time, we want to help by “fixing” the problem. But the thing is, we can’t fix other people. We can only offer support and be there for them as they work it out themselves.
10. Be yourself.
This is the most important one of all. Be genuine, be honest, and be authentic. Don’t try to be someone you’re not, or pretend to be something you’re not. Just be yourself, and let your friendship develop naturally.
By following these tips, you can be a good friend without being annoying. Just remember to be respectful, understanding and supportive, and you’ll do great!
I was out of town last week for a few days, hiking the Appalachian Trail, sleeping outside in 34-degree weather, roughing it. Sometimes, when I came to an especially breathtaking bit of scenery, frightening rapids that I had to cross or an especially daunting rocky incline to to scurry up, I would muse: Imagine how cool all this would be in VR. (That is, if I’m not already living in a simulation.)
I know that may sound sad, but VR is getting better all the time, and what’s wrong with wanting to hike through Daisy’s Shaw’s “Solitude” world?
Mostly I didn’t miss my headset while I was out in the wild, but being reunited with my favorite gadget was nice.
Virtual offices will allow us to interact, face to face, in person (so to speak) with our work colleagues regardless of where our organic bodies dwell. You can already spend time in a spacious VR house and watch TV in your home theater, with your spouse (or their avatar) by your side. Before too long, technology will make VR indistinguishable from actual-reality (only much better!), with perfect-fidelity avatars and devices that can replicate smell and touch (and sex), and machines in which your body will stand, sit and lie, creating the illusion that you are walking and otherwise existing in a real physical space within your virtual world.
Where will you choose to reside? There is a company of developers working on a prototype. In the Infiniverse section of the Multiverse app, you can pick the neighborhood in which you wish to live (you can even create your own neighborhood), buy and sell apartments in the various high-rises, invite your friends over to your apartment and even open a business in the district of your choice.
A cityscape in the Infiniverse
Eugene Arencibia, who founded the Mental Health District in the Infiniverse, and its store, Healthy Mental Me, raves about the growing Infiniverse community.
“At first I found that it was cool,” says Arencibia, “being able to freely roam about the city, then to be able to purchase an apartment. Along the way I met some real good people, they were all very helpful, kind and great to talk to that soon they became friends. Building the Mental Health District we really made an impact where people can come and share their stories, and those people became friends. The community has grown, we had a couple of events that really went well and a great turnout.”
The centerpiece of the Multiverse community is the Planetarium, a terrific science museum that we’ve written about before, but there is also a recreation of Rome’s Coliseum, a business park, maze games and local art museums.
An exhibit on mythical beasts, in an Infiniverse art museum
While some early subscribers have complained about a lack of consistent nightlife and other entertainment, the pace of activity is picking up, and fans praise both the neighborliness of the community and the potential for future growth. A cool experiment worth watching, and visiting.
Saturday, April 30, 2022 from 9:00 PM to 10:00 PM (EST), AltspaceVR, free
The “Hide and Seek” events sponsored by VR Forward have become some of the more popular events in Altspace, and it’s not hard to see why. VR Forward (run by a team of ten, including Oswin, Arabella, MoiraRose, Brenton, Honey Jinsang, MoonHunter, Nicole, TrippyHippie, AngelHeart and Jano Vocalman) chooses dynamic, generally prefabricated worlds that are perfect for your favorite childhood game, and sets you loose.
Hide and Seek in a Science Fiction World
They’ve located prior Hide and Seek events in a science fiction city and an expansive amusement park (where the rides really worked), and this Saturday’s Fantasy Village game promises a great evening of childlike fun.
Fantasy VillageHide and Seek in an Amusement Park
The founding VR Forward members all met at AltspaceVR events.
“After months of running into each other in the same hang out spots, dance clubs, beautiful virtual beaches,” MoiraRose says, and musing to each other, “‘oh I wish someone would do xyz,’ we realized that between us we had some pretty capable skills. So for just over a year now we have been VR Forward.”
VR Forward also sponsors Crime Time, a true crime talk show, King of Comedy, a comedy game show show, Let’s Play it By Ear, a “name that tune”-style game show, among other regular events. They’ve organized full concerts, a Carnival of Curiosities, Yule Ball and St. Patrick’s Day bash. What really made their name was a prom that they sponsored in 2021, which garnered almost 1200 joins, and which recreated your high school prom down to the most specific detail, such as streamers, French art from the Louvre, palm trees, disco balls, a photo booth, and line dances, as well as a vote for Prom King and Queen.
And they’re doing it again in 2022! This year’s prom promises an undersea theme.
To see how to get VR dramatizations wrong, wander over to It: Float; while the 360-degree 3D effects are great in this Stephen King inspired short VR film, all you can do is look around. If you walk forward, the scene bends and moves.
By contrast, the best VR effects are immersive. You are there, and you can literally walk into the movie. How you watch is up to you.
The technical state-of-the-art for this kind of thing remains Gianpaolo Gonzalez’s NightMara, a Looney-Toon of a horror comic, which allows the VR viewer to wander through cartoon landscapes at their own whim.
The serialized fantasy drama, Lustration, has effects come close to those of NightMara, and the mood and story are immensely suspenseful and satisfying.
Lustration, written and directed by Ryan Griffen, from his graphic novel, is a realistically drawn animation, in a noirish style that reflects the source material’s art by James Brouwer. It tells the story of the “In-Between,” a world between life and death; two agents of the hereafter, Bardolph and Gallus, who face a reckoning; two cops investigating the murder of a conspiracy theorist; and the elusive ways that their worlds are set to collide.
Bardolph and Gallus
You can sit and watch the story unfold from the comfort of your armchair, like good old-fashioned TV; you can wander around the VR “set,” if your physical space is big enough; you can toggle between several different camera angles within the app; or, most intriguingly, you can even flip a switch to watch the same scene unfold in the world of the living or from the viewpoint of the ghosts.
Officer Pine encounters a ghost
An eerie, immersive and chilling experience, which rewards repeated viewings.
We’re all animals, and as such we should be compassionate towards our fellow creatures. Animals feel pain, love and happiness just as we do, yet they are often treated inhumanely. There are many ways that we can be more compassionate towards animals, both big and small. In this article, we will discuss some of the things that you can do to make a difference in the lives of animals everywhere!
Kalyee SrithnamKalyee Srithnam
— Spay or neuter your pets to help reduce the number of animals who are euthanized each year due to overpopulation.
— Adopt an animal from a shelter or rescue organization instead of buying one from a breeder or pet store.
— Don’t support businesses that use animals for entertainment, such as circuses. When I was younger, I used to go to the circus all the time to see the elephants and tigers. But now that I know how those animals are treated, I would never support that industry again.
— Educate yourself about animal welfare issues and share what you’ve learned with others.
— Be a responsible pet owner. Provide your animal with a home, food, shelter, love and care.
— Volunteer your time or donate money to an organization that works to improve the lives of animals.
I LOVE animals. I wish all animals would be free. The happiest animal is a FREE animal. They should all be free to roam and not have to be in a cage or on a leash. They should all have food and water and medical care. We need to do better for our animal friends. Each and every one of us can make a difference in the lives of animals. By being more compassionate towards them, we can create a better world for all creatures to live in!
Until next time,
Xoxo
Kalyee
^^^
Kalyee Srithnam is a 24-year-old writer, columnist, sometime-model and erudite chocolate fiend, who loves unicorns and writing content that helps people feel seen. Her column appears each Monday and Thursday.Follow her on Twitter.
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.
The big idea
Managers may mistreat employees who perform poorly because they assume it results from a lack of diligence rather than other factors, according to research we published in September 2021.
Surveys show that about 1 in 7 U.S. workers feel that their manager engages in hostile behaviors toward them. Abusive supervision may range from relatively mild behaviors such as lying or not giving credit for work to more severe actions, such as insults or ridicule.
While past researchhas suggested that it’s the poor performance of workers provoking managers’ abusive reactions, we wanted to examine whether the faulty perception of the supervisor deserves at least some of the blame.
So we conducted two studies, drawing on research showing that people are prone to perceptual errors when judging negative events. One of these is the fundamental attribution error, a tendency to overattribute negative outcomes to others’ personalities rather than other explanations.
In the first study, we recruited 189 pairs of employees and supervisors from a variety of industries. We asked supervisors to rate their employees’ job performance as well as their conscientiousness or diligence – that is, how organized, industrious and careful they are. We then asked employees to rate themselves on the same measures.
Finally, we asked employees to rate how abusive their supervisors were toward them – such as by ridiculing them in front of others – within the previous month.
We found that managers assessed lower-performing employees as less diligent than the workers rated themselves. Research shows self-ratings of personality traits like diligence are generally more accurate than external ratings. This suggests supervisors believed poor-performing employees were less diligent than they actually were. In addition, these employees perceived higher levels of abuse than others did.
This study didn’t include independent measures of the employees’ diligence or their managers’ abuse. So in our second one we wanted to determine if the managers still blamed a lack of diligence for an incident involving poor performance even when the supervisor knew that the employee wasn’t the primary cause.
We recruited 443 supervisors via an online portal to complete two surveys. In the first, we asked them to think of one of their employees whose first name began with a randomly generated letter and rate their degree of conscientiousness. We used random letters to avoid bias.
One week later, we contacted the same supervisors to complete the second survey, presenting each with an imagined incident in which the employee from the earlier survey performed poorly on a work project. We then randomly assigned them to various scenarios indicating what was responsible for the poor outcome, such as the employee, a software malfunction or both. We asked them what share of the blame they put on the software versus the employee.
We found that when supervisors were told that the employee’s lack of effort and the malfunction were equally responsible for the poor outcome, they still blamed the employee most. When asked to provide feedback, managers who blamed employees were more objectively abusive, such as by using expressions of anger or threats.
Suggesting abusive management behaviors are justified or that a worker may deserve the treatment is problematic because it puts the onus for correcting these harmful actions on the targets of abuse rather than the perpetrators. Our research suggests it may be perceptual errors on the part of managers that deserve more blame.
What’s next
We would like to explore how people and employers can reduce instances of abusive supervision. And we’d like to look into what other factors besides perceptual biases might be responsible.
^^^
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The state is generating love. They are making it too easy to love. Love is seductive, it is good to love, but you have to learn about it, you have to be careful. Are there too many people getting hurt?
The government cannot control love, they can only facilitate it and make sure that it is as pure as possible. They are the shepherds of love, making sure that it does not get corrupted. But even the shepherds can be corrupted. And when they are, people get hurt.
Kalyee Srithnam
Love is a powerful thing. It should not be taken lightly. Love can make or break a person. It is the most important emotion that a person can experience.
Love is something that needs to be nurtured. The government understands this, and that is why they put so much effort into making sure that love is pure. They want people to be able to love freely, without any ulterior motives.
The government cannot control love, but they can certainly help it along. By ensuring that love is pure, they are helping us to experience the best possible version of it. And that is something that we should, theoretically, all be grateful for.
I have had powerful experiences in my own life, as a young woman. For example, I remember the first time I fell in love. It was a very intense and beautiful feeling. But it didn’t last, because we were too young and immature to understand what love really meant.
Now that I am older, I am troubled by the way the government tries to control us, by making it too easy to fall in love. Here is why this is a problem: love is a very personal experience, and it should be up to each individual to decide who they want to love, and how. The government should not be able to dictate these things for us.
I think that the government’s interference in our love lives can actually have negative consequences. For example, it can lead to unhappy marriages, or relationships that are not based on love, but on convenience. For example, if the government makes it too easy for us to get married, we might marry someone because it is convenient, rather than because we are truly in love with them.
Here is a very specific example of something the government does that worries me: In the United States, if you are married and your spouse dies, you automatically become the legal guardian of their children. This means that if you are in a relationship with someone who has kids, and they die, you would automatically become the legal guardian of those kids, whether or not you wanted to be. That seems like a lot of responsibility to put on someone who might not be ready for it, or who might not even like children.
Here is another way the government interferes with whom we love: It can be really hard to get a visa if your partner is not from the same country as you. This means that, even if you are in a long-term, committed relationship with someone who is not from your home country, you might not be able to move to their country or they might not be able to move to yours. What if you are in a relationship with someone who is not allowed to be in your country? For example, what if you are an American and your partner is from Iran? The US government might not let them into the country. This can cause a lot of problems for couples who are forced to live apart or who have to travel back and forth
Another problem with the government’s control over our love lives has implications specifically for young people: the legal age of marriage. The government decides how old you have to be before you can legally get married. In some places, like Iran, the age is as young as nine! Nine! That’s way too young for someone to be making a lifelong commitment. Many people think that the government should not control our love lives at all. For example, here in the United States, the government doesn’t regulate marriage at all. Some people say that this is a good thing, because it leaves the decision up to the couple themselves. Others say that it’s bad, because there’s no guarantee that two young people are ready for marriage just because they say they are.
I am not dispassionate about this. Let me tell you something that happened to me, which is very personal: When I was 20 years old, I got married. It was not a happy marriage, and after just six months, my husband and I decided to get divorced. We both agreed that it wasn’t working out, and so we went our separate ways. Now, some people might say that we were too young to get married in the first place. But I say that the government “generated” our love, because of one specific government action. You see, in order to get married, we had to go through the government. We had to get a marriage license from the state. And that’s when it hit me:
The government was telling us that our love was legitimate. That it was real. And so we believed them. Does the government really have any right to legitimize someone’s love? I don’t think so. Who are they to say what is and isn’t love?
I believe that the government should stay out of our love lives, and let us make our own choices about who we want to love. We are the best judges of our own happiness.
That’s my opinion. What do you think? Let me know in the comments below! Thanks for reading. 🙂
Xoxo,
Kalyee
^^^
Kalyee Srithnam is a 24-year-old writer, columnist, sometime-model and erudite chocolate fiend, who loves unicorns and writing content that helps people feel seen. Her column appears each Monday and Thursday.Follow her on Twitter.
Cover image: Pexels. Image of Kalyee, courtesy of the author.
Nominated for Academy Awards for best picture, best director and best original screenplay, “Licorice Pizza” is also garnering attention – and raising eyebrows – for the relationship at the center of the film.
Set in 1970s California, it tells the story of 15-year-old Gary, who falls for a 25-year-old woman named Alana. As they work together on Gary’s crackpot business ventures, the pair grow closer, and the film ends with a kiss between the two.
Yet age-discordant relationships are quite common. Somewhere between 36% and 41% of sexually active adolescent girls report having been sexually involved with a male partner three or more years older than them. About 5% of men report that they had a romantic relationship with a woman significantly older than them while they were adolescents.
How do these relationships affect the teens who are in them? And are they always bad?
These were the questions my co-authors and I set out to answer in a series of studies on adolescents in relationships with people significantly older than them.
A host of negative outcomes for girls
There has been quite a bit of research over the years on how these types of relationships affect girls.
We wondered if these negative outcomes might simply be a function of the types of girls who enter into them – for instance, girls who are more sexually active or more willing to engage in other risky behaviors. However, we found that there were no characteristics that distinguished girls who entered into relationships with significantly older men from girls who didn’t.
Only a handful of studies have asked girls themselves how they feel about these relationships. While most people tend to see these relationships as a form of sexual abuse or predation, most of the girls in the relationships don’t see them that way. In one study of teenage mothers, most of them described their relationships as consensual and not exploitative. Yet after the relationships ended, they were more likely to paint the relationships in a negative light.
In research I’ve conducted that hasn’t been published yet, I found older adolescents typically also don’t describe these relationships in negative terms. However, you could argue that these assessments can’t be taken at face value, since many of the girls – either because of emotional immaturity or a desire to protect their romantic partner – might not want to admit that the relationships are harmful. Others may not realize until later in life that the relationships weren’t healthy.
What about the boys?
Research also indicates some negative outcomes for boys in relationships with older women.
For instance, we found that while in these relationships, boys are less likely to use contraception, more likely to get a sexually transmitted infection, more likely to have sex and more likely to get a partner pregnant. Boys in these relationships were also more likely to smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol and exhibit anxiety.
Cultural attitudes toward these relationships likely affect how adolescents respond to them.
The fact that these relationships are criminal – and that most Americans view them negatively – creates the false idea that all adolescents involved in such relationships will experience them as abusive, even though most do not.
The gender of who’s older and who’s younger also influences cultural attitudes.
When a relationship occurs between an adolescent boy and an adult woman – like the kind in “Licorice Pizza” – it’s seen as a form of sexual exploration rather than sexual exploitation. These types of relationships are given a certain amount of legitimacy that relationships between adolescent girls and adult men don’t receive.
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Because society defines relationships with adolescent girls and adult men as abusive, perhaps adolescent girls are better able to define those relationships that way themselves. And when society defines the inverse as a form of sexual exploration rather than exploitation, it may make it harder for boys to see them as a form of abuse.
So while there are many negative outcomes associated with these relationships for both adolescent girls and boys, how society frames these relationships may affect how they’re experienced. Historically and in other cultures, these types of relationships have been fairly common and aren’t seen as deviant.
At the same time, I understand the uneasiness felt by some viewers of “Licorice Pizza.” On-screen courtships like the one between Gary and Alana may normalize – or even romanticize – relationships between teenagers and adults. And that may make it harder for teenagers to realize when they’re being exploited.
