Heartcrossings

We are spending Thanksgiving weekend with some old friends of DB a few states away from home. These are families that formed around when DB was first married and have had many years to grow bonds between each other. The wives and the children have spend many holidays together. This is the first time they met me and J. We received a warm welcome, everyone did their best to make us feel at home.  J found a bunch of kids to roughhouse with and is happy as a clam. DB is enjoying the time with old friends - their interaction opens windows into his past that I was aware of but had not experienced until now. The ladies have to pause their conversations mid-stream to include me. The men not as much, they are able to find things to chat about that don't require them to have had previous acquaintance with me.  The first evening goes very well. The next morning. I am beginning to grow a little trying to fit comfortably without encroaching upon people I have known less than ten hours....

I used to be the girl that scoffed at Mills & Boon romances, enjoyed the modern twist on fairy tales - in which Snow White pursues an aggressive feminist agenda among other things egregious. I used to also believe that a woman's sense of self is worth a lot more than anything a man can give her - and to that end it was worth fighting for to the bitter end. In my first marriage, I found myself turning dangerously enamored of the myth of the "perfect" union. We had to read each others' minds and anticipate needs that were unspoken. That union was the fatal mix of unrelentingly perfect and dangerously flawed. My sense of self took a beating that required the better part of a decade to recover.  At the time of meeting DB, the facade had come together quite nicely. I looked (and even felt) together and confident - qualities that DB found very attractive. I had no reason to know that the facade was merely a veneer. Nothing and nobody had quite tested its resilience.  Th...

Having mucked around in data for the longest time in my career, I am sucker for trends - the quirkier is the better. It's fun to tease out odd correlations between data sets even it has no practical value. For exactly that reason Christian Rudder's OkTrends makes for fascinating reading. Anyone who has sought a match online, is quite quickly able to identify some basic "types". Over time, they are able to tag a profile to a type with reasonable accuracy. Rudder with his access to the mother lode of online dating data is able a whole lot more than tag and classify people based on their profiles. "We've compiled our observations and statistics from hundreds of millions of OkCupid user interactions, all to explore the data side of the online dating world." The The " data side of the dating world - is fascinating to say the least.