35That the public codification of the category romance novel’s materiality revolves around a generic interpretation is no surprise given the commercial character of popular fiction. As scholars such as John Cawelti and Ken Gelder have argued, the field of popular fiction is much more preoccupied with the notion of genre than that of literary fiction :
I think it’s fair to say that going into a major contract (other than marriage) with someone, such as buying property or a car, is a sign that things are pretty serious between you and your boo. The reason why contracts are such a big deal is that they’re generally much harder to get out of than they are to get into, so most people take care when signing on the dotted line and expect to be committed for a long time.
A typical romance story was told in the first person, allegedly from a true account confided to a trusted comic book professional. They generally followed a predictable dramatic arc, with a fairly wide range of crises — unrequited love, class barriers, jealousy, career conflicts, haunted pasts, etc. — inevitably resolved with a monogamous happily-ever-after ending. “Well, darling, suddenly I don’t love you anymore! I can’t explain it — but I just don’t!” announces Tony at the outset of “Changes of Heart,” the lead story from the April 1965 issue of Young Romance (the longest-running title in the romance pantheon). He and Brenda had been so right for each other. Then — boom! The thrill is gone! Brenda doesn’t know how she’ll carry on. She dates, but can’t get Tony out of her head. One night the doorbell rings — “It’s Tony!” she thinks. But it isn’t Tony, it’s Tony’s old friend Bill Oliver. Tony’s blown town with no forwarding address, and Bill thought she might know where to find him. Brenda breaks down sobbing, spilling the whole story. Bill listens sympathetically, then admits that he, too, was recently dumped. They start hanging out, and suddenly realize they’ve fallen for each other. “There was no need for words — our love was strong because it had been born out of pain.”
The romance comics craze caught on slowly at DC . . . . When DC finally attempted a full-fledged love title, editor in chief Irwin Donnenfeld made the unprecedented decision to hire a woman as editor. “The romance magazines really appealed to young girls,” he says, “so I felt a woman would have a better handle on what a young girl would like, better than a guy like Bon Kanigher, who was doing war books.”
Which is exactly how I’ve felt lately. I know my life is full of good things—I have wonderful friends, wonderful parents, and I love what I do. But, as someone who tends to overthink things, I’ve been feeling a little let down about some things in my life that aren’t working out as well as I’d hoped—like a recent breakup, uncertainty about my career path, and not exactly loving where I live.
A team of psychologists recently studied brain scans of volunteers who wrote about an emotional experience for 20 minutes a day for four sessions. They compared the scans to those of volunteers who wrote down a neutral experience for the same amount of time. The brain scans of the first group showed neural activity in a part of the brain responsible for dampening strong emotional feelings, suggesting that the act of recording their experience calmed them. This same activity was absent in the volunteers who recorded a neutral experience.
In this age of media mayhem, it’s no surprise that one of the first signs of commitment tends to be a public announcement on some form of social media. You’ve seen them: the infamous couple’s selfie, the heartfelt note for all to see, and the hashtags like “me and my baby.” These public displays are usually a pretty good sign that things are going well and that you’re both comfortable enough to broadcast your affection to the world. Such public displays can only mean “we’re committed and we want everyone to know.”
One day last summer, I missed the bus to the train station, and when I asked a cyclist for directions, he offered to carry me to the station. How nice! How many examples of happy things in your life can you list, that you did or someone did for you? Take ten minutes: the first five to think of something nice to do, and the last five to do it. Life has nothing to offer if not optimism, and if you honestly think about it, you realize there are a lot of happy things people do for each other. You don't need to be optimistic about life, it is better to realize that life is optimistic, whether you are or not.
First off, if you’re looking for ways to be happy, you’re not alone. Take Tony. He came up with the concepts behind 5 to Thrive after he’d been kicked out of his house by his angry mother on Christmas Eve. He was still in high school, had no money and going home was no longer an option. An action plan was born, one that Tony has used in his own life – a plan that you, too, can use to achieve a happier life.
a week to build up to a shared chuckle about traffic, and even that may stir up bad feelings that are curiously strong. But you will continue making neutral contact—neither venting anger nor rushing to please. In forty-five days, you will have built a new shared foundation upon which you both feel happier and better about. You may always need to limit your trust in this person, but you will be able to relax in his presence the way gazelles relax in a world full of lions.
Isn’t that beautiful? When it comes to God, you don’t have to pick whether you want committed love or compassionate love. He encircles you, surrounds you. You are swimming in and exalted by his committed, compassionate love. He doesn’t just love you legally, which is true, right? Jesus died for your sins, so God loves you and he won’t hold you accountable for a sin that his Son died for. Legally, he loves you in that way. But it is more than that! His heart is moved with compassion for you.
34The stereotype-driven character of the category romance’s materiality ensures that the public is likely to follow the producers’ primary suggestion and interpret the book in generic terms as a popular romance novel. This interpretation is achieved via the repetitive material invocation of numerous widespread stereotypes that surround the genre in our culture. Although this strategy reinforces and perpetuates a very clichéd cultural image of the genre, one of its major interpretative benefits is that such stereotypes can be interpreted – decoded – by a huge and diversified audience. This public intelligibility of its material code is an important commercial consideration for a book that circulates in a wide variety of cultural and commercial spaces frequented by a wide variety of consumers.
When I meet Vuong for lunch at a hip LA diner near Beverly Hills, it's clear he's not kidding. As soon as we sit down, he whips out his laptop to show off its 12-hour battery. He tells me about the Grid. "It's just like bioinformatics, where you're searching for a sequence of code in a pool of DNA," he explains. "But the DNA is all the Web pages in the world."
Vuong is the author of an underground Internet classic, The Soulmate Manifesto, a cost-benefit analysis of romance that proposes "a mathematical model that could predict and explain all human behavior pertaining to love." Lately, he's been all over the Net with his theories about using statistical analysis to find a date. A few months ago, he launched an online dating service, SocialGrid, which he promised would "change the world." Nobody was sure if he was kidding or serious.
The study examined a group of city bus drivers over a period of two weeks. They found that employees who put on a fake smile for the job were in a worse mood by the end of the day. But drivers who genuinely smiled as a result of positive thoughts actually reported being in a better mood by the end of the day. So when you smile, make sure to mean it!
Indeed, Mai was from Vietnam, but I realized later she would never have called herself Vietnamese. She was Hmong—a member of a small, proud, isolated ethnic minority (what anthropologists call “an original people”) who inhabit the highest mountain peaks of Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, and China. Kurdish-like, the Hmong have never really belonged to any of the countries in which they live. They remain some of the world’s most spectacularly independent people—nomads, storytellers, warriors, natural-born anticonformists, and a terrible bane to any nation that has ever tried to control them.
Another important chemical is Norepinephrine, this is the chemical that makes you feel hot and have butterflies in your tummy when the person you want looks at you. It’s a stress hormone, it also causes an awkward feeling and cause them to have sweaty palms as well. Also a dry mouth and for someone to be nervous and mess up their words when talking to the person you like. This is the hormone that has people constantly smiling after their first kiss, or when they are together and they can’t fight the feeling of happiness. Last important chemical is MHC is a group of genes that control the molecules that are on the surface. MHC levels come out when sweating and through body odor and also through saliva.
The good news from the study is, as Joshanloo points out, you can fix people’s pessimistic approaches about being and staying happy. In the author’s words, “helping individuals to reassess and modify their maladaptive beliefs about happiness could be an important component of positive psychology interventions and therapeutic techniques that aim to improve overall mental well-being."
This book made me look at marriage and commitment in a whole new light. So interesting to learn how less Westernized cultures view the dynamic of marriage and the role it plays in their personal lives and in the community - all while following her personal journey and the thoughts she wrestles with. There are points of merit and value to be taken to heart from these societies, which I loved.
I loved this. I loved programming when I had a great teacher that explained stuff quite well and made me quite excited to try making my own games! But as I progressed through my course my teachers weren't as good and to this day I still have trouble with C++ or object-oriented programming in general. This rekindled that love for typing code and built a bridge between my love for C and my fear of C++. But enough of my story - I want to talk about the game!
You may think equality would make you happy, but the closer you get to it, the more your brain finds tiny differences to dwell on. When mammals gather, each brain seeks the good feeling of being dominant. You can easily see this in others, but when your brain does it, it feels like you’re just seeking what you deserve to feel good. Your inner mammal will constantly find ways that you have been undervalued and this can make you miserable even in a rather good life. You will feel much happier if you relax and enjoy wherever you find yourself.
It might be that you've started dating a guy and you want to know if he's going to want a committed relationship or if he's going to turn into a stringer (i.e. a guy who strings you along for years only to finally break it off), or maybe you've already been strung along for quite a long time and you want to know how to get him to finally make a commitment.
8One of the consequences of this system is that category romances are highly conventional. All category romance novels share the overall conventions of the romance genre,6 but within this encompassing generic framework each category romance also incorporates the conglomerate of conventions that characterize the line in which it is published. As a result, conventionality is pivotal to nearly every aspect of the category romance story and text. These conventions are, moreover, strongly enforced by editors and publishers, who act as gatekeepers guarding the genre and line profiles. Narratives that do not incorporate the various conventions are simply not published in the category romance system.7 The strong conventionality that consequently marks the category romance novel is often interpreted as a characteristic that renders the category romance an aesthetically inferior form, and it is frequently cited as one of the main reasons for the format’s low cultural status.8
Suddenly, Officer Mary bursts onto the scene. Wayde produces a gun and tries to shoot the lady cop, but Fran flies in front of her and takes the shot. As Fran crumples to the ground, two other officers appear and shoot and kill Wayde. Gloria is carted off and Officer Mary is thankful that Fran saved her life. Relieved the ordeal is over, Fran is happy to repent for her sins of lust and passion. As she waits in the ambulance, Fran asks for God's forgiveness.
The philosopher Odo Marquard has noted a correlation in the German language between the word zwei, which means “two,” and the word zweifel, which means “doubt”—suggesting that two of anything brings the automatic possibility of uncertainty to our lives. Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order. In a world of such abundant possibility, many of us simply go limp from indecision. Or we derail our life’s journey again and again, backing up to try the doors we neglected on the first round, desperate to get it right this time. Or we become compulsive comparers—always measuring our lives against some other person’s life, secretly wondering if we should have taken her path instead.
Sometimes a change of location is enough to change your mood. If I wake in the morning and remember all that I didn’t complete the day before, I usually have the wisdom to get out of bed right away. When I lie there, I end up feeling guilty or ashamed or frustrated that I’m not doing or having what I want to do or have. Who would think that feeling stuck could be softened merely by leaving the bed or the desk or the kitchen. Even five or fifteen minutes away from that mentally stifling place can turn discouragement or worry into acceptance, and lead you into a mental or physical detour that can give a more satisfying slant on what felt so heavy minutes before.
The study examined a group of city bus drivers over a period of two weeks. They found that employees who put on a fake smile for the job were in a worse mood by the end of the day. But drivers who genuinely smiled as a result of positive thoughts actually reported being in a better mood by the end of the day. So when you smile, make sure to mean it!
13Genette identifies a crucial difference between the reception and interpretation of the (narrative) text and the (material) paratext of a book. Whereas the former is targeted at a very specific (and ideal) kind of reader, who has the background knowledge necessary to understand and unlock the text, the latter is directed at a far more substantive and heterogeneous group of consumers without a clear-cut profile.
At the core of the Dating Syndicate is a relatively untested open source protocol called FOAF (friend of a friend). This is a flavor of XML file that holds data on a person's attributes: body type, interests, friends, and assorted other personal information. Like all XML file types, FOAF files are platform-independent, although Filkins plans to keep all the Dating Syndicate FOAF files on a secure server to ensure user privacy.
Kirby: Joe and I were working for McFadden Publications at the time. McFadden had comics and in one of the books we did a feature called My Date. It suddenly occurred to me that McFadden was the biggest purveyor of romance in the world and was making millions at it, and we were sitting on top of the same thing, except that there were no romance stories in comics. My Date was a prelude.
The experts had said that what the children need is aggression, not affection — crime, not love. But suddenly the industry converted from blood to kisses. They tooled up the industry for a kind of comic book that hardly existed before, the love-confession type. They began to turn them out quickly and plentifully before their own experts had time to retool for the new production line and write scientific papers proving that what children really needed and wanted — what their psychological development really called for — was after all not murder, but love!
It’s no secret that stress can get you down. Luckily there’s a pretty sweet solution: some between-the-sheets action—and that totally includes solo sessions. Those mind-blowing romps can not only boost your mood, but also slash stress and beat anxiety. Blood pressure reactivity to stress is better for people who recently had penile-vaginal intercourse than for people who had other or no sexual activity. Brody S. Biological Psychology, 2005, Jun.;71(2):0301-0511. Can’t argue with that, right? And in case you need an excuse to get it on more often, consider this: Research suggests that the more sex people have, the happier they tend to be. One study even suggests that having sex once a week may make you feel as stoked as scoring an additional $50,000 in income. Getting lucky even more frequently—four or more times per week—has been linked to making more money—and while extra dough certainly can’t buy happiness, it definitely plays a part in it.
