Lovelife | Dominik Mayer – Products, Asia, Productivity

He Couldn’t Remember  

Tyler Wetherall writes in the New York Times about how she helped her ex-boyfriend recover from memory loss:

To break up with someone is to lose the imagined future you would create together, but you would always share the landscape of your collective past. If Sam could not remember, I would be alone in that landscape.

Marry Early  

Viet Tuan for VnExpress International:

Vietnam is urging citizens to marry before 30 and bear children early to maintain an ideal replacement fertility rate. […]

The decision calls for people to marry before they are 30 and bear children early. Women should have their second child before 35, it advises.

The reason being:

Vietnam’s population hit 96.2 million last year, which is third in Southeast Asia and 15th globally, according to the Central General Census and Housing Steering Committee.

The country however reached a turning point in 2015 when it started to become one of the countries with the fastest aging populations in the world, the Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs said in a 2016 report.

'This Is Small Talk Purgatory': What Tinder Taught Me About Love  

CJ Hauser in The Guardian:

But once I gave up on the banterers, my Tinder chats became uniform. The conversations read like a liturgy: where are you from, how do you like our weather, how old is your dog, what are your hobbies, what is your job, oh no an English teacher better watch my grammar winkyfacetongueoutfacenerdyglassesface. The conversations all seemed the same to me: pro forma, predictable, even robotic.

That’s when I realised that what I was doing amounted to a kind of Turing test.

The Bro Code  

Booze, Sex, and the Dark Art of Dealmaking in China

Sliding Into Marriage  

Meg Jay for The New York Times:

Sliding into cohabitation wouldn’t be a problem if sliding out were as easy. But it isn’t. Too often, young adults enter into what they imagine will be low-cost, low-risk living situations only to find themselves unable to get out months, even years, later.

Early Men and Women Were Equal, Say Scientists  

Study shows that modern hunter-gatherer tribes operate on egalitarian basis, suggesting inequality was an aberration that came with the advent of agriculture

21 Women  

The University of Montreal has found that men who had sex with more than 20 women lower their prostate cancer risk.

The Voltron Theory of Casual Dating  

In the absence of one good partner, an actively dating single person will naturally construct a corpus of complementary partners who, if assembled into one giant Voltron partner, would be his or her ideal boyfriend or girlfriend.

Oh, yes.

Why Do We Kiss?

I would never have linked kissing with mouth-to-mouth feeding.

To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This  

Mandy Len Catron:

More than 20 years ago, the psychologist Arthur Aron succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory. Last summer, I applied his technique in my own life, which is how I found myself standing on a bridge at midnight, staring into a man’s eyes for exactly four minutes.

Very interesting.

The Saddest Feeling in the World  

Aditya Yadav:

After a breakup you will never see her dog again and her dog will never know why you stopped visiting.

How I Learned I Was Pro-Choice by Secretly Aborting My Friend’s Baby  

Zaron Burnett III had to make the decision to abort his friend’s baby:

How do you decide something like that for someone else? How do you know what the right thing to do is? What grounds do you use to decide if an abortion is the right call? Morality? Practicality? I had nightmares of babies cussing me out. I had dreams of my friend pushing a stroller and cursing my name. There was no way to be certain. And, in the absence of certainty, my mind offered me lots of ways I might ruin the lives of others.