Sarah Wilson

some happy relationship maths (and proof every woman needs a plumber)

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A couple of new UK studies out today have boiled down relationship success to a few simple stats. Totally fascinating, albeit overly generalised, stuff! (Anyone love relationship generalisations as much as me?)

a woman to aspire to !
a woman to aspire to !

The spurious figures:

* Women should be 27 per cent more intelligent: Of the 1,074 couples looked at aged between 19 and 75, the report concluded that the wife should be 27 per cent more intelligent than her husband, hold a degree while he should not.

Hello, the “I just want to marry a plumber” call of just about every smart woman I know has backing! I’m not sure what the evolutionary rationale is to this factoid. And I don’t know whether 40 years ago it was the same. I suspect not.

Perhaps it’s a new quirk in adaptive relating – succesful relationships these days require a lot of smart juggling and emotional awareness. It’s more complex than 40 years ago to run a relationship. Women tend to steer relationships more than men. So smart, emotionally aware women make better relationship partners.

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I eat: 10-day eat fit food detox

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baramundismall09A few months back I tried out a juice detox. It worked lovely wonders.  So I decided to give Eat Fit Food’s detox a try. Theirs runs for 10 days, all the food is delivered to your door in the wee hours of the morning, it includes 3 meals plus 2 x snacks and juice and you really wouldn’t know that you’re detoxing because the food is exciting. Not drab. Every day is different. The cost? It works out as $56 a day. That’s for EVERYTHING you’ll eat in an entire day.

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how to: focus in batches

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I love this anecdote about how when things are tough and resources are limited, you can focus better. Because you have to. I’ve written about this before in Sunday Life.spaceball how to: focus in batchesspaceball how to: focus in batches3016316592 d75a13f568 how to: focus in batches

Ray Bradbury was a freelance writer who was trying to support his family. However, he was working at home with his cute little children. This proved to be incredibly distracting, so he had to find somewhere else to write. So, he headed over to UCLA’s Lawrence Clark Powell Library.

In the basement of the library there was a number of typewriters that gave 30 minutes of writing time for a dime.

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are you a tapper? a checker? a counter?

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Sunday’s post on my being neurotic has had a funny impact. Everyone’s been approaching me confessing their quirks. Not in an ashamed way, but in a way that comes with a cute smile that says, “we’re all such funny creatures, aren’t we…”.

Image via Pinterest
Image via Pinterest

I’ve even had a talent scout for Jerry Seinfeld’s The Marriage Ref wanting to get in touch with people who have quirks who’d be happy to appear on the show. This is what she wrote: “I’m really not looking for serious neuroses, but more quirky things that people do, along with their partner’s response or light grievance with it.”

In the spirit of our all being in this together, below are some more neuroses, names deleted. What are yours? You a tapper? A checker? A number counter? Share….!

Derek Reilly, at surfing mag Stab, sent me this from a column he’s just written for the mag (uncanny!):

  • When boarding an aircraft I must walk to the final porthole on the air-bridge, sight the fuselage, identify the model of aircraft (and its potential age) or else it will crash. The responsibility of two hundred lives means that, even if I have a death wish, which I do occasionally, I still have to look – or risk having the blood of innocents on my hands.
  • When I walk, I tap the back of my legs with my feet. The faster I walk, the faster I tap. Running is a physical impossibility for me.
  • When I look in the mirror, the first third of my tongue comes out of my mouth, dog-like. I didn’t know even know I did this until Wheels, the other Stab guy, triumphantly announced it to a group of people in an elevator (it had a mirror and I was doing it). A humiliating triumph for a man whom I champion and behold as a great friend.

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Sunday life: yes, I’m neurotic. Phew, i’m glad that’s out

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This week… I am neurotic

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Now, you might ask, how can indulging in a private personality schism make life better. I’m kind of asking myself the same, but let’s see how this goes.

For starters, openly acknowledging something in yourself that others have long suspected can make life easier for everyone involved. But let’s take this one step further. Acknowledging and celebrating something that we all have lurking beneath the surface – in one guise or another – but that we rarely talk about, can take life to a whole new level of sweetness. Movies and books about oddball characters do this. I’m thinking Juno and American Beauty. We recognise a part of ourselves in the kooky characters, and it makes us smile in belongingness.  It just does.

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guest post: how to heal auto-immune disease, by someone who’s been there (Clare Bowditch!) #5

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I quite love Clare Bowditch. That’s her up above. The admiration kicked off when she emailed me a while back after reading something I’d written and she suggested we meet for tea when I was in Melbourne next cos we’d have stacks in common. I love contacting people I’d like to meet and suggesting tea. … Read more

how giving up booze has helped us all become nicer people!

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In case you missed it, I gave up alcohol for February, as ambassador for Febfast.

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The whole concept totally took off, which makes me so happy and impressed with human nature in general. Almost everyone I know took part. Bloody incredible. And the shift in everyone’s behaviour is astonishing. There’s a calmness. An OKness about town.

Gossip terror Ros Reines was inspired to comment in Spectator that the whole of Sydney seems to be on the wagon this month.

A FebFast update: 7200 people took part (I’d double that figure – a lot of people didn’t register) and it’s raised over $500K. Team Sarah Wilson coughed up more than $8K.

Last weekend my dear friend, crime author and highly impressive human being (she knocks my socks off) Tara Moss held a literary salon in her house up in the mountains where most of the room wasn’t drinking. We drank pomegranate juice in big wine balloons instead.

A lot of us have been going to the movies. And doing the Bondi-Bronte walk. And having tea in our gardens.

How’ve you been going? What tricks have worked for you? Below some great feedback from people around Australia. It made me teary….

When I first read about FebFast in Sarah Wilson’s column I giggled with some girlfriends that a whole month without alcohol would ruin me  – well it hasn’t, only two of us signed up but the support and interest from friends has been great. Next year I will really push for their participation and sponsorship, the main benefit for me so far has been such a wonderful improvement in overall health, no headachy mornings, less mood swings, lighter on the scales and better bladder control! Thanks FebFast for giving me a great way to detox after the festive season. I will definetely be participating next year and really monitoring my intake of alcholic beverages from now on. I will also be buying shares in whichever company produces soda, mineral and tonic H2O!

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sunday life: so, defriending is word of the year, but does it make life read better?

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So on Thursday I was stood up by a friend. Her excuse was as flimsy as a philanderer’s promise and it was her third last-minute no-show. Sitting at the restaurant fuming into a ramekin of bar olives I wondered if it wasn’t time to defriend.

3367181479 47624367a2 sunday life: so, defriending is word of the year, but does it make life read better?

It’s a concept many of you relate to. I know this because  “unfriending” has just been deemed Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary, and presumably because more than just a few of us are talking about dumping redundant friends. (Oxford debated whether to go with “unfriend” or the social media-speak version “defriend”; proper English won out.) But my question, as always, is whether a decluttering of your black book – like you might a drawer of kitchen appliance warranties – makes life better. Come take a walk with me on this one.

  • Truth is, I have too many friends. Again, you get what I mean. Our circles have expanded, we’re stupidly bogged down in life admin and many of us have become friend whores, accumulating hundreds (thousands?) of friends on Twitter and Facebook. Exerts call these “weak ties”. We had no idea this would happen when we signed up. But that’s what technology does – it moves faster than us. Now, we’re swamped with weak ties.

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do an arm dance on a Friday

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For reasons I’m not entirely sure about, I was transfixed by this – a Youtube post of Gwyneth Paltrow’s personal trainer Tracey Anderson demo’ing her arm workout in the mirror. She made it especially for Gwytneth and on her site Goop GP says she does it when she’s traveling. It’s one of my favourite things … Read more