Dating, Love & Relationships Around The World

Her eyes are wide as they stare into yours. You wrap your arm around her waist and pull her in close. She touches your face and you lean in, tilt your head – to the right, of course – and your lips connect. The rushing sensation leaves you little room to wonder, “Why the hell am I doing this anyway?”

Forget the love and romance. Could it be that we kiss because it helps us sniff out a mate? Are our pheromones “talking” and exchanging biological information?

Of course, the simplest answer is that humans kiss because it just feels good. After all our lips and tongues are packed with nerve endings, which help intensify all those dizzying sensations of being in love when we press our mouths to someone else’s. Experiencing such feelings doesn’t usually make us think too hard about why we kiss – instead, it drives us to find ways to do it more often.

A team of specialists from State University of New York conducted a study to ascertain the perceptions of men and women during the act of kissing. Their observations are that women place more emphasis on kissing than men.

Women use kissing as a method of:

• Judging their potential partner
• Later, to maintain intimacy
• To check the status of a relationship

For men, kissing means increasing the likelihood of sex. Further, the study revealed men are less discriminating regarding whom to kiss. A man becomes less and less likely to kiss his female partner as the relation progresses. But for a woman, kissing is important throughout.

Find Someone To Kiss In Your Town….

Technorati Tags: love, romance, kiss, kissing

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It seems they take surveys for every damn thing.

The US government likes to spend money. Just take a look at their debt and you won’t be surprised that they fund the World Values Survey which is done regularly by a global network of social scientists.

The survey interviewed people worldwide and posed the question “Taking all things together, would you say you are very happy, rather happy, not very happy, not at all happy?” And, “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?”

The results of the survey? The world is getting happier and the happiest country is Denmark, with its democracy, social equality and peaceful atmosphere.

Zimbabwe, torn by political and social strife, is the least happy, while the world’s richest nation, the United States, ranks 16th.

It found increased happiness from 1981 to 2007 in 45 of 52 countries analyzed.

“I strongly suspect that there is a strong correlation between peace and happiness,” said Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, who directed the study.

And, said Ingelhart, there is a strong correlation between happiness and democracy.

Puerto Rico and Colombia also rank highly, along with Northern Ireland, Iceland, Switzerland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Canada and Sweden.

“Though by no means the happiest country in the world, from a global perspective the United States looks pretty good,” Inglehart said. “The country is not only prosperous; it ranks relatively high in gender equality, tolerance of ethnic and social diversity and has high levels of political freedom.”

The survey, first done in 1981, has kept to two simple questions:

“Taking all things together, would you say you are very happy, rather happy, not very happy, not at all happy?” And, “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?”

Writing in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, Ingelhart’s team said they have surveyed 350,000 people.

“Ultimately, the most important determinant of happiness is the extent to which people have free choice in how to live their lives,” Inglehart said.

Technorati Tags: Denmark, Zimbabwe, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Northern Ireland, Iceland, Switzerland, Ireland, Netherlands, Canada, Sweden

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There was a time when Sweden’s liquor stores were few and far between and had the look of hospital pharmacies. They closed by 6 on weekdays and never opened on weekends. Choice was limited and prices high. Not only that bottles were displayed inside glass cases. Customers took numbers–and waited.

These measures were imposed to discourage the consumption of alcohol in a nation with a tradition of drinking to the point of drunkenness and a history of abuse going back to the miseries of 19th-century industrialization, when cheap liquor led to widespread abuse.

But times have changed forSwedish drinkers as was evidenced recently.

A drunken senior (78) appears to have been a little short on cash to pay for the ferry from the Danish town of Helsingor to Helsingborg in Sweden. He didn’t get to the age of 78 by not using his brains so he decided to steal a dinghy and tried to row back to Sweden across the strait of Oresund, a distance of three miles.

He quickly grew tired and, trusting fortune and the currents to see him safely home, took a snooze at the bottom of the boat, where Danish police later found him out at sea, still asleep.

The strait is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. Police said the owner of the dinghy had decided not to press charges.

Technorati Tags: Sweden, Swedish, senior, Danish

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