The recession is doing strange things to people. It’s causing many different types of changes – some positive and some negative. One of the things that seems to be affected greatly is relationships. People are handling dating, marriage and discussions about money differently than they did in the past.

For some people, this has been a good thing. Couples that are facing the recession head-on together may be strengthening their relationship as a result of undergoing these tough times as a team. Unfortunately, that’s not how everyone is handling this situation.

There are quite a few couples out there that find their relationship impacted by the recession in a negative way. They are fighting about money. They are fighting about things unrelated to money because they’re stressed out by their finances. They are letting the recession tear them apart instead of allowing it to bring them together.

At the end of this difficult economic time, we are going to see that the way we dealt with the recession says a lot about who we are and the lives that we lead. Those couples who opt to make use of this time to bring themselves closer could be the ones that end up having positive life-long relationships.

Tags: dating, economy, marriage, money, Personal Finance, recession, Relationships

The topic of weddings and honeymoons seems to keep coming up in my life a lot lately. I have to admit, it’s not a topic that I really understand. I’ve never been someone who was a big fan of ceremonies and I kind of think that the whole hullaballoo that people put themselves through for planning an elaborate wedding is really kind of strange. Nevertheless, it’s something that people do so the topic keeps coming up.

What people seem to be telling me lately is that the wedding is stressful but only as stressful as they’d expected it to be. The honeymoon, on the other hand, is also stressful but the stress seems to surprise them because they expected this vacation part of the new marriage to be a breeze.

That expectation seems silly to me. As someone who has done a fair amount of traveling, I have come to expect that there are often going to be problems on my vacations. Travel just comes with a lot of hassles including delays and illnesses and weather issues and getting lost. Don’t get me wrong - I love to travel – but nothing about it really seems simple to me.

And it definitely doesn’t seem simple when it involves planning and going with another person. There are very few people that I’ve actually enjoyed traveling with because people have such different travel styles. I’m lucky because there are some people really close to me that I travel well with but I certainly don’t travel well with everyone that I’m close to so the idea that travel with someone else will go smoothly isn’t something I’d bank on.

I certainly think that honeymoons should be fun and romantic and enjoyable. I think that about all types of vacations. However, I don’t think that they’re simple things to plan out and make happen so that’s something all of these marriage-planning people may want to take into consideration as they do their planning!

Tags: honeymoon, hubpages, kathryn vercillo, marriage, Travel, trips, vacation, wedding

I recently wrote an article with 20 Tips for Dealing with Difficult People. What the common denominator for almost all of these tips ended up being was that you really need to deal with difficult people by changing yourself rather than them. This is a firm belief that I have for all situations that are making us unhappy. We can rarely change the circumstances around us and can even more rarely change the others within those circumstances but we can always work to change ourselves.

We like to believe that it is the people around us who are causing trouble for our lives. Although the problems that we face do often come to us in the form of conflict with another person, the solutions lie almost entirely within ourselves. How we opt to take in information, react to situations and deal with our own feelings about things is all up to us and that’s something that can entirely alter the situations that we find ourselves in.

For example, your husband goes on a business trip and doesn’t call you when he arrives even though you think that he should. You get angry. And then you get worried. And then you get anxious because you’re wondering where he is and what he’s really doing and why he hasn’t called and who he’s doing things with and … you make yourself crazy and angry. And when he calls, you express this anger and the two of you get into an argument.

In your mind, this entire thing was caused by the fact that your husband didn’t call. In reality, it was caused by your own belief that he should’ve called and your choice about how you reacted to it. Yes, he could’ve been doing god knows what with god knows who or he could’ve been lying in a ditch somewhere but neither of those things would have been altered by your own over-the-top reaction. You can choose to simply not react in this manner and save yourself a lot of chaos in your mind.

This isn’t to say that your husband shouldn’t call if he said he was going to. It’s to say that you can choose healthier options for your own mind and healthier ways of communicating your feelings. You can wait until your husband gets home to discuss how this made you feel and what you wish could be different next time. And you can give him the room to react accordingly. You can choose to be different if you want your relationships to be different.

Tags: change, communication, dating, friendships, how to improve relationships, hubpages, kathryn vercillo, people, Relationships

Everyone says that couples fight most about sex and money. Although there are many reasons for this, I think that a big one is that these are the two core topics that seem to be off limits for discussion in our society. We need to learn how to talk about each of them more openly and less defensively in order to reduce the amount of negativity that we experience surrounding them.

I recently wrote an article with 100 Tips for Talking about Money. The article covers different tips for discussing money with different people at different times. For example, there are tips for talking about money with a romantic partner before you move in together as well as after and there are tips for talking about money with your parents when you still live with them, after you move out and later when it may be time for them to move in with you.

Money impacts all of our relationships. It is a factor in friendships when it comes to how often to eat out, where to go and whether or not you can talk about money together. It’s a factor in proper parenting and the education and independence of our children. It’s a factor at work where salaries can cause controversy. Because it’s such a prevalent part of our lives, we really need to learn how to talk about!

Tags: discuss money, finance, money, money and relationships, money conversation, people and money, Personal Finance, talk about money, talking about money

Something that I was reading earlier today made me start thinking about the cost of weddings. Do you know how much money people are spending to get married these days? Even budget weddings are expensive. Heck, even choosing to elope instead of getting married with a big ceremony can be expensive if you’re not careful about how you do it. So why is it that people spend a small fortune on the ceremony of marriage?

I know the reasons that everyone says that they don’t mind spending money on a wedding. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime-event. It’s an important rite of passage. It’s a great gathering of friends and family that is worth the cost that comes with it. Yada yada yada.

I still don’t get it.

Perhaps this is because I’m just not a person who much likes ceremonies. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve been to some really fun weddings. I have ideas in mind that would surely make any wedding of mine a blast to attend. I just don’t think it’s worth a five-figure number for a single-day event that may or may not turn out like you planned.

Maybe I’m just not romantic enough. Or maybe I’m just not traditional enough. I’m not sure.

What’s your opinion? Are weddings today really worth their cost?

Tags: ceremony, cost of wedding, elope, getting married, hubpages, kathryn vercillo, marriage, wedding

Yesterday I wrote about child prodigies (and specifically the case of Sufiah Yusof, a child prodigy in math who went on to become a prostitute). There are child prodigies in many different walks of life from music to sports. One area of this that I find to be really interesting is the child prodigies of literature.

There have been many different child authors throughout history. In ancient times, many of these were kids who wrote poetry or diaries but then died at a young age and the work was published post-humously in a sort of “what could have been” look at where their literary careers may have gone if they had lived into adulthood.

In modern times, child authors are a bit more complex. These are typically kids who write a book (often with the help of a parent or grandparent) and who then get picked up by a publisher as a result of a parent or guardian’s persistence. The children then get marketed widely and are adored by the public because they’ve written a published book before they’ve reached adulthood.

What do you make of these kids? Are they really literary prodigies or are they simply smart kids who got their fifteen minutes of fame for their writing because their parents wanted them to and the market supported them in that?

I definitely think that these kids should be admired. It’s tough to sit down and write a book at any age. If they’re writing stories instead of playing with their friends and watching TV then they’re exercising their natural sense of artistic expression and I think that’s terrific. But I’m not sure that these kids are really prodigies per se.

Tags: books, child authors, kids who wrote books, published kids, writing

I was a smart enough chick to be a bit of an odd kid. I started talking at around four months and started reading by the age of two and I imagine that it must have been more than a bit strange to look at me carrying on a decently smart conversation with popsicle smeared all over my mouth. I was a smart kid. However, I was no genius or child prodigy.

Child prodigies really interest me. These are kids who are so good at one area of study that they excel on an adult level before the age of 13. These are the kids who compose music when their peers are watching cartoons. These are the kids that can do math at a level I’ll never reach before they can reach the water fountain without a step stool. These are the kids who start college before they start puberty.

I’m particularly interested by female child prodigies. There are a few reasons for this. First of all, there just aren’t that many women listed in lists of female prodigies. Second of all, these women tend to excel in specific areas of life including poetry but not in male-dominated fields like chess or math. And third, those women who do make it into the annals of history as female child prodigies tend to have far more interesting lives than their male counterparts.

One woman that I’ve become interested in as I’ve studied female child prodigies is Sufiah Yusof. This chick was born in 1984 which makes her younger than I am but before I was in my senior year of high school, she had been accepted at Oxford University to study math. A female math child prodigy is an interesting and rare thing indeed.

However, things didn’t go so smoothly for Yusof once she was immersed in college. She became a runaway who gave up her studies in math for jobs in waitressing followed by work in prostitution. She got famous for awhile as the child prodigy who made it as a high-priced hooker and gave several interviews about how much she loved being a prostitute. Apparently, at least according to Wikipedia, she now regrets that time of her life and has returned to school and “respectable work” as a social worker.

I can’t tell you how fascinating I find all of this. And a lot of that fascination stems from the fact that I think it’s tough for smart women to make it in today’s society. Yes, there are many doors open to us that weren’t open to us before. But the social world for women remains different than it is for men. Our sexuality is tied to us no matter how much we’re praised for our smarts.

I can’t even imagine what it would be like to enter college at the age of 13. When I was 13, my precocious intelligence was taking a back seat to an interest in pop music and a concern for how to make it navigate the walls of a tough junior high school. Dealing with entering puberty was tough enough around my peers; I can’t even imagine how it would have been if I’d been amongst college kids.

I think there are a lot of people out there who would judge someone like Sufiah Yusof for the choices that she made. But I wonder, did she really have much choice? Propelled into an adult world before she was emotionally mature enough to handle it, is it really any wonder that this female child prodigy ended up where she did. And for that matter, is where she ended up really so bad in the end? Truly smart people use their smarts to figure themselves out and then to help others and that sounds like exactly what this woman is doing.

Tags: child prodigy, child prodigy prostitute, hub pages, kathryn vercillo, prodigies, prostitution, smart women, sufiah yusof, women, women in society

I read a lot of books about creativity. I read a lot of memoirs by artists and writers. And I know a lot of people who make art their living, their way of life or an important hobby that they would never let go. What all of this intake of information about art has taught me is that most creative people have blocks that they have to deal with when it comes to their creativity. And like most of our issues in life, those blocks were often built during childhood.

Spend any significant amount of time with children and you will see that they are naturally imaginative. It isn’t just in the way that they play – although it’s clear there with their fantasy games and make-believe. It is in the way that they approach life, with the curiosity and wonder that we associate with being a kid. It is in the way that they solve problems and in the way that they negotiate friendships.

Adult artists know that they can learn a lot from kids about all of these things because kids don’t just ‘think outside of the box’. Kids don’t even see the box. Or they see the box but what they see is a potential fort or ship or space for drawing on.

Unfortunately, it happens all too quickly that kids are taught that the box is a box. They are limited by life and education and experience. Their imaginations begin to dwindle. This happens as a part of life. But it also happens directly as a result of the failure of parents and teachers to encourage the ‘not-just-a-box’ thinking that kids naturally have.

I’ve written an article today with 20 tips for encouraging your children’s creativity. I hope that you will read it and add to it because I think that one of the most important things that a parent can do is to encourage kids to continue to be creative. It isn’t about being artistic, although that’s a nice side benefit, but rather about being creative in life so that it always seems that problems have solutions even when they aren’t obvious to them. It’s about celebrating life and the wonder that it holds. These are things we all need more of and things that we shouldn’t take from our kids earlier than life gives it to them.

Tags: arts, creative home, creativity, expression, hubpages, kathryn vercillo, kids, Parenting

I’ve been really lucky in the past few years in that I have made a large number of great new friends. I’m not just talking about the people that I kind of know and see around. I’m talking about good friends who are really there for me.

It wasn’t always this way. I’ve often found it difficult to make new friends as an adult. Since I work from home, figuring out where to meet new people is tough. And since I’m busy, it’s hard to make the time that you need to make in order to really build up friendships.

But I’ve been successful at it lately and I’ve benefitted from that greatly. Here are some tidbits of info on how I’ve managed to make new friends:

• Met people through the Internet. Whether it’s Craigslist or Meetup.com or just via commenting on the blogs of local bloggers, I’ve used the Internet to make that initial connection. It’s just so much easier than approaching someone in a coffee shop, I think.
• Found things I like to do. It helps to have some shared activity when making new friends so I find things that I like to do and then invite along new people that I want to be better friends with.
• Said yes when people invited me to things. The more you go out, the more chance you have of making new friends, right?
• Maintained connections online. I find that sites like Facebook and chat conversations on AIM make it easy to really trade information and get to know someone even when you can’t get together in person all of the time. It’s not a substitute for real face-to-face connecting but it’s definitely a great supplement.
• Shared myself openly. The more open and honest I am about who I am and what’s going on with me, the stronger the connections that I’ve been able to make with others.

What else are people doing to make new friends as adults?

Tags: ehow, friendship, kathryn vercillo, meeting people, Relationships, socializing, society

I wrote an article earlier today over at my Real Words blog all about how I’ve seen a recent shift in the way that my online social networking communication is taking place. In the past, I’ve had two types of connections online. First, there were my friends in real life who I chatted about normal stuff with on sites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. And then there were people who I know only from online who would add me to those sites just to send me links to their online work.

What I’ve noticed recently is that more and more people on these sites are truly interested in starting real conversations. The line between my real life friends and my online friends is starting to blur. People I don’t know are asking me how my day is going and responding to my general status updates. They are inviting me to meet them in the real world or at least expressing an interest in knowing what my real world is like.

At the same time, my real world friendships are getting closer as a result of staying more frequently updated with everyone’s activities online. I know that this revelation isn’t new – many people have experienced this with online social networking. But I still sense an even greater shift in this going on right now, at least in my own life, and I’m excited to see how it develops.

Tags: communication, friendship, kathryn vercillo, online networking, real words, Social Networking, writing