Relationships

No Place Like Home For The Holidays. Can I get an amen?

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No, the holidays sure do take things up a notch at home. Something about coming home to be merry and bright is exhausting. And when we’re tired, the universal family nonsense ( or as we say in yiddish, mishegas) gets amplified, and suddenly it’s an episode of Days of Our Lives, without the funny window washer guy and the evil twin cheerleaders. Holidays are just the worst for family drama.

Unfortunately, for families with daytime Emmy hopes, weddings can be worse. If you are engaged, and expecting a volatile Week coming up take advantage of it. Pull aside the worst offenders, and point out how their behavior upsets you. Try to use “I” statements, and do not be accusatory. Then add “I really hope not to experience that on my wedding day.” Hopefully something will click, and your wedding will be more silver screen, and less soap opera.

Happy Holidays!

Dinah

Millionaire Matchmaking, Bachelorettes, and those crazy housewives

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Reality TV is a fact of life these days. Finding your Mr. Or Ms. Right on national television? I’m pretty sure that’s official country song wrong place number 23 to look for love. There are, however, things to be learned from the seekers of everlasting happiness and romance in prime time.

Patty Stanger, “The Millionaire Matchmaker” on Bravo, spends an hour a week matching up difficult personalities. The editing surely makes things a) more amusing and b) less frustrating than they appear in the tiny mirror on the side of our guilty-pleasure-mobiles. But Patty does have some valuable things to say (and some funny ones to be sure).

The most important advice I’ve heard her give is “make love a priority and love will come.” the same needs to be true after love has been found. When planning your wedding, love still has to be the priority so that it will know how to stick around.

The Bachelorette is incomprehensible to me, personally. It’s some perverse version of sorority rush with all the catty parts and none of the redeeming sisterhood. If you can learn anything from this one, it’s be careful what you wish for. And for goodness sake, don’t wish to be locked up in a house full of weepy overly made up, emotionally underdeveloped girls.

Last but not least we have the Unsinkable Kim Wozniak, of The Real Housewives of Atlanta. She found her latest football player love at a charity event she was attending to support another housewife’s penchant for dancing badly in public. And now she’s (on the show) about to pop with a new baby boy. Now that’s one way to make love stick around

The reality tv trend has got to hit a wall at some point. Let’s keep the super glam wedding shows and dispense with the drama. Is anybody with me?

Where’s my remote?

-Dinah

December. New Month. Thank Goodness.

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Sometimes what you need is a demarcation.  A boundary. The end of a week, the end of a month, sometimes even just the end of an afternoon, depending on what you’re doing, or who you’re spending it with (Oh, yes Aunt Ida. That’s a lovely teacup! Akron? Really?) You catch my drift.

Here’s the trick. You can invent your own boundary. Sit yourself down, and have a Lifetime Movie Moment.  Talk to yourself in the mirror, or at a picturesque location of your choosing- and decide to stop in the name of love. Cut it off at the pass.. Why have a bad day, when you can keep it to a bad morning?  Make it a bad few days rather than assigning it a whole week.

Picturesque location anyone? (This one happens to be the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens). Photo by Stephen Thomas

This is a super important trick for brides-to-be, because contrary to those soft focus articles in BRIDES magazine, things go wrong.  And you’re gonna have to partition off those times or you’ll feel like Cinderella stood up by a gal who said she was your fairy godmother, but might have been the Avon Lady.  Invitations printing wrong on that fancy new paper? Found out your dress will be late?  Time to start picking out locations for that “She’s Getting Married” Lifetime movie you’re starring in.  Get to it, TV star.  ‘Cause you’ve got work to do.

Welcome to December everyone. Signing off, from my picturesque location where the sun is shining, and there’s some very cheesy music swelling as we fade out.

-Dinah