Talking about grown-up love online

One of the great miracles of my life is the affection between our two kids. As an only child myself, I always feared the prospective challenge of playing referee among multiple offspring. From what I could see of multi-child families, parenting siblings looked not...

Keep your Facebook friends from revealing your secrets

The T-List has a very readable, useful and detailed post, Are Your Facebook Friends Revealing Secrets? The post points out that when you leave a post on a friend’s Facebook wall, their privacy settings (whether they allow their wall posts to be viewed only by...

5 life problems created by Facebook — and 1 solution

The launch of Facebook Places, which lets people “check in” to geographic locations the way they can with FourSquare, Yelp or Gowalla, has provoked a fresh round of reflection on how Facebook affects our lives and relationships. Here are 5 problems that...

What we look like when we plug in

We all see them. Perhaps we are among the guilty ones. We see them at restaurants: Families at dinner; each member plugged into his or her iPad, iPhone or iPod. We see them at work: Colleagues texting and checking statuses on social networking sites while...

How to win friends and influence people…through social media

Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people could be described as the father of relationship marketing and the grandfather of social media. Two recent blog posts revisit the book and highlight its implications for the social media era. J. Eddie...

The single woman’s guide to texting

My husband and I are closing in on our 10th wedding anniversary, and for the most part, that is great news. About 11.5 years out of our past 12 years together have been very very happy, and if you zero out the months that were tense because one of us had a new Macbook...

thirtysomething meets the Internet

When I was sixteen I hated Jane Austen. I read Pride and Prejudice, but couldn’t get beyond the anachronism. Every plot point rested on the impossibility of speaking directly and honestly: Mr. Darcy, if you could simply explain yourself to Miss Bennet, I’m...

4 ways online communication can build relationships

Dear Alex: The Internet can be good for relationships. No, it’s not an affirmation. It’s the argument I’d like to make to Alex Lickerman, who recently wrote a post about the Effect of Technology on Relationships for his blog on Psychology Today....