Here are the five relationship trends to look for in 2013.
1. Single parents next Internet dating trend.
If 2012 was the year for the silver-haired to flock to online dating, I predict 2013 will be the year for single parents to meet and greet online.
With 14 million time-strapped single mothers raising one in four American kids, and plenty more single dads doing the same thing, the Internet is a convenient, economical and efficient way to shop for a new mate.
Look for more offline events hosted by dating sites that have a bring-the-kids, “G” rating.
2. Living together will lose its appeal.
As more and more people realize cohabitating doesn’t prevent divorce, and is more likely to prevent marriage, we will see those who are looking to settle down in a somewhat traditional marriage will be less likely to move in together.
The trend toward living together was supposed to buffer the heartache that comes from a post-marital breakup, but hundreds of thousands have learned that breaking up from a nonmarital union is just as prickly.
Pet and flat screen custody battles still ensue.
3. Stay-over relationships will increase.
The newest relationship trend, the stay-over relationship will continue to increase.
In a stay-over relationship, lovers maintain two homes, comingle only a few personal items and sleep over at each other’s houses as schedules permit.
This kind of relationship is particularly suited to single parents who arrange their love lives around child custody schedules and older adults who want to maintain a grandparent homestead for extended family.
“Plenty of thinking and feeling men will begin to
look at sexually aggressive women as junk food.”
4. Slow love will increase in popularity.
is a cultural response to a high-speed technological life that erodes secure human attachments.
Coined by Dr. Wendy Walsh, slow love is a response to increased sexual opportunity, addictive dating and a sexualized media that has people sustaining themselves on junk food relationships.
The objective of slow love is to create sustainable intimate relationships with high emotional nutrition, with the hallmarks being:
1. Purging of low-criteria relationships that offer sex without commitment or expressions of love.
2. Adoption of healthy sexual boundaries and the learned communication skills needed to slow down the pace of a budding romantic relationship.
3. Delaying the onset of sexual activity with a new partner until a healthy degree of emotional intimacy is established.
4. Reduction in the use of digital technology in romantic courtship and supplementing telephone conversations and face-to-face nonsexual interactions.
5. Creating a positive “passion turning point” through sex by exchanging a verbal expression of love before sexual activity begins.
5. Men will begin to say no to junk food sex.
Gender roles have been stretching, morphing and flipping all over America, as couples settle into a work and home life that suits each individual partner.
Despite this, in the area of sexuality, men have been dictated a very narrow cultural male code.
Men, women and the media place subtle pressure on men to subscribe to an old-fashioned code of sexual conduct that includes messages to try to obtain as much sex as possible and as early as possible, with the strict missive that to delay sex in the name of relationship building is somehow unmanly.
This year, plenty of thinking and feeling men will begin to look at sexually aggressive women not as easy targets, but as junk food they simply don’t need.
Photo source: twodaymag.com
