Joyless advent calendars
"This is the last year I get sucked into the advent calendar nonsense," writes Lacey from Green Bay. "If you get to December without the bloody thing being pilfered, you're lucky. A week on and I'm still recovering from the 5am wake up call from December 1. The damn things aren't even Christmassy - all movie merch or teddy bear twee hiding a teeny morsel of old chocolate. But the worst is the negotiations. Because one is never enough. 'Can I have another one? No. Please? No. Just one more? No' ... And if you think you could leverage some good behaviour out of a daily nub of chocolate, well, you're right, you can. But all you can hear is the sound of your own parental whinging on high rotate - 'if you don't put your shoes on/brush your teeth/eat your broccoli then you won't get that dried up crumb of orangutan-killing palm-oil-laden chocolate'. Ugh."
Romance is dead
Why do people stay in bad relationships? A study in Portugal enlisted 1000 subjects who were asked to imagine themselves in a loveless, 10-year marriage. Would they stick or split? They were divided into four groups. The first group were just told they were in an unhappy marriage. The second were told they'd been married for only one year. The third were told that they'd bought a house together. The final group were told they'd put a lot of emotional effort into trying to save their marriage. The results found that 35 per cent of people who'd put money or effort into the marriage would stay. They called this the "sunk cost effect": which is basically if you feel you are going to waste effort or money you put in, you will hang around.
