Day 37: Hedging Bets on the Royal Wedding

Pick up any newspaper, current affairs magazine or read any online UK paper website, everyone has started to hedge bets on the long-term outcome of the royal soon to be newlyweds?  Kate is not Diana and Will is not Charles.  In Day 35, Dr. Oz talks about the ways in which healthy marriages can boost longevity.

Will Kate and Will survive? They met eight years ago at age 20.  According to Macleans magazine, the couple has had a pretty uneventful courtship and they have lived together for a few years now.  They had a brief break up but got back together.

Charles maintained his friendship and relationship with Camilla whilst married to Diana. He wound up with his first love after Diana's death after Camilla left her husband. Back in those days, social circles evolved around face to face charity events, polo matches, balls and other regal celebrations with high society.

What about now? Will the advent of the internet, that is emails, texting, social network sites like Facebook mean that one day Will or Kate will be leaving one another?  Dr.Oz's wife, Lisa talks about the importance of communication in couples.  When you love yourself and have a healthy relationship with yourself, you are better equipped to establish boundaries with the ones you love.

Facebook is now one of the top reasons why couples stray.  All of a sudden, with the click of a mouse, you can get in touch with people you have not kept in contact with in ten , twenty or thirty years.

I was briefly on facebook a year and a half ago and deleted my account.  Most of the people who were contacting me were former male friends from highschool and past loves from my single years.  If I had really wanted to keep in touch with these folks because of common bond or circle of friends, we would not have lost touch.  Atlhough flattered I was remembered, it made me uncomfortable and I realized that when it comes to sharing details about my life and photos, I do that with my inner circle of friends and family. Not online. So I went off Facebook.

Will and Kate?  Where will they be in twenty or thirty years?  I hope together and attending their offsprings' weddings.

My marital advice to Will and Kate is what Dr. Oz says to couples: Hug each other every day and spend time connecting emotionally.

When your arms are around each other, they won't be clicking the mousepad or around someone else.

Here is what the UK Indepedent Paper Has To Share:

"Affairs are fizzling out, and the change is recent. If the final years of this decade are sounding the death-knell for the affair, the late Nineties and early Noughties were its zenith – and ever-cheaper technology was the fuel philanderers used to stoke the flames of desire. Increasingly available technology – mobile phones, SMS messages, internet connections, BlackBerrys and Bluetooth – made it easier than ever to make contact and stay in touch. "Technosexuals" used phones, email and the internet to hook up with partners for easy encounters. Bluetooth allowed the unfaithful to pick out potential partners on trains and in bars. Research by the London School of Economics found that a quarter of mobile-phone users sent sexually explicit text messages, and one in six people flirted with someone who was not their partner via their phones.

As home PCs became affordable, huge numbers of the populace went online. Through websites such as Friends Reunited, we started to seek out long-forgotten friends, often for romantic reasons. The same story was played out in homes across the globe. Bored husbands and housewives, hypnotised by Windows 95 and the wonders of a 24-bit per second dial-up internet connection, would wobble along the information superhighway from the comfort of the spare bedroom, track down high-school sweethearts and start affairs. Six month later, the marriage would be over. Luddites didn't stand a chance.

Even the England goalkeeper David James succumbed to the lure of Friends Reunited and walked out on his 13-year marriage after rekindling an affair with an old flame through the nostalgia-driven website.

Friends Reunited, launched in 1999, was arguably the first mainstream social networking site. More than 15 million people subscribed. It was suddenly easy for any Tom, Dick or Harriet stuck in a loveless marriage to try to revive the carefree romances of their youth. Friendships that had lapsed decades ago were dusted off, and affairs were inevitably started.

It became easier than ever to find people to cheat with. At the same time, the logistics of an affair also became easier, thanks to burgeoning communication online.

And it won't stop there. The BT futurologist Ian Pearson predicts that in the next 10 to 15 years urban positioning technology will mean that you can text an attractive person in a bar just by pointing your phone at them. He also predicts the rise of technology such as "ego-badges"; jewellery-like devices on which you will be able to upload personal information for transmission to passers-by. ations technology. The very structure of the way we communicate with each other changed. Personal mobile phones outsold home phones; text messaging abbreviations crept into standard language; kisses at the end of communications became common; emails replaced "snail mail" and then replaced telephone calls; and finally, face-to-face conversations diminished as office workers began emailing colleagues sitting next to them rather than speaking to them. "

The Independent UK Paper Online

May Kate ande Will have a marriage that boosts their health and longevity.  May they break bread around their table with royal generations to come.