Please can everyone just go back to normal kissing, tongues inside mouths, says Olivia Craighead in Gawker. This week, at the VMA awards, Kourtney Kardashian and her singer boyfriend Travis Barker were pictured alongside Megan Fox and her singer boyfriend Machine Gun Kelly. “Even the most sex positive among us must admit that this is vile.” First, they were all standing in a loo, which is bad enough. Second, this is not a group of fumbling teenagers but fully functioning grown-ups. “All of them have children, so they have presumably had sex where there was (hopefully) kissing involved. Each of them should know that this is not where the tongue goes.”
Don’t hold out for destiny
If you’re looking for a soulmate, stop now, says Arthur C Brooks in The Atlantic. The chances are, they don’t exist. Despite so many of us believing in them, the idea of there being a soulmate out there for you is nonsense. “What’s more, engaging in fanciful ideas about romantic love can make it harder to find and keep.”
If you think you and your partner are somehow divinely, cosmically matched, you are more likely to place unrealistic expectations on them. A “soulmate” would be able to predict your wishes, read your mind and satisfy you for ever. That’s a tall order – and I can’t imagine many humans would be able to meet those criteria.
Besides, sometimes the best bit about relationships is the challenges. “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,” Shakespeare wrote in his 116th sonnet, “But bears it out even to the edge of doom.” He had a point. Proper love goes on and on, quite often on bumpy roads. “Long-term romance is such a sweet adventure precisely because it is not destiny.”