Love Marshmallows

 It's the holidays so I am being blog lazy for a bit as I try to cope with another year kicking the bucket. God how time soars by as you age. I still remember being a kid and waiting just the week till Christmas was an eternal agony.
Now its like once the 4th of July hits Christmas is the next damn day.
Anyway, this is a nice blurb article from Psychology today



Love Marshmallows
By John R. Buri, Ph.D.
Created Nov 2 2010 - 7:15am
Imagine that you are a 4-year old and you have just been given a choice:
- you can have one marshmallow immediately
- OR you can have two marshmallows if you wait 15 minutes.
Those children who at age 4 did not delay gratification --- they grabbed a marshmallow immediately --- were followed up at age 16, and now during adolescence they were:
- less able to deal with the frustrations of life
- more apt to back down from challenges and difficulties
- less self-reliant and assertive
- less socially confident and effective
- less dependable and trustworthy.
Imagine that you are an 8th grader and you have just been given a choice:
- you can have $1.00 right now
- OR you can have $2.00 if you wait until next week to get it.
The inability to delay gratification --- to wait until next week to get $2.00 --- is a far better predictor of poor academic performance than is IQ.
As a nation, we scoff at delayed gratification --- our current financial deficit stands at $13,683,993,569,372!  (And it has increased an average of $4.14 billion per day for the past 3 years.)  Spending cuts? --- that would mean someone would have to do without – someone would have to sacrifice.
In a Newsweek listing released this fall of the 100 most successful nations in the world, the U.S. did not even make the top 10.
A recent report has identified the U.S. as having the weakest families in the western world.
I recently scanned the dozen or so top marriage and family textbooks, and only 2 of them discussed the role of sacrifice in love relationships --- and only 1 of these 2 talked about sacrifice as having a positive role in love.  [The other 1 emphasized that if you sacrifice, you are apt to become a martyr and to be taken advantage of by your partner.]
Let me make it clear --- sacrifice is vital if you want love to thrive.
Watching-out-for-yourselfism doesn’t work.
Something-for-nothingism may apply in the world of in-loveness [Love? Or Being In Love?], but not in love.
How often are the love marshmallows waiting for us to simply reach out and grab one?
- In those moments when you can respond to the one you love with kindness or with nastiness
- At those times when the coy come-ons of a co-worker display a blatant disregard for the fact that you are already in a committed relationship
- When you have to choose how you will respond to your partner's need to talk --- with interest or with indifference
- When your former lover flirtatiously befriends you on Facebook, even though they know you are attached
Like the 4-year old, we can reach out and grab a marshmallow anytime we want.
But not without a price.
Something-for-nothingism does not work in love.