As we age, we sleep less soundly: one evolutionary explanation is that in the ancestral environment the young hunters and warriors required undisturbed sleep, while the older members of the tribe acted as watchdogs and needed to be woken by the slightest noise.
The stimulus for it was an Israeli study that had observed different responses to male and female parents. Babies’ oxytocin levels rose during cuddling by the mother but not by the father, and during active play with the father but not with the mother. Very interesting.
I wanted to shake not just Lydia but the whole world of people who do not understand the difference between control of emotion and lack of it, and who make a totally illogical connection between inability to read others’ emotions and inability to experience their own.
Gene started to get up and collapsed back in the chair. “Here’s my last bit of advice before I fall over. Watch some kids, watch them play. You’ll see they’re just little adults, only they don’t know all the rules and tricks yet. Nothing to worry about.”
My father would quote Thoreau—“Henry David Thoreau, American philosopher, Don,” he would say as I walked around our living room working on a mathematics or chess problem—“Never trust any thought arrived at sitting down.”
It was possible that her emotional state would make her more receptive to the Gene Sabbatical, but it seemed advisable to defer the news until the next morning, after we had had sex. Of course, if she realized that I had withheld data for that purpose, I would be criticized. Marriage was complex.
It seemed reasonable to conclude that happiness in marriage was not a simple function of time, and that instability was part of the price of an improvement in overall well-being.
My love for Rosie was so powerful that it had caused my brain to make a grammatical error.
Gregory Peck in the role of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.
As a husband, I knew that it was easier not to argue.