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The time has come to admit a dark and troubling secret: I am the fattest of my friends. It’s true. I admit it. All my attempts at wearing untucked shirts and upsizing my pants can’t hide the pain in my heart. It’s me. I’m the fat one.

Relational disorders have been defined as “persistence and painful patterns of feelings, behaviors, and perceptions involving two or more partners in an important personal relationship.” We already know the relational disorder as “I can’t stop fighting with my parents” or “our marriage just hasn’t been right for years.” While the relational disorder has been a peripheral code of “clinical significance,” it can only be considered unofficially by mental health professionals as ‘relational problems’ contributing to a larger problem. And most (if not all) insurance plans do not cover issues such as marital conflict without some sort of diagnosis. What can be done to change this?

For most of people gambling is fun and a form of harmless entertainment. But for four to six percent of gamblers it is a devastating illness that negatively impacts every aspect of their life. And for every person who is a compulsive gambler the lives of 7-14 people are severely impacted by the lies, the debts, and the lack of attention that characterize addicts in relationships.

Have you have been on a date with someone who is fidgeting and bouncing their leg like a jackhammer with a smile that seems oddly out of place on their face? Why do so many people smile when they are nervous? Are they trying to disguise their real feelings or are they just smiling as a way of managing their stress?

Go ahead and gossip – turns out some gossip may be good for our relationships.

Last week, my maternal grandmother Mary, my Bubu, died at the age of 99. The end of her life, sleeping in a hopspital bed with my Aunt and Cousin at her side, was as quiet and uneventful as her early life was chaotic and unpredictable.

As a small child, my Bubu lived through the departure of her parents and two older brothers from Poland in 1913 when she was five years old. She watched the German and Russian armies fighting back and forth through the little towns where she was living during World War I. And she experienced the deaths, one month apart in 1917, of her grandfather and grandmother in whose care she and her little sister Anna had been left.

Mary and Anna nearly starved to death during the war. The uncle who was supposed to bring them to the United States died suddenly just before they were supposed to depart, and the other uncle who eventually set out with them went blind during the trip and was sent back to Poland from England, leaving the girls aged 11 and 13 to journey on alone. Once they reached Ellis Island, they were met by a brother who could not prove that they were related, prompting the immigration authorities to hold them until paperwork could be sent. When they were finally reunited with their family in Denver in 1921, they no longer recognized their mother. Their parents divorced soon after.

In 1924, at the age of 16, my Bubu wrote the following for a school assignment which my aunt found recently while going through her papers:

“Essay on Man”

We don’t know what the future has in store for us. The only thing that keeps us going is the hope and faith that God has planted in our hearts.

No matter what happens to us, we always hope and believe that something better will come.

In our greatest distress and worst situations, we keep on hoping for “better.” In the hour of death, or seeing death before our eyes, we don’t give up. We struggle and hope to live a little longer, because we believe that the future might hold something nicer, better, and happier than the past.

Think your insomnia just leaves your tired? A new study in the Journal of SLEEP finds that chronic insomnia (the kind that lasts for several weeks or more) may have both short and long term consequences- like depression and anxiety- if left untreated.

Definition in the forearms, muscles in the small of the back, broad shoulders, strong hands – if you ask any woman, she might appreciate a number of different aspects about the physique of a man. And although much attention has been placed on the type of bodies men like in their women, current research shows that men’s physical attributes may be just as important.

I could sum up in a few words Mehl and Pennebaker’s work on gender and daily word use, but hey, it’s a blog! I’m allowed some extra room in electronic conversation. Besides, I’m feeling up for the challenge (via writing- which makes one wonder what would Pennebaker say about that?) and the female stereotype of talkativeness has just been silenced. Sort of.