relationships

Google negotiates with music labels, ultrabooks could add tap-to-pay, and Kobo copies Amazon by putting ads in its cheaper Touch e-reader.

Links from Monday's episode of Loaded:

These days, love comes, love goes, love doesn't necessarily even stay the night.

Do you need more proof of this sad and very modern truth? Oh, you do. Then please let me help you. A survey conducted by market researchers Lab 42 declares that 33 percent of human beings have broken up with their beloveds by text, e-mail, or Facebook.

Yes, Facebook.

You might imagine that I am talking about 13-year-olds. Because you definitely, surely have to be 13 to be on Facebook. Yet, no. This survey purports to offer the truths of 550 people older than 18--and, clearly, … Read more

These days, if you don't meet your date online, there must be something a little wrong with you.

There is a small cabal of humans, however, who are still uncertain as to whether someone you meet on, say, Facebook, mightn't be married. Or merely a hardened criminal.

I mention this dilemma because of the tale of 23-year-old Leah Gibbs, from Rhondda, South Wales.

The way The Daily Mail presents it, Gibbs met Adam Minton on Facebook and agreed to be his date. Her hope was that they would spend their first encounter watching a DVD at Minton's … Read more

Is it pride in pulchritude? Is it pressure from the opposite sex? Or might it even be that not so many people like to see men naked?

In an intellectually titled piece of research--"Let My Fingers Do the Talking: Sexting and Infidelity in Cyberspace"--Diane Kholos Wysocki, a professor of sociology and women's studies at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, and Cheryl D. Childers, a professor of sociology at Washburn University, create a snapshot that some might find intuitive and some might find depressing.

Their numerical conclusions appear clear: two-thirds of the women surveyed said … Read more

It started on Facebook. She looked into his two-dimensional eyes, ignored the fact that the game was called Mafia Wars, and decided that this might be love.

Oh, perhaps it didn't start with precisely those indications of love and foreboding, but I can tell you how it ended--with an $8,386.88 lawsuit for "misrepresentation, promissory estoppel, defamation of character, and intentional infliction of emotional distress."

All of us who read romantic novels must pay a debt to the Tri-City Herald, which dutifully recorded the progress and regress of a Facebook relationship between Cheryl Gray, 50, from … Read more

Your spouse has been working late in the office. You fear it might be the office cupboard.

Your spouse suddenly has a friend who needs a lot of comfort after a bereavement. You suspect the comfort might have slipped beyond the cuddle.

So, please, get yourself a GPS and track that spouse wherever he or she may roam.

This is not merely my suggestion for your peace of mind. It is that of a New Jersey court that decided that following your husband or wife is not an invasion of privacy. It's more of a loving gesture of concern. (… Read more

Few of us have been given the tools to make us instantly beautiful. Not even visits to the finest surgeons in LA seem to do the trick.

We deal with our imperfections. However, it appears that 30,000 who tried to gain access to BeautifulPeople.com, a dating site for the supremely pretty, are having extreme difficulty dealing with rejection.

You might remember this site. Two years ago, it declared that its standards were strict. It declared that British people were, in general, on the less blessed side of pulchritude.

But now the Guardian reports that Beautiful People has turned … Read more

Lovers are jealous beings. They become very upset when the object of their affections is stolen by another.

I wasn't aware, however, that the same applied to married people.

A case currently playing in the theater of a London court is, however, enlightening me. For it is alleged that Ian Puddick, a plumber who seems to be a star of a TV show called "Bricking It," raised arms against his wife's alleged lover.

He allegedly raised them, then lowered them to his computer keyboard, whereupon he tweeted and created Web sites that railed against his rival.… Read more

Have you ever seen "The War of the Roses"? This was a movie in which a husband and wife participate in a considerable amount of divorce drama.

Somehow, this movie comes to mind when I hear that police have now dropped the charges in a case I wrote about yesterday involving a wife, a husband, and a fake Facebook profile.

Should you not like to click on links, let me give you the short version: estranged wife creates a fake Facebook profile for a teenage girl called Jessica Studebaker. Husband befriends fake teenage girl on Facebook. He allegedly … Read more