On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, Googled, "how can I get my boyfriend to..." and Google responded with a list of popular searches. The search engine's first suggestion? Propose.
He then changed the query to "how can I get my girlfriend to..." The most popular query? "Sleep with me."
You can actually try this for yourself and see how things change over time. Instead of 'How can i get my girlfriend/Boyfriend. Try Googling 'How can I get my wife/husband to' and see the changes in queries. You will be surprised oh how things change.
While Ariely's discoveries are, well, predictably rational, I decided to take things a step further and discover how these relationships change, once the girlfriend has learned how to get the boyfriend to propose. So I went for the "How can I get my wife/husband to..." paradigm. The last time I enjoyed this much simultaneous fun and tragedy was when I read a Russian novel in a Croatian bar.
You will be moved to tears, or perhaps St. Petersburg, when I tell you that husbands' most frantic search is, "How can I get my wife to love me again."
Before you reach for your handkerchief to dry your eyes, might I tell you that the next most popular googling suggestion is, "How can I get my wife to swing."
You will feel that your world has been temporarily righted when I tell you that the next two pleas involve losing weight and shaving. However, the list is completed with wanting to know how to get your wife to trust you again, love you and, that perennial source of friction, shut up.
What of the wives? Once they are betrothed, do they come to terms with their man's foibles and failings?
Well, the prime Google search for "How can I get my husband to..." is followed by the words "fall in love with me again." Yes, husbands and wives apparently want to be loved by their partners but have no idea how to achieve it.
This plea is followed by wanting their husbands to be "more affectionate" and "to love me again." Forget the "falling in love" part; just give me the basic love thing, these searchers seem to say--the one that involves a little thought and kindness.
Soon, though, the googling warts are exposed. For the next most popular is the need to know how to get the husband to help around the house. This is followed by more intimate needs, like romance and conversation. However, it is rounded out by a need to get husbands to leave the house and stop drinking.
Wow... what do you make of all of this?
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