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A man who wanted to break up with his girlfriend ended up accidentally proposing to her with the ring he had intended to give to a work colleague he’d been secretly seeing.

Christmas might be the most wonderful time of the year but for Reddit user aptly named Propermistakeregret, it was a nightmare.

And yes, there was alcohol involved.

It’s happened to all of us at some point, right?

He shared the glorious story with fellow Redditors and how much he regretted it. Oddly enough, no one had the tiniest bit of sympathy.

‘I’m seeing someone else, wanted to break up with her. I bought the ring for a work colleague, wasn’t planning to propose until the holiday we planned,’ he wrote.

‘During New Year’s Eve, I proposed to my girlfriend. It’s been posted on my friend’s Snapchat, my girlfriend’s Facebook page, everywhere.’

‘I saw people proposing so I wanted to go with the flow and proposed to my girlfriend whilst partially pissed. Can I get the ring back and cancel the engagement please?’

Looking for legal advice, the poster wanted to know if there were legitimate ways for him to get the ring back. But unfortunately, as the law experts on Reddit explained, it wouldn’t be possible unless perhaps the ring cost a fortune and he was able to show that he was so intoxicated that he lacked legal capacity to offer a gift.

After a few unforgiving comments from users including pleas for the poster to and see a therapist, he posted an update; he is now marrying his original girlfriend.

‘I’ve had a long and hard think to myself, I decided to hand in my four-week notice to my boss and start afresh.

‘I think it’s best my girlfriend doesn’t find out about the affair I’ve been having so I’ve spoken to my colleague and told her I’m not going on holiday with her and I’ve ended it with her.

‘I’ve known my girlfriend longer and my mum gave me a call saying she’s happy and she’s always wanted grandchildren and whatnot so I didn’t want to disappoint my mum. I’m going to marry my girlfriend.’

He revealed that his girlfriend has started planning the wedding on her Macbook and he doesn’t want to interrupt or upset her.

‘I think it’s the right thing to do,’ he added. ‘Just worried that my colleague will somehow get a hold of my girlfriend and tell her about the times we’ve slept together. That’s my final decision and I think I’ll stick to that.

Let’s hope the girlfriend doesn’t peruse through Reddit while making her plans then.

Metro

Lifestyle

Man proposes to girlfriend when he meant to propose to someone else at work

Mehdi Qazi Friday, January 11, 2019

Cheating means different things to different people.

For some, it’s a flirty encounter or a lusty text, while others have far more liberal approach, seeing only the most blatant forms of adultery as valid, like sleeping with someone else.

According to new research, it seems that half of young men fall into the latter category because, unlike 73 per cent of women, they don’t class kissing as cheating.

The same number also said they didn’t think cyber sex counted either, compared to 75 per cent of women, who did.

Dating coach James Preece suggests that the findings might be in line with the different ways men and women typically broach intimacy.

“There's no way round this though,” he tells The Independent, explaining that regardless of your gender, if you kiss another person and don't think you’re cheating, it indicates a fundamental lack of respect for your partner and the relationship itself.

“If you don't care enough about your actions or how your partner will react, then you are with the wrong person,” he adds.

The survey, conducted by BBC Radio 5 Live, included data on 2,066 British adults.

True to what one might it expect, it found that 91 per cent of people would consider sleeping with someone other than their partner as cheating.

But the lines become blurred when it comes to more nuanced forms of intimacy, such as browsing on a dating app, which 40 per cent of respondents said counted as cheating.

The survey also asked people for their views on sex education, which is set to undergo its first revamp in 17 years, with no mention of cyber-bullying, LGBT+ issues, consent or pornography included in the current syllabus.

Clearly, it’s time for an update as 47 per cent of people said their school sex education didn’t prepare them for their sex lives.

5 Live’s Anna Foster said the findings shed light on the importance of improving sex education and tackling some of the taboos surrounding certain issues.

“Whether it’s the stiff upper lip or the ‘no sex, we’re British attitude’, as a country we’re just not comfortable talking about sex,” she said.

The findings come the same day the radio station launches its #sextakeover, when Foster will be joined by celebrity guests, including activist Munroe Bergdorf and TV star Vicky Pattinson, to discuss contemporary attitudes towards sex and dating for a special two-hour show.

“We’ll be talking about sexual health, relationships, sex and society and the future of sex,” Foster added.

“We’ll be joined by some big names, a live audience and special guests to get the conversation going.”

Independent

Lifestyle

ONLY HALF OF MEN SAY A KISS COUNTS AS CHEATING

Mehdi Qazi Saturday, January 5, 2019

The discovery of a new fat cell could explain the connection between smoking cessation and weight gain and lead to improved treatments for obesity as a result.

In a recent study conducted by the University of Michigan Life Sciences Institute, a team of researchers explored the function of a new type of fat cell: the thermogenic or “beige” fat cell.

Jun Wu, research assistant professor at LSI and senior author of the study, had formerly come across beige fat cells in previous research.

Beige fat cells burn energy when activated through thermogenesis, which is when heat is produced in the body.

In order to assess how beige fat cells function, Ms Wu and her team investigated beige fat that had been activated.

Their findings, published in the journal Nature Medicine, highlighted a molecule present in the beige fat of mice and humans called CHRNA2 (cholinergic receptor nicotinic alpha 2), a protein that plays a role in thermogenesis.

No CHRNA2 was detected in the white fat of the mice and humans, the function of which is to store energy as opposed to burn it.

CHRNA2 is also known for regulating the reliance of nicotine in the brain.

Therefore, these findings could shine a light on why individuals who quit smoking often gain weight, as the nicotine in cigarettes has been proven to suppress the appetites of smokers.

Ms Wu stressed that this research is not intended to encourage people to smoke in order to avoid weight gain, but rather that this discovery could help people suffering from obesity or metabolic issues.

“It is really cool to discover a selective pathway for beige fat, a new cell-type - and even more exciting that this is conserved in humans,” she said.

“Beige fat is very important in regulating whole-body metabolic health.

“Our results in mice show that if you lose even one aspect of this regulation - not the whole cell function, but just one part of its function - you will have a compromised response to metabolic challenges.”

According to Ms Wu, increased understanding of the CHRNA2 signalling pathway could lead to improved treatments for individuals who have gained an unhealthy amount of weight.

“This pathway is important from a basic research standpoint, but it also has relevance for metabolic and human health research,” Ms Wu said.

“The more we can narrow down a precise pathway for activating beige fat, the more likely we are to find an effective therapy for metabolic health that does not carry harmful side effects."

Independent

Lifestyle

NEW FAT CELL COULD EXPLAIN WHY PEOPLE WHO QUIT SMOKING GAIN WEIGHT

Mehdi Qazi Wednesday, May 30, 2018

According to the myth, Zeus disguised himself as swan to seduce Leda. She later laid two eggs, out of which two sets of twins hatched.

Sex has intrigued humankind forever.

And while we may think people today have developed wild and crazy sexual practices, compared with our ancestors, we don't even know the meaning of the word "bizarre".

Take these seven examples:

1. Cleopatra's vibrator was the bees' knees. And other bits...

Sex toys go back as far as ancient Egypt, with the invention of the clay dildo. In fact, Egypt's Queen Cleopatra is considered by some to be an early innovator of vibrators, as she is said to have pleasured herself with the buzzing created by a box full of bees. Suicide-by-asp was obviously the last resort of a lady who liked to live dangerously.

In an effort to improve their dildos, the ancient Greeks and Romans had leather sheaths put on them to better simulate the feeling of an actual penis, instead of the texture of wood or stone.

These leather-sheathed dildos, known as olisbos, were so popular that in the classic Greek comedy play Lysistrata, the Greek women stage a sex strike to end the Peloponnesian War partly because they can no longer import good leather dildos.

2. Heavy petting parties

The term "heavy petting" can be traced back to the 1920s, where men and women in North America would hold "petting parties".

These events were different, "but certainly there were parties where young people did quite a lot of erotic exploration — kissing and fondling. These parties always stopped before intercourse. In that sense they had imposed limitations created by the group presence. They were not orgies and they were not promiscuous — one set of partners only," explained history professor Paula Fass on U.S. National Public Radio.

Petting parties "allowed young people to experiment in a self-limiting way by creating peer regulation that both encouraged experimentation and created clear limits," Fass added.

Versions of the party, depending on where they were happening, were also called necking, mushing, fussing or spooning parties.

3. Taoism, also known as preserving semen, the essence of life

Taoism is centred upon the belief of qi (or chi) — the life force that is within everything in existence. When it comes to the human body, the chi takes the form of jing, that is the essence that gives us life, and Taoists believe that the loss of jing may cause illness and even death when it becomes totally expended, according to Lit Verse.

In the body, the one substance that is said to contain the most jing is the semen. This belief led the ancient practitioners of Taoism to believe that a man should not lose too much of his semen, because it's the essence that gives life — and because of this, ancient Taoist men were advised not to ejaculate during sex.

4. A leech on your labia to fake virginity

During medieval times, where a woman's virginity was highly regarded, women who were not virgins would go to weird extremes to give their husband the illusion that they were still virgins. One option was to do this by placing a leech on their labia the day before their wedding night.

"The day before her marriage, let her put a leech cautiously on her labia, taking care lest it slip in by mistake; then blood will flow out here, and a little crust will form in that place. Because of the flux of blood and the constricted channel of the vagina, thus in having intercourse the false virgin will deceive the man," read one version of the Trotula.

5. Bundling

Bundling was the practice of putting a courting couple together in bed for the night, fully clothed, so they get better acquainted before marriage.

"To ensure there wouldn't be any hanky panky, they would not only be clothed but have a barrier between them. Sometimes it was a board that went down the length of the bed — a bundling board or a large pillow ("bundling bolster") down the middle, or put in a sack — a bundling bag that could be sewn or tied shut to prevent them from removing it," according to the Sexual History Tour.

This was to prevent premarital sex.

6. Crocodile dung to prevent pregnancy

Amorous ancient Egyptian women used crocodile-pooh pessaries. Documents dating back to 1850BCE refer to this method of contraception for ancient Egyptian women. Trying to avoid pregnancy, they would shove crocodile dunginto the vagina to act as a diaphragm.

Crocodile dung is actually slightly alkaline, like modern-day spermicides, so it could have worked, noted The Daily Mail.

7. Sweat as an aphrodisiac

Before aphrodisiacs and lubricants as we know them, female fans of ancient Roman gladiators would buy their sweat and grime after matches and use it as an aphrodisiac lubricant.

Some women wore hairpins and other jewellery dipped in gladiator blood, and some even mixed gladiator sweat into facial creams and other cosmetics.

Huffington Post

Lifestyle , World

These 7 Old-Time Sex Traditions May Amaze And Shock You

Mehdi Qazi Saturday, May 26, 2018

The human eye can physically perceive millions of colours. But we don’t all recognise these colours in the same way.

Some people can’t see differences in colours – so called colour blindness – due to a defect or absence of the cells in the retina that are sensitive to high levels of light: the cones. But the distribution and density of these cells also varies across people with “normal vision” causing us all to experience the same colour in slightly different ways.

Besides our individual biological make up, colour perception is less about seeing what is actually out there and more about how our brain interprets colours to create something meaningful. The perception of colour mainly occurs inside our heads and so is subjective – and prone to personal experience.

Take for instance people with synaesthesia, who are able to experience the perception of colour with letters and numbers. Synaesthesia is often described as a joining of the senses – where a person can see sounds or hear colours. But the colours they hear also differ from case to case.

Another example is the classic Alderson’s checker-shadow illusion. Here, although two marked squares are exactly the same colour, our brains don’t perceive them this way.

The culture of colour

Since the day we were born we have learnt to categorise objects, colours, emotions, and pretty much everything meaningful using language. And although our eyes can perceive thousands of colours, the way we communicate about colour – and the way we use colour in our everyday lives – means we have to carve this huge variety up into identifiable, meaningful categories.

Painters and fashion experts, for example, use colour terminology to refer to and discriminate hues and shades that to all intents and purposes may all be described with one term by a non expert.

Different languages and cultural groups also carve up the colour spectrum differently. Some languages like Dani, spoken in Papua New Guinea, and Bassa, spoken in Liberia and Sierra Leone, only have two terms, dark and light. Dark roughly translates as cool in those languages, and light as warm. So colours like black, blue, and green are glossed as cool colours, while lighter colours like white, red, orange and yellow are glossed as warm colours.

The Warlpiri people living in Australia’s Northern Territory don’t even have a term for the word “colour”. For these and other such cultural groups, what we would call “colour” is described by a rich vocabulary referring to texture, physical sensation and functional purpose.

Five key colours

Remarkably, most of the world’s languages have five basic colour terms. Cultures as diverse as the Himba in the Namibian plains and the Berinmo in the lush rainforests of Papua New Guinea employ such five term systems. As well as dark, light, and red, these languages typically have a term for yellow, and a term that denotes both blue and green. That is, these languages do not have separate terms for “green” and “blue” but use one term to describe both colours, a sort of “grue”.

People see colours differently according to the way their language categorises them.Shutterstock

Historically, Welsh had a “grue” term, namely glas, as did Japanese and Chinese. Nowadays, in all these languages, the original grue term has been restricted to blue, and a separate green term is used. This is either developed from within the language – as is the case for Japanese – or through lexical borrowing, as is the case for Welsh.

Russian, Greek, Turkish and many other languages also have two separate terms for blue – one referring exclusively to darker shades, and one referring to lighter shades.

Language and colour

The way we perceive colours can also change during our lifetime. Greek speakers who have two fundamental colour terms to describe light and dark blue – “ghalazio” and “ble” – are more prone to see these two colours as more similar after living for long periods of time in the UK – where these two colours are described in English by the same fundamental colour term: blue.

This is because after long term everyday exposure to an English speaking environment, the brain of native Greek speakers starts interpreting the colours “ghalazio” and “ble” as part of the same colour category.

But this isn’t just something that happens with colour, in fact different languages can influence our perceptions in all areas of life. And in our lab at Lancaster University we are investigating how the use of and exposure to different languages changes the way we perceive everyday objects. Ultimately, this happens because learning a new language is like giving our brain the ability to interpret the world differently – including the way we see and process colours.

Independent

Lifestyle , Science&Technology

The way you see colour depends on what language you speak

Mehdi Qazi Sunday, April 22, 2018

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