Legislator Wu Yi-chen (吳宜臻) urges couples to be vigilant on Valentine’s Day.
“Don’t be impulsive, don’t relent to coaxing, don’t be swept away by passion, don’t upload [private photos of each other],” Wu said at a Wednesday press conference at the Legislative Yuan.
Wu is about to push an amendment to the Sexual Harassment Prevention Act (性騷擾防治法) in response to a recent rash of privacy infringements between ex-couples.
Photo: AFP
From 2012 to 2013, major private photo scandals increased from 24 to 42. The majority of these photos were taken in the context of a romantic relationship and later used for retribution, according to the Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation (婦女救援基金會).
Neele Wang (王建中), a long-time hotline counselor in Taipei, said that acrimonious fighting, bitter breakups and frightening divorce rates are societal trends that have become a major focus of his work.
Wang’s Focus and Forecast Consulting Company is a provider of employee assistance programs — services meant to boost employee productivity in the workplace. One service is hotline counseling to employees across Taiwan who have personal, legal, financial and health questions. A lot of the questions he deals with are personal.
“We have many different services, but get a lot of phone calls about relationships. It’s one of the top three reasons employees call,” Wang said.
“It’s not just men who behave in frightening ways — women do it, too. Shouting, throwing things, slamming doors, or something worse when they become angry. It’s not uncommon,” Wang said.
In Taiwan, new pressures on modern love include changing gender expectations, record-long working hours and social technologies that can reduce real-life human contact, Wang said. But the basic romantic relationship problems, such as conflicts with in-laws, are the same.
“For the most part, many of the problems that plague relationships are versions of problems that existed before,” he said. “You can solve them with good communication.”
“A very damaging thing we see a lot is one person saying yes, when he thinks no,” Wang said.
“He says ‘okay,’ but is secretly furious and thinks, ‘Why would you do this?’ He finds his mates and complains, but he does not complain to [his girlfriend]. He does not want her to become angry or set her off in any way. They don’t resolve their issues. They build up and then come out at one time, and sometimes it is a destructive expression of anger.”
HAPPINESS WORKSHOP
In the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, Johnny Chen (陳俊良) of Focus and Forecast has been busy planning the Happiness Workshop (幸福工作坊), a series of Thursday night classes taught by invited professionals.
The course begins on Feb. 27 and features classes on maintaining a peaceful and productive relationship. There’s “getting to know yourself,” “understanding the influence your nuclear family has on your relationships” and a psychometric assessment based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator that’s used to help one partner understand the other’s communication style. There is a unit on positive ways to handle a breakup.
So far, couples have not rushed to enroll. But Chen, a 20-something in his first corporate job, stands behind the merits of his brainchild.
“It addresses a real problem. Maybe it’s a problem people don’t want to talk about,” he said. “Finding a romantic spark isn’t too hard, you could do that by chance walking down a street. What’s hard is maintaining a relationship and not letting it sour.”
For more information about the Happiness Workshop contact Johnny Chen at (02) 3765-3313 ext. 23, or go to (Chinese): www.goo.gl/XGoEUg.
Towering high above Taiwan’s capital city at 508 meters, Taipei 101 dominates the skyline. The earthquake-proof skyscraper of steel and glass has captured the imagination of professional rock climber Alex Honnold for more than a decade. Tomorrow morning, he will climb it in his signature free solo style — without ropes or protective equipment. And Netflix will broadcast it — live. The event’s announcement has drawn both excitement and trepidation, as well as some concerns over the ethical implications of attempting such a high-risk endeavor on live broadcast. Many have questioned Honnold’s desire to continues his free-solo climbs now that he’s a
As Taiwan’s second most populous city, Taichung looms large in the electoral map. Taiwanese political commentators describe it — along with neighboring Changhua County — as Taiwan’s “swing states” (搖擺州), which is a curious direct borrowing from American election terminology. In the early post-Martial Law era, Taichung was referred to as a “desert of democracy” because while the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was winning elections in the north and south, Taichung remained staunchly loyal to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). That changed over time, but in both Changhua and Taichung, the DPP still suffers from a “one-term curse,” with the
Jan. 26 to Feb. 1 Nearly 90 years after it was last recorded, the Basay language was taught in a classroom for the first time in September last year. Over the following three months, students learned its sounds along with the customs and folktales of the Ketagalan people, who once spoke it across northern Taiwan. Although each Ketagalan settlement had its own language, Basay functioned as a common trade language. By the late 19th century, it had largely fallen out of daily use as speakers shifted to Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), surviving only in fragments remembered by the elderly. In
Lines between cop and criminal get murky in Joe Carnahan’s The Rip, a crime thriller set across one foggy Miami night, starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Damon and Affleck, of course, are so closely associated with Boston — most recently they produced the 2024 heist movie The Instigators there — that a detour to South Florida puts them, a little awkwardly, in an entirely different movie landscape. This is Miami Vice territory or Elmore Leonard Land, not Southie or The Town. In The Rip, they play Miami narcotics officers who come upon a cartel stash house that Lt. Dane Dumars (Damon)
RSS