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.
The depressing numbers continue to pile up, like casualty lists after a lost battle. This week, after the government announced the 19th straight month of population decline, the Ministry of the Interior said that Taiwan is expected to lose 6.67 million workers in two waves of retirement over the next 15 years. According to the Ministry of Labor (MOL), Taiwan has a workforce of 11.6 million (as of July). The over-15 population was 20.244 million last year. EARLY RETIREMENT Early retirement is going to make these waves a tsunami. According to the Directorate General of Budget Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS), the
Many will be surprised to discover that the electoral voting numbers in recent elections do not entirely line up with what the actual voting results show. Swing voters decide elections, but in recent elections, the results offer a different and surprisingly consistent message. And there is one overarching theme: a very democratic preference for balance. SOME CAVEATS Putting a number on the number of swing voters is surprisingly slippery. Because swing voters favor different parties depending on the type of election, it is hard to separate die-hard voters leaning towards one party or the other. Complicating matters is that some voters are
Five years ago, on the verge of the first COVID lockdown, I wrote an article asking what seemed to be an extremely niche question: why do some people invert their controls when playing 3D games? A majority of players push down on the controller to make their onscreen character look down, and up to make them look up. But there is a sizable minority who do the opposite, controlling their avatars like a pilot controls a plane, pulling back to go up. For most modern games, this requires going into the settings and reconfiguring the default controls. Why do they
Take one very large shark, a boat (we’re gonna need a bigger one of those) and a movie that ran way over budget and you’ve got all the ingredients of a career-making film for one of Hollywood’s most successful directors. Now fans of Jaws — Steven Spielberg’s terrifying thriller about a man-eating shark — can re-live the movie as it celebrates its 50th anniversary in an exhibition at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles. “The film certainly cost me a pound of flesh, but gave me a ton of career,” Spielberg told reporters as he toured exhibits of props and memorabilia
RSS