I'm in a great relationship of seven months. My boyfriend and I never get sick of each other. We respect each other and are there for each other, and we talk very openly, even when we're upset. His ex-girlfriend is part of our group of friends. She is thin and very pretty. I know I'm attractive, but I'm struggling to lose these 10 pounds I put on in college. Also, she's super-sweet, and she and my boyfriend broke up because he cheated on her. He told her right away and felt sick about it for a long time, so I'm not worried that he'd cheat on me. Friends tell me how much he loves me, and he even told me he'd feel "lost" without me. Still, I get nervous when they're alone or talking a lot. I haven't said anything about her being around so much, but I know other girls wouldn't stand for it.

You're the one who's obsessed with getting in another woman's pants -- being able to wear his ex-girlfriend's skinny jeans, and not just as arm-warmers.

I know, if he's going to be chummy with his ex, couldn't she please be one of those women people charitably describe as "pretty once you get to know her"? Instead, it seems her 10-step get-gorgeous routine involves "1. Wake up," while you probably feel you have to put in a half-hour in the bathroom some mornings just to keep from scaring the dog. And then, some evening when you're at your glowiest (after a brief struggle to squeeze your muffin-top into steel-belted control-top pantyhose), you need only stand next to her to feel yourself rapidly devolving from arm candy to arm ballast.

It would be easier if she fit the stereotype of the gorgeous girl with the tiny lump of coal heart. Unfortunately, she's sunshine with legs (sickeningly long, slim legs, with no hint of cankles). Making matters worse, they had an indiscretion-driven breakup, not an "I'm sick of you" breakup. Whatever could be stopping him from scampering back to her? Well, it doesn't sound like you're exactly a barker, and although men prioritize looks in women, once you're within the zone of what a guy finds hot/cute/sexy, other stuff comes into play: Are you kind? Does he feel needed, appreciated, understood? Do you click as a couple -- naked and clothed? And okay, you aren't on the short list to be an Abercrombie model, but is every day more fun because you're in it?

Don't let on how jealous you feel (it sends a message that you're not all that), and don't try to control a man by telling him what to do (it leads to resentment, secretiveness, and rebellion). You tell a man what to do by making him happy and by being happy with him. Your relationship may eventually end, but if you accept that, you can enjoy the hell out of it while you have it. For peace of mind, start a conversation about what you appreciate about each other. Listen up and you might get your head around the notion that he's with you because he's "lost without you" -- and not because he lost his directions to the skinny girl's house.

I'm an okay-looking guy, but I look terrible in photos. I am joining an online dating site and don't know what to do about my picture. I can't afford a photographer.

Some people's photos look best with some clever cropping. Apparently, yours look best if you crop out your head. Part of your problem is that you probably think of taking "a" picture (or three) instead of doing as professional photographers do -- taking maybe 1,000. This basically means staging a photographic accident, meaning in at least one of the 1,000 shots, you should accidentally look like yourself or even better.

A novelist friend of mine, Sonya Sones, author of The Hunchback of Neiman Marcus, takes some fantastic photos of her various traumatized author friends. She says people look best when the photographer shoots from a little above them and advises against using a flash -- ever -- because "it makes people look ugly. Period." She suggests shooting outdoors, in the shade: "In the sun, people get hideous haunted-house shadows under their eyes and noses, which is not a good look unless it happens to be Halloween." I'll add that you should experiment initially with different angles to find your best and try some shots in which you're doing something you enjoy -- fishing or grilling or playing poker -- so you'll forget to freeze and look awkward. Put in a little effort and you could soon be posting a picture that's more NotBadLookingGuy123 than Quasimodo456 ("You had me at 'Hell no!'").

I have a good relationship with my boyfriend of a year except for how he ignores me when he's stressed. The first time this happened, he disappeared for a week and didn't respond to texts or voicemails. He later explained he'd been swamped with work and apologized repeatedly. Last weekend, he again disappeared for a week. After I texted and left voicemails, he finally texted, "Work is big right now." He has told me he likes me because I don't complain or try to get his attention when he's busy. Actually, I'm a wreck when he disappears. My ex would also ignore me for weeks and then text like nothing had happened. Stupid me for staying around for two years, as it ultimately ended when he texted me that he couldn't talk to me anymore because he'd gotten married.

When a guy you're dating ignores your texts and voicemails for weeks, you don't call him your boyfriend; you block his number so he can never call you again -- and long before his excuses go from "I got a little busy" to "I got a little married."

Men do seem to have more of a "fight-or-flight" response to stress, but the impulse to drop out is just a tendency, not a biological mandate. If a man cares about you, he will somehow manage to overcome his teensy-weensy feelings of discomfort to stay in touch with you, even through tough times in his life. Sure, now that messages are no longer delivered by the Pony Express, letting you know that he still cares can sometimes take some effort -- perhaps even tapping his finger eight times on a tiny wireless gadget and hitting "send." And yes, I did see your boyfriend's excuse above: "Work is big right now." Right. Besides being your "boyfriend," is he also known as "Barack Obama" and "The Leader of the Free World"?

History is repeating itself because you're repeating yourself. Like one of those robothings in "The Terminator," no matter what indignity a guy blasts you with, you drag what's left of you upright and go back for more: "Hey, just call me when you have some free time -- maybe between marriages." You probably even take it as a compliment when your boyfriend admires how you're all "I am victim, hear me roll over" when he ignores you. Beverly Engel, in her terrific book "The Nice Girl Syndrome," cautions that the motive for being "nice" in the face of cruel treatment is often guilt, shame, fear of confrontation, fear of rejection, and an intense fear of being alone.

Being so compliant is pretty counterproductive because men are into the thrill of the chase, not the thrill of a woman who's on them like a tick on a dog no matter what they do. To be treated with respect, you need to be the disappearing one; disappear from the dating scene until you develop the self-respect to express your needs like you have a right to have them. You'll be ready to date when you require only one person in your life to feel whole -- and it isn't some guy who does with your dignity what other people do with Quilted Northern.

I've had a seven-year crush on an acquaintance despite how, whenever I see him, he barely remembers he's met me before. I'm now eight months into a relationship with a wonderful man. While at a bar with him, I ran into my crush. He was all over me and emailed later to ask me on a hike. On one hand, it's just a hike. On the other hand, I'm terrified to risk losing what I have.

Sure he wants to go on a hike -- a hike your skirt up over your head. It's tempting to have your shot at the one who got away. That one's usually more sparkly and exciting than the one who holds your hair back after a few-too-many at a party lands you on the roadside, giving what's left of the grapes back to nature. The question is, who really wants to go on this hiking date, you or your ego? You determine that by laying out the qualities you find essential in a man and seeing whether your boyfriend has them. Also consider that a relationship takes more than finding somebody with a blast of bar charisma; it's a "culture" two people create by being together. If your relationship is really good, you're gambling a lot. Much as you want to believe your crush has finally "seen" you, maybe he has just seen that you're taken and wants to engage in a little poaching -- the kind where the thing you bag in the woods gets to ride back in the truck cab instead of roped to the hood.

I admire that you often add research to your columns, so I thought I'd ask you about an article I read on birth control pills. Apparently, taking the pill can cause the "wrong" man to smell good to you -- a man you might not be into once you're off the pill. Unfortunately, I experience severe mood swings when I'm not taking the pill -- uncontrollable rages for about a week a month. But, now I'm worried that I'll choose a partner I'll lose interest in reproducing with when I'm off the pill. Also, I wonder whether being on it is lying about who I am. Of course, if I can't control my mood swings, it won't matter, because I'll scare every man away!

It seems those health class videos about getting your period -- "You're a woman now!" -- were a tad incomplete. One week a month, you're also Chuck Norris.

The cause of your rage probably isn't all the people saying deeply offensive things to you like "Are you using that chair?" but a nosedive in your level of "the happy hormone," serotonin. Dr. Emily Deans, a psychiatrist with the terrific blog "Evolutionary Psychiatry" on PsychologyToday.com, explains that your period gets launched by a drop in progesterone, "which can interfere a bit with the machinery that makes serotonin. This can lead to hunger, cravings, agitation, insomnia, irritability, and rage" or, to put it in relationship terms: "Someday, my prince will run."

Deans says the pill can help alleviate these symptoms, and certain variations seem especially helpful: the 24-day pill and the three-monther (meaning Auntie Flo visits only once every three months). The problem is the issue you brought up. The article you read references the research of Swiss biologist Claus Wedekind, who made a bunch of women sniff a bunch of men's stinky T-shirts to study the pill's effect on mate preferences. Women who weren't on the pill went for the smell of men with dissimilar immune systems -- men with whom they'd produce children with a broader set of immune defenses. Women on the pill preferred the smell of men with immune systems similar to theirs (the immunologically redundant), probably because the pill chemically mimics pregnancy and cues a genetic adaptation that leads women to seek out kin to protect them when they're pregnant.

If that isn't enough bad news for you, the pill's pregnancy simulation seems to kill the attractiveness bump women get at ovulation, their most fertile time of the month, when their faces, scent, and other features become subtly more appealing to men. (It may also lead ovulating women to dress and act less provocatively than they otherwise would.) In a study by psychologist Geoffrey Miller, female lap dancers not on the pill earned an average of $276 a night whereas those on it brought in only $193, making pill-using lap dancers $80 less hot and sexy to men per night.

So, the answer for your mood swings is...count to 10 when you get angry (because it sometimes takes that long for your rocket-propelled grenade launcher to warm up)? For a more peaceful alternative, Deans advises that some women's PMS symptoms are alleviated by certain antidepressants (SSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, such as fluoxetine and sertraline) but notes their problematic downside: "Nothing kills sex drive like an SSRI!" Deans has had some success prescribing bupropion, a non-SSRI antidepressant she calls "unlikely" to be a sex drive killer, but observes that "it can be agitating and cause insomnia."

As a possible non-drug alternative, Deans suggests magnesium malate supplementation: "Five hundred milligrams of magnesium malate at bedtime seems to help with anxiety, rage, and PMS symptoms such as cramps and headaches," she says. "Magnesium is typically low in standard American diets and not found in large amounts in multivitamins and is generally safe if you have normal kidneys." Deans adds that cycling from a low-carb diet to a higher-carb, low-protein diet three days to a week before starting your period can ease PMS symptoms, possibly by helping with serotonin uptake.

There is a prejudice that you're a better person if you just try to meditate yourself out of your rage on those weeks when you find yourself in the mood for long walks on the beach followed by a home strangling. But fixing brain problems by taking a pill is really no different from taking insulin for diabetes to keep from going into a diabetic coma. You're just taking a brain that's slacking off in the neurochemical department and bringing it up to par. Especially once you're in a relationship, a little "better living through chemistry" (or diet or vitamins) certainly seems preferable to doing "the little things" to keep your love alive -- like sticking Post-its around the house with cute little messages like "Homicide comes with a stiff prison term."

My husband and I are entrepreneurs, developing a new product. We're both working long hours. He's miserable because he has no time for his art (painting), and our sex life is in shambles. There isn't a lot of blame or anger. We simply go about our entire days with little or no flirting and fall into bed completely exhausted at night. Even if we crave sex, we're too tired. We kiss goodnight and promise it'll be different tomorrow or on the weekend, but it never is, and I see no reason to believe things will change. We used to race home from work to have wild sex and then do silly things together in the evenings. People always called us "the sensual couple" because we couldn't keep our hands off each other. How can we get the zing back?

Eighty percent of sex is just showing up. (The other 20 percent is remaining conscious while you're having it.)

Of course, you'd need to leave work at a reasonable hour to make your role-play in bed more dirty doctor/naughty nurse than adjacent coma patients. I know, that's not what it says you're supposed to do on your printout of the Puritan Work Ethic. Former Harvard psychology professor Shawn Achor writes in The Happiness Advantage that we're taught that we have to sacrifice happiness for success and told that only when we're successful will we be happy. Achor counters that happiness isn't something that falls in your lap when you attain some level of accomplishment; it's "a work ethic." He cites a decade of research suggesting that happiness "raises nearly every business and educational outcome: raising sales by 37 percent, productivity by 31 percent, and accuracy on tasks by 19 percent, as well as (leading to myriad) health and quality of life improvements."

Remember, people called you "the sensual couple" because you couldn't keep your hands off each other, not because you couldn't take your eyes off the clock. Ditching the clock for at least some of the day is essential. It's activities that make you lose track of time that make you happy -- activities like sex (and painting) that also make you forget yourself and that package your husband neglected to bring to the post office.

To put this in entrepreneurial terms, you need to relaunch your sex life and take it as seriously as you would a business launch. Look at sex as a mandatory meeting you need to have naked. And as unromantic as this sounds, you need to put "flirt with husband" on your daily schedule -- until it becomes a habit again. Implied in that is "be fun!" Be silly like you used to. Make an effort to leave work well before the cows not only come home but start watching "Seinfeld" reruns. And replace any motivational posters decorating your office with ones that reflect your newfound knowledge of trickle-down happy-nomics, for example: "As you climb the ladder of success, be sure to stop every now and then to let your husband look up your dress" and "Behind every successful woman is a man with his pants down."

I'm a recently divorced 40-something mom who's having trouble making female friends. I'm excluded from group activities, and my attempts at get-togethers fall flat. I attributed this to my being a bit quiet and reserved until a mom at school -- previously a friend -- casually remarked, "You're one of the moms we all love to hate!" What?! What am I doing that makes me hateable? Male friends say it's because I am "hot" and "have a killer body" and other women are jealous.

Middle-aged women who've gotten a little frumpy, schlumpy, and stretchmarky cling to how "what's on the inside is what really matters"...right until what's on the outside is a hot, shapely, newly available divorcee collecting their husbands' eyeballs like the Pied Piper commandeering the rodent population of Hamelin. Being "reserved" surely doesn't help. If you were mousy, you'd probably be considered shy. Being a looker and reserved possibly marks you as a snob. To take this less personally, recognize that these women are probably driven by fear, envy, admiration, and/or intimidation. To get them to see you more as a person than a hot person, you need to extend yourself: Be assertively friendly; join a volunteer organization so people get to know you through your actions; and seek out women who seem happy and secure. All in all, you need to be realistic. Understand that the first thing in some women's minds will always be how much cuter they are when they aren't standing next to you -- unless you're dressed in something that's figure-hugging in the manner of those bags they zip the dead bodies into at the morgue.

I feel like a disappointment to my boyfriend of seven months. I'm 28; he's 35 and Mr. Smart. He is a Brit and was a top student at Cambridge. He says everyone expected him to become Prime Minister, but he decided to buck their expectations and become a portrait painter. Although he earns a good living, I believe he considers himself a failure compared with the wealthy Brits commissioning his paintings. He says I'd be "more attractive" to him if I wrote for a media blog, as it would help his filmmaking career aspirations.

Love is patient, love is kind, love is surprised you aren't more accomplished and thinks you're kinda uggo when you're anxious. And okay, love isn't Prime Minister, just some hired brush, but maybe love could paint a couple extra chins on The Duke of Oldemoneyham or Lady Footlocker instead of taking all that bitterness and self-loathing out on you.

Apparently, the next best thing to running a country is finding a girlfriend, appointing yourself her sadistic guidance counselor, and running her spirit down till she feels like a chalk outline of the woman she used to be. (All the better to prime her to further your career at the expense of her own.) This isn't love; it's insidious emotional abuse -- a man doing everything to undermine his girlfriend's confidence, only to turn around and remind her that confidence is sexy.

A younger woman who's unsure of herself who pairs up with an older, accomplished man is most prone to get into this sick compliment-dig-apology loop you're in. You idealized this guy and the relationship to the point where you've become desperate for his approval so you can crawl back up from where he's put you down. If you had a stronger self and a realistic view of him, you'd see his putdowns for what they are -- stealth abuse passed off as loving criticism: "Here, let me help you out of a little more of your self-worth."

Instead of wondering how you might grow body armor, ask yourself those basic questions so many in relationships forget to keep asking: Does this person make me happy? Is my life better because I'm with him? You can go back to being that strong, confident woman you once were -- once you no longer have an emotional predator for a boyfriend. After you ditch him, take some time to ponder my favorite definition of love, by sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein: "Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own." A guy who loves you Heinlein-style will "help you better yourself," but by cheering you on for having the guts to change careers and by telling you you're beautiful and sexy -- without following up by whispering a bunch of sweet "you're nothings" in your ear.

How important is it that personal style and sensibilities match in a relationship? I'm 24 and having trouble agreeing to a first date with a man if he texts or emails me an emoticon. I majored in literature, love language, and see the emoticon as the epitome of intellectual laziness and bad expression of self.

-- :(

"O Romeo, Romeo...eeuw, Romeo...you're wearing dad jeans and a T-shirt with a wolf on it, and not in an ironic way." As a younger woman, you're more likely to dump guys over little things, like style crimes. But after a few years of dating, and a few rounds with some Slick Ricks, minor sensibility mismatches should pale in comparison with serial cheating and undeclared STDs. (You can steer a guy into cooler shirts. It's harder to get a guy to throw on some ethics.) That said, as a lit hound, you aren't "shallow" in looking critically at a guy's emoticon use, just unwise in cutting him off before the first date because of it -- assuming the rest of his email doesn't reveal scorching illiteracy and poor self-expression. Maybe this is his one area of intellectual laziness. We all have some -- for example, the intellectually lazy assumption that somebody's intellectually lazy just because he sometimes "winks" with punctuation marks.