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Enlisting the Break-Up Pros

Published by Starshine Roshell on September 29, 2020

Could Japan’s Wakaresaseya Woo Away Our Ball-and-Chain POTUS?

Dear Wakaresaseya Agency,

We were recently perusing the news when among the usual fare of planetary plagues, unsurvivable hurricanes, and right-wing Christian three-ways, we read about your surreptitious services. We don’t mind confessing we’re entirely intrigued.

Can it be true there are businesses in Japan dedicated solely to breaking up relationships? And that people hire these covert agents to bust up their own marriages by luring their spouses into affairs??

It’s hard to believe — but then again, if someone had told us six months ago that we’d be marching to save the US Freaking Postal Service and shoveling mountains of money at Ole Grampa Biden, we’d have laughed in their unmasked face, sputtering, “Shyeah, right, I’d sooner homeschool my kids!”

Mating in Captivity?

Published by Starshine Roshell on May 2, 2020

Why the Wave of ‘Quarantine Babies’ Must Be a Myth

I’ve heard the prophecy. You’ve heard the prophecy. By now we’ve all heard it: Nine months from now, we’ll see a wave of “quarantine babies,” conceived while humans across the globe stayed indoors and *wink, wink* found ways of entertaining themselves.

But I don’t believe it for a minute.

Have you ever seen a porno featuring a couple in sweatpants and rubber gloves wiping down boxes of frozen waffles and Minute Rice with spray bleach after returning, face-masked and reeking of Purell, from a terrified jaunt to the market?

The answer is no, my friends. No, you have not.

Because this moment we’re suffering through is not a sexy moment. In fact, this bizarre blip in history couldn’t be less of a turn-on if it were a glob of ketchup-flavored spittle dangling from Donald Trump’s twaddle-spewing flaptrap.

‘Divorce Coach’ in Your Corner?

Published by Starshine Roshell on December 18, 2019

Pro Guides Aim to Pave Rough Road to Splitsville

If you’ve seen the new Golden Globe–nominated movie Marriage Story on Netflix, then you likely came away from it knowing three things for certain:

(1) The movie, starring Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, should have been called Divorce Story. (2) Divorce can be brutal, even for couples who aim to do it amicably. (3) Lawyers make everything worse.

Of course, the film offers just one perspective. Not all uncoupling couples will find their well-intentioned plans of a congenial split dragged down into the mud by ruthless attorneys happy to see them skewering one another’s characters in court.

But amid all the existential upheaval that comes from a marriage cracking apart, it does seem like handing over one’s precarious financial and emotional fates to a professional who benefits personally from litigation is an even worse idea than … well, than marrying that douche in the first place.

And that’s where the Divorce Coach comes in. The latest addition to the booming Coaching oeuvre, divorce coaches have sprung up to support individuals (not couples) who are running the long, painful, and often quite complicated marriage-dissolution gauntlet. They serve as sounding boards and strategizers to help overwhelmed clients navigate the process of divorce from deciding whether to even get one all the way through building a new post-divorce relationship with their exes.

Giddy for ‘Your Loss’

Published by Starshine Roshell on October 15, 2018

Hometown Girl Kit Steinkellner Creates, Writes New Facebook Watch Series

You wake up in the middle of the night to pounding rain and realize you’re alone in bed. Your husband never came home — and now he’s not answering his phone. Panicked, you jump in your car and plow into the storm, scouring the slippery streets for his car. What if you don’t find him? you wonder. What if he’s …?

This scenario, or one like it, happened to Class of 2004 Dos Pueblos High School grad Kit Steinkellner a few years back. But it had an exceptionally happy ending: Not only was her spouse okay, but Kit turned the idea into a new web TV series called Sorry for Your Loss.

Premiering on Facebook Watch in September, the show stars Elizabeth Olsen as a young woman struggling to recover from the sudden death of her husband. It has a 94 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the first episode had 2.8 million views in the first week — and it was all inspired by that one horrific night of worry.

Will I Marry You? Why Knot

Published by Starshine Roshell on January 21, 2018

Reverend Starshine Reporting for Duty

Only two men have ever seriously asked me to marry them, and I said yes to both. One was my husband, John, 23 years ago, which led us to say “I do” on a Malibu cliff overlooking the ocean. The other was my beloved friend Mott from college — about two months ago.

Mott wasn’t asking me to be his bride; he was asking me to officiate his wedding to his bride. So I got myself ordained on the interwebs as legit damned clergy — and last weekend I married them. On a Malibu cliff, as luck would have it, overlooking the ocean.

An officiant — also known as a solemnizer (yeesh), celebrant (… better), and vow master (now we’re talkin’) — has to sign the marriage certificate, give a charming little nuptial speech, keep the ceremony rolling along at a perky clip, cue the vows, pronounce the couple hitched, and, importantly, leap out of the photographer’s shot for The Big Kiss. All of those duties suited me just fine.

Love Makes You Fat. Here’s Proof.

Published by Starshine Roshell on September 8, 2015

7 Ways That Listicles Are Making Us Stupid or Why Are We Still Talking About Donald Trump?) So what’s the reason for this now officially undeniable link between mass and matrimony? There’s the obvious answer, of course: that once you’ve found a partner, you stop working so hard on your appearance. You skip a spinning class here and there, stop spending mornings wrestling with your straightening iron and — oh, what the hell — buy your first-ever pair of elastic-waist pants.

Avoiding the Custody Shuffle

Published by Starshine Roshell on September 15, 2011

Continue readingAvoiding the Custody Shuffle

Take This Ring and …

Published by Starshine Roshell on July 1, 2010

Continue readingTake This Ring and …

Relationship Dissection

Published by Starshine Roshell on June 17, 2010

Down underground, in the basement of UCSB’s psychology building, behind two locked doors and another emblazoned with red hazard signs, a man lies in a pitch-black room, his skull in a scanner. Behind a window, lab techs stare silently at black-and-white renderings of his gray matter.

If this clinical scene doesn’t make your heart flutter, your face flush, and your guts flip-flop with jumpy juice, then you’re clearly not a scientist at the university’s Brain Imaging Center.

But Bianca Acevedo is. She’s a postdoctoral research fellow (am I the only one who enjoys calling women fellows?) who studies the neuroscience of love. “It’s a relatively new field, but it’s flourishing quickly,” said Acevedo, who spends her days translating lofty romantic notions into precise scientific terms. Working with the campus’s “Close Relationships Lab,” she uses a “Passionate Love Scale” to evaluate the “neural correlates of long-term pair-bonding.”

All of which would be funny if it weren’t just a little bit creepy.

On Decent Proposals

Published by Starshine Roshell on June 3, 2010

It’s June. Wedding season. Only a few days left to dig out that embossed invitation, navigate your buddy’s online bridal registry, and take a Sharpie to the scuffs on your party shoes.

During the reception, the deejay will spin “Single Ladies,” and you’ll want to hit the dance floor and show off your mad self-spanking skills. But the groom’s gabby Aunt Joan and sozzled Uncle Ted will stop you to tell The Story. The treasured “How He (or She) Proposed” anecdote. It’s told and retold at these events, laying the foundation for the couple’s mutual mythology, the oral history of their romance.

Our culture loves a good “Will you marry me?” narrative. It’s the dragon-slaying folktale of our modern world. How’d he do it? How’d he fell the beast? Did he use wit, or brawn? Did he bury the ring in bean dip or convince the philharmonic to bust out Dramarama’s “Anything, Anything,” falling to one knee and wailing, “Marry me, marry me, marry me …”?

Outrageous proposals abound in recent news. A San Diego tattoo artist inked “Rachel, will you marry me?” onto his own leg. (I’d marry him for his perfect punctuation, but that’s my freak-ness weakness.) A New Jersey valedictorian popped the question by calling her beau and fellow grad to the stage after her speech. A New York fella edited himself into Back to the Future, rented a movie theater, and took his girlfriend to see the flick — in which he shows up on screen, looks into the camera, and asks her to be his wife. They all said yes. Aww.