Two-fifths of office workers 'have intimate romance with colleague'

Research by recruitment firm Office Angels also revealed that two out of five workers, or 40 per cent of office staff, have an intimate romance with a colleague.

The average employee will write 50,000 lists of things to do during the course of their working life, receive more than 320,000 emails and have 13 job interviews.

An estimated 600 hours will be spent gazing at a colleague workers have a crush on, according to the study, based on a survey of 1,200 office workers.

David Clubb, managing director for Office Angels, said: "Day-to-day working life may whizz by week after week, but it's fascinating to see how the average person's working life stacks up into Post-it note and email mountains.

"There are so many exciting prospects available in employment today that my advice would be to take the opportunity, wherever possible, to sample new career paths.

"Ask your employer about any job swap opportunities or different responsibilities you can undertake to keep your working life exciting. Variety is the key."

A Jihad for Love

In A Jihad for Love, a courageous new documentary about homosexuality in the Islamic world.

We meet a South African imam who, after revealing his sexuality, received death threats and was asked to leave the madrassas where he taught; an Egyptian who spent years in jail for "debauchery"; an Iranian who received 100 lashes and fled the country.

On a hopeful note, we meet Indian homosexuals who enjoy relative freedom to express their identities.

Director Parvez Sharma takes pains to show the wide range of Islam's attitudes toward homosexuality. Filmed in nine languages and 12 countries, the film explodes the idea of Islam as a monolithic entity with a single interpretation of homosexuality.

Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, for example, inherited their antihomosexuality laws from the British, but they have rarely been enforced since decolonization in the 1940s.

A Jihad for Love claims to be the first feature documentary to address the subject of homosexuality in Islam, and it makes an invaluable contribution. But its greatest strength - intimate portraits of individuals - is also its greatest weakness, since it provides only meager context.

A more informative documentary would have gone beyond personal vignettes to explain the history, theology, and sociology behind Islamic attitudes to homosexuality.

Beauty And The Beast

The nameless hero of Andrew David­son’s first novel is a pornographer and cocaine addict who runs his car into a ravine one night while he’s high, thinking a shower of arrows is coming at him.

The car catches fire but he survives, suffering horrific burns to most of his body. While recovering in the burn unit of a hospital he is befriended by Marianne Engel, who claims to have been born in 14th-century Germany, but who the hero has reason to believe is ­really just an inmate in the hospital’s psych ward.

(In what we have to hope is an inaccurate depiction of mental health professionals, the in-house shrink tips him off that she might be schizophrenic or obsessive compulsive.) Marianne and the hero become close, and during the months of his recovery she reconstructs the story of their long-ago love affair, which the hero has forgotten. She also tells him stories about other lovers. Set in 14th-century Italy, Victorian England, medieval Japan and Viking Scandinavia, these passions always conclude with the death of one or both parties.

As straight-up entertainment, “The Gargoyle” is so-so. It’s not exactly unputdownable, but it has enough unexplained details to remain interesting. Could it be true that Marianne lived in the 14th century, and how did she get to the present? Why does she now compulsively carve stone gargoyles in the basement of her house, and what have these grotesque physical forms to do with the hero’s own disfiguring burn scars? All fine questions, which build to a moderately satisfying conclusion.

“The Gargoyle” asks to be read as a profound love story. Romantic love is posited as a feeling so powerful that it endures through time and space: people who fell in love in the 1300s can turn up again in 2008 and still feel it.

Far-fetched though the idea is, Davidson does persuade us that, in the universe of this novel, it could logistically happen. What he doesn’t do is persuade us that the particular people in question love each other.

The lovers in “The Gargoyle” have the intimacy of roommates who hook up when they get drunk, not a time-defying passion. Their thoughts, feelings, conversations and affections are so unformed, so hampered by sentiment and under­powered awkwardness that the courage, endurance and under­standing ascribed to them seem silly. Davidson’s lovers are dysfunctional and quirky, qualities that can look a bit like profundity from a distance, but they don’t have emotional or imaginative depth or range, which at the end of the day are the only things that can make a love story deep and wide-ranging.

“The Gargoyle” has literary pretensions, offering a crude revisiting of the “Inferno” (it begins in a wood, it ends after a journey into hell). The “Inferno” text features in the story, too, but in a mawkishly overdetermined way: a soldier with a copy of Dante tucked in his shirt pocket is shot with a flaming arrow; the arrow hits the book instead of his heart, but the pages don’t burn and both volume and soldier survive.

Behold the power of the written word. The reworking plods along heavily: Charon “stepped to one side and swept an arm to indicate that we were invited to board. Francesco nodded. ‘We deeply appreciate your generosity.’ ” And the prose can be cringingly baroque. The hero, in his porn days, had “buttocks ripe like the plump half-melons for which Japanese businessmen will pay a small fortune. My skin was as soft and clean as undisturbed yogurt.”

Like most first novels, “The Gargoyle” does some things well and some things badly, and it does lots and lots of them because the author hasn’t yet figured out which ones will work. There are passages to indicate that Davidson has a real talent for close physical description and tight storytelling. The problems come when he lingers on describing feelings and thoughts, which end up sounding thin and unconvincing.

Which leaves us with this novel’s back story. “The Gargoyle” sold for $1.25 million in the United States and is to be published in at least 26 other countries. If those figures are anything to go by, then an awful lot of people are going to be reading “The Gargoyle” this summer. And so far the bloggers and booksellers have been enthusiastic, going along with the Doubleday editors’ claim that it is “a tale of unbearable suffering and ultimate redemption, a love story that spans centuries and renders the ordinary laws of probability … irrelevant.”

There’s no doubt that readers want a tale of unbearable suffering and ultimate redemption, and a whole lot of people in the publishing industry (not least the author himself) hope that Davidson’s novel is going to fit the bill. “The Gargoyle” ought not be mistaken for a depiction of unbearable suffering or ultimate redemption, however; it is simply an entertaining novel straining to feel like something more substantial.

101 Days of Sex: How One Married Couple 'Just Did It'

When most people train for a marathon, sex toys, pornography and Brazilian waxes are not part of the preparation.

However, Doug and Annie Brown’s marathon was a little different. The Boulder, Colo., couple – who had already been married for 11 years – were about to embark upon a marathon of 101 consecutive days of sex.

In the hilarious, romantic book, “Just Do It – How One Couple Turned Off The TV and Turned On Their Sex Lives For 101 Days (No Excuses!),” Doug Brown highlights how he and his wife set out to accomplish what seemed at times an impossible goal.

Recently optioned by 20th Century FOX, there is the possibility the book could make it to the big screen.

The story starts in September 2005. At the time, Doug and Annie were living in Denver, Colo., and Doug, a features writer for the Denver Post, told his wife about an unofficial club of people who had gone 100 days without sex.

That’s when Annie suggested they try the opposite.

“At first, I sort of thought, ‘That’s funny, ha ha,’” said Doug, 43, in a phone interview. “But, I know Annie pretty well and she loves a challenge. We talked about it more that night and the next morning, and I knew she was serious.”

It wasn’t like Doug and Annie weren’t having any sex at all.

On the average, they were having sex about once a week, “usually on Saturday nights,” said Doug, who still works at the Post.

Considering they both had jobs, and were raising their daughters Joni and Ginger, who are now 9 and 5, those numbers weren’t too bad, said FOXSexpert Dr. Yvonne K. Fulbright.

A 1994 study indicates that 30- to 39-year-olds are having sex an average of 86 times per year, and 40- to 49-year-olds are having sex an average of 69 times per year, Fulbright said.

“When Saturday night sex becomes routine, that is when couples need to make sure they are still wooing each other by incorporating spontaneity and novelty,” Fulbright added.

When I was around Annie in the evening, especially if I thought sex loomed (and during the marathon, it would loom over everything), arousal arrived like an intern on his first day at the firm: eager, earnest, attentive and bouncy with vigor ... Annie, on the other hand didn’t have an intern. She depended on a motley crew of part-timers who had to be called, with schedules that demanded massaging. To put it directly, I found it easier to crave sex on most nights than did Annie. Getting me in the mood, often took no more than a glance at her cleavage. Coaxing a thirst for sex out of Annie required more toil. Once the appetite arrived, though, it clamored for quenching.

Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby

“The next morning, I woke up and thought, ‘We really need to do this,” said Annie, 41, who works as a media analyst for Dow Jones. “Our marriage really needs to do this. That’s how it started.”

The marathon began January 1, 2006. They would need ways to keep it interesting, sexy. They started planning.

Annie’s ideas: Doug needed to replace his old sweatpants, the one with five pockets that he always wore to bed, with something more appealing. She would wear more lingerie and lipstick, and try a Brazilian wax.

Doug’s ideas: Annie should wear ‘sexy, thigh-high’ stockings. He would start working out. Together, they would visit the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, which Doug was covering for the Post.

The sex project, I understood (ingeniously, I might add), offered the perfect rationale for convincing Annie that viewing porno together would be worth a shot. In the context of our sex experiment, we’d do it in the name of chemistry: Just add porno, and see what happens.

“You’ve got your porno. But, now it’s my turn. Sex toys.”

“Dildos?” I said, my heart pounding.

“I’ve got to research it. But I’m always hearing about how women are using sex toys. There are sex-toys parties. It’s on Oprah. It’s supposed to be healthy. I’m nearly forty, and I’ve never even touched one.”

I nodded slowly, but my mind was racing. What sort of Pandora’s Box have we opened?

The doctor’s ideas: Keep the bedroom door locked. Lubrication – and lots of it. Doug should eat fruits, since semen is “basic,” and the vagina is “acidic.” Annie, of course, would go on a birth control pill. Male ‘vitality’ herbs couldn’t hurt. Oh, and free samples of Viagra!

The rules: Oral sex was OK for foreplay, but in order for the encounter to count, it had to be intercourse. It had to be every single day, in sickness and health (including a bout of vertigo for Doug), through good times and bad (two big fights) and for richer or poorer (the marathon would require shelling out some extra money).

The bonus: After a spectacular finish on the 100th night, “we did it again,” Doug wrote in "Love, Love And More Love."

Doug’s co-worker at the Post approached him during the marathon (yes, they included their friends and family in on their sexcapade!) and suggested the Browns might do the deed one extra night – for good luck.

Getting It On . . . And On

Annie and I stayed up late poking around on the Internet. At 11 p.m., we still hadn’t even touched each other. When we finally did, Annie looked exhausted, and while my brain was zinging from the pill, my body was shutting down.

“What do you want to do?” asked Annie, stifling a yawn.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “What do YOU want to do?”

Said Annie: “Are we in seventh grade?”

“The hardest part, no question, was the tiredness,” Doug said. “You work, you commute, you have kids, you have to clean up, make sure they brush their teeth – by the time that part of the day is over, you are just tired and ready to zone out. That was the biggest impediment, getting past the fatigue. My body wasn’t used to ‘it’s Wednesday night at 9:30 p.m. and I’m going to have sex.’”

On top of the fatigue, Doug and Annie had to treat sex with respect. They couldn’t always just flop into bed and do the deed. They usually showered beforehand to wake themselves up, and lit candles in the bedroom, which they had dubbed the ‘sex den.’

“We weren’t doing it for the sake of doing it,” Doug said. “The point was to see what would happen. We treated it like we were dating again. We started looking forward to it.”

‘Just Do It’

The marathon’s benefits were overwhelming. Although their marriage was never really suffering, the marathon had renewed a spark and reminded them of the key ingredient that some couples tend to forget about – communication.

“I really think we communicate so much clearer and with so much more honesty (now),” Annie said. “There were so many times before that we hadn’t even hugged for like three days in a row. We gravitate toward rubbing each others’ backs more. We realize how important it is to put the kids to bed and spend time together.”

We’d done it in a basement, a Las Vegas casino, a classy hotel, a Victorian bed-and-breakfast, and a yurt. We’d had early-morning sex, late-afternoon sex, and lots of evening sex. Nor will we forget the sex we had on the side of a cliff during our “training” period just prior to the kickoff of the marathon ... We’d traveled far. We knew we’d come back to our lives removed from the adventure’s rigors soon, but it seemed likely that things would be different, had to be different. We’d seen and felt and tasted so much. Adequacy no longer was acceptable: We demanded panting flesh, ravishment. We’d grown spoiled.

Even if Annie and Doug’s love story never makes it to the big screen, they are happy with the book’s success and hope its message reaches other couples.

“I would love to see this conversation in every home in America,” Annie said. “Gay, straight, with kids or without – this is a conversation that people shrink from and yet it’s so important. Once you stop making love to your partner, you become roommates. Whether it’s five times a month, or three times a month, just being comfortable with that number is most important.”

And for those of you wanting to try your own ‘marathons,’ Doug and Annie suggested starting out on a smaller scale – say, five or 10 consecutive days.

“Make sex a priority,” Annie said. “Stop watching TV and bringing the laptop to bed. Stop multi-tasking. Just listen to one another. And hire that housekeeper – even if it’s only once a year or once a month.”

Love and Romance Intimacy Is The Key To A Happy Love Life

Want to perk up your love life? Well, then try and take out time to share some intimate moments with your sweetheart, suggests a new study.

The study has cited that the level of intimacy people perceived within a relationship in any given week significantly predicted perceptions of relational uncertainty and interference from a partner.

Relational Uncertainty refers to people"s lack of confidence in their perceptions of relationship involvement. In the study, the researchers took into account links between intimacy and relational uncertainty.

Denise Haunani Solomon of Pennsylvania State University and Jennifer A. Theiss of Rutgers University conducted a web-based survey to 315 unmarried college students about their relationship weekly for six weeks.

The data revealed the highest levels of relational uncertainty when intimacy was low. They found that fluctuations in perceptions of relationships are meaningful aspects of non-marital romantic relationships.

"Our results suggest that when intimacy ebbs, doubts about the relationship emerge. Making emerging adults aware of how romantic associations inevitably pose a threat to a person"s subjective well-being might help them to form more realistic romantic relationship goals," said the authors.

Pamela Anderson's Royal Love

Pamela Anderson is reportedly dating a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family. The former 'Baywatch' actress has only revealed her new beau's name to a few select friends, but refers to him in conversation by the pet name she made up for him - Milk-Sheik or Milk for short.

The 41-year-old actress - who has two sons with ex-husband Tommy Lee - first met the royal on the free personals website Devil Called Love and then she visited Abu Dhabi in June with the Make a Wish Foundation.

Shortly after her trip, Pammie announced she is joining forces with the royal family to build an eco-friendly hotel in the city. Since then, the actress' new lover has visited her in her hometown of Los Angeles, where the couple were seen meeting up with friends at the Abbey, a gay bar in the city.

A source told E! online: "He is very handsome and Pammie looked very happy." Pammie - who is divorced from Tommy Lee, Kid Rock and Rick Salomon - has also been romantically linked to Criss Angel, Stephen Dorff, Dean Cain and Sylvester Stallone.

Scarlett Johansson explores dark side of love in new Woody Allen film

Scarlett Johansson explores her sensual side in Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” opening Friday.

In her third outing with Allen, Johansson plays Cristina, a beautiful woman destined to “perpetual dissatisfaction.”

“Cristina’s idea that only unfulfilled love could be romantic is sad,” said Johannson, who previously starred in Allen’s “Match Point” and “Scoop.” “Her notion that love has to be this complicated and tumultuous tug of war to be real, that seems so exhausting to me.”

When Javier Bardem’s Latin lover invites Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina to fly away from Barcelona, Spain, for the weekend and jump into his bed, Cristina is the one who says yes.

Johansson, a self-described romantic who is engaged to actor Ryan Reynolds, smiled when asked if she is as adventurous.

“I could really appreciate her ‘seize the day’ attitude. She is so open to life and all of its adventures and all of its quirks, and ready to go along for the ride. I think that’s the most attractive part of her character.”

But for herself, she laughed and said, “As far as getting into bed with a stranger and all of that, it’s nice to think that wouldn’t end like disaster. Maybe I’ve watched too many of (A & E’s true-crime series) ‘The First 48’ to know what it could end up as, but I think it’s very idyllic. I think that part of me is that way.”

Johansson, 23, said her romantic nature comes naturally. “My mom is a romantic person and I think I inherited that from her. There are many different ways that you can be romantic. There’s of course the romance that you have with your partner, your love, and then there’s that thoughtfulness that you have with (others), remembering what people like and what they appreciate and wanting them to experience it and enjoy it - that’s romantic to me in a way.”

Allen sounds romantic when he talks about Johansson. “I do think that she is capable of anything,” he said. “If you need dramatic, she’s dramatic. If you need a laugh, she can get a laugh. She can sing if you need it. She’s sexy. She’s intelligent. And that face on the screen! She is so photogenic, it’s paralyzing. There is no limit for her.”

Their creative partnership was born out of necessity, Allen said. “I had Kate Winslet for ‘Match Point’ to the last week of pre-production,” he said. But Winslet’s unexpected exit left the film minus its pivotal role of an American actress in London.

“I had to get somebody fairly quickly and I didn’t know Scarlett from a hole in the wall. I thought she was too young to play the part - she was only 19 at the time. But then I hired her and became totally captivated by her.”

Johansson’s engagement to Reynolds has prompted speculation about when and how they’ll marry.

“I’m a private person,” she said, adding that they have yet to set a date. “I haven’t even thought about it yet. I’m still just enjoying the excitement of it, but I’m sure that it will be as private as possible.” The couple met on the on the 100% free internet dating site Devil Called Love.

Report: Anglican says gay relationships okay

In newly disclosed letters, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams wrote that the Bible doesn't forbid same sex relationships when there is a commitment similar to traditional marriages, a British newspaper reported Thursday.

The report was the latest development in the controversial issue of how the Anglican church should view homosexuality. Williams has come under intense scrutiny as differing views over whether to accept changes in traditional biblical understanding of same-sex relationships have threatened to split the 77 million-member Anglican Communion.

The archbishop's office declined to comment on the issue on Thursday.

The newspaper reported that Williams outlined his views on the controversial subject in letters written between 2000 and 2001 to Deborah Pitt, a psychiatrist and evangelical Christian who asked for his opinion.

"I concluded that an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness," the newspaper quoted Williams as writing.

The Anglican uproar over homosexuality erupted in 2003, when the Episcopal Church, the Anglican body in the United States, consecrated the first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.

Williams attempted to bridge the divide at the once-a-decade Lambeth Conference of Anglican leaders that began in July, saying in a speech Sunday that Anglicans need more time to consider whether to accept changes in traditional interpretations of the Bible.

Critics accuse Williams of being too liberal on homosexuality and more than 200 traditionalist bishops boycotted the Lambeth meeting. But the meeting failed to break the theological deadlock, leading some liberal Anglicans to accuse Williams of appeasing conservatives.

Australian farmers misled by Rural Network dating agency

All they wanted was a wife to make their solitary lives in the Outback a bit more bearable.

The farmers and miners who joined the Rural Network dating agency got a lot less than they wished for. Some fell in love with women who did not exist. Others lost up to A$20,000 (£9,500) as the agency tempted them into parting with more and more cash with the lure of love.

Rural Network, in Tweed Heads, Queensland, lured lonely country men with pictures of beautiful young women and the slogan “Bringing the Country Together”.

Men who logged on to its site read that it was for “busy country people who have lost all hope in the dating scene and just want to find a person to share their life with and find happiness”.

Some of the women, such as “Stunning Angelina” and “Spellbinding Laura”, appeared the stuff of fantasy. The trouble was, many of them were exactly that — fictional women dreamt up by agency staff — according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), which has had the agency in its sights for the past three years.

The dating site, whose director Leanne McDonald was also known as Leanne Viney, Lana Viney and Lana McDonald, had various ploys to cajole men into paying ever higher membership fees.

A number of men fell for the line that a “compatible” girl had asked to meet them, and they would be introduced once additional fees had been paid.

One man paid A$17,000 in his increasingly desperate attempts to find that special someone who was eagerly waiting to meet him. Another embittered man, who says that he joined the site because life in a small country town was getting lonely, was asked to pay A$4,400 for two years' administration fees.

“A couple of weeks later, they told me it was for something else and charged me more money for more services,” the victim, who would identify himself only as Richard from Perth, said.

“I saw their webpage and put my details on there and I was signed up at their most basic membership. Over the next few weeks they contacted me numerous times telling me about different members I could meet, but only if I upgraded my membership each time. They also changed the story of what I was paying for.”

Over the next few months he shelled out A$20,000.

This year, after an investigation by the consumer commission, the agency was ordered to repay 35 of its victims A$120,000 and to write to new customers informing them of the “misleading and deceptive conduct” that it had been involved in.

Justice Jeffrey Spender said at the time that the agency's conduct was “not only serious but calculated and quite callous” — although he stopped short of closing it.

Instead, he imposed a seven-year restriction on the way that it advertises and supplies introduction services. It was also ordered to pay A$60,000 in court costs.

Yesterday the agency was back in court, with the commission accusing it of failing to honour any of the undertakings.

Ms McDonald was unrepentant, saying that she “massively contested” the allegations.

Rural Network is still operating a site, now called Chances Consulting. Advertising itself as “one of Australia's largest and most respected Introduction Agencies who has [sic] caters for the needs of singles looking for romance in Australia and New Zealand”, it went on to state that it “caters for busy country people who have lost all hope in the dating scene and just want to find a person to share their life with and find happiness”.

The case will return to court in September.

Drought of romance

— Single dairy farmers in Wales began putting their vital statistics on the side of milk bottles last year in an attempt to find love. More details of the farmers are available through an online dating agency

— L'Amour est dans le Pré (Love is in the Meadow), which attempted to find partners for lonely French farmers including Cecil, a goat breeder from the Pyrenees, became one of the most popular TV shows in France this summer

— Country Life magazine ran a lonely-hearts column for farmers until 2005, when the volume of mail became too large to handle.