There comes a time in a relationship when three words can mean a new level of trust and intimacy or profound embarrassment. It's a moment immortalized in pop culture everywhere from Rachel and Ross on “Friends” to the more platonic relationship between Paul Rudd and Jason Segel’s characters in “I Love You, Man.”

With all the pressure around these three words, they are bound to come out a the wrong time, and Glamour’s 2012 Guy survey found that a full 50 percent of men admitted to saying “I love you” by accident (i.e., before they meant to), with the biggest “excuse” being “it just came out” (56 percent). Being drunk at the time (23 percent) and saying it during sex (13 percent) rounded out the top three reasons for premature confessions of devotion.

There was another question that got a “yes” from over half of survey-takers: Saying “I love you” first. 56 percent of the men surveyed by Glamour said that in past relationships, they’ve been the first to say those three words. A study published in the June 2011 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology produced similar results; researchers at MIT surveyed 100 undergraduates and 47 heterosexual couples and found that in two thirds of relationships, men were the first to say “I love you,” and often think about saying it a full six weeks before the women in the relationship.

But the results of the MIT study also showed that those three words may have a different meaning for men and women: Men were happier to be told “I love you” if they hadn’t yet had sex with their partner, while women were happier if their partners confessed their love after a sexual relationship had developed. Those findings suggested to researchers that men associate the phrase with physical fidelity and women see it more as a sign of emotional intimacy and commitment. "Men may be more impulsive in the way they express love, but what love means to men and what love means to women may be very different," study co-author Josh Ackerman, assistant professor of marketing at MIT Sloan School of Management, said in a press release.

In Mumbai the rich build helipads atop their houses, the poor beg not just for food but also water. The condominiums of the wealthy tower above the tarp roofs of the poor so that when they turn to the heavens in prayer they see instead the rich at play. Obvious disparity is a defining feature of Mumbai, and the city's survival and relative harmony despite this is what makes it so fascinating to writers.

I don't recall when I slipped from writing about the mainstream to writing only of the margins. But one evening a few years ago I found myself accompanying a young hijra, an Indian transgender, to the home of her guru for a story I was reporting. I was then invited to attend a brothel madam's birthday party in the red light district. Thereafter it seemed only natural that when the brothel workers went on pilgrimage to a shrine high up in the hills outside Mumbai, that they would invite me along.

With every interview, I learnt a little more of the intimate hardships of poverty. Through every shared experience I saw how great a struggle it was for an already marginalized person to survive in a city with eyes only for the prize of power and wealth. For the courage they displayed, everyone I met deserved to have his or her story told. Then in 2005 I was introduced to a girl called Leela who didn't just have a story, but who became part of a story that captivated India.

Leela was 19, and a bar dancer. Every night she danced fully clothed to Bollywood music in a seedy little bar called Night Lovers. The more energetic and calculated her dancing, the more likely it was that her customers, the men who'd come to watch her, would reward her. If they liked what they saw, they flung money at her. On a good night Leela earned the equivalent of $50. Customers also showed their appreciation with gifts of perfume and offers of money for sex.

Leela was one of 75,000 women who danced in bars. And at the time there were 1,500 such bars in Mumbai. Their aesthetic was a curious blend of a 1970s nightclub and a Bollywood set. But even among the crowd, Leela stood out. Most bar dancers were illiterate. Leela read novels. She had a wicked sense of humor. And she knew without a doubt that she deserved better than her customers. Through hundreds of hours of interviews I found that despite the physical hardship and routine degradation at the hands of customers and cops, Leela's life, relative to the alternative of the street or back in the village was under her own control, and, as far as she was concerned, a happy one.

In the summer of 2005, the local government decided to ban dancing in bars. The decision was a bald attempt to capture the middle class vote, and cost thousands of women their livelihood. Innumerable bar owners, waiters, bouncers, even taxi drivers and tailors who'd earned money from the bars also suffered losses.

Leela's life, which I chronicle in my book Beautiful Thing, was now out of her control. Like the Bollywood films to whose music she danced, it was chaos in the extreme. READ MORE

Do most people recognize sexism in their daily lives? And what does it take to get them to shake their sexist beliefs?

In a recent study titled "Seeing the Unseen" psychologists Janet Swim of Pennsylvania State University and Julia Becker of Philipps University Marburg, Germany, set out to answer these questions.

Over the course of three separate, seven-day-long trials, Swim and Becker asked 120 college undergraduates (82 women and 38 men, ranging from 18 to 26 years old, some from the U.S., some from Germany) to record in a journal sexist comments they encountered on a daily basis. According to Swim, she and Becker hoped to determine whether forcing people to pay attention to less obvious forms of sexism could decrease their endorsement of sexist beliefs.

During the trials, subjects were instructed to note instances of sexist behavior toward women, ranging from unwanted sexual attention to blatantly sexist jokes and derogatory comments.

They were also asked to record subtler actions that many would consider harmless: men calling women "girls, " complimenting them on stereotypically feminine behavior and sheltering them from more "masculine" tasks. Swim and Becker described this less obvious sexism to participants as “benevolent sexism,” a term coined by psychologists Peter Glick and Susan Fiske in a 1996 study to refer to "a paternalistic attitude towards women that idealizes them affectionately," Glick told The Huffington Post.

Want a successful marriage? Make sure you have sex when you're ready.

According to a new study, women who are sexually active early in their adolescence--specifically, before age 16--are more likely to divorce.

Researchers at the University of Iowa used the responses of 3,793 women who are married or have been married at some point in their lives from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth to examine the relationship between the age at which they had their first sexual experience, and the success of their first marriage.

At first glance, the findings seemed alarming: multiple outlets (including this one), reported that up to 47 percent of women who lost their virginity during their teen years divorced within 10 years of getting married--implying that women who lose their virginity during adolescence will inevitably face conflict in their later adult relationships.

In fact, while the age at which sex first occurred was significant in determining women’s likelihood to divorce, more important was whether that sex qualified as “wanted." That's because the earlier women had their first sexual experience, the less frequently the sex was actually wanted. In short, the study's conclusions were less about the correlation between when a girl loses her virginity and her risk of divorce than it was about how the nature of the first sexual experience affects later romantic relationships.

While some of the initial reports about the study alluded to this point, they often did not explore it completely, so we decided to go to the source--lead researcher Anthony Paik--to shed more light on this surprisingly complicated study.