Fappy Gilmore

This column had to be moved (for reasons I should not explain). It's now here. This column references some of the research by Roy Baumeister, a prolific social psychologist. Here's bit from another column that details some of Baumeister's work:

Entertaining a re-up with a guy who treated you cruelly is bizarre -- unless you consider a psychological gotcha called "the Zeigarnik effect." Social psychologists Roy Baumeister and Brad Bushman explain that when a task or goal gets interrupted, the automatic, unconscious part of our brain keeps pinging the conscious part, nagging us to finish up whatever we've left incomplete. (Unfortunately, our subconscious is only interested in getting the thing finished, not whether the guy in question is a complete douche-iopath.)