I have never been one to be cautious in love. I’ve been known to lead with my whole heart, leaving my head behind. I’ve learned the hard way that this can sometimes be the equivalent of walking blindfolded into a fire.
So now I am more cautious. I think about how my actions will affect love in the long-term. I hold my tongue when I feel like saying something that might alter the course. And I step back whenever I sense myself becoming attached to someone who might hurt me. In other words, I have become more sensible.
And somehow, I always end up feeling a bit hurt, and a bit resentful that I might never be able to love like I did the first time.
I’ve often been told that you never get over your first love. You get over them. No matter how badly things ended though, you still linger in the magic that was your first time feeling like anything in the world is possible.
I still wonder if I’ll ever be able to love that fearlessly again, drop my gaurd and just take chances without thinking or worrying about where things will end up.
Or, is it better to be sensible when it comes to love?
Is there anything worse than being in love… and sharing your experiences with others only to have their judgment belittle your own?
I’ve always believed the importance of keeping an open mind and listening to most everyone’s commentary about the things I’m going through. But when it comes to love, I’ve learned to trust my own head and heart. This is why, perhaps, I learned no keep quiet about matters of the heart and choosing only writing it down.
The truth is that other people will keep you grounded. They might sound cynical when they say things might not work out. It’s hard to hold your tongue too and not act discouraged upon hearing them voice their seemingly irrational opinions. It’s ironic too when even the most happily married people doubt the possibility of two people meeting and falling in love.
Shakespeare did write that journeys end in lovers meeting. Can’t it just be that simple? Why does sharing love with others make everything seem so much more complicated?
If you can answer that question then you are much smarter than I.
At the end of the day though, I’ll stand by my conviction that you cannot go wrong when you follow your heart. This is something I know to be true. It’s why I do the things I do–like writing to you and sharing this blog and these words with the world.
What if you met someone who you felt like you had known your whole life? And what if the attraction and connection was mutual? What if the conversation felt so natural that you felt inclined to immediately call them a good friend? What if you went so far as to consider the possibility that they might be the one?
Then, after a few days together, what if they told you they were going to the farthest place possible, on the other side of the world, in a completely different hemisphere where you would not even experience the same seasons… would you follow them?
What would you do?
It is quite possible that a story like this exists, is being written and is inspired by real life. Had it been fictional, the hero and herione would still be together–at least in the same time zone.
But I wonder, dear soulmate and readers alike, has this ever happened to you? How much would you give up, how far would you go, what would you do if you knew who you wanted to be with at the end of the day?
I’ve learned a lot over the past few years. One thing I’ve learned is to beware of emotional attachment.
I recall when I felt something rare for someone a few years ago who then made me feel punished for doing so. Since then, I do not get involved when deep matters of the heart are concerned.
I’ve learned to convince myself that I live with an open heart, when I know deep down its buried under lock and key, hidden behind a barbed wire fence, and shielded over with a layer of bulletproof steel.
I remember a long time ago, when I found myself dancing in the arms of an intriguing stranger, I knew that nothing would become of it. I knew that the sun would rise the next day and we would resume our lives as though nothing happened. And as quickly and easily as two trains running on opposite tracks, we would lose touch and forget that we ever passed each other in that fleeting moment in time.
So what’s to be done then, when it comes to playing by the rules of this this 21st century love–if there is even such a thing?
I’ve learned to make the most of every intimate encounter, however brief it may be. I’ve learned to relish the moments when I’m held, cherish the times I’ve been kissed and absolutely be swept away in those moments when I am wholeheartedly wanted by someone, however short that time may be–be it a dance across a porch floor at midnight or a morning in someone’s arms.
Because after all… every lit bit of love is something, is it not?
To the soulmate I am yet to meet:
Stranger, I can’t wait to love you
your face, concealed in the humble
glimpses of light reflected in people’s eyes,
I have met on the streets, I have let
men’s embrace and undying moments
incline your return down my path
what ends did you trade along the way?
your voice, I have never heard
but when I do, I will know it was you
disguised in another, how easily we forget
nothing lasts, nothing is lost
sun sets on the past, we rise anew,
Lover, I can wait to know you
I remember the way she said my name. I remember the songs that she told me reminded her of me. I remember the way she said s
She missed me. I remembered all these things as I sat at my desk this afternoon and stared blankly at my computer screen.
And then I could feel a wave of sadness wash over me the way the ocean breaks over a rocky coast–pouring into every crevice before withdrawing with the tide once more.
I wonder where love goes when it’s gone. Two of my favorite quotes are from Washington Irving, who said, “There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief… and unspeakable love.”
The other quote is slightly reminiscent of the solitary image of a lonely wave returning to the shore. “Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.”
I thought of these things this weekend as I sat down by the water and watched the waves pour themselves over the seaweed covered rocks. They softened the landscape with their melancholy rhythm.
And so I waited for the tide to soften the sharp edges–as they do to sea glass. After all, whenever something is broken–be it a heart or a piece of glass–it is hardly beautiful at first. But after enough time has passed, the edges get softened and then a beautiful souvenir is revealed.
I’m not quite there yet–just waiting for the edges to smooth.
It takes a great deal of poise to navigate the waters of heartbreak with grace. It takes a lot of courage to dare to choose the high road over one paved with bitterness and regret. It takes a lot of growing, learning, leaping and hoping to believe that something beautiful is waiting up ahead.
There was a moment today where I caught myself falling in and out of love with old memories. As I walked to work this morning a song came on the radio… the song–the one I used to sing and dance to once upon a time. It was hauntingly beautiful to hear it again.
Most people have certain songs that bring them back to different places in their lives. But after you lose a friend or a lover, some songs can become emotional landmines, leaving you to quickly change the station for fear of remembering what that love felt like.
I used to hide from this particular song.because I couldn’t bear to see it top the list of “Most Played.”
But today I made a point just to listen to it. Instead of changing the station, I relished the melody just like I used to. And when the song ended, as it always does, I realized that it did not resurface all the old feelings of hurt and loss but rather the simple notion that what I felt was real, and more beautiful than any song.
Is it possible to be in love with someone who you know nothing about? This very question is perhaps the heart and soul of these letters–the constant wondering if it is possible to put your love on hold for someone who might never show up.
While I don’t always believe in love at first sight, I believe in chemistry at first sight. I have always believed that I will know who I am supposed to be with simply by that instant connection.
It’s rare, it doesn’t come around often, and it often leaves me speechless whenever I encounter it. It’s that pinnacle moment when you know your life is suddenly and drastically about to change (and hopefully for the better, I might add).
I wonder now, as I write this letter, if anything will become of that stranger I saw down at the pier on Saturday night… we will see!
Of all the things I’ve learned in the past few months, I have found the most valuable lesson when it comes to life and love is to simply just go with it.
Love takes some crazy turns, and I’ll admit that I have most always tried to prepare myself for them. In the past I tried to protect myself from being hurt by never admitting to someone how I felt for them. I denied my heart at the expense of it being broken. I denied someone the opportunity to be really and wholly loved. And in my active pursuit to prevent myself from being hurt, I ended up hurting myself even more.
Since then I have tried so desperately not to attach myself to people. I kiss without thinking anything of it, and I go out to dinner with guys with no expectation of doing anything more. I try my best to control the way I feel for someone.
But recently, I have learned that it is best not to overanalyze matters of the heart. Love is dangerously unpredictable and can chart a vast course that will take you to some unexpected places. Don’t wonder where the road will lead, or what each kiss means. Just take everything as it comes and simply go with it.
In one of my favorite books, The Time Traveler’s Wife, author Audrey Niffenegger writes: “Don’t you think it’s better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?”
What do you think?
Happiness isn’t always easy. But when it does come around, in small bursts or for a long-term stay, it is richly rewarded.
There are certain people and places that bring you back to yourself–that ground you and make you feel whole once again.
Last night I caught up with an old summertime friend over dinner and a bottle of wine. The more we fell deeper into conversation and laughter, the more I felt like I was coming home.
I cannot articulate the feeling I get when I reunite with old friends from home. It’s strange and beautiful to be overwhelmed with a kind of happiness and love that seems to sweep away all the wintertime cobwebs that tangle my heart in its coldness and solitude–leaving me feeling lost and vulnerable.
And just when I feel at a loss for words, I am swept off my feet by the feeling of going home. It’s really a love affair I have with this echanting place where I return to every summer.
Home has a way of bringing you back to yourself. Whenever I feel lost, I find myself there.
There is something so rich and rewarding about returning home after a long year away. Reuniting with familiar faces, running down my favorite dirt road, tasting the salt on my skin and feeling the weight of the summer sky overhead remind me that anything is possible. And I wonder now, as I write, is it possible to be seduced by a place? I think so.
But even more than that, it is completely and wholly possible to be seduced by love.
Once upon a time there lived a girl who believed in everything beautiful in the world- like love and dreams. But more importantly, she believed in the most dangerous thing of all: the good in people.
One beautiful summer night this girl fell in love- her first big love. And the whole world looked different. Every moment she spent with him was better than the next. And together they watched the moon spill out over the bay every night, watched stars steal across the evening sky, and even chased fireflies that ceased to die in the morning light.
It was magical.
And then winter came and tested them. Their love had endured another summer. But by the third summer things had changed. Though they were together on the same island off some distant coast, he had a change of heart. And the distance between the two of them could now be measured in hundreds and thousands of miles.
But then that autumn, as the leaves began to fall, this girl lost her grandfather, her lifelong pen pal. With no one to write to, she set out to write to her soulmate- someone who could never reject her love.
But that beautiful house on the hill, on an island far away, that belonged to her grandparents for nearly half a century, was now just an asset. And that nightmare of it ever being sold was beginning to blur into reality.
And so now the girl wakes alone, in a city far away. Summer no longer has its same rhythmn. Love no longer has the same feeling.
But this is not where the story ends… somewhere along the way she finds love again, in some distant land, in pages far away.
I watched a documentary about the elderly. Toward the end of the film an old man was being interviewed and through his tears he explained how he had nothing to live for now that his wife had passed away.
He went on to explain how he had no one to share stories with. He had no one to talk to about daily things that happened to him. He had no one to share his life with that could make it as meaningful and colorful as his wife did.
I began to think about how completely paralyzing love is when it is lost. The only thing I can imagine to be more painful is having someone withdraw their love and have a change of heart.
When someone who has loved you passes away, there is comfort in the knowledge that they loved you- that they would have loved you forever if life had given them a chance.
But when someone you love suddenly changes their mind and takes away their love for you, there is an absence that is starkly similar to death. It is as if you lost somebody- a person you beleived to be someone different than he or she turned out to be.
And that is how I felt when someone I loved suddenly had a change of heart… I thought I was the only one who felt for a few dark moments that I had no one to share my life with.
I realize that it is normal to feel a tragic sense of loss when love gets lost. I realize though that life does go on, and fortunately for me, I have you to believe in.
Dear Soulmate,
I looked for you today, but I simply could not find you. In your absence, I began to unravel some memories of former loves- as I usually do when I stand unenthused waiting for the train. My hands were buried deep into my pockets and my face hidden under my scarf. But somehow none of the memories that came to me were enough to keep me warm.
There is a kind of cold that is more mild, usually accompanied with snow. There is the kind of cold that sends you indoors to build fires and make hot cocoa. And there is the kind of raw cold that is usually intensely dry air that can be carried on the wings of an Arctic wind.
And then there is the kind of cold that people are able to emit simply in their silence and distance. This kind of cold is the coldest of all.
And I realized, as I watched my breath dissapear like smoke against the faded glow of street lights, that sometimes you have to look ahead to the future for warmth.
And when I do look ahead, like standing on the edge of a subway platform peering down the tracks to see where they bend around the tunnel, I can’t help but believe that if they led me to you- then I’m on the right track.
How do you forget the way it felt to kiss someone, to touch them, to love them? When do you wake up and forget the way it used to be when your life felt complete and whole, a perfect harmony of happiness and bliss?
How do you forget the way it felt to be on top of the world?
Probably the worst advice that has ever been given by anyone is “move on.” The words slip so easily from the mouths of those we love, even the mouths of those who we’ve kissed in the most intimate of moments. But what happens when someone you have been so completely in love with, tells you to “move on”
Where to, I might ask?
Cold Sunday mornings like today make me wake feeling discomforted by the fact that I have simply gotten used to being out of that kind of beautifully wholesome love. What people really mean when they say, “move on,” is simply just don’t look back. The moment you look behind at how good you once felt in your past is the moment where the present feels incomplete.
So without looking back I get through the days, looking ahead to you instead. But still I cannot forget where I’ve been.
And I wonder still, is it really better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?
Dear Soulmate,
There are so many times when I convince myself that I have seen you or perhaps will see you in the near future. Every corner I turn, every door that I open, I always have this hope that our paths will cross.
I wonder, is it wrong to always be thinking of you in this frantic treasure hunt kind of way? Why can’t I just sit back and wait for you to come to me, or at least wait for time to author our story? Why do I have this incessant urge to pursue you.
I suppose the easiest answer is that I feel at a loss when I look around at other people holding hands and kissing. I feel at a loss when I watch movies where Hollywood stages captivating romances entangled in real life scenarios.
I feel at a loss without you.
the notebook's allie and noah
When I look around at everyone else who appears in love, I too want to share laughter, kisses and stories with someone who cares about me. While I am certainly not alone, I sometimes cannot help but feel it. This I suppose only makes me human.
While you may argue that my longing for you is simply a product of the holidays that remind me that it is the season for love and being loved, or maybe the cold nights followed by colder mornings, my yearning for you stems from another notion.
I fear that you will have missed so much of me by the time I finally meet you. And I fear that I will miss so much of you by the time you finally meet me.
While I am still young it is easy to harken back to my past loves, as those memories are not buried too deeply in my past. I recall how I grew with all of them, and how they all saw me at my best and worse. I suppose you, too, will grow with me during a different more mature stage of my life. And you, too, will see me at my best and my worst.
What gives me comfort is knowing that who we are today has everything to do with where we are coming from
Dear Soulmate,
I’ll admit that it’s sometimes difficult to believe in you. I’ll admit that there are times I doubt that you will ever come around. I’ll admit that there are times I am convinced our paths will never cross.
I realize though, as I sit here in seemingly idle thought, that these doubts only make me human.
Perhaps it is the holidays that always have a way of making me feel more alone instead of grateful for the love of family and friends I have all around me.
Truthfully, I just want to feel wanted again. The only way I can even imagine what that feeling may be like is if I go back- into that dreadfully prohibited place where memories cease to collect dust but instead flow freely despite the cluttered avenues of my mind.
What makes my past experiences so appealing is the thought that somewhere amidst all the memories of kissing in the rain and stealing affectionate glances, there arrives the curious and intriguing possibility that my past may just be my ticket to the future.
Have I already met you, soulmate?
There’s an old expression that says there’s a reason why some people in your past never make it to your future. Instead those people become either polished trophies or rusted antiques stored in boxes labeled “experience” stacked somewhere in memory’s attic.
If you are in fact a polished trophy, need you be stored only in my memory? Why can’t I parade you around instead, showing the world that I have found that all-encompassing achievement, life’s most beautiful reward. That I, too, have found love.
Perhaps I have simply forgotten you- like a trophy in the attic, gone unnoticed even after all the effort it took to earn it. Maybe love goes unnoticed sometimes.
Maybe one day I will reopen those boxes and find you.
Dear Soulmate,
Is it possible to miss someone whom you have never met?
This question has been on my mind for quite some time now. Perhaps it is the absence of a love that used to be that makes me long for a restorative kind of love to fill the void.
Because once you have walked beside someone you have loved, the walk is that much longer alone. Once you have held the hand of someone you have loved, your hands no longer feel as warm in their absence. Once you have sat in silence beside someone you have loved, you long for some kind of distracting noise when they have left. Anything to fill the silence- to fill the empty space where love used to be.
Where are you, dear soulmate? The first snow of the season has fallen outside my window and I dare not venture outside to make footprints in the snow without you.
This is the season for romance, a time for love.
Someday I know you will walk with me for miles, in what will feel like only a few feet in your company. Someday I know you will warm my cold hands. You will sit beside me and I will wonder, in silence, how I ever lived my life without you.
I know these things because I believe in you that much.
I believe it was in the opening scene of the movie Bridget Jones’s Diary where leading lady Bridget Jones (played by Renee Zellweger) delivers the line, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that when one part of your life starts going okay, another falls spectacularly to pieces.” Although this is a modern spin off of the first lines in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the context holds true.
Perhaps you may read into this more optimistically, believing that it is not possible for life’s equilibriuim to always remain belanced between the good and bad events, but that it lends its balance in favor of the good. But life simply does not work like this. With the sun there will inevitably come clouds.
Dear Soulmate,
So here we are again, a thousand worlds away from one another but together in this lifetime.
I don’t even know anything about you, but at the same time I feel I know everything. It’s an incredibly complicated but beautiful contradiction.
I bet you like to sail. I bet you sleep in late. I bet you like to drive when your upset, shifting gears and switching songs. I bet you have brown hair that you never style but it always falls across your forehead perfectly, even when you wake up. I bet you have wonderful plans for the future that make your eyes light up when someone asks you where you see yourself in five or ten years. And somehow, I hope the answer is with me.
Love is hard though, it’s a difficult journey. You know that scene in Jerry MaGuire where Dorothy (Renee Zellweger) is standing in the kitchen and tells her sister Laurel that she is in love. This is an incredibly brave thing to say because sometimes, especially at the beginning of a relationship, there is so much uncertainty and doubt that suppresses the excitement and butterflies from that first kiss.
People often tell one another that they love them without regard to the consequences. Love changes though. People learn that they cannot promise each other everything, that they cannot fill their expectations. When Dorothy tells Jerry that she deserves his soul- all of him, in order for their love to truly work, there is a moment of tragedy in the realization that it may not work out after all.
You know that pivotal moment when you realize that love is not on the same page anymore? I hope that we never feel that way with one another. I know that we will fight, I know we will disagree. I know we will get upset. We are only human.
And I cannot promise you that it will be easy for me to tell you that I love you for the first time, simply because it will have taken me so long to say. The reason for this is because I know that when I tell you that I love you, it will be forever.
I know you will promise me just the same because I deserve that much, too.
The point is not that you’ve been hurt or fell in love and it wasn’t all you dreamed about. It’s about trying again. It’s about seeing the world in a new way- learning from the past but moving on. It’s essentially the essence of what makes this life so beautiful, and in many ways as enchanting as a fairy tale.
But to answer her question, a soulmate is that real kind of love that you never fall out of. It is the kind my parents and grandparents have. Their love stories are equally fairy tales in their own way. It’s not a Hollywood movie where the two leading characters run into each others arms at the end. It’s life.
Dear Soulmate,
It is difficult to imagine what you may be doing right now as I write to you. Perhaps you are running your fingers through your hair while talking on your cell phone, leaning back in your favorite chair as you gaze thoughtlessly out a window- your version of multitasking. Or maybe you are halfway around the world, sleeping peacefully and breathing easily beside some beautiful man who you are uncertain if you love. Or maybe you are out jogging, just a few streets away, and you passed a guy who looked like he was looking for you.
I cannot accurately predict what you are doing anymore than I can predict who you are. But I can at least imagine all these things.
I cannot wait to meet you- I cannot wait to look across a crowded room filled with all our friends and communicate with our eyes. I cannot wait to share secrets with our unsaid words, and instead with the way we move past one another in public. I cannot wait for those moments where you leave me at a loss for words, speechless by some unanticipated gesture that fills every little corner of doubt that I had mistaken you for having.
I cannot even wait for you to laugh at me when I’m upset at something you think is trivial. For you to decide not to open the door you made me slam. For you to stop giving compliments because I always object them. For you to turn up the volume on CNN when I’m telling you about my day.
Our relationship will not be easy, but it is important to remember that nothing good comes easily. Everything good in life is worth the fight and worth the challenge- which is why, at first meeting, I may just shake your hand and smile out of routine.
Be persistent. If you don’t give up on me- then I will know it is truly meant to be. Just know, that I have loved you all along, even that moment before we first shook hands.
Today I wandered through the city streets alone with my hands in my pocket under an overcast sky that was ripe with the promise of rain. I could not help but feel as wanderlust as the lost leaves that swirled in the wind around buildings and in between the brake lights of stopped traffic. These are the days I feel like giving up on you- I feel like untying the lines that bind me to the promise of a safe harbor, and sailing off into the impending winter storms on the horizon instead. I feel alone and hopeless.
I will not lose faith though, and I refuse to believe that this journey of mine will be absent of the beauty that you will show me. It is strange though to feel lonely- to miss someone who has not yet even filled a space in my heart. Perhaps it is the hope, the dream of you that leaves a void, and a place for you to fill.
I witnessed two separate wedding parties being photographed around town today. One bride walked down a sidewalk outside the church, escorted by two matching bridesmaids who assisted the bride with carrying her dress. People passing on the sidewalk all glanced over, some even moving to get a better view. Other people pointed her out from across a city street streaming with cars. Cameras were flashed as though she was a celebrity. All the bystanders who caught a glimpse of her were smiling.
Where there is love, there is joy.
The principle of love creating this radiant joy that results in outward expressions of happiness is incredibly enchanting. It is the fairy tale of romance. There need not be a knight in shining armor or true love’s kiss- there needs only to be that kind of love that sparks that kind of joyfulness that makes even strangers smile.
Someday, I know, our story will make others smile just the same.
Saturday, August 11, 2012
FROM A FAN
I used to be a “frigid” wife.
I knew even before I got married that I wouldn’t be able to keep up the “schedule” of sex my husband and I had established during our courtship, and once I even warned him that it was going to have to slow down. But I think that went in one ear and out the other at supersonic speed, touching nothing in between.
Sure enough, not long after we got married sex became a battleground for us, and we struggled with the problem like two fish flopping around next to each other in the bottom of an open boat: gasping for a natural breath and injuring ourselves with every pointless, ineffectual spasm.
To me it seemed simple: he wanted me to be his sexual appliance, a handy-dandy love machine that could be switched on and off at his command. I felt no desire, and I didn’t want to “submit” to being handled and penetrated when I wasn’t in the mood. If he really loved me, this sex thing, this “merely physical” part of our lives, wouldn’t be such a big freakin’ deal. And his pissy, furious responses to my refusals only made me more sure that he didn’t really love me. He just wanted to use my vagina.
To him it seemed simple, too. If I loved him — as I consistently claimed — why didn’t I want to make love?
These things always look absolutely nuts in retrospect. You wonder how you managed to get through that crazy period in your life, how you could have been so wrong, how you could have set yourselves up in such a no-win situation. It looked hopeless at the time, a total impasse. Yet we succeeded in overcoming it, and one of the things I discovered in the five or six years since I started talking about our sexual renaissance in public is that this kind of sexual recovery is not as rare as I imagined. Being a writer by trade and a blabbermouth by inclination, a blog like this was inevitable.
In March of 2003 I started the first blog devoted to this subject and almost immediately, in between some positive, even enthusiastic reactions from both genders, I started getting hostile email. Sometimes very hostile email. When women wrote to me in a negative vein, it was usually an objection to my “cynicism” or “cold-bloodedness” about the subjects of sex and marriage. But when men wrote in to disagree with me they seemed to be pissed off about everything, up to and including (it seemed to me) the fact that women existed at all. As time went on I had to accept that the dominant emotion a large proportion of men were feeling when the subject of marital sex came up in the discourse was pure, unrepentant rage. You could power the Enterprise with the fury these guys were generating.
So men are angry. That’s not a very original observation, of course, but it is effectively the dark center of the problem we’re talking about in this blog. Here’s another banal observation: American intercentury culture has put some peculiarly frustrating pressures on men and women alike, so we all have unrealistic and — worse — essentially non-negotiable expectations when it comes to marriage and sex.
This is the rock: we all want Love, which we have redefined toward an unsustainable ideal, and this is the hard place: when we feel we aren’t getting Love, we seek Power, which the culture has restructured in ways none of us can any longer confidently use.
So I’m not going to blithely tell you to take Deep Cleansing Breaths and chill out. You feel what you feel. Some of us obviously feel worse than others. But even the most charmed, most actualized human being can’t feel Loved “enough.”
Still, we can sometimes work it out. With effort and introspection we can come to feel content enough to let go of desperate striving and angry scrambling for ascendancy over other people and concentrate instead on controlling the one thing we can ever really have power over: ourselves.
In this blog I’ve been telling my story, my struggle with Power and Love within myself and my marriage, with a view to helping you examine your own. I used this narrative method because the final chapter in the saga of my sexual recovery involved a special kind of re-imagining of my life story, so that in my own mind I became the odd, unusual protagonist of a romantic novel of erotic renewal. Eventually I hope you’ll be “re-writing” your own history in a similarly heroic way.
This approach is not only an outgrowth of my own experience, but has been guided by several discussions I’ve had with academics and research I’ve done in my freelance journalism that talks about the problem — if you agree that it is one — of sorting out the differences between “femininity” and “masculinity” in a world that demands recognition social equality. I can promote the goals of feminism and still recognize that there has to be an erotic difference between men and women to maintain sexual chemistry and stave off boredom (to the extent that’s possible). If you want to have more and better sex, the last thing you want to do is turn yourself into a Unisexual Being (whose penis is merely an afterthought). Ugh.
What qualities make a man sexy, what makes a woman notice and respond to him as a man? What kind of behaviors and attitudes make the difference? I believe men should have “permission” — sorry, that’s the only way I can think of to phrase the thought in this day and age — to develop their own vision of masculinity and sexiness without a lot of fainting and hanky-wringing from people who seem to fear that adult, intelligent men can’t make responsible use of the feelings, images and narratives of “heroic” art and literature.
This is also a way to help you see your marriage as a major component of your Big Story, the moral narrative of your life, and not just a vexing little contractual arrangement that you’re going to cancel if you don’t get your way (and pronto). You’ll want to strive for what I call “intentional manhood,” the kind of manhood that’s action and not just reaction. Because a man who goes through his life like a paramecium, recoiling from one stimuli and caroming off the sides of his Petri dish into another, is going to feel confused and frustrated about everything, not just his sex life.
In the old days most men had the mythology of religion to help them frame their lives, their aspirations and their everyday goals. If you had faith, you could pattern your life after Moses, Mohammed, or Mithra, follow the rules and expectations of your particular tradition, and understand your little life as a part of some Grand Design.
These days, most of us don’t have — or want — that kind of pre-packaged Big Picture. This is both bad and good. Bad in that it leaves us adrift, existentially speaking, and good because it allows us to make use of our individual human creativity and experience to create our own Big Pictures. One size does not fit all, and it’s usually best to let people work things out for themselves — as long as they can see the full reality of their circumstances and relationships.
That’s why I’ve been giving very up-front, very blunt advice/analysis (see the long list of Stories in the sidebar). And a lot of people of both sexes haven’t liked it one. little. bit. But here’s the thing: American “self-help” literature is piled high with boneless attempts by pop psychology gurus to address these issues in a soothing, sweet-talking, I’m Okay, You’re Okay kind of way. Not only is their glib, bourgeois blandola the next best thing to useless, it’s boring. So while I can understand how you might not want to hear a lot of what I’m saying (except for the sexy bits, maybe), being too careful of your feelings would be the death of my ability to be honest with you. Besides, I figure you can take it.
So what about this storied marriage of mine? I could paint it as high drama, in some kind of classical story arc, a suspenseful narrative driving to a stunning climax, followed by a satisfying denouement. Unfortunately for my artistic instincts, the truth is rather more prosaic. Our twenty-five-year marriage has been like most other people’s: a series of rising and falling waves of affection, distraction, anger and happiness. In and out of love, convinced it’s not going to work, sure it’s forever, not sure again. As the years spooled out, though, the trust and sureness grew.
But there was a moment that might qualify as a Turning Point, when I had my first glimmering of the central truths of this blog, so let me tell you about it.
My husband had a bad habit in the first decade of our marriage of going to some routine business function or some minor get-together by himself, or just stopping for some after-work drinks with the boys, and “losing all track of time.” Not only would he not come home until hours later, reeling, he wouldn’t even call to tell me where he was.
Naturally, in the fullness of time came the day when, realizing at 11 p.m. that he was out on another of these toots, I literally packed my bag, put my infant daughter in her carrier and picked up the phone to call a cab.
So why didn’t I? Why did I put the phone back into the wallset, sit down at the kitchen table and cry (raging, pounding the Formica, mopping my face with the place mats) before putting the baby back in her bed and unpacking my bag?
I realized (somehow, in the flame-edged haze of my fury) that for all my fussing and fuming about this issue, I must have somehow not been able to get my husband to really understand how deadly serious it was to me. He still didn’t Get It, and there had to be a reason for that, a reason I had to fathom. I also knew that if these incidents continued — or, heaven forfend, got worse — they were going to make me breaking-point angry again, every single time. My resentment would grow with each event, and that would increasingly poison each successive calculation of the tradeoff between staying and going. (Sound familiar?)
So I couldn’t just decide to stay; I had to figure out how to avoid wanting to leave in the future. I had to think it through, not just react in the same tired, ineffective way every time it happened. I had to figure out what was going on inside him, not just inside me. When I finally decided to use my brain on the situation instead of my furious, resentful, self-righteous emotions and — even more challenging — to allow that I might be doing (or not doing) something to make it worse, I figured it out.
He didn’t call me when he was out on these little adventures because they were expressions of his freedom to act as he damn well pleased, without explanation or excuse: Look at me, I’m Baaaaad, baby. There ain’t no jail in the territory can hold me. The last thing a man wants to do when he is making that kind of statement is to call his wife and get permission to continue being a desperado.
To me these hops off the reservation were slaps in the face, gestures of contempt and dominance. I read each one as a big “fuck you!” to to my needs and feelings. To him they were just expressions of manhood and personal autonomy. He saw my “excessive” anger about these “minor” incidents as a demand to toe the line of unnecessary marital rules, as an attempt to assert control over him.
These incidents revealed that a subterranean jockeying for Power had taken over between us, a vicious spiral of secret disappointments and unspoken demands on each other that neither of us could fulfill because if we did, we would be declared The Loser.
Realizing that ugly truth about us both — and not just reflexively blaming him for the entirety of the problem — was the beginning of my deeper understanding of many more of our issues, including the sexual one. It’s amazing what just accepting a truth of that caliber can do for your attitude and actions in a relationship. No, it didn’t happen overnight — that’s just in the movies — but as I continued with my committment to facing the truth about our power relationships I came all the way back to my husband, emotionally as well as sexually.
So why, you might be asking, since I was the one who made the first move in my own marriage, am I talking to MEN in this blog? As so many of those angry correspondents have told me, over and over again, what I need to be doing is telling women to straighten up and fly right. Women should be repeatedly reminded of the “contract” they signed when they got married, in which the first sentence is (apparently): “Give husband sex at least twice a week, whether you like it or not.” Women just need to come across with the punani on a more regular basis, and then everybody would be happy. So why (these guys cry) are you talking to me when it’s really her cold-ass selfishness that is the problem?
Because…listen carefully here…if I tell you that your marital dissatisfactions are all your wife’s fault, you are in a totally helpless position. If she is the one and only, absolutely immovable cause of all your sexual difficulties, you can do nothing to improve the situation. You might as well give up, today, this minute, and go out and get divorced.
Maybe that’s what you’ll ultimately decide to do. It’s an honest option. Sometimes wives turn out to be impossibly neurotic or situations are so Fido Uniform that there’s no hope. But if there’s a possibility of encouraging a rebirth of your wife’s sensuality and intimate affection, don’t you want to at least try it before you file the papers?
One of the useful concepts in that vast drippy body of earnest suburban psychobabble I referenced earlier is that in any situation where people are dissatisfied with the status quo, they are the ones who “own” the problem, and they are the ones who must do the most to solve it. It may feel unfair to you to have to make concessions or changes when the problem, from your point of view, is really being caused by a partner who refuses to fulfill your reasonable expectations.
But in my experience, standing on My Rights, insisting that other people admit that they are the ones who are wrong in a given situation, or deciding that they must make the changes I demand before I will change myself, has gotten me exactly nowhere (or, worse, somewhere I really didn’t want to go). This is especially true when it came to those pesky unspoken contracts, where I was the only judge of what were “reasonable” terms and conditions.
I started out the blog talking about little things that men can fix practically overnight, because sometimes that’s all that’s needed — or all a man has the stomach for. And when it comes to women and sex, “little things” — things you might consider irrelevant or ridiculous or even insulting — sometimes count much more than you might have imagined. Does it come as a surprise to you that the sort of romantic gesture many women yearn for isn’t the presentation of expensive flowers, but noticing that there’s dog hair on the rug and pulling out the vacuum — without subsequent bragging of your martyrdom or demands for gratitude?
There are some things women feel that they just can’t tell the men they love. Things they can’t say out loud, things they can’t admit to themselves or to you, and things they don’t even quite understand in their own minds. These are the secrets we’re afraid to voice, the dissatisfactions we don’t verbalize for fear of slaughtering your ego or making ourselves less desirable — or more disposable. Women might bitch and moan day and night about everything else in their lives, yet never confess the most essential things, the things their lovers really need to know.
Yeah, there were a lot of generalizations in that paragraph. I’m going to be making a lot more. Generalizing has gotten kind of a bad rap lately. People object to it when it’s their ox being gored and let it go when someone else’s is getting the shaft. But it has a long and respectable rhetorical history, for good reason. It’s true that our natural tendency to generalize can sometimes get us into logical trouble, as when (to give the classic example) we assume that because all we’ve ever seen are white swans, black ones don’t exist. But generalizing is also the only way we can “make sense” of large bodies of data that can’t realistically be considered otherwise.
While each person is an individual unlike any other and every marriage is a unique experience for its participants, I’ve been discussing a lot of things that I believe a significant number of people or marriages have in common. So let’s make a deal: when I use the terms “women” or “men” or “marriage” or any other large category, you will understand that I may not be talking about you or any other particular man or woman. Don’t take it personally. If it doesn’t apply to you and your marriage, it doesn’t apply. You don’t have to defend yourself. You especially don’t have to defend yourself with an email screed that details my failings as a woman, human being and Internet chatterbox. I believe you, okay? And anyway, why should my little feeeeemale opinion matter to a Big Strong Man like you?
So, are we cool? Excellent.
Onward.
Over the last year and a half of thinking about these issues for the blog, I’ve been developing a Man’s Plan For Marital Action, and I hope you’ll come along while I flesh it out. It goes something like this:
To recover his marriage sexually (and every other way), a Man will:
1) Face facts (obviously we’re already working on that)
2) Fix “little things” first
3) Understand the emotional calculus of Love and Power in his relationship
4) Return to the basics of his own character and masculinity
5) Create his own solutions in his own context.
In the beginning of the earlier blog (reproduced in the pages on “Disgust,” “Discomfort,” etc.), I offered a few very basic practical suggestions, little things you could do right away without a lot of consideration and turmoil. Everyone would prefer to take simple, concrete actions that have a chance of succeeding (or at least improving the situation) before committing themselves to more challenging efforts. It’s perfectly okay to hope that those little things will turn everything around for you, and it’s certainly possible that they will — but don’t count on it.
The more important part of this blog was / is / will be an attempt to give you tools for drilling down to your deeper personal truths, your aquifer, the way you define yourself as an adult human of the male persuasion in today’s ambivalent and sometimes downright hostile society. To give you food for thought on that vexed bit of business, I’m advancing my own preliminary ideas about the masculine mystique.
In my view, a man — I don’t say a “real man,” because there are no fake men, only boys–
* Knows who he is * Knows what he wants * Seeks the truth, and tells it * Does the Right Thing
All well and good, you’re probably thinking (rolling your eyes), but didn’t I promise not to purvey tired self-help clichés like “know yourself” and “the truth will make you free”? Well, yeah, except that I am talking basics here, after all, and those apparently vapid bullet points are the chassis supporting the most relevant characteristic, to wit:
A man also
* Uses his individual masculine mythos with intelligence and style, in bed and out
Your “masculine mythos” is essentially your personal erotic legend, the story of Manhood Your Way. As a sexually aware adult exposed to the seductions of your culture, you already have an erotic mythos, but unless you frequent certain egg-headed halls of academe, you probably haven’t given it much thought. There’s been a lot of snotty ivory tower theorizing on this concept, and many of you have (in a sense) seen the smoke rising over the ivied walls as they burn all that intellectual lumber, but the ideas can also be really useful to the ordinary guy.
But if the concepts sound like so much folkloric bullshit to you, don’t worry about it. Stick with things you can do by rote, without the cogitation. Use them or lose them as necessary.
But how do you know if your marriage is worth even that much effort? Two ways: first, determine whether there is still a reservoir of mutual good will and psychological compatibility in the non-sexual side of your relationship. On that question this is Julia Grey’s Acid Test: are you still laughing together?
Shared humor is a crucial bond. It signals fundamental, unspoken agreements between people about how the world works and how they’re functioning in it. Once a sexual problem raises its head in a marriage, your senses of humor understandably start dragging their feet, but if you can’t laugh together, ever — even if it is only at a sitcom or a movie you’re watching — you’re pretty much doomed. Down the Irreconcilable Differences river. On that Lonesome Train. Riding off into the sunset. Lost in … well, you get the picture.
The other way to determine whether there is still enough left in your marriage to work with is to figure out, honestly, how much you’re willing to do to improve things in the absence of any effort from her.
Are you willing to be the sole active partner in solving your sexual impasse, at least at first? Do you love your wife enough (or at least value the marriage enough) to let go of your notion of Your Rights for the time being and take up tasks that might be annoying, time-consuming and open-ended, all without reaping immediate “rewards”?
As you’ve probably gathered, my thoughts on this subject could be rocky going (and not just because they go interminably, like this post). This is not your second nature sort of thing, and it sometimes goes very much against the grain. Even having to consider some of these ideas pisses some men off. A lot. Worse, when/if you actually try them, you may NOT get the gratitude and Hot Wet Love you expect, especially short term.
In fact, I guarantee you’ll wonder at some point why the hell you bother.
So. If after reading all this you decide that salvaging your marital sex life is not worth the effort, that’s fine. Click out of the blog. Walk away from the computer.
Because the most important element in all this — the one crucial, non-negotiable thing you’ll need along the way — is to be genuinely, brutally, consistently honest with yourself. No denial allowed.
Still with me?
Good. Let’s go.
I knew even before I got married that I wouldn’t be able to keep up the “schedule” of sex my husband and I had established during our courtship, and once I even warned him that it was going to have to slow down. But I think that went in one ear and out the other at supersonic speed, touching nothing in between.
Sure enough, not long after we got married sex became a battleground for us, and we struggled with the problem like two fish flopping around next to each other in the bottom of an open boat: gasping for a natural breath and injuring ourselves with every pointless, ineffectual spasm.
To me it seemed simple: he wanted me to be his sexual appliance, a handy-dandy love machine that could be switched on and off at his command. I felt no desire, and I didn’t want to “submit” to being handled and penetrated when I wasn’t in the mood. If he really loved me, this sex thing, this “merely physical” part of our lives, wouldn’t be such a big freakin’ deal. And his pissy, furious responses to my refusals only made me more sure that he didn’t really love me. He just wanted to use my vagina.
To him it seemed simple, too. If I loved him — as I consistently claimed — why didn’t I want to make love?
These things always look absolutely nuts in retrospect. You wonder how you managed to get through that crazy period in your life, how you could have been so wrong, how you could have set yourselves up in such a no-win situation. It looked hopeless at the time, a total impasse. Yet we succeeded in overcoming it, and one of the things I discovered in the five or six years since I started talking about our sexual renaissance in public is that this kind of sexual recovery is not as rare as I imagined. Being a writer by trade and a blabbermouth by inclination, a blog like this was inevitable.
In March of 2003 I started the first blog devoted to this subject and almost immediately, in between some positive, even enthusiastic reactions from both genders, I started getting hostile email. Sometimes very hostile email. When women wrote to me in a negative vein, it was usually an objection to my “cynicism” or “cold-bloodedness” about the subjects of sex and marriage. But when men wrote in to disagree with me they seemed to be pissed off about everything, up to and including (it seemed to me) the fact that women existed at all. As time went on I had to accept that the dominant emotion a large proportion of men were feeling when the subject of marital sex came up in the discourse was pure, unrepentant rage. You could power the Enterprise with the fury these guys were generating.
So men are angry. That’s not a very original observation, of course, but it is effectively the dark center of the problem we’re talking about in this blog. Here’s another banal observation: American intercentury culture has put some peculiarly frustrating pressures on men and women alike, so we all have unrealistic and — worse — essentially non-negotiable expectations when it comes to marriage and sex.
This is the rock: we all want Love, which we have redefined toward an unsustainable ideal, and this is the hard place: when we feel we aren’t getting Love, we seek Power, which the culture has restructured in ways none of us can any longer confidently use.
So I’m not going to blithely tell you to take Deep Cleansing Breaths and chill out. You feel what you feel. Some of us obviously feel worse than others. But even the most charmed, most actualized human being can’t feel Loved “enough.”
Still, we can sometimes work it out. With effort and introspection we can come to feel content enough to let go of desperate striving and angry scrambling for ascendancy over other people and concentrate instead on controlling the one thing we can ever really have power over: ourselves.
In this blog I’ve been telling my story, my struggle with Power and Love within myself and my marriage, with a view to helping you examine your own. I used this narrative method because the final chapter in the saga of my sexual recovery involved a special kind of re-imagining of my life story, so that in my own mind I became the odd, unusual protagonist of a romantic novel of erotic renewal. Eventually I hope you’ll be “re-writing” your own history in a similarly heroic way.
This approach is not only an outgrowth of my own experience, but has been guided by several discussions I’ve had with academics and research I’ve done in my freelance journalism that talks about the problem — if you agree that it is one — of sorting out the differences between “femininity” and “masculinity” in a world that demands recognition social equality. I can promote the goals of feminism and still recognize that there has to be an erotic difference between men and women to maintain sexual chemistry and stave off boredom (to the extent that’s possible). If you want to have more and better sex, the last thing you want to do is turn yourself into a Unisexual Being (whose penis is merely an afterthought). Ugh.
What qualities make a man sexy, what makes a woman notice and respond to him as a man? What kind of behaviors and attitudes make the difference? I believe men should have “permission” — sorry, that’s the only way I can think of to phrase the thought in this day and age — to develop their own vision of masculinity and sexiness without a lot of fainting and hanky-wringing from people who seem to fear that adult, intelligent men can’t make responsible use of the feelings, images and narratives of “heroic” art and literature.
This is also a way to help you see your marriage as a major component of your Big Story, the moral narrative of your life, and not just a vexing little contractual arrangement that you’re going to cancel if you don’t get your way (and pronto). You’ll want to strive for what I call “intentional manhood,” the kind of manhood that’s action and not just reaction. Because a man who goes through his life like a paramecium, recoiling from one stimuli and caroming off the sides of his Petri dish into another, is going to feel confused and frustrated about everything, not just his sex life.
In the old days most men had the mythology of religion to help them frame their lives, their aspirations and their everyday goals. If you had faith, you could pattern your life after Moses, Mohammed, or Mithra, follow the rules and expectations of your particular tradition, and understand your little life as a part of some Grand Design.
These days, most of us don’t have — or want — that kind of pre-packaged Big Picture. This is both bad and good. Bad in that it leaves us adrift, existentially speaking, and good because it allows us to make use of our individual human creativity and experience to create our own Big Pictures. One size does not fit all, and it’s usually best to let people work things out for themselves — as long as they can see the full reality of their circumstances and relationships.
That’s why I’ve been giving very up-front, very blunt advice/analysis (see the long list of Stories in the sidebar). And a lot of people of both sexes haven’t liked it one. little. bit. But here’s the thing: American “self-help” literature is piled high with boneless attempts by pop psychology gurus to address these issues in a soothing, sweet-talking, I’m Okay, You’re Okay kind of way. Not only is their glib, bourgeois blandola the next best thing to useless, it’s boring. So while I can understand how you might not want to hear a lot of what I’m saying (except for the sexy bits, maybe), being too careful of your feelings would be the death of my ability to be honest with you. Besides, I figure you can take it.
So what about this storied marriage of mine? I could paint it as high drama, in some kind of classical story arc, a suspenseful narrative driving to a stunning climax, followed by a satisfying denouement. Unfortunately for my artistic instincts, the truth is rather more prosaic. Our twenty-five-year marriage has been like most other people’s: a series of rising and falling waves of affection, distraction, anger and happiness. In and out of love, convinced it’s not going to work, sure it’s forever, not sure again. As the years spooled out, though, the trust and sureness grew.
But there was a moment that might qualify as a Turning Point, when I had my first glimmering of the central truths of this blog, so let me tell you about it.
My husband had a bad habit in the first decade of our marriage of going to some routine business function or some minor get-together by himself, or just stopping for some after-work drinks with the boys, and “losing all track of time.” Not only would he not come home until hours later, reeling, he wouldn’t even call to tell me where he was.
Naturally, in the fullness of time came the day when, realizing at 11 p.m. that he was out on another of these toots, I literally packed my bag, put my infant daughter in her carrier and picked up the phone to call a cab.
So why didn’t I? Why did I put the phone back into the wallset, sit down at the kitchen table and cry (raging, pounding the Formica, mopping my face with the place mats) before putting the baby back in her bed and unpacking my bag?
I realized (somehow, in the flame-edged haze of my fury) that for all my fussing and fuming about this issue, I must have somehow not been able to get my husband to really understand how deadly serious it was to me. He still didn’t Get It, and there had to be a reason for that, a reason I had to fathom. I also knew that if these incidents continued — or, heaven forfend, got worse — they were going to make me breaking-point angry again, every single time. My resentment would grow with each event, and that would increasingly poison each successive calculation of the tradeoff between staying and going. (Sound familiar?)
So I couldn’t just decide to stay; I had to figure out how to avoid wanting to leave in the future. I had to think it through, not just react in the same tired, ineffective way every time it happened. I had to figure out what was going on inside him, not just inside me. When I finally decided to use my brain on the situation instead of my furious, resentful, self-righteous emotions and — even more challenging — to allow that I might be doing (or not doing) something to make it worse, I figured it out.
He didn’t call me when he was out on these little adventures because they were expressions of his freedom to act as he damn well pleased, without explanation or excuse: Look at me, I’m Baaaaad, baby. There ain’t no jail in the territory can hold me. The last thing a man wants to do when he is making that kind of statement is to call his wife and get permission to continue being a desperado.
To me these hops off the reservation were slaps in the face, gestures of contempt and dominance. I read each one as a big “fuck you!” to to my needs and feelings. To him they were just expressions of manhood and personal autonomy. He saw my “excessive” anger about these “minor” incidents as a demand to toe the line of unnecessary marital rules, as an attempt to assert control over him.
These incidents revealed that a subterranean jockeying for Power had taken over between us, a vicious spiral of secret disappointments and unspoken demands on each other that neither of us could fulfill because if we did, we would be declared The Loser.
Realizing that ugly truth about us both — and not just reflexively blaming him for the entirety of the problem — was the beginning of my deeper understanding of many more of our issues, including the sexual one. It’s amazing what just accepting a truth of that caliber can do for your attitude and actions in a relationship. No, it didn’t happen overnight — that’s just in the movies — but as I continued with my committment to facing the truth about our power relationships I came all the way back to my husband, emotionally as well as sexually.
So why, you might be asking, since I was the one who made the first move in my own marriage, am I talking to MEN in this blog? As so many of those angry correspondents have told me, over and over again, what I need to be doing is telling women to straighten up and fly right. Women should be repeatedly reminded of the “contract” they signed when they got married, in which the first sentence is (apparently): “Give husband sex at least twice a week, whether you like it or not.” Women just need to come across with the punani on a more regular basis, and then everybody would be happy. So why (these guys cry) are you talking to me when it’s really her cold-ass selfishness that is the problem?
Because…listen carefully here…if I tell you that your marital dissatisfactions are all your wife’s fault, you are in a totally helpless position. If she is the one and only, absolutely immovable cause of all your sexual difficulties, you can do nothing to improve the situation. You might as well give up, today, this minute, and go out and get divorced.
Maybe that’s what you’ll ultimately decide to do. It’s an honest option. Sometimes wives turn out to be impossibly neurotic or situations are so Fido Uniform that there’s no hope. But if there’s a possibility of encouraging a rebirth of your wife’s sensuality and intimate affection, don’t you want to at least try it before you file the papers?
One of the useful concepts in that vast drippy body of earnest suburban psychobabble I referenced earlier is that in any situation where people are dissatisfied with the status quo, they are the ones who “own” the problem, and they are the ones who must do the most to solve it. It may feel unfair to you to have to make concessions or changes when the problem, from your point of view, is really being caused by a partner who refuses to fulfill your reasonable expectations.
But in my experience, standing on My Rights, insisting that other people admit that they are the ones who are wrong in a given situation, or deciding that they must make the changes I demand before I will change myself, has gotten me exactly nowhere (or, worse, somewhere I really didn’t want to go). This is especially true when it came to those pesky unspoken contracts, where I was the only judge of what were “reasonable” terms and conditions.
I started out the blog talking about little things that men can fix practically overnight, because sometimes that’s all that’s needed — or all a man has the stomach for. And when it comes to women and sex, “little things” — things you might consider irrelevant or ridiculous or even insulting — sometimes count much more than you might have imagined. Does it come as a surprise to you that the sort of romantic gesture many women yearn for isn’t the presentation of expensive flowers, but noticing that there’s dog hair on the rug and pulling out the vacuum — without subsequent bragging of your martyrdom or demands for gratitude?
There are some things women feel that they just can’t tell the men they love. Things they can’t say out loud, things they can’t admit to themselves or to you, and things they don’t even quite understand in their own minds. These are the secrets we’re afraid to voice, the dissatisfactions we don’t verbalize for fear of slaughtering your ego or making ourselves less desirable — or more disposable. Women might bitch and moan day and night about everything else in their lives, yet never confess the most essential things, the things their lovers really need to know.
Yeah, there were a lot of generalizations in that paragraph. I’m going to be making a lot more. Generalizing has gotten kind of a bad rap lately. People object to it when it’s their ox being gored and let it go when someone else’s is getting the shaft. But it has a long and respectable rhetorical history, for good reason. It’s true that our natural tendency to generalize can sometimes get us into logical trouble, as when (to give the classic example) we assume that because all we’ve ever seen are white swans, black ones don’t exist. But generalizing is also the only way we can “make sense” of large bodies of data that can’t realistically be considered otherwise.
While each person is an individual unlike any other and every marriage is a unique experience for its participants, I’ve been discussing a lot of things that I believe a significant number of people or marriages have in common. So let’s make a deal: when I use the terms “women” or “men” or “marriage” or any other large category, you will understand that I may not be talking about you or any other particular man or woman. Don’t take it personally. If it doesn’t apply to you and your marriage, it doesn’t apply. You don’t have to defend yourself. You especially don’t have to defend yourself with an email screed that details my failings as a woman, human being and Internet chatterbox. I believe you, okay? And anyway, why should my little feeeeemale opinion matter to a Big Strong Man like you?
So, are we cool? Excellent.
Onward.
Over the last year and a half of thinking about these issues for the blog, I’ve been developing a Man’s Plan For Marital Action, and I hope you’ll come along while I flesh it out. It goes something like this:
To recover his marriage sexually (and every other way), a Man will:
1) Face facts (obviously we’re already working on that)
2) Fix “little things” first
3) Understand the emotional calculus of Love and Power in his relationship
4) Return to the basics of his own character and masculinity
5) Create his own solutions in his own context.
In the beginning of the earlier blog (reproduced in the pages on “Disgust,” “Discomfort,” etc.), I offered a few very basic practical suggestions, little things you could do right away without a lot of consideration and turmoil. Everyone would prefer to take simple, concrete actions that have a chance of succeeding (or at least improving the situation) before committing themselves to more challenging efforts. It’s perfectly okay to hope that those little things will turn everything around for you, and it’s certainly possible that they will — but don’t count on it.
The more important part of this blog was / is / will be an attempt to give you tools for drilling down to your deeper personal truths, your aquifer, the way you define yourself as an adult human of the male persuasion in today’s ambivalent and sometimes downright hostile society. To give you food for thought on that vexed bit of business, I’m advancing my own preliminary ideas about the masculine mystique.
In my view, a man — I don’t say a “real man,” because there are no fake men, only boys–
* Knows who he is * Knows what he wants * Seeks the truth, and tells it * Does the Right Thing
All well and good, you’re probably thinking (rolling your eyes), but didn’t I promise not to purvey tired self-help clichés like “know yourself” and “the truth will make you free”? Well, yeah, except that I am talking basics here, after all, and those apparently vapid bullet points are the chassis supporting the most relevant characteristic, to wit:
A man also
* Uses his individual masculine mythos with intelligence and style, in bed and out
Your “masculine mythos” is essentially your personal erotic legend, the story of Manhood Your Way. As a sexually aware adult exposed to the seductions of your culture, you already have an erotic mythos, but unless you frequent certain egg-headed halls of academe, you probably haven’t given it much thought. There’s been a lot of snotty ivory tower theorizing on this concept, and many of you have (in a sense) seen the smoke rising over the ivied walls as they burn all that intellectual lumber, but the ideas can also be really useful to the ordinary guy.
But if the concepts sound like so much folkloric bullshit to you, don’t worry about it. Stick with things you can do by rote, without the cogitation. Use them or lose them as necessary.
But how do you know if your marriage is worth even that much effort? Two ways: first, determine whether there is still a reservoir of mutual good will and psychological compatibility in the non-sexual side of your relationship. On that question this is Julia Grey’s Acid Test: are you still laughing together?
Shared humor is a crucial bond. It signals fundamental, unspoken agreements between people about how the world works and how they’re functioning in it. Once a sexual problem raises its head in a marriage, your senses of humor understandably start dragging their feet, but if you can’t laugh together, ever — even if it is only at a sitcom or a movie you’re watching — you’re pretty much doomed. Down the Irreconcilable Differences river. On that Lonesome Train. Riding off into the sunset. Lost in … well, you get the picture.
The other way to determine whether there is still enough left in your marriage to work with is to figure out, honestly, how much you’re willing to do to improve things in the absence of any effort from her.
Are you willing to be the sole active partner in solving your sexual impasse, at least at first? Do you love your wife enough (or at least value the marriage enough) to let go of your notion of Your Rights for the time being and take up tasks that might be annoying, time-consuming and open-ended, all without reaping immediate “rewards”?
As you’ve probably gathered, my thoughts on this subject could be rocky going (and not just because they go interminably, like this post). This is not your second nature sort of thing, and it sometimes goes very much against the grain. Even having to consider some of these ideas pisses some men off. A lot. Worse, when/if you actually try them, you may NOT get the gratitude and Hot Wet Love you expect, especially short term.
In fact, I guarantee you’ll wonder at some point why the hell you bother.
So. If after reading all this you decide that salvaging your marital sex life is not worth the effort, that’s fine. Click out of the blog. Walk away from the computer.
Because the most important element in all this — the one crucial, non-negotiable thing you’ll need along the way — is to be genuinely, brutally, consistently honest with yourself. No denial allowed.
Still with me?
Good. Let’s go.
LOVE: IMAGINE TWO PEOPLE
Imagine two people two short steps away from an embrace...what yearns between us just under surface overflows in a gentle way our hesitation in evident yet the wanting pleasurably washes over us it seems we must be content to embrace each other with our eyes and minds yet, what a joy it has been to share this gift of holding one another visually..I hope when I take my short forward step you, too, will take yours
LOVE/ DATING: WHY WOULD A WOMAN WANT TO WASTE TIME WITH THE WRONG GUY....THE LOSER...BAD GUYS (PART 1- 2)
Why do woman get involved with loser and waste time and emotions with the wrong men instead of being with a man who give them love, a house,...kid...everything they want and make their life easy.
Why are these women so STUPID? Just because they have these urges, why does that justify acting on them? I'd love to eat pizza and fried chicken every day. I'd also like to eat cookies, cake, and ice cream 3 times a day. Why don't I do it? It will lead to bad long term consequences. What the hell is wrong with these women?
If you are a woman get involved with a bad guy, single dad...ect......there will be bad consequences.
As far as I can tell, chicks don't date ugly boys either. Ugly may have different meanings for men and women, but the results are still the same.A hot homeless bum living in trash ain't getting some.
Regarding women who like bad boys, one could argue that they do so because they think they can change them. But they can't.
Okay, think about that for just two seconds,. When you like something, it's because it is what it is the way it is, yes? For instance: you like chocolate cake because it is chocolate cake. You don't think to yourself, "Yeah I like this chocolate cake because, if I try really, really hard, I can make it into banana cream pie. Mmmhm. I like me some chocolate cake so I can have that pie."
Women, and especially younger women, tend to like or enjoy "bad boys" because of the "lawless" quality someone else pointed out. Some young women can live out their rebellion streak vicariously through these guys who are "edgy" and flaunt authority. They tend to be, yeah, self-confident, and that's pretty darned attractive too. They push the boundaries of regular, vanilla, quiet social acceptability and conformity and, yeah, that can be appealing too to to go along on that ride with someone.
An attraction to "bad boys" does not equal a propensity for abuse. It's, a lot of the time, just an opportunity to explore one's own sense of wanting to explore the boundaries of society and finding someone to take you there. It's about rebellion.
And eventually, they all grow out of that, find the value in a certain amount of conformity that most can live with,
This stupid thing called "love". It's more destructive than the entire US military arsenal. It amazes me when a girl can complain for days on end and call the person they're with the worst things in the world yet will stay with them because they "love him". I've actually asked a girl why they were with a guy and they said they loved the guy but i asked "what do you love about him?" and they said "he's just a great guy!" after they had gone on for hours about how awful of a human being the person is. It's pathetic.
Romance is a drug that prevents women from having to deal with the tougher issues in their life, like aging, finances, significant stress, problems with their children, and many other things. Stability, companionship, creation of a home and family if that's what you desire, and some sense of a safe place to come home to and deal with the cares of the world. Stupid behavior is how I describe irrational behavior that throws caution to the wind and causes women to hook up with men who are unsuitable or dangerous. The warning signs are there but they let their romantic feelings override. The motives are wrong – they're looking for someone to give them the castle or, if they're very wounded and have had very bad experiences, someone who's going to heal those wounds. So they go into a relationship with an unrealistic expectation of what marriage or a long-term relationship is going to be.We've been taught that somehow the power of our love can change a man, and that the sexier and more beautiful we are, the more powerful we are. Women often confuse sexual power with personal power, confusing the difference between being able to arouse a man with feminine power. But then she doesn't know how to keep him because his interest will wane once the hunt is over. She's gotten her romantic fix during that time, but when he leaves her high and dry once the sexual excitement wears off, she's left confused and lonely and questioning herself even more.
Summarizing a recent conversation with my medical assistant about this very issue:
She said that it's comforting to know that if a situation were to arise where we were in danger, that I could be trusted to do everything in my power to ensure the safety of not just myself, but her as well, and that she would not be alone in fighting for a solution.
To often we think of a "bad boy" as someone with a criminal record, scars from knife/gun fights, a foul mouth, rebellious attitude, and a bunch of tattoos. While these things can communicate a degree of safety and protection, they do so at such an extreme, that it is likely to be too extreme, and often backfires, which can result in unhealthy relationships and behavior that jeopardizes anyone involved with them.
A person doesn't need to have a partner who is dangerous and rebellious in order to feel secure; it is quite possible, and highly advisable, to find someone who will fulfill this desire in a mature, wise, and selfless manner.
I found this article that might be of interesting:
Father/Daughter Relationships: Effects of Communicative Adaptabilityand Satisfaction on Daughter's Romantic Relationships Jessica Katorski
ABSTRACT Research has shown that the relationship a daughter has with her father remains with her intoadulthood. The father/daughter relationship is said to have an affect on future relationships, including romantic relationships. One hundred and eight-one females from the La Crosse, WIarea completed questionnaires regarding the relationship with their father as well as the relationship with their current (or most recent) romantic partner. The females were asked to determine what attachment style best describes each relationship, assess their satisfaction level concerning the relationship with their father, and asked questions regarding their communication adaptability level. Results showed that relationships could only be made between the attachmentstyles in the father/daughter relationships and the communication satisfaction and adaptability.
INTRODUCTION A great deal of research has been conducted to find the effects of family during one’s childhood. Researchers have found that parent-child relationships affect the psychological well being of the child. Barnett and Kibria stated that positive parent-child relationships are thought to enhance several aspects of psychological well being while negative relationships are thought to predispose to psychological distress. Due to such findings, one might suggestthat the impact of the family environment on young adults is significant as well (Kissee, Murphy, Bonner, & Murley, 2000). Dumlao and Botta (2000) and Perkins (2001) state that the relationship between young adultwomen and their fathers has previously been neglected when examining the relationships within a family. Familyinfluences within the young adult cycle of life have gone virtually unstudied (Kissee, Murphy, Bonner, & Murley, 2000; Lamb, 1981; Way & Gillman, 2000). Many are convinced that the relationship between mothers and daughters is the most important parentalrelationship. While the relationship is certainly valuable, the connection that a female has with her father in manyways matters more than the one with her mother (Nielsen, 2001). Due to this, research on the affects of a young-adult daughter's relationship with her father is of value. Therefore, research was conducted on young adult women determining if or what was the relationship between father/daughter relationships and the daughter's romanticrelationships. Each young woman completed surveys regarding attachment style in the relationship with her father, her satisfaction level regarding the relationship with her father, and her communicative adaptability.
In a strong statement by Secunda (1992), she described a female's father as her "first love," regardless of the experiences in her relationship with her father. This text noted that it might be assumed that the father-daughter relationship has the potential to shape interaction patterns that surface as women enter adult relationships. Therefore, this supports the hypothesis that a pattern may be apparent between father-daughter relationships and the daughter's romantic relationships. Research has found that women with abusive or absent fathers often choose partners who abuse or abandon them (Secunda, 1992). Research concerning intermediate variables as adjusting factors proves interesting. According to Beatty and Dobos (1992) satisfaction may be described as an internal affect resulting from the acquisition of pleasure and/or avoidance of pain. More specifically, any stimulus that fulfills needs, produces positive reinforcement, or confirms one’s ideal self-image produces satisfaction (Beatty & Dobos, 1992). Previous findings from Vangelisti, Crumley, Baker, & Canary (1999) have supported the interdependence theory, which states that relational satisfaction is linked to the degree to which one’s standards are met. Satisfaction has also beenused as the primary criterion for evaluating the quality of family communication (Pearson, 1989). Some research has focused on the satisfaction in conversation with others viewing satisfaction as a global response to relationships. Due to various types of interaction with one's father, satisfaction was operationalized in global terms for this study.
Attachment is an overall term that refers to the state and quality of an individual's attachments. These attachments are divided into two distinct different types, secure and insecure attachment. Attachments are part of relationships from infancy. The emotional bonds that infants form with their caregivers serve as blueprints for the way people view themselves and others. They affect the way people act in their adult relationships. (Bowlby,1969;1973) Specifically regarding attachment in relationships, Bowlby stated that attachment relationships were importantfor humans across the life cycle and that attachment behaviors depicted interaction "from cradle to the grave." (Bowlby, 1979, p129). Once working attachment models are formed early in life, they are used as a guide for the child's attachment behavior both in familiar and new situations (Cassidy & Kobak, 198 . Research has been conducted and supported the hypothesis that one's early attachment styles serve as a prototype for later relationships outside the family (Crowell & Feldman, 1987; Main & Goldwyn, 198. Due to these findings, using attachmentstyles as the comparison between family and romantic relationships serves as dependable. As previously stated, communication is the core of every relationship. Generally, individuals desire to express a positive nature through communication. In order to do so, one must be able to adapt to situations accordingly.
Communicative adaptability, the ability to adjust in social settings, can also be defined as the capacity of the individual to adjust him/herself to the situation with minimum friction (Karlsson, 1963). Beatty, Marshall, & Rudd (2001) state that communicative adaptability involves the use of wit and emotional reactivity as well as emphasizes individual differences in the capacity to adapt to immediate surroundings. A number of scholars have researched this area, only with slight variations to the research. There are subtle differences in the theory constructs, yet they all share the recognition that the degree to which individuals adjust insocial settings is unevenly distributed across the population. Since communication is inevitable, individualsexperience various social settings, and the variance in communicative adaptability is considerable, it would be ofinterest to discover if there is relationship between attachment styles in relationships and an individual's level of communicative adaptability. In order to build upon completed research, the objective is to address the following questions:RQ1: Is there a relationship between a daughter's attachment style with her father and the attachment style with her current (or most recent) romantic partner?RQ2: Is there a relationship between the daughter's attachment style with her romantic partner and her satisfaction level regarding her relationship with her father?RQ3: Is there a relationship between the daughter's attachment style with her father and her satisfaction level regarding her relationship with her father?RQ4: Is there a relationship between the daughter's attachment styles with her father and her level of communication adaptability?RQ5: Is there a relationship between the daughter’s attachment style with her romantic partner and her level of communication adaptability?
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Katorski UW-L Journal of Undergraduate Research VI (2003) as they had previously for the relationship with their father. This included completing the 5-point Likert scale along with choosing one style that best represents the romantic relationship. SubjectsFemales above the age of 18 were the subjects of this research. Due to the separation from close parentalguidance, women this age are appropriate subjects for this study. One hundred and eighty-one women completelyresponded the previously mentioned questionnaires. Procedures This data was collected by a convenience sample. Majority of the women is students in the La Crosse area. Surveys were distributed throughout a few residence halls, a couple classrooms, and a campus organizationalmeeting. The researcher immediately collected the surveys upon completion by the subject. Data AnalysisDue to the number of variables involved in this study, several tests were completed in order to best analyze the data. Chi Square was run comparing the attachment styles of the relationship with the father to the attachmentstyles of the relationship with the partner. ANOVA was used to compare the attachment styles with the communication satisfaction and communication adaptability. SPSS will be the mode of determining results. The intermediate variables will be compared one another, then examined regarding style of relationships for each individual.
RESULTS Upon computing the results of the questionnaires received, fascinating answers were found for the proposed research questions. The following is an explanation of the findings in relation to each of the five specific research questions. RQ1: Is there a relationship between a daughter's attachment style with her father and the attachment style withher current (or most recent) romantic partner?The data from each of the participants was entered and a cross-tabulation was conducted. Each of the four attachment styles in the relationship with the father was cross-tabulated with the four attachment styles in the relationship with the romantic partner. The Pearson Chi-Square test showed a significance level of .53, which is notstatistically significant. Therefore, this shows that one cannot assume any relationship between the attachment style with the father and the attachment style with the romantic partner. The results show that one cannot determine anysort of relationship outside of a chance relationship. RQ2: Is there a relationship between the daughter's attachment style with her romantic partner and the satisfaction level regarding her relationship with her father?From the results computed through an ANOVA test, one cannot confirm that there is a relationship between a daughter's satisfaction level with relationship with her father and her attachment style in her romantic relationship. None of the results showed statistical significance between any of the levels. RQ3: Is there a relationship between the daughter's attachment style with her father and the satisfaction levelregarding her relationship with her father?The level of satisfaction regarding the relationship with her father is much higher when the attachment style is secure. The mean for the satisfaction is 6.2705 with a secure attachment style. This mean drops to 4.9643 with a preoccupied attachment style. Next, the mean is 4.2704 for the dismissing attachment style and 4.2118 for the fearful attachment style. Due to these results, one could make a connection between the secure attachment style and a high level of communication satisfaction. RQ4: Is there a relationship between the daughter's attachment style with her father and her level of communication adaptability?Although there is not a drastic difference in the levels of communication adaptability, those individuals with a fearful attachment style displayed the highest level of communication adaptability with a mean of 3.8725. The preoccupied and secure attachment styles were 3.8357 and 3.8011 respectively. Lastly, those individuals with the 3
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Katorski UW-L Journal of Undergraduate Research VI (2003) dismissing attachment style had a mean of 3.6202. Those who have a fearful attachment style do have a higher tendency toward communication adaptability, however a strong relationship would be hard to support. RQ5: Is there a relationship between the daughter's level of communication adaptability and the attachment style with her romantic partner?A different result was found when comparing the attachment styles of the romantic relationship with the communication adaptability. Those individuals with a secure attachment style with their romantic partner had a mean of 3.82. The mean scores continued to lessen with preoccupied at 3.7619, fearful at 3.7263, and dismissing at3.6745. Again, one may be able to speculate; however, it may be difficult to make a strong relationship between the two.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS As previously stated some of the results showed a relationship, while others did not do so. This causes more analyzing to occur in order to gain a greater understanding of the relationships between the variables. When comparing the communication satisfaction level with the attachment styles of the father relationship andthe communication satisfaction level with the attachment styles of the romantic relationship, one finds very differentresults. There is complete statistical significance between the communication satisfaction and the attachment styles with the father. The ANOVA shows that the number for statistical significance is .000, whereas there is notstatistical significance between communication satisfaction and the attachment styles with the romantic partner. That score of significance is .145. Although it is not very high, there is no way of making a connection. This is the same situation for communication adaptability. There is statistical significance for the score of communicationadaptability at .024. The communication adaptability and attachment with partner score is .208. These are not quite the results expected; however, they do prove to be interesting. The relationship a daughter has with her father is one that greatly affects her life. This relationship began atchildhood, and has continued into adulthood. Regardless if the relationship is healthy or not, it still has some sort of affect on the daughter. When comparing it to the relationship with a romantic partner, one is looking at a much different relationship. This consistency continued throughout the results. Statistical significance was present when addressing the relationship between the father and daughter, yet never present between the daughter and her partner. U
Using multiple comparisons allows one to examine the specific attachment styles to the level of communicationsatisfaction. The secure attachment style shows statistical significance in regards to communication satisfactionwhen compared with each of the other attachment styles. For each of these match-ups, the statistical significance is .000. None of the other combinations displays statistical significance in regards to communication satisfaction. Continuing with the relationship with the father but looking at the communication adaptability level displays slightly different results. There is statistical significance when comparing the secure attachment style and the dismissing attachment style in regards to communication adaptability. Statistical significance is present whencomparing dismissing and fearful as well. This is fascinating because the only one not showing statistical significance when compared is the preoccupied attachment style. The preoccupied attachment style can be described as, "I want to be completely emotionally intimate with others, but I often find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I am uncomfortable being without close relationships, but I sometimes worry that others don't value me as much as I value them," (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991). When one is a part of a preoccupied type of relationship, she desires to be very emotionally intimate. This would cause her to feel hurt more easily possible take each comment or conversation to heart. Therefore, responding with a witty comment or joke would not be in the nature of this individual. The mean score for those individuals with a preoccupied attachment style is 5.7190, which is relatively high. One could any speculate as to why that score is high. Speculations could lead to the belief that only certain aspects of the relationship cause dissatisfaction. A point of interest regarding the dismissing attachment style in the relationship with the romantic partner is the placement of the mean scores for that style. The level of communication satisfaction concerning the dismissing style is the highest of the four; however, the level of adaptability is the lowest. This could be because these females desire independent relationships, therefore feeling satisfied rather easily. Due to the desire for an independentrelationship, she is able to state her feelings in a more aggressive manner.
Wit, humor, and ease of conversation would not be a high priority when one does not desire any intimacy in that relationship. Another hypothesis could include the fact that the female is used to a high level of satisfaction in her relationship with males. If her romantic partner does not live up to her expectations, than she would rather remain completely independent from him, seeing no need to adapt to situations smoothly. . The research does not allow one to conclude that there is a relationship 4
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Katorski UW-L Journal of Undergraduate Research VI (2003) between the attachment styles in father/daughter relationships to those in romantic relationships. However, there isstatistical significance (.000) to show that there is a relationship between the attachment styles in the father/daughter relationship and daughter's communication satisfaction. There is also statistical significance (.024) to reveal a relationship between the attachment styles in the father/daughter relationship and the daughter's communication adaptability. One disappointing finding is that there is no statistical significance with the daughter's romantic relationship related to any variable. This is slightly shocking due to past research and literature that supports the importance of the father/daughter relationship and its effects on the daughter's life in the future.
There's a theory that we always seek to "make it right." So (very simply put) if you had a parent that largely ignored you -- -- you'll tend to choose partners that ingnore you or are unavailable to you so this time in this relationship you can "fix" what was wrong. I cannot tell you how long I played the game "ignore me more and I'll try harder." It's painful and embarrasing to even think about.
It's easy to follow the patterns that you've been following since childhood. Even if they're not very satisfying, they ARE familiar. Most humans basically fear change and the unknown and have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to embrace something new...even if what's new is going to be better for them. Changing your habits -- even if you are changing them for the better -- is freakin' hard. It takes constant awareness, it takes a firm commitment to bettering yourself, it takes learning new skills, and it takes ACTION. You can analyze yourself to death, but if you don't change your behavior nothing's gonna change.
PART 2
If women want men to marry, maybe a little more work needs to be done to understand men and to think about what men feel and what men need and what motivates men to take on the awesome responsibility of marriage and parenting in a world that doesn’t like them very much.
I was having a conversation recently with a Christian woman and trying to explain the sexual needs of men and she was explaining why she had no obligation to care much about men’s needs if she didn’t feel like it, (because whatever happened to her in life had to make her feel good, otherwise she didn’t feel that she should be obligated to do it). I raised the point about how men have to get up and go to work whether they feel like it or not. Men have to deal with her family whether he feels like it or not. Men have to be dragged off to shopping or artsy stuff whether he feels like it or not. Her response was to say “that’s different”. I think men are horrified at the way that women treat us as objects. And don’t mean just as sperm-donors and wallters (for paying taxes for universal health care, IVF and contraceptives), I mean by being incapable of understanding what men want – what incentives they respond to and what a woman has to do to get them to engage and take on tasks.
It’s like women want the freedom to sleep with bad men, and yet be supported by the good men through taxpayer dollars without having to care about the needs of those good men. Sort of turning good men into ATMs and bad men into sperm donors – all with the goal of squeezing life dry by using people and trying to do as little as possible for anyone else. I think that’s what abortion and divorce are – a resenting of RELATIONSHIPS. A rejection of the idea that a woman should have any duties or obligations to anyone else at all.
It reminds me of atheism, where people reject God because they just can’t be bothered with the demands of a relationship but instead reduce Christianity to being happy and being forgiven what whatever selfish things they do. I think that’s what’s behind the drive to turn Christianity into “having happy feelings”. It plays very well with women, but men are suspicious of it, because they sympathize with God and they wonder – what about God’s needs? what about God’s feelings? who is thinking about his interests in this relationship? Christianity is about serving God, not keeping score to make sure that he gives you more than you give him. Sometimes I think that all of this opposition to evidence of God’s existence and character is really just a way of keping him cloudy, indistinct and at a distance. We do this so that we can use him to “forgive” us and to feel significance and love, but only when we feel like it. We avoid the evidence so that it is not really clear what our obligations are. Christians seem to be making God out in their image, and substituting their goals for his goals, without really caring what he thinks about it. And I think I see something similar happening between women and men. No one understands us, and they don’t want to, so long as they get what they want from us.
Why are these women so STUPID? Just because they have these urges, why does that justify acting on them? I'd love to eat pizza and fried chicken every day. I'd also like to eat cookies, cake, and ice cream 3 times a day. Why don't I do it? It will lead to bad long term consequences. What the hell is wrong with these women?
If you are a woman get involved with a bad guy, single dad...ect......there will be bad consequences.
As far as I can tell, chicks don't date ugly boys either. Ugly may have different meanings for men and women, but the results are still the same.A hot homeless bum living in trash ain't getting some.
Regarding women who like bad boys, one could argue that they do so because they think they can change them. But they can't.
Okay, think about that for just two seconds,. When you like something, it's because it is what it is the way it is, yes? For instance: you like chocolate cake because it is chocolate cake. You don't think to yourself, "Yeah I like this chocolate cake because, if I try really, really hard, I can make it into banana cream pie. Mmmhm. I like me some chocolate cake so I can have that pie."
Women, and especially younger women, tend to like or enjoy "bad boys" because of the "lawless" quality someone else pointed out. Some young women can live out their rebellion streak vicariously through these guys who are "edgy" and flaunt authority. They tend to be, yeah, self-confident, and that's pretty darned attractive too. They push the boundaries of regular, vanilla, quiet social acceptability and conformity and, yeah, that can be appealing too to to go along on that ride with someone.
An attraction to "bad boys" does not equal a propensity for abuse. It's, a lot of the time, just an opportunity to explore one's own sense of wanting to explore the boundaries of society and finding someone to take you there. It's about rebellion.
And eventually, they all grow out of that, find the value in a certain amount of conformity that most can live with,
This stupid thing called "love". It's more destructive than the entire US military arsenal. It amazes me when a girl can complain for days on end and call the person they're with the worst things in the world yet will stay with them because they "love him". I've actually asked a girl why they were with a guy and they said they loved the guy but i asked "what do you love about him?" and they said "he's just a great guy!" after they had gone on for hours about how awful of a human being the person is. It's pathetic.
Romance is a drug that prevents women from having to deal with the tougher issues in their life, like aging, finances, significant stress, problems with their children, and many other things. Stability, companionship, creation of a home and family if that's what you desire, and some sense of a safe place to come home to and deal with the cares of the world. Stupid behavior is how I describe irrational behavior that throws caution to the wind and causes women to hook up with men who are unsuitable or dangerous. The warning signs are there but they let their romantic feelings override. The motives are wrong – they're looking for someone to give them the castle or, if they're very wounded and have had very bad experiences, someone who's going to heal those wounds. So they go into a relationship with an unrealistic expectation of what marriage or a long-term relationship is going to be.We've been taught that somehow the power of our love can change a man, and that the sexier and more beautiful we are, the more powerful we are. Women often confuse sexual power with personal power, confusing the difference between being able to arouse a man with feminine power. But then she doesn't know how to keep him because his interest will wane once the hunt is over. She's gotten her romantic fix during that time, but when he leaves her high and dry once the sexual excitement wears off, she's left confused and lonely and questioning herself even more.
Summarizing a recent conversation with my medical assistant about this very issue:
She said that it's comforting to know that if a situation were to arise where we were in danger, that I could be trusted to do everything in my power to ensure the safety of not just myself, but her as well, and that she would not be alone in fighting for a solution.
To often we think of a "bad boy" as someone with a criminal record, scars from knife/gun fights, a foul mouth, rebellious attitude, and a bunch of tattoos. While these things can communicate a degree of safety and protection, they do so at such an extreme, that it is likely to be too extreme, and often backfires, which can result in unhealthy relationships and behavior that jeopardizes anyone involved with them.
A person doesn't need to have a partner who is dangerous and rebellious in order to feel secure; it is quite possible, and highly advisable, to find someone who will fulfill this desire in a mature, wise, and selfless manner.
I found this article that might be of interesting:
Father/Daughter Relationships: Effects of Communicative Adaptabilityand Satisfaction on Daughter's Romantic Relationships Jessica Katorski
ABSTRACT Research has shown that the relationship a daughter has with her father remains with her intoadulthood. The father/daughter relationship is said to have an affect on future relationships, including romantic relationships. One hundred and eight-one females from the La Crosse, WIarea completed questionnaires regarding the relationship with their father as well as the relationship with their current (or most recent) romantic partner. The females were asked to determine what attachment style best describes each relationship, assess their satisfaction level concerning the relationship with their father, and asked questions regarding their communication adaptability level. Results showed that relationships could only be made between the attachmentstyles in the father/daughter relationships and the communication satisfaction and adaptability.
INTRODUCTION A great deal of research has been conducted to find the effects of family during one’s childhood. Researchers have found that parent-child relationships affect the psychological well being of the child. Barnett and Kibria stated that positive parent-child relationships are thought to enhance several aspects of psychological well being while negative relationships are thought to predispose to psychological distress. Due to such findings, one might suggestthat the impact of the family environment on young adults is significant as well (Kissee, Murphy, Bonner, & Murley, 2000). Dumlao and Botta (2000) and Perkins (2001) state that the relationship between young adultwomen and their fathers has previously been neglected when examining the relationships within a family. Familyinfluences within the young adult cycle of life have gone virtually unstudied (Kissee, Murphy, Bonner, & Murley, 2000; Lamb, 1981; Way & Gillman, 2000). Many are convinced that the relationship between mothers and daughters is the most important parentalrelationship. While the relationship is certainly valuable, the connection that a female has with her father in manyways matters more than the one with her mother (Nielsen, 2001). Due to this, research on the affects of a young-adult daughter's relationship with her father is of value. Therefore, research was conducted on young adult women determining if or what was the relationship between father/daughter relationships and the daughter's romanticrelationships. Each young woman completed surveys regarding attachment style in the relationship with her father, her satisfaction level regarding the relationship with her father, and her communicative adaptability.
In a strong statement by Secunda (1992), she described a female's father as her "first love," regardless of the experiences in her relationship with her father. This text noted that it might be assumed that the father-daughter relationship has the potential to shape interaction patterns that surface as women enter adult relationships. Therefore, this supports the hypothesis that a pattern may be apparent between father-daughter relationships and the daughter's romantic relationships. Research has found that women with abusive or absent fathers often choose partners who abuse or abandon them (Secunda, 1992). Research concerning intermediate variables as adjusting factors proves interesting. According to Beatty and Dobos (1992) satisfaction may be described as an internal affect resulting from the acquisition of pleasure and/or avoidance of pain. More specifically, any stimulus that fulfills needs, produces positive reinforcement, or confirms one’s ideal self-image produces satisfaction (Beatty & Dobos, 1992). Previous findings from Vangelisti, Crumley, Baker, & Canary (1999) have supported the interdependence theory, which states that relational satisfaction is linked to the degree to which one’s standards are met. Satisfaction has also beenused as the primary criterion for evaluating the quality of family communication (Pearson, 1989). Some research has focused on the satisfaction in conversation with others viewing satisfaction as a global response to relationships. Due to various types of interaction with one's father, satisfaction was operationalized in global terms for this study.
Attachment is an overall term that refers to the state and quality of an individual's attachments. These attachments are divided into two distinct different types, secure and insecure attachment. Attachments are part of relationships from infancy. The emotional bonds that infants form with their caregivers serve as blueprints for the way people view themselves and others. They affect the way people act in their adult relationships. (Bowlby,1969;1973) Specifically regarding attachment in relationships, Bowlby stated that attachment relationships were importantfor humans across the life cycle and that attachment behaviors depicted interaction "from cradle to the grave." (Bowlby, 1979, p129). Once working attachment models are formed early in life, they are used as a guide for the child's attachment behavior both in familiar and new situations (Cassidy & Kobak, 198 . Research has been conducted and supported the hypothesis that one's early attachment styles serve as a prototype for later relationships outside the family (Crowell & Feldman, 1987; Main & Goldwyn, 198. Due to these findings, using attachmentstyles as the comparison between family and romantic relationships serves as dependable. As previously stated, communication is the core of every relationship. Generally, individuals desire to express a positive nature through communication. In order to do so, one must be able to adapt to situations accordingly.
Communicative adaptability, the ability to adjust in social settings, can also be defined as the capacity of the individual to adjust him/herself to the situation with minimum friction (Karlsson, 1963). Beatty, Marshall, & Rudd (2001) state that communicative adaptability involves the use of wit and emotional reactivity as well as emphasizes individual differences in the capacity to adapt to immediate surroundings. A number of scholars have researched this area, only with slight variations to the research. There are subtle differences in the theory constructs, yet they all share the recognition that the degree to which individuals adjust insocial settings is unevenly distributed across the population. Since communication is inevitable, individualsexperience various social settings, and the variance in communicative adaptability is considerable, it would be ofinterest to discover if there is relationship between attachment styles in relationships and an individual's level of communicative adaptability. In order to build upon completed research, the objective is to address the following questions:RQ1: Is there a relationship between a daughter's attachment style with her father and the attachment style with her current (or most recent) romantic partner?RQ2: Is there a relationship between the daughter's attachment style with her romantic partner and her satisfaction level regarding her relationship with her father?RQ3: Is there a relationship between the daughter's attachment style with her father and her satisfaction level regarding her relationship with her father?RQ4: Is there a relationship between the daughter's attachment styles with her father and her level of communication adaptability?RQ5: Is there a relationship between the daughter’s attachment style with her romantic partner and her level of communication adaptability?
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Katorski UW-L Journal of Undergraduate Research VI (2003) as they had previously for the relationship with their father. This included completing the 5-point Likert scale along with choosing one style that best represents the romantic relationship. SubjectsFemales above the age of 18 were the subjects of this research. Due to the separation from close parentalguidance, women this age are appropriate subjects for this study. One hundred and eighty-one women completelyresponded the previously mentioned questionnaires. Procedures This data was collected by a convenience sample. Majority of the women is students in the La Crosse area. Surveys were distributed throughout a few residence halls, a couple classrooms, and a campus organizationalmeeting. The researcher immediately collected the surveys upon completion by the subject. Data AnalysisDue to the number of variables involved in this study, several tests were completed in order to best analyze the data. Chi Square was run comparing the attachment styles of the relationship with the father to the attachmentstyles of the relationship with the partner. ANOVA was used to compare the attachment styles with the communication satisfaction and communication adaptability. SPSS will be the mode of determining results. The intermediate variables will be compared one another, then examined regarding style of relationships for each individual.
RESULTS Upon computing the results of the questionnaires received, fascinating answers were found for the proposed research questions. The following is an explanation of the findings in relation to each of the five specific research questions. RQ1: Is there a relationship between a daughter's attachment style with her father and the attachment style withher current (or most recent) romantic partner?The data from each of the participants was entered and a cross-tabulation was conducted. Each of the four attachment styles in the relationship with the father was cross-tabulated with the four attachment styles in the relationship with the romantic partner. The Pearson Chi-Square test showed a significance level of .53, which is notstatistically significant. Therefore, this shows that one cannot assume any relationship between the attachment style with the father and the attachment style with the romantic partner. The results show that one cannot determine anysort of relationship outside of a chance relationship. RQ2: Is there a relationship between the daughter's attachment style with her romantic partner and the satisfaction level regarding her relationship with her father?From the results computed through an ANOVA test, one cannot confirm that there is a relationship between a daughter's satisfaction level with relationship with her father and her attachment style in her romantic relationship. None of the results showed statistical significance between any of the levels. RQ3: Is there a relationship between the daughter's attachment style with her father and the satisfaction levelregarding her relationship with her father?The level of satisfaction regarding the relationship with her father is much higher when the attachment style is secure. The mean for the satisfaction is 6.2705 with a secure attachment style. This mean drops to 4.9643 with a preoccupied attachment style. Next, the mean is 4.2704 for the dismissing attachment style and 4.2118 for the fearful attachment style. Due to these results, one could make a connection between the secure attachment style and a high level of communication satisfaction. RQ4: Is there a relationship between the daughter's attachment style with her father and her level of communication adaptability?Although there is not a drastic difference in the levels of communication adaptability, those individuals with a fearful attachment style displayed the highest level of communication adaptability with a mean of 3.8725. The preoccupied and secure attachment styles were 3.8357 and 3.8011 respectively. Lastly, those individuals with the 3
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Katorski UW-L Journal of Undergraduate Research VI (2003) dismissing attachment style had a mean of 3.6202. Those who have a fearful attachment style do have a higher tendency toward communication adaptability, however a strong relationship would be hard to support. RQ5: Is there a relationship between the daughter's level of communication adaptability and the attachment style with her romantic partner?A different result was found when comparing the attachment styles of the romantic relationship with the communication adaptability. Those individuals with a secure attachment style with their romantic partner had a mean of 3.82. The mean scores continued to lessen with preoccupied at 3.7619, fearful at 3.7263, and dismissing at3.6745. Again, one may be able to speculate; however, it may be difficult to make a strong relationship between the two.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS As previously stated some of the results showed a relationship, while others did not do so. This causes more analyzing to occur in order to gain a greater understanding of the relationships between the variables. When comparing the communication satisfaction level with the attachment styles of the father relationship andthe communication satisfaction level with the attachment styles of the romantic relationship, one finds very differentresults. There is complete statistical significance between the communication satisfaction and the attachment styles with the father. The ANOVA shows that the number for statistical significance is .000, whereas there is notstatistical significance between communication satisfaction and the attachment styles with the romantic partner. That score of significance is .145. Although it is not very high, there is no way of making a connection. This is the same situation for communication adaptability. There is statistical significance for the score of communicationadaptability at .024. The communication adaptability and attachment with partner score is .208. These are not quite the results expected; however, they do prove to be interesting. The relationship a daughter has with her father is one that greatly affects her life. This relationship began atchildhood, and has continued into adulthood. Regardless if the relationship is healthy or not, it still has some sort of affect on the daughter. When comparing it to the relationship with a romantic partner, one is looking at a much different relationship. This consistency continued throughout the results. Statistical significance was present when addressing the relationship between the father and daughter, yet never present between the daughter and her partner. U
Using multiple comparisons allows one to examine the specific attachment styles to the level of communicationsatisfaction. The secure attachment style shows statistical significance in regards to communication satisfactionwhen compared with each of the other attachment styles. For each of these match-ups, the statistical significance is .000. None of the other combinations displays statistical significance in regards to communication satisfaction. Continuing with the relationship with the father but looking at the communication adaptability level displays slightly different results. There is statistical significance when comparing the secure attachment style and the dismissing attachment style in regards to communication adaptability. Statistical significance is present whencomparing dismissing and fearful as well. This is fascinating because the only one not showing statistical significance when compared is the preoccupied attachment style. The preoccupied attachment style can be described as, "I want to be completely emotionally intimate with others, but I often find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I am uncomfortable being without close relationships, but I sometimes worry that others don't value me as much as I value them," (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991). When one is a part of a preoccupied type of relationship, she desires to be very emotionally intimate. This would cause her to feel hurt more easily possible take each comment or conversation to heart. Therefore, responding with a witty comment or joke would not be in the nature of this individual. The mean score for those individuals with a preoccupied attachment style is 5.7190, which is relatively high. One could any speculate as to why that score is high. Speculations could lead to the belief that only certain aspects of the relationship cause dissatisfaction. A point of interest regarding the dismissing attachment style in the relationship with the romantic partner is the placement of the mean scores for that style. The level of communication satisfaction concerning the dismissing style is the highest of the four; however, the level of adaptability is the lowest. This could be because these females desire independent relationships, therefore feeling satisfied rather easily. Due to the desire for an independentrelationship, she is able to state her feelings in a more aggressive manner.
Wit, humor, and ease of conversation would not be a high priority when one does not desire any intimacy in that relationship. Another hypothesis could include the fact that the female is used to a high level of satisfaction in her relationship with males. If her romantic partner does not live up to her expectations, than she would rather remain completely independent from him, seeing no need to adapt to situations smoothly. . The research does not allow one to conclude that there is a relationship 4
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Katorski UW-L Journal of Undergraduate Research VI (2003) between the attachment styles in father/daughter relationships to those in romantic relationships. However, there isstatistical significance (.000) to show that there is a relationship between the attachment styles in the father/daughter relationship and daughter's communication satisfaction. There is also statistical significance (.024) to reveal a relationship between the attachment styles in the father/daughter relationship and the daughter's communication adaptability. One disappointing finding is that there is no statistical significance with the daughter's romantic relationship related to any variable. This is slightly shocking due to past research and literature that supports the importance of the father/daughter relationship and its effects on the daughter's life in the future.
There's a theory that we always seek to "make it right." So (very simply put) if you had a parent that largely ignored you -- -- you'll tend to choose partners that ingnore you or are unavailable to you so this time in this relationship you can "fix" what was wrong. I cannot tell you how long I played the game "ignore me more and I'll try harder." It's painful and embarrasing to even think about.
It's easy to follow the patterns that you've been following since childhood. Even if they're not very satisfying, they ARE familiar. Most humans basically fear change and the unknown and have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to embrace something new...even if what's new is going to be better for them. Changing your habits -- even if you are changing them for the better -- is freakin' hard. It takes constant awareness, it takes a firm commitment to bettering yourself, it takes learning new skills, and it takes ACTION. You can analyze yourself to death, but if you don't change your behavior nothing's gonna change.
PART 2
If women want men to marry, maybe a little more work needs to be done to understand men and to think about what men feel and what men need and what motivates men to take on the awesome responsibility of marriage and parenting in a world that doesn’t like them very much.
I was having a conversation recently with a Christian woman and trying to explain the sexual needs of men and she was explaining why she had no obligation to care much about men’s needs if she didn’t feel like it, (because whatever happened to her in life had to make her feel good, otherwise she didn’t feel that she should be obligated to do it). I raised the point about how men have to get up and go to work whether they feel like it or not. Men have to deal with her family whether he feels like it or not. Men have to be dragged off to shopping or artsy stuff whether he feels like it or not. Her response was to say “that’s different”. I think men are horrified at the way that women treat us as objects. And don’t mean just as sperm-donors and wallters (for paying taxes for universal health care, IVF and contraceptives), I mean by being incapable of understanding what men want – what incentives they respond to and what a woman has to do to get them to engage and take on tasks.
It’s like women want the freedom to sleep with bad men, and yet be supported by the good men through taxpayer dollars without having to care about the needs of those good men. Sort of turning good men into ATMs and bad men into sperm donors – all with the goal of squeezing life dry by using people and trying to do as little as possible for anyone else. I think that’s what abortion and divorce are – a resenting of RELATIONSHIPS. A rejection of the idea that a woman should have any duties or obligations to anyone else at all.
It reminds me of atheism, where people reject God because they just can’t be bothered with the demands of a relationship but instead reduce Christianity to being happy and being forgiven what whatever selfish things they do. I think that’s what’s behind the drive to turn Christianity into “having happy feelings”. It plays very well with women, but men are suspicious of it, because they sympathize with God and they wonder – what about God’s needs? what about God’s feelings? who is thinking about his interests in this relationship? Christianity is about serving God, not keeping score to make sure that he gives you more than you give him. Sometimes I think that all of this opposition to evidence of God’s existence and character is really just a way of keping him cloudy, indistinct and at a distance. We do this so that we can use him to “forgive” us and to feel significance and love, but only when we feel like it. We avoid the evidence so that it is not really clear what our obligations are. Christians seem to be making God out in their image, and substituting their goals for his goals, without really caring what he thinks about it. And I think I see something similar happening between women and men. No one understands us, and they don’t want to, so long as they get what they want from us.
POETRY: DEAR SWEETHEART
Loving you comes easy to me
You gave me my wings
setting me free
Gave me--
the wings of love
floating me
high beyond and above
Beyond--
hurt, anguish, and pain
Above--
dark clouds where sorrow reigned
With my wings
you came bearing
additional intimate things:
You brought hope
into the hopeless day
You brought sunshine
always leading my way
Your loving touch
showing your care
ESSENTIALLY- the promise
to always be there
Taken on a cloud of bliss
surrounded by serenity
with every tender kiss
My broken heart
with no pulse
you've given it the will to start
the will to let love beat
joining the partial vessel
once so incomplete
Left in void
without the sensual trail
you made into my heart
inevitably leading our love to prevail
PART II
Dear Sweetheart...
To have found a love like ours
is like a beautiful garden of flowers
with a heavenly scent,
and more loveliness than we mortals
have ever had the rashness to achieve.
Our garden of life is like a sweet dream,
or an afterlife in which real people
know the joy that we thought
only angels could enjoy..
PART III
You stole my heart with only three words
My gangster of love, no mercy was heard
With the ease of your touch, you've invaded my skin
Taken over my spirit, all wounds you do mend
The sound of your voice captivates my soul
Your forgiveness and love make me forever whole
The calm in your eyes take over my mind
Embraces my thoughts and stops all time
With only a look, you control all of me
Yet in bondage of passion your love sets me free
You soothe my tempest heart like the peace of a dove
I know in my heart you're my gangster of love
4
Amidst darkened skies and storms of sorrow
She lingers within the shores of serenity
The waves lulling her into a dreamy daze
With father moon illuminating hope from above
She encloses her heart within trembling hands
Her mind full of dreams and uncertainty
Wishing, wondering, waiting
Could he hold the sacred key?
Silently he approaches, with his captivating gaze
His smile could melt even the coldest of hearts
Together they walk in a silence of contentment
Her hand within his, her heart close to his own
The heavenly bodies radiate blessings from above
As his lips meet hers in a tender first kiss
Their souls entwined by the fates of time
Forever they?ll share the sweet rapture of serenity
5
Love is like a snow storm,
Blizzarding through my mind.
Snow may fall in many a unique forms,
Creating love, all more special and kind.
At first the snow is soft, gentle and warm,
Oh, how you long for more.
At first the snow is bright and glistining- with charm,
Oh, how love is something to adore.
As the snow continues to fall,
So does the passion, being received from him.
Never do you want the clouds to stall,
Disbursing the love (being lit from within.)
You look at the grass, once dead and brown,
To be comforted by a warm blanket of protection.
Then into the mirror, once a frown,
Has turned itself in the other direction.
After continuous streets, filled with white,
The ice slowly begins to melt.
After never being alone, throughout the night,
The absence slowly begins to be felt.
Before you know it, the streets are black,
And the grass too returns to its normal brown.
Before you know it, it's become a apparent fact,
That the love, once rose strong, melted and left town
6
Come to me in the dark of the night
And whisper my name
In your rhythmical, pacific, voice
Gently hold me close to you
And let me fall asleep
On your magnetic chest
Let my first vision of daylight
Be accompanied by your quiescent,
Genteel, body next to mine
Your beautiful eyes shut, as you dream,
I delicately wake you
With a gentle warm kiss
Walk with me to the ocean
And smell the sweet sea
As the rising sun warms the sand
Sit with me on the beach
And let's listen to the sound
Of the dancing waves
7
Silken threads that bond us to each other
Sourced in light from hearts own pool and phased so as not to smother
The Independent light of love---- in sibling, parent, lover
And companion in life's journey, offering hand with which to cover
Fears of failure, doubts and pain, all needs which fairly shared
Distribute and diminish, leaving space for dreams that dared
A Joint target of Life won, Tasks done, souls bared----
To closest scrutiny by our celestial parent; New Body pared
To heavenly form---- from that start in seedy clay
Made divine by love alone and caring, daring, sharing say
Life seen through someone else's eyes, a Golden piercing ray
Doth shine within us, bounces back, increases every day
The best in us, the blessed in us, the truth that truly may
Open the door knocked upon, in brothers heartfelt way
And Truth and Life, revealed in one
With One in All, does offer pay
In full
8
Was not your clay and mine
Co-mixed before our birth?
Is not your laugh and kind regard
The very substance of my mirth?
Does not your every tear
Drown my treasure ship?
It's not your form nor fame, My Love
That is the object of my worship.
It seems that you and I
Were from the same clay formed.
You breathe, I sigh; your heart, my beat
You came... my world has been transformed.
9
When you want the definition of a word,
where do you turn?
Do you,
flip through a dictionary,
call on a friend?
Well, I want the definition of Beauty,
but neither the largest dictionary,
nor closest friend,
Could do those sweet six letters any justice.
No Beauty magazine,
could give me the tip;
No fortune teller,
would be able to predict;
Ask a philosopher,
and he is confused.
But ask me,
and see what you would discover.
My answer would be,
true Beauty is defined only by
YOU.
10
Standing out under the stars
Reminds me of our memories
Of Happiness, sorrow, but mostly love...
And with you here right by
my side, I can say
Thanks to the "above"...
With That I can only
ask is this Using,
Love, or Bliss?...
But then again...
What's Love without
the start of Bliss...
11
Love, what is love?
Is it the happiness
of being brought together
from a strength sent from above?
Is it like the feel of joy?
As when to when you see your bundle of joy,
your babby girl or babby boy.
Is it a strength that can last?
I don't know....thinking of loves past.
But all and all love is a feeling
that no words can fully explain,
It can make a man do things known as insane,
Even though what he's doing might seem insane,
All he's trying to do is deal with love
and a good piece mind,
The kind of love that makes any person blind.
You gave me my wings
setting me free
Gave me--
the wings of love
floating me
high beyond and above
Beyond--
hurt, anguish, and pain
Above--
dark clouds where sorrow reigned
With my wings
you came bearing
additional intimate things:
You brought hope
into the hopeless day
You brought sunshine
always leading my way
Your loving touch
showing your care
ESSENTIALLY- the promise
to always be there
Taken on a cloud of bliss
surrounded by serenity
with every tender kiss
My broken heart
with no pulse
you've given it the will to start
the will to let love beat
joining the partial vessel
once so incomplete
Left in void
without the sensual trail
you made into my heart
inevitably leading our love to prevail
PART II
Dear Sweetheart...
To have found a love like ours
is like a beautiful garden of flowers
with a heavenly scent,
and more loveliness than we mortals
have ever had the rashness to achieve.
Our garden of life is like a sweet dream,
or an afterlife in which real people
know the joy that we thought
only angels could enjoy..
PART III
You stole my heart with only three words
My gangster of love, no mercy was heard
With the ease of your touch, you've invaded my skin
Taken over my spirit, all wounds you do mend
The sound of your voice captivates my soul
Your forgiveness and love make me forever whole
The calm in your eyes take over my mind
Embraces my thoughts and stops all time
With only a look, you control all of me
Yet in bondage of passion your love sets me free
You soothe my tempest heart like the peace of a dove
I know in my heart you're my gangster of love
4
Amidst darkened skies and storms of sorrow
She lingers within the shores of serenity
The waves lulling her into a dreamy daze
With father moon illuminating hope from above
She encloses her heart within trembling hands
Her mind full of dreams and uncertainty
Wishing, wondering, waiting
Could he hold the sacred key?
Silently he approaches, with his captivating gaze
His smile could melt even the coldest of hearts
Together they walk in a silence of contentment
Her hand within his, her heart close to his own
The heavenly bodies radiate blessings from above
As his lips meet hers in a tender first kiss
Their souls entwined by the fates of time
Forever they?ll share the sweet rapture of serenity
5
Love is like a snow storm,
Blizzarding through my mind.
Snow may fall in many a unique forms,
Creating love, all more special and kind.
At first the snow is soft, gentle and warm,
Oh, how you long for more.
At first the snow is bright and glistining- with charm,
Oh, how love is something to adore.
As the snow continues to fall,
So does the passion, being received from him.
Never do you want the clouds to stall,
Disbursing the love (being lit from within.)
You look at the grass, once dead and brown,
To be comforted by a warm blanket of protection.
Then into the mirror, once a frown,
Has turned itself in the other direction.
After continuous streets, filled with white,
The ice slowly begins to melt.
After never being alone, throughout the night,
The absence slowly begins to be felt.
Before you know it, the streets are black,
And the grass too returns to its normal brown.
Before you know it, it's become a apparent fact,
That the love, once rose strong, melted and left town
6
Come to me in the dark of the night
And whisper my name
In your rhythmical, pacific, voice
Gently hold me close to you
And let me fall asleep
On your magnetic chest
Let my first vision of daylight
Be accompanied by your quiescent,
Genteel, body next to mine
Your beautiful eyes shut, as you dream,
I delicately wake you
With a gentle warm kiss
Walk with me to the ocean
And smell the sweet sea
As the rising sun warms the sand
Sit with me on the beach
And let's listen to the sound
Of the dancing waves
7
Silken threads that bond us to each other
Sourced in light from hearts own pool and phased so as not to smother
The Independent light of love---- in sibling, parent, lover
And companion in life's journey, offering hand with which to cover
Fears of failure, doubts and pain, all needs which fairly shared
Distribute and diminish, leaving space for dreams that dared
A Joint target of Life won, Tasks done, souls bared----
To closest scrutiny by our celestial parent; New Body pared
To heavenly form---- from that start in seedy clay
Made divine by love alone and caring, daring, sharing say
Life seen through someone else's eyes, a Golden piercing ray
Doth shine within us, bounces back, increases every day
The best in us, the blessed in us, the truth that truly may
Open the door knocked upon, in brothers heartfelt way
And Truth and Life, revealed in one
With One in All, does offer pay
In full
8
Was not your clay and mine
Co-mixed before our birth?
Is not your laugh and kind regard
The very substance of my mirth?
Does not your every tear
Drown my treasure ship?
It's not your form nor fame, My Love
That is the object of my worship.
It seems that you and I
Were from the same clay formed.
You breathe, I sigh; your heart, my beat
You came... my world has been transformed.
9
When you want the definition of a word,
where do you turn?
Do you,
flip through a dictionary,
call on a friend?
Well, I want the definition of Beauty,
but neither the largest dictionary,
nor closest friend,
Could do those sweet six letters any justice.
No Beauty magazine,
could give me the tip;
No fortune teller,
would be able to predict;
Ask a philosopher,
and he is confused.
But ask me,
and see what you would discover.
My answer would be,
true Beauty is defined only by
YOU.
10
Standing out under the stars
Reminds me of our memories
Of Happiness, sorrow, but mostly love...
And with you here right by
my side, I can say
Thanks to the "above"...
With That I can only
ask is this Using,
Love, or Bliss?...
But then again...
What's Love without
the start of Bliss...
11
Love, what is love?
Is it the happiness
of being brought together
from a strength sent from above?
Is it like the feel of joy?
As when to when you see your bundle of joy,
your babby girl or babby boy.
Is it a strength that can last?
I don't know....thinking of loves past.
But all and all love is a feeling
that no words can fully explain,
It can make a man do things known as insane,
Even though what he's doing might seem insane,
All he's trying to do is deal with love
and a good piece mind,
The kind of love that makes any person blind.
POETRY: I HELD YOU BEFORE...ANOTHER TIME
I have held you before,
Another time, another place.
Our spirits entwined
in an eternal embrace.
Our corporeal flesh
shed time and again.
Yet, our ethereal souls
knowing no end.
Like a Phoenix we rise
from aeons past ash,
Our spirits unsure
of our newly forged paths.
One thing's for certain,
This one thing I know,
Our love springs eternal
Throughout Time's ebb and flow.
2
Your glowing face
Lights up my days
With tender love
Your soothing voice
Is a song only an
Angel could sing
Your sweet-tasting lips
Are sugar drops
To my heart
Your natural perfume
Is a healing vapor
To my soul
Feeling your body
Next to mine
Is indescribable
3
Where do I begin to describe a love that is so sincerely pure?
The lasting beautiful memories, that both our hearts forever endure
The meaningful lasting feelings, that two in love could ever share
Bonding forever together as one, with tender, loving, respectful care
I have received God's most precious blessing, your love is in my heart
Our fate at our birth planned together, destined from the start
As we journey through our life together, our love is in full bloom
You make the sun shine down on me, never any gloom
Our special song of togetherness, I dedicate it to you
You sing it to me every day; your love is shining through
Writing love poems back and fourth, every day and every night
Touching our hearts with words of love, our love is glowing bright
The look of love that to me you give, burns my heart intently
Lets everyone around the world see your love for me
You always give me your best love, unconditionally because you could
I return to you all of my love, like you know I always would
It does not matter what others think, our love beats theirs by far
What really counts to you and me, our love glows like a star
Thank You for giving and being with me, you are my beautiful life
Without you here to live with me, my life would be my strife
You are truly the most wonderful woman, that I have to forever love
I wrote this poem just for you, to thank dear God above
No one could ever take our precious memories; I will forever claim
On my mind and deep in my heart, is you and your beautiful name
One last beautiful thought for your soul, heart, and your mind
You will always have a man that loves you, until the end of mankind!
4
I saw her beauty clearly,
She was a goddess.
She turned and smiled,
It was a ray of sunshine on a darkened day.
I heard her voice,
It was the voice of an angel.
It was like she stood out from everyone else,
Like a diamond in a coal pile.
Or a seventeenth cetury gold coin,
So precious and valuable.
She is like a sapphire,
Beautiful and extremly rare.
I ask myself where such an irresistible person could have came from,
Then I say only in my DREAMS.
With the grace and beauty of a goddess,
She captured my heart for all eternity
5
Pleasant winds, whistle blows;
The sun before me, there it glows.
This woman beside me by my hand
Like the night, I conquer the land.
I feel the peaceful Spring while I rest
Like a bird sleeping in a nest.
I smell the flowers in the air
As I smile upon the stars that Heaven shares.
She has a heart of pure fire.
I must admit, I most admire.
Chirping birds as the sun is drawn;
I see before me, it is dawn.
The dawn behind the splendid hill,
So far, yet so very near...
It's not a sight which I fear
Not with this vision by my side.
Faith and Truth!
We can't deny.
It cannot hide...
Within this aura, I am free
Gallant as a deity
I fly towards you as a dove
With this eternal sense of love.
6
I have always had a fantasy,
it involves a waterfall
as far as the eye can see.
And a woman,
a beautiful woman,
who loves me with her lips,
and makes love with her hips.
The love we could make,
would be filled with passion and mist,
I am not like any other,
for she will remember she was kissed.
As the water would shoot down from the top,
the dream would never end,
the dream would never stop.
I'd touch every inch of her body
with all of the love that I held,
as I'd love her even harder,
she'd say, "I love you," as she yelled.
As she'd say, "I love you",
with water dripping down like rain,
I realize we would be, in essence,
in the same dimension,
and our love would never change.
7
Suspended in the oceans of time. Together we will be.
Passed the world and all which we can see. Without you here
is no future. Time no longer moves. Days I'm with you fly by in joy.
Days we are apart my heart feels destroyed. I cannot say we will
be together forever, but to break your heart I will do never.
I want to cry out loud how you make me proud, time without you
lies in silence. Darkness crowds my burning eyes. As the water flows
in the ocean that holds time our memories will be stored. Much filled
but space for more. Each step I take you run through my mind,
your love is not hard to find. Each time I blink I can't help but
think, our thoughts together in one link. I thank God each night
for everthing is just right. To have found you makes my life worth
living. To have our time together held in this Ocean of love makes
each day a great experience. I could never thank you enough but
I will try, by telling you now I will love you till I die.
8
The ending night craves to see the light of the moon
It craves to see the moonlit love soon
Their rendezvous is based on roll of the die
but until its coming, the night must wait and sigh
The ending night craves to match the glorious day
'Tis said they were one, but now the truth is nay
The day burned the night with its harsh rays
That is why the night has it's solemn ways
The ending night craves to return to it's former beauty
and be able to perform it's other duties
Before, the night brought tranquility and shall do so anon
all of this happens when the night turns to dawn
The ending night craves to have others wander during it's reign
but their ignorance leads them to believe that the night is full of bane
so the night suffers in it's own darkness
Only one offers to save it from the abyss
The ending night craves to see the Nightingale yet again
Her song allowing the heart of the night to mend
She listens and soothes the night's torment
To revive the night to day she is hell bent
The ending night craves to remember the joy the day brought
but all it remembers is how it lost the battle fought
That is why no stars twinkle in it's wake
and why the night knows not which path to take
The ending night craves to regain everything lost
It would do anything, no matter the cost
but the night rejoices for the gift of the nightingale
Without her, it's will to carry on would simply fail
The ending night craves to be understood
but no one cares to see the details under the hood
Yet understanding brings insight
and insight brings the return of the light
The ending night craves to be craved
the reward for overcoming the perils braved
The night deserves joy now, does it not?
Especially with the hardships his lessons wrought
The ending night craves to trust again
and relight the flame that is now dim
Or, perhaps the night needs to wake from its dreams
and realize everything is not what it seems
But, until the waning night turns to waxing day
the night will patiently sit and wait
9
Sweet of breath and flushed with passion
she steals past the eyes and is my heart's assassin.
She ruffles the soul like a warm summer wind
and leaves me to ponder the depth of our sin.
To embrace her as one- is my life's endeavor
but fail though I will... and love her forever.
Another time, another place.
Our spirits entwined
in an eternal embrace.
Our corporeal flesh
shed time and again.
Yet, our ethereal souls
knowing no end.
Like a Phoenix we rise
from aeons past ash,
Our spirits unsure
of our newly forged paths.
One thing's for certain,
This one thing I know,
Our love springs eternal
Throughout Time's ebb and flow.
2
Your glowing face
Lights up my days
With tender love
Your soothing voice
Is a song only an
Angel could sing
Your sweet-tasting lips
Are sugar drops
To my heart
Your natural perfume
Is a healing vapor
To my soul
Feeling your body
Next to mine
Is indescribable
3
Where do I begin to describe a love that is so sincerely pure?
The lasting beautiful memories, that both our hearts forever endure
The meaningful lasting feelings, that two in love could ever share
Bonding forever together as one, with tender, loving, respectful care
I have received God's most precious blessing, your love is in my heart
Our fate at our birth planned together, destined from the start
As we journey through our life together, our love is in full bloom
You make the sun shine down on me, never any gloom
Our special song of togetherness, I dedicate it to you
You sing it to me every day; your love is shining through
Writing love poems back and fourth, every day and every night
Touching our hearts with words of love, our love is glowing bright
The look of love that to me you give, burns my heart intently
Lets everyone around the world see your love for me
You always give me your best love, unconditionally because you could
I return to you all of my love, like you know I always would
It does not matter what others think, our love beats theirs by far
What really counts to you and me, our love glows like a star
Thank You for giving and being with me, you are my beautiful life
Without you here to live with me, my life would be my strife
You are truly the most wonderful woman, that I have to forever love
I wrote this poem just for you, to thank dear God above
No one could ever take our precious memories; I will forever claim
On my mind and deep in my heart, is you and your beautiful name
One last beautiful thought for your soul, heart, and your mind
You will always have a man that loves you, until the end of mankind!
4
I saw her beauty clearly,
She was a goddess.
She turned and smiled,
It was a ray of sunshine on a darkened day.
I heard her voice,
It was the voice of an angel.
It was like she stood out from everyone else,
Like a diamond in a coal pile.
Or a seventeenth cetury gold coin,
So precious and valuable.
She is like a sapphire,
Beautiful and extremly rare.
I ask myself where such an irresistible person could have came from,
Then I say only in my DREAMS.
With the grace and beauty of a goddess,
She captured my heart for all eternity
5
Pleasant winds, whistle blows;
The sun before me, there it glows.
This woman beside me by my hand
Like the night, I conquer the land.
I feel the peaceful Spring while I rest
Like a bird sleeping in a nest.
I smell the flowers in the air
As I smile upon the stars that Heaven shares.
She has a heart of pure fire.
I must admit, I most admire.
Chirping birds as the sun is drawn;
I see before me, it is dawn.
The dawn behind the splendid hill,
So far, yet so very near...
It's not a sight which I fear
Not with this vision by my side.
Faith and Truth!
We can't deny.
It cannot hide...
Within this aura, I am free
Gallant as a deity
I fly towards you as a dove
With this eternal sense of love.
6
I have always had a fantasy,
it involves a waterfall
as far as the eye can see.
And a woman,
a beautiful woman,
who loves me with her lips,
and makes love with her hips.
The love we could make,
would be filled with passion and mist,
I am not like any other,
for she will remember she was kissed.
As the water would shoot down from the top,
the dream would never end,
the dream would never stop.
I'd touch every inch of her body
with all of the love that I held,
as I'd love her even harder,
she'd say, "I love you," as she yelled.
As she'd say, "I love you",
with water dripping down like rain,
I realize we would be, in essence,
in the same dimension,
and our love would never change.
7
Suspended in the oceans of time. Together we will be.
Passed the world and all which we can see. Without you here
is no future. Time no longer moves. Days I'm with you fly by in joy.
Days we are apart my heart feels destroyed. I cannot say we will
be together forever, but to break your heart I will do never.
I want to cry out loud how you make me proud, time without you
lies in silence. Darkness crowds my burning eyes. As the water flows
in the ocean that holds time our memories will be stored. Much filled
but space for more. Each step I take you run through my mind,
your love is not hard to find. Each time I blink I can't help but
think, our thoughts together in one link. I thank God each night
for everthing is just right. To have found you makes my life worth
living. To have our time together held in this Ocean of love makes
each day a great experience. I could never thank you enough but
I will try, by telling you now I will love you till I die.
8
The ending night craves to see the light of the moon
It craves to see the moonlit love soon
Their rendezvous is based on roll of the die
but until its coming, the night must wait and sigh
The ending night craves to match the glorious day
'Tis said they were one, but now the truth is nay
The day burned the night with its harsh rays
That is why the night has it's solemn ways
The ending night craves to return to it's former beauty
and be able to perform it's other duties
Before, the night brought tranquility and shall do so anon
all of this happens when the night turns to dawn
The ending night craves to have others wander during it's reign
but their ignorance leads them to believe that the night is full of bane
so the night suffers in it's own darkness
Only one offers to save it from the abyss
The ending night craves to see the Nightingale yet again
Her song allowing the heart of the night to mend
She listens and soothes the night's torment
To revive the night to day she is hell bent
The ending night craves to remember the joy the day brought
but all it remembers is how it lost the battle fought
That is why no stars twinkle in it's wake
and why the night knows not which path to take
The ending night craves to regain everything lost
It would do anything, no matter the cost
but the night rejoices for the gift of the nightingale
Without her, it's will to carry on would simply fail
The ending night craves to be understood
but no one cares to see the details under the hood
Yet understanding brings insight
and insight brings the return of the light
The ending night craves to be craved
the reward for overcoming the perils braved
The night deserves joy now, does it not?
Especially with the hardships his lessons wrought
The ending night craves to trust again
and relight the flame that is now dim
Or, perhaps the night needs to wake from its dreams
and realize everything is not what it seems
But, until the waning night turns to waxing day
the night will patiently sit and wait
9
Sweet of breath and flushed with passion
she steals past the eyes and is my heart's assassin.
She ruffles the soul like a warm summer wind
and leaves me to ponder the depth of our sin.
To embrace her as one- is my life's endeavor
but fail though I will... and love her forever.
JOURNAL: CHILDHOOD MEMORIES...OF LOST IN SPACE
I don't know if combining Forbidden Planet with Seinfeld and Gilligan's Island is exactly on target, but there are elements of all three. I was in second grade when this show premiered, and I never missed an episode. The stories were always interesting to me, and even at age eight the character of Dr. Smith absolutely captured my imagination. There are aspects of this fellow that are so very interesting - here is a guy with a great deal of education who never seems to have learned anything from the mythology he is always reciting to everyone, as in "All That Glitters", my all-time favorite episode. He didn't remember the tragedy of King Midas when he was making his wish? His greed and his cowardice override any mental advantage he may have. He is truly the George Costanza of space exploration - whenever he stumbles upon a piece of good fortune he has to milk it for all it's worth until the whole situation turns on him. Then there are the children - Will and Penny. No matter what Dr. Smith does they still like the guy, and he does a lot. He bargains with aliens to take Will's brain for their experiments instead of his, and in another episode turns Penny into platinum, although he does feel remorse about the latter deed. In fact, the children are Smith's only friends. He is merely tolerated by the adults, and for good reason.
There is the "innocence and chastity beyond reason" element that was part of Gilligan's Island and is part of this show too. Despite the only natural and healthy attraction between Major Donald West and Judy Robinson, we are to believe that nothing really happens between the two for years on end. Also like Gilligan's Island, although the group's first priority starts off as finding a way to return to earth, eventually they settle into a kind of domestic tranquility and seem to make peace with their situation of being "lost in space".
Of course, rewatching this series over forty years later, it is not quite as great as I remembered it, but it is still great fun and Smith is still a fascinating character. It's also interesting to see what people in the 1960's thought earthly civilization would be like in 1997. It's humorous yet somewhat tragic to see the optimistic viewpoint people had of the future in the 1960's pertaining to human nature. What the series' creators couldn't foresee is that today people are much more like Zachary Smith than the Robinson family - at least the people in charge of things are.
The show makes you feel you are apart of the action. You get sad when the show gets sad, you feel happy when Robinson's are happy. You feel angry at Doctor Smith when he is up to his old tricks. The show has empathy for other forms of life they come across. It allows you to see things from their point of view and not just humans! This show is pure fantasy. It's pure imagination. That's why you shouldn't care if it's camp or not! The show, although was serious in the first few episodes, Irwin Allen obviously wanted to have fun and make people enjoy the adventure
I can still remember the horror and fascination of space in the mid-1970s, which at the time was completely new terrain. Giant blobs, tentacled creatures, plastic ray guns, laser beams - it didn't matter what tricks the producers employed, it was all NEW STUFF as far as I was concerned. Of course, if you compare the props, effects and plots with today's sci-fi, you'd probably burst out laughing and scoff at how primitive it was back then. When you were 5 years old and you sat in your parents' living room, hunched over a black-and-white TV set, scared out of your wits, yet thrilled to bits at the harrowing adventures of the Robinsons. You buy it because maybe even at that young age, you had a crush on Penny Robinson (Angela Cartwright) and you want to try and grasp that feeling again, which at the time was also NEW STUFF to you. So this is first and foremost a trip down memory lane and it won't appeal to anyone who never watched the show as a kid.
POETRY: WITH ETERNITY
They are the basis of my being,
This soul rested within theirs.
While fears of their doom,
Become victims to faith.
For they and I are one,
With eternity
2
Eyes lit upon the warmth of love as you hold me close in your arms
Eyes staring into each others soul, love waiting to explode.
Music melody softly playing as we kiss the night away.
Eyes searching for love so true, memories flashing with every thought of you.
Eyes beholding such a mystery wanting this to last forever and not be history.
Eyes tell the soul it's you and only wants to be loved by you.
The look of love is in your eyes as you hold me close to you.
Body language speaks its mind as we make gestures with our eyes.
Laughter, joy fills the soul, regal, elegant to behold.
Look of love is in your eyes like the ocean surf with heavy tides.
Look of love is in your eyes mellowing out intoxicating pleasures.
If eyes could express the meaning of love,
They would speak a heavenly language sent from heaven above.
3
Every moment, since our first
Danced lovingly through my mind
Every smile, every laugh, every tear.
How lucky I am to have had those times,
Luckier still, to have more.
Tomorrow is a day I always look towards,
Tomorrow is another day with her.
Her thoughts of me find my heart,
Her thoughts are kind and pure.
Her thoughts, to me, I return in kind.
As I think of her once more.
The curve of her cheek as she looks past my gaze
Leads my heart to her lovely face.
This moment, like so many, catches me drifting,
Luck is mine once more.
Every moment, since our first
Has been lovelier than the last,
Every smile, every laugh, every giggle, every Her...
As I simply sit here next to her,
These thoughts keep filling my mind;
As I simply sit here next to her,
I smile, and smile, and smile.
4
When left alone with your own shadow,
There are times when u forget to hide
Waters surfacing beneath your eyes,
And the warm drops fall upon the ground.
The mists of the past enfold you in their embrace
And refuse to let you go, to set you free,
For what still binds you for the dream of yesterday
Is the memory of that look in her eyes -
For when you gazed across the black of night,
You found the light you had been searching for
All your life (and perhaps even before)
In the shimmering twinkle in her eyes.
You stepped out of the darkness, and walked hand in hand,
Leaving footprints by the shore buried in the sand.
Your peals of laughter and tears of sadness
Mixed with the music of the crashing waves.
And you thought this joy would last forever,
But happiness was not all you thought it would be.
Your soul looked for something you could not find,
From the gentle chains, you yearned to be free.
So you drifted away, and she let you go,
With the last ray of the sleepy sun?s fading light.
The shaft of light shined upon her silver tears
As she slowly disappeared from your sight.
In the middle of an empty, endless black sea
You drifted away like a lost island.
Clouds of illusions and false hopes blinded you
You had no one to turn to, or reach out for your hand.
You looked back, but she was nowhere in sight,
You closed your eyes and tried to shut away the night.
Try as you might, you can?t bring back yesterday,
Can?t wish for daylight in the thickening gray.
One night, you wake up to see her eyes again -
Two brilliant torches in the dark night sky.
And you realize, she has always been there
Her bright eyes have never really said goodbye.
You look up and you know, as they cast a bright glow
That her eyes of light will always be there
To show you the way, to tell you that the day
And all happy memories will last forever.
This soul rested within theirs.
While fears of their doom,
Become victims to faith.
For they and I are one,
With eternity
2
Eyes lit upon the warmth of love as you hold me close in your arms
Eyes staring into each others soul, love waiting to explode.
Music melody softly playing as we kiss the night away.
Eyes searching for love so true, memories flashing with every thought of you.
Eyes beholding such a mystery wanting this to last forever and not be history.
Eyes tell the soul it's you and only wants to be loved by you.
The look of love is in your eyes as you hold me close to you.
Body language speaks its mind as we make gestures with our eyes.
Laughter, joy fills the soul, regal, elegant to behold.
Look of love is in your eyes like the ocean surf with heavy tides.
Look of love is in your eyes mellowing out intoxicating pleasures.
If eyes could express the meaning of love,
They would speak a heavenly language sent from heaven above.
3
Every moment, since our first
Danced lovingly through my mind
Every smile, every laugh, every tear.
How lucky I am to have had those times,
Luckier still, to have more.
Tomorrow is a day I always look towards,
Tomorrow is another day with her.
Her thoughts of me find my heart,
Her thoughts are kind and pure.
Her thoughts, to me, I return in kind.
As I think of her once more.
The curve of her cheek as she looks past my gaze
Leads my heart to her lovely face.
This moment, like so many, catches me drifting,
Luck is mine once more.
Every moment, since our first
Has been lovelier than the last,
Every smile, every laugh, every giggle, every Her...
As I simply sit here next to her,
These thoughts keep filling my mind;
As I simply sit here next to her,
I smile, and smile, and smile.
4
When left alone with your own shadow,
There are times when u forget to hide
Waters surfacing beneath your eyes,
And the warm drops fall upon the ground.
The mists of the past enfold you in their embrace
And refuse to let you go, to set you free,
For what still binds you for the dream of yesterday
Is the memory of that look in her eyes -
For when you gazed across the black of night,
You found the light you had been searching for
All your life (and perhaps even before)
In the shimmering twinkle in her eyes.
You stepped out of the darkness, and walked hand in hand,
Leaving footprints by the shore buried in the sand.
Your peals of laughter and tears of sadness
Mixed with the music of the crashing waves.
And you thought this joy would last forever,
But happiness was not all you thought it would be.
Your soul looked for something you could not find,
From the gentle chains, you yearned to be free.
So you drifted away, and she let you go,
With the last ray of the sleepy sun?s fading light.
The shaft of light shined upon her silver tears
As she slowly disappeared from your sight.
In the middle of an empty, endless black sea
You drifted away like a lost island.
Clouds of illusions and false hopes blinded you
You had no one to turn to, or reach out for your hand.
You looked back, but she was nowhere in sight,
You closed your eyes and tried to shut away the night.
Try as you might, you can?t bring back yesterday,
Can?t wish for daylight in the thickening gray.
One night, you wake up to see her eyes again -
Two brilliant torches in the dark night sky.
And you realize, she has always been there
Her bright eyes have never really said goodbye.
You look up and you know, as they cast a bright glow
That her eyes of light will always be there
To show you the way, to tell you that the day
And all happy memories will last forever.
POETRY: YOUR EYES
Your eyes,
Deep and mysterious.
Your lips,
So soft I could kiss them forever.
Your face,
Wonderful and expressive.
Your soul,
The most beautiful I've ever come
upon.
Your heart,
The biggest and most caring in the
world.
For so many reasons I can't even begin to descibe,
I love you and only you.
PART II
Beautiful eyes of sparkling blue
Like the sea on a breezy afternoon
Your voice is peaceful
And calm like the setting sun
Lips as gorgeous as the red, red rose
So pretty and so fair
Your skin so soft and milky white,
Like the clouds in the sky
Wonderful is the way that you love me...
I am in great debt to you
Sweet is the way I describe you,
While no other word could ever do
So talented in many ways,
So precious in every form...
I'm so glad that you're mine so I'll ask one more time,
Will you marry me?
PART III
Lady, you fascinate me with all your illustrious beauty.
I recognize all your splendor when I first noticed your
smile that entered into my heart.
Such good times when I'm near you;
you captured my adoring eyes anxious to
experience your love.
I blow you kisses anticipating the taste of your lips.
Ahh, how I admire you and your feminine grace and the
warmth I noticed in your cheeks, blushing with romance
and love's fire.
You release my heart from pain and
let me love you... my lady.
I dream of you night and day, vivid pictures of you in
my mind that filters into my spirit.
I'm enchanted by the loveliness of your face
and you fascinate my soul.
I long to be held in your arms.
Keep silent, my love, and let me just look at you and
swoon in your moon-glow eyes.
You are the deliverance of my life;
all the expressions of your lips
lift me to glorious skies.
Give me for the rest of my life your sweetness so ravish-
ing as melodies of cooing doves,
and I love to be loved by you
as My Valentine forever and more...
PART IV
Let my words bring enchantment to your heart
And bring forth magic from the dark
Words I place adrift in the wind
Do with moonbeams blend
Upon your heart descend
Incense and candles burn within
The words I cast upon the breeze
Let love?s potency begin
Its luring flight
Upon the edge of night
Your heart you cannot defend
Against my magic blend
Of shadows and moonbeams bent
Of love?s peppermint scent
From within your sleep
Into my arms you leap
Within your dream you speak my name
If only your racing heart to tame
And to quench our kisses flame
Hot the night becomes
For one that enchantment overcomes
But the spell will soon be broken
Once you have from sleep awoken
You notice on the sun?s first rays
The scent of peppermint stays
And remember
Deep and mysterious.
Your lips,
So soft I could kiss them forever.
Your face,
Wonderful and expressive.
Your soul,
The most beautiful I've ever come
upon.
Your heart,
The biggest and most caring in the
world.
For so many reasons I can't even begin to descibe,
I love you and only you.
PART II
Beautiful eyes of sparkling blue
Like the sea on a breezy afternoon
Your voice is peaceful
And calm like the setting sun
Lips as gorgeous as the red, red rose
So pretty and so fair
Your skin so soft and milky white,
Like the clouds in the sky
Wonderful is the way that you love me...
I am in great debt to you
Sweet is the way I describe you,
While no other word could ever do
So talented in many ways,
So precious in every form...
I'm so glad that you're mine so I'll ask one more time,
Will you marry me?
PART III
Lady, you fascinate me with all your illustrious beauty.
I recognize all your splendor when I first noticed your
smile that entered into my heart.
Such good times when I'm near you;
you captured my adoring eyes anxious to
experience your love.
I blow you kisses anticipating the taste of your lips.
Ahh, how I admire you and your feminine grace and the
warmth I noticed in your cheeks, blushing with romance
and love's fire.
You release my heart from pain and
let me love you... my lady.
I dream of you night and day, vivid pictures of you in
my mind that filters into my spirit.
I'm enchanted by the loveliness of your face
and you fascinate my soul.
I long to be held in your arms.
Keep silent, my love, and let me just look at you and
swoon in your moon-glow eyes.
You are the deliverance of my life;
all the expressions of your lips
lift me to glorious skies.
Give me for the rest of my life your sweetness so ravish-
ing as melodies of cooing doves,
and I love to be loved by you
as My Valentine forever and more...
PART IV
Let my words bring enchantment to your heart
And bring forth magic from the dark
Words I place adrift in the wind
Do with moonbeams blend
Upon your heart descend
Incense and candles burn within
The words I cast upon the breeze
Let love?s potency begin
Its luring flight
Upon the edge of night
Your heart you cannot defend
Against my magic blend
Of shadows and moonbeams bent
Of love?s peppermint scent
From within your sleep
Into my arms you leap
Within your dream you speak my name
If only your racing heart to tame
And to quench our kisses flame
Hot the night becomes
For one that enchantment overcomes
But the spell will soon be broken
Once you have from sleep awoken
You notice on the sun?s first rays
The scent of peppermint stays
And remember
POETRY: WHEN I LOOK INTO YOUR EYES
Come my Love, let's wander this Garden of Love.
Be in amazement of its beauty, space and the heavens above.
Stand near the fountain, listen to the soft music it provides,
take in the aroma and beauty, that in all of nature abides.
Listen to the sounds of the bees as they buzz merrily at work,
hear the crickets and the songs of the birds as they chirp.
Feel the soft air, the warmth on your face,
let your spirit soar in this restful place.
Relax, and let your mind be at ease,
for this garden is here to appease.
And when your soul and spirit have quieted and calmed,
rest assured there is nothing that will raise an alarm.
For here in My Garden of Love, not only nature is at rest,
but your heart and soul find comfort in my arms' carress.
Your mind can soar and find heights unknown to man,
and all you need do, is to place your love in my hand.
For as I care for My Garden, your love I also nourish,
so that we both can mature and blossom and flourish.
Entwined in love's pleasure, erotic passion and heat,
where your desires await like a welcomed retreat.
Lost in this Garden, unaware of time and place,
we find refuge, in love and devotion and our souls peace.
Come with me my love, view My Garden, smell the aroma of love
it will fill your senses, your spirit will lift
to heavens above.
You will not forget this place, or the peace
you cherish so dear,
for I will continue by your side as long as you wish me near.
Let us lay in the grass, wade the brooks,
taste of the fruit so ripe,
Let's play and wander thru My Garden for days and nights.
You will not want to leave, but to tend this Garden with care,
a liftime you will stay, you will not care.
Come, My Garden awaits, all you need do is open
your heart's gate.
PART II
When I look into your eyes,
I can see beyond the beauty of the stars in the skies.
When I look into your eyes,
It makes me stop and realize
That without you in my life
I would have so much pain and strife.
Without you in my life,
It would be as if my heart were cut with a knife.
Without you in my life, my love, I would not be whole.
Before you and I found each other, I always played the fool.
It seemed as if I were like a sheep, over my eyes I had wool.
It seemed as if I were in a pit-less hole.
But now that you and I have found each other,
We are what makes each other whole.
In my life, to love you is my goal.
The wool over my eyes, away you have taken.
Your heart is something I will not ever be breaking.
From the pit-less hole, it is I you have risen,
Because when I look into your eyes
My heart seems to stop, and seems to be frozen.
You open my eyes and make me see so much more clearly..
It is you, my love, that I love, oh, so dearly.
When I look into your eyes,
It takes away all my pain and fears.
When I look into your eyes,
It takes away all my sadness and tears,
With all my wasted years.
For you I will take any leap,
Because when I look into your eyes,
You make me so happy, I begin to weep.
You and I hold the key to our heart,
And it is ours forever and always to keep.
From a sleep
That was oh, so deep,
It is I, my love, you have woken.
Our love in our heart has spoken.
This curse, my love, you and I have broken.
PART III
Soft golden light
moments before dawn
magical... shimmering
I watch you sleep.
Light plays on your face
dancing into shadows
gently coaxing you to wake
butterfly lashes, flutter
beautiful blue, comes to focus.
Smiling lips, reaching arms
searching hands
warm love; laced hugs
sighs and snuggles.
A kiss...
Quiet whispered, "I love you"
slow burning passion
a time to enjoy love
peaceful... warm...
dawns shadows...
and loves blinding light!
Be in amazement of its beauty, space and the heavens above.
Stand near the fountain, listen to the soft music it provides,
take in the aroma and beauty, that in all of nature abides.
Listen to the sounds of the bees as they buzz merrily at work,
hear the crickets and the songs of the birds as they chirp.
Feel the soft air, the warmth on your face,
let your spirit soar in this restful place.
Relax, and let your mind be at ease,
for this garden is here to appease.
And when your soul and spirit have quieted and calmed,
rest assured there is nothing that will raise an alarm.
For here in My Garden of Love, not only nature is at rest,
but your heart and soul find comfort in my arms' carress.
Your mind can soar and find heights unknown to man,
and all you need do, is to place your love in my hand.
For as I care for My Garden, your love I also nourish,
so that we both can mature and blossom and flourish.
Entwined in love's pleasure, erotic passion and heat,
where your desires await like a welcomed retreat.
Lost in this Garden, unaware of time and place,
we find refuge, in love and devotion and our souls peace.
Come with me my love, view My Garden, smell the aroma of love
it will fill your senses, your spirit will lift
to heavens above.
You will not forget this place, or the peace
you cherish so dear,
for I will continue by your side as long as you wish me near.
Let us lay in the grass, wade the brooks,
taste of the fruit so ripe,
Let's play and wander thru My Garden for days and nights.
You will not want to leave, but to tend this Garden with care,
a liftime you will stay, you will not care.
Come, My Garden awaits, all you need do is open
your heart's gate.
PART II
When I look into your eyes,
I can see beyond the beauty of the stars in the skies.
When I look into your eyes,
It makes me stop and realize
That without you in my life
I would have so much pain and strife.
Without you in my life,
It would be as if my heart were cut with a knife.
Without you in my life, my love, I would not be whole.
Before you and I found each other, I always played the fool.
It seemed as if I were like a sheep, over my eyes I had wool.
It seemed as if I were in a pit-less hole.
But now that you and I have found each other,
We are what makes each other whole.
In my life, to love you is my goal.
The wool over my eyes, away you have taken.
Your heart is something I will not ever be breaking.
From the pit-less hole, it is I you have risen,
Because when I look into your eyes
My heart seems to stop, and seems to be frozen.
You open my eyes and make me see so much more clearly..
It is you, my love, that I love, oh, so dearly.
When I look into your eyes,
It takes away all my pain and fears.
When I look into your eyes,
It takes away all my sadness and tears,
With all my wasted years.
For you I will take any leap,
Because when I look into your eyes,
You make me so happy, I begin to weep.
You and I hold the key to our heart,
And it is ours forever and always to keep.
From a sleep
That was oh, so deep,
It is I, my love, you have woken.
Our love in our heart has spoken.
This curse, my love, you and I have broken.
PART III
Soft golden light
moments before dawn
magical... shimmering
I watch you sleep.
Light plays on your face
dancing into shadows
gently coaxing you to wake
butterfly lashes, flutter
beautiful blue, comes to focus.
Smiling lips, reaching arms
searching hands
warm love; laced hugs
sighs and snuggles.
A kiss...
Quiet whispered, "I love you"
slow burning passion
a time to enjoy love
peaceful... warm...
dawns shadows...
and loves blinding light!
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