Relationship Advice

Could Loneliness Be The Dawn of Real Happiness And Romance?

Loneliness is one of the deepest sorrows – at its peak it feels like a quiet desperation, a yearning to melt completely with another, a slow suffocation that we can’t escape no matter what. And it was shocking to see how common it is. The media has begun to describe the spread of loneliness as an epidemic!

How can we escape it, what can we do? The most common response is a search for a companion, for a lover.

“If only I had someone,” we think, “everything will be all right.” Failing in this search, many begin to turn to alcohol, depression, or self-destructive behaviors.

But the search is flawed, self-defeating right from the start. Whatever we do might seem to work for a while, but we are running away from loneliness – and the more we run, the stronger it gets.

Relationships Rooted in Loneliness

Romance that stems from loneliness is fake, a rose made of plastic; all it does is cover up our yearning. This is how many relationships are – two lonely people who are mutually clinging and grasping on to each other. Regardless of what they say or do, each person is really thinking: please take care of my heart.

How do we take care of other hearts when we can’t even nourish our own?

In such relationships, the neediness is still there. Once the honeymoon period is over, the neediness and unhappiness begins to arise again. For no one – no matter how beautiful, handsome, sweet, attentive, and dashing – can fulfill your needs exactly the way you want them to. There’s always something else that will appear – something they haven’t done that you want them to, or they’ve done something you wish they hadn’t.

When that happens, the yearning arises again. In fact, it has always been there, just beneath the surface. But you think it is your partner’s fault, and you begin to blame them – “You were supposed to make me happy!” But how can they? No one can make you happy but you. All they can do is cover the yearning temporarily.

The Repugnance of Desperation

Being in the depths of loneliness makes it harder to find a partner. This neediness can only be hidden for so long, if one manages to hide it at all.

It is common knowledge that desperation is one of the most unattractive traits out there. The more you run after them, try to hang on to them, the more a quality partner will retreat. They have options, people who make them happy instead of wanting to rely on them – why stay with you?

Relax into your Loneliness

Trying to fill this yearning with a companion is the logical response; but it is a bottomless pit. Loneliness cannot be satisfied in such a manner.

It is a strange thing to say, but when you are lonely, the first step is not to run out and find someone. The first step is to stop running away from our aloneness.

I’ve heard a beautiful quote once: Aloneness is our nature. Loneliness is us running away from it.

What does that mean? You are alone; so just be alone. Loneliness – the despair – only comes when we begin to run away from it, when we tell ourselves our lives shouldn’t be this way.

The most important step is inner acceptance. Relax into your loneliness. Simple sit down and feel it, explore how it feels. Don’t think about it, just feel it through your body. Welcome it, let it be there without tensing up your body or feeding it with your thoughts, and you’ll find the sadness slowly begins to melt away.

Next, learn how to nourish your own heart. Make yourself happy. Think loving thoughts towards yourself. Play with love as energy; send it rolling up and down your body, letting it build. One day your heart will overflow with love. Only then can you be able to love – how can you give what you don’t have?

Delight in your aloneness

Celebrate your aloneness. Fill your free time with play and song. Let it be a genuine joy, one that comes from having melted away the sadness. For this is the strangest thing – when you no longer care about love, you are the most likely to find it.

Why? No longer are you needy; no longer are you desperate and lonely. You are happy, and people will begin to take notice. “What does he have, what is she doing to be so happy?” they will ask. And they will want some of that joy, and they will begin to come closer.

And when you are in a relationship, no longer will there be grasping or clinging. You are no longer looking for the other person to come along and make everything right. Only then can there be true romance. Only then can you love for the sake of loving, give for the sake of giving.

First learn to delight in being alone, to stop running away from your loneliness. Once you have learned to delight in yourself – that is when you can delight in the other. Only then can romance really start.

Are You Playing The Blame Game? Do Any Of These Situations Sound Familiar?

By melody

Randy was reaching for a doughnut when his wife glared at him. Inside, Randy could feel a defiance surging inside. He reached for the second doughnut and felt smug and happy with himself.

Janet struggled to maintain her composure when Jerry joked about her going to spend her morning with a bunch of “old ladies”. Her anger railed in particular because just prior to his coming in to the room and making the statement she was recalling how he had hurt her by referring to someone else with his pet name for her.

Lisa was furious with Greg because he had chosen to call her while she was getting her hair done and didn’t believe it really took so long to highlight and trim her hair. He had even called his hairdresser to confirm his opinion that it should not have taken so long to accomplish.

Fighting words, all of the examples above could and did lead to long lasting, all out battles between these couples. Their ability to see themselves as the victim in the situation perpetuated the argument. Each part of the couple felt wrongly accused and unjustly treated. They were, of course, all correct.

They had been unjustly treated and had been wronged in some way. So had their partners! When we fall into the game of seeing ourselves as a victim and our partners ad the perpetrators we fail to recognize the others position.

It’s easy to do isn’t it? It’s easy for us to see ourselves as the victim of the wrong. But in reality what is really going on? Both people are feeling hurt, threatened and that they are being treated unfairly.

So what do we do? How do we address the issues when both partners are feeling wounded? It’s tough and requires a great deal of commitment that sometimes, we can’t muster.

When something goes wrong and we feel wounded our brain kicks into a survival mode that prevents us from seeing the situation at hand clearly. What we do is see things purely from our own perspective. This is not because we are terrible humans. This is because it’s what are brains are wired to do.

Survival Mode

When something happens and we feel threatened, our brains go into survival mode. What this means is that we go into hyper alert. Adrenaline pumps through our veins and we seek to regain a sense of control.

When our survival is threatened we feel out of control. There is, in fact, nothing so out of control is feeling like we are headed for disaster and death.

But then our brains look to regain control, and we do this by laying blame on someone. Once blame is in place, once we know whom to blame, then we know how to respond to the situation. Our brains can relax (to some degree) because we know what course of action to take.

Once we know who is to blame we know how to respond. If, the person to blame is ourselves, then we know we have to attack ourselves, berate ourselves and punish ourselves until we have learned the lesson to not do whatever it was again. This is the personification of the Victim role.

If the person to blame is someone else, we then get to chose between two responses. We choose to either defend ourselves against the perceived perpetrator, or rescue the victim.

Either way we get a sense of control and power back. When its our spouse we can see them as both Victim and Perpetrator. Our response then, is to rescue them and protect them from our anger at their perpetrative behavior.

An example of this is John, who knew his wife was stressed and tired, and he loved her desperately. One day he came in to find his wife spanking their daughter with a belt.

He intervened and gently told his wife, “Honey, I know work is hard right now. Why don’t you go take a hot bath? I’ll take care of Carrie.” He never held her accountable for her behavior, just tried really hard to make sure that she didn’t feel so stressed.

What’s really going on?

The thing is, John still blamed his wife for her horrid behavior, even though he rescued her from the consequences of it. His anger and resentment built over the years for all he had “protected” her from.

Eventually he left her, taking the children with him, and felt righteous about having done so. After all, she had been such an abusive person.

Now, I’m not saying she wasn’t abusive. What I am saying is that the cycle of abuse happens in an environment of blame. John perpetuated the blame and while he may have protected his children to some degree, he also left them without a mother because he failed to see her behavior as a cry for help.

As Randy reached for the third doughnut he laughed at himself. What is going on here? I’m acting like a child. Then he recognized that his mother had tried to control his eating, and what his wife did was trigger a memory of that. He laughed at himself and told his wife he was sorry for reacting like a rebellious teen.

Janet reached over and gave Jerry a hug. Her lips trembled as she told him how hurt she was feeling and how his comment had made it worse.

Jerry was defensive at first, but then looked at the pain in her eyes and told her he was sorry, that he didn’t mean to hurt her. Then he talked about how jealous he was of the time she spent away from him.

Lisa eventually got it that Greg was not really upset about her getting her hair done, but that his insecurity over her having had an affair a year before had kicked in and he couldn’t stop himself.

Lisa became tearful as she apologized for scaring him that way. She recognized that his behavior was not really as irrational as it appeared.

When we step out of blame; the potential for empathy is endless.

6 Signs You May Be Dating a Psycho

By lavalife2

We’ve all got a teeny bit of psycho in us. But the line between going ga-ga for someone and becoming completely delusional about the boundaries of the relationship is a fine one.

If your newest fling’s behavior is starting to give you a serious case of the heebie-jeebies and you wonder where the glowing personality went that you met on the first date, you may have hitched up with a psycho.

From bunny-boiling to phone-tapping, incessant emails to branding-style scratched initials in your back, there’s a lot to be afraid of. Herewith, six signs your honey is half-baked.

Communication Overload

There’s a difference between an eager beaver and a psychotic partner. An eager beaver calls you once and leaves all their phone numbers and email addresses so you can find them when you get the urge to reach out. A wacko calls all of your numbers and sends messages to all of your email addresses — all day and every day.

And the more time that passes between live interaction with a psycho, the more nutsy the notes and messages become. “Hey, it’s me” morphs into “I’ve called 12 times…where are you?” and finally “Pick up the phone or I swear I’m gonna boil the bunny.”

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

The fibs seem harmless at first; they may even be confused or couched as miscommunications.

But psycho partners lie incessantly in an attempt to control you. So what starts as lies about small things, like liver also being his favorite food (so that it looks like you two are so similar you must be soul mates) escalates into elaborate fabrications about him needing your emotional support because he’s just discovered that he has an identical twin brother whose cancerous liver will self-implode without a transfusion of your lover’s genetically matched blood.

Beware the contradictions, the overabundance of justifying details, the well-timed dramas.

Stalk Talk

Don’t be fooled by the cliché image of a trenchcoat-clad dude running from telephone pole to telephone pole as he follows his victim home from the bar. Stalking girlfriends and boyfriends come in all shapes and sizes (and outfits).

And their techniques are many: from blatantly setting up tent and bonfire on your front stoop to see what time you get home, to “coincidentally” planting themselves in public places they know you’ll frequent — your neighborhood porn shop, your synchronized swimming class, the recycling room in the basement of your building.

Don’t discount the idea of your phone being tapped if it seems your lover knows secrets you’ve shared only with friends over the phone. If you’re starting to get that creepy “being watched” feeling and have actually found yourself wondering how the witness protection program works, you’ve probably made allies with a lunatic.

Scared Out Of Your Wits?

Some guys like it when a girl draws blood from his back with her French manicured nails. And some girls, when doing the doggy, like to be spanked till their buttocks burn pink.

But if the recipient of said “passionate” punishment isn’t the one getting off, this kind of thing falls under the category of branding. As in, “This is my man and I’ve created a hickey self-portrait on his neck to show you that he’s taken.”

Mine, Mine, Mine!

We’ve all felt moments of jealousy in our lives. And that’s probably a good thing — a little bit of envy keeps us on our toes. But there’s jealousy, and then there’s jealousy of the paranoid variety. Imagine this: you can’t look at anyone of the opposite sex, let alone talk to them, without your partner freaking out.

And that’s just with strangers (read: I know you’re cheating on me with your doorman because you always say “hello”). Classic psycho jealousy behavior also pertains to, god forbid, ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends — even pals and family members. In other words, to a psycho, everyone is a threat.

Pay attention to ME

A psycho needs constant attention, and if that need isn’t met, all hell breaks loose. Does your girlfriend fall to the ground in a pretend faint so that you have to stay home and take care of her rather than hit the pub with your friends on a BNO?

Does your boyfriend hold your hand or perform other PDAs (public displays of affection) only when other males are around? You see, it’s all about control and having power over you and the relationship. Psychos want to know everything (snooping is classic behavior and these dating duds seem to have eyes on the backs of their heads), and many may assume that you’re in a committed relationship just because you made it through a first date.

Caveat

Of course we jest. In real life, stalking, obsessive phone calling and other possessive behavior is not cool. And not at all funny. If you suspect you are being stalked or are otherwise being harassed by a former or current partner, don’t hesitate to call or visit your local police. And if you are facing an emergency, dial 911.

Why Do Happy Couples Suddenly Fall Out Of Love?

By eddie

It seems to be a complete mystery. Something we cannot understand. And yet it happens every day all around us: People who used to love each other madly suddenly fall out of love, just like that.

What are the reasons?

Sarah’s Story:

Sarah and her boyfriend had been the perfect couple. It was as if they had waited for each other their whole lives. They had the same hobbies, the liked the same things, they considered each other to be soulmates.

This went on happily for two years – the perfect relationship, until her boyfriend suddenly started to pull back, to act strange and get distant. Eventually he broke up with her, and when she asked for the reason he simply replied that he didn’t love her any more.

Sound familiar? Has this also happened to you or someone around you?

A disappointment.

Isn’t true love meant to be forever?

Well, I cannot give you an answer to this one, but I can give you the advice that you need to examine your perception of “true love”. I can tell you: All that glistens is not gold.

A high expectation of true love, and an exaggerated romantic view of the ideal concept of love can disturb the view to having a fulfilling and healthy relationship.

A realistic view is vital.

What is the Main Reason that People Fall out of Love?

Of course, there are numerous reasons why people break up, but they are not always the same ones as why people fall “out of love”.

The term “to fall out of love” implies that they’ve been in love before and all of a sudden the love is gone.

This is of course an illusion. Nobody loses their love overnight.

In my experience there are 3 main reasons why people don’t love anymore, and therefore break up with their partners.

1. Their expectations weren’t met

If you meet a person and you are really attracted, you tend to idealize things. You fall in love with that person, because everything is so new, so fresh. The sex is great, you’re having a great time discovering all the positive attributes of your partner. All your needs and expectations are being addressed, and when they’re not, you simply put your rose-colored glasses on.

The problem here is that your view of your partner is not always a realistic one. Everyone gives their best, tries to show a better self and to hide possible flaws.

We accommodate and compromise much easier at the beginning.

The problem here is that they met each other’s expectations at the beginning, but later on in the relationship, when the fire has cooled off a little, they tend to pull off their masks and show their real selves.

Now they are acting how they really are. No more compromising, no more accommodation, no more meeting the partners needs.

And here is where it can lead to conflicts because someone will not have their needs fulfilled, and will feel betrayed in a way.

This is usually the moment when the person “falls out of love”.

2. Was it really Love?

Another problem is that people very often cannot say if they’re in love or not. They confuse sexual fulfillment with love.

This happens very often to young people, or people who have been in a long term relationship or marriage for a long time. They confuse the initial fulfillment of a need which has not been met for a long time with love.

Once this urge has been satisfied, (this doesn’t always have to be a sexual need), they suddenly lose interest and “fall out of love“.

Of course, it wasn’t love in the first place, that’s why the whole thing appears out of the blue.

3. Mistreatment

Unfortunately it happens frequently, especially with men, that they start sweet and kind and later on they become loud and abusive.

Violence is of course the most extreme case, very often the partners suddenly change their behavior in ways that cannot be tolerated any more by the other one. Good examples are drug and alcohol abuse.

The partner finds that they are very disappointed and loses their love for the person, because their basic needs aren’t provided any more. The relationship isn’t fulfilling and healthy.

Knowing Why is Helpful

The knowledge of the 3 reasons why people can fall out of love can be helpful to us. They can teach us how to behave correctly at the beginning of a relationship.

We have to have realistic expectations about love and relationships, and most of all we have to be who we really are right from the beginning.

Make clear what your needs are despite the risk that your new partner might not love it.

Pretending and cutting back your basic needs will only draw a false picture of you, a picture which will fade with time and possibly make your partner eventually fall out of love with you.

Would you take that risk? I won’t.

Your friend,

Eddie

Why You’d Be Crazy To Get Married Before You’re 30

By david

Marriage in your twenties is for the birds!

Marriage and Me

I never talk about marriage… Not that I’m against marriage, nor am I commitment phobic . I’ve been married. It lasted three years and one day. It was basically like a lease. At the end she still had low mileage, that “new wife smell,” and she still looked great when I returned her to the dealership. She was like a certified pre-owned Lexus.

Now this is not the part that will offend you – it’s this next part that will get under your skin.

Twenty is Too Young!

For those of you who got married in your twenties, I think all of you got married too young. Yeah I know: “I want to be a young mommy,” or “I want to be a young dad.” But a young mom and a young dad still have no idea who they are as a person.

Get to Know You

If you’re a woman, you really don’t know who you are until you’re thirty. And, sorry guys, but if you’re a man you really don’t know who you are until you’re at least thirty-five to forty. This would make all of you old dads and older moms – not exactly Warren Beatty old but older and, may I add, wiser. Now I could go online and grab you a bunch of statistics about divorce rates and everything else, but why bore you with statistics that you can research on your own.

What it All Means

This would also mean that families would be smaller and the worlds population would slow down to something more manageable. This is not an Al Gore thumping blog post but we are running out of key resources in the world and a few less kids would really help the issue.

From all my years of coaching, I have just found that women don’t really know who they are until they’re thirty. Your twenties are all about finding yourself. And as for men, we’re just way too immature until we’re at least thirty-five to forty.

I’ve recently emailed all the women I’ve dated in my twenties . . . all 700 of them 🙂 I sent them an email that said:

Thanks for the Experience!

“Thanks for the experience. You were great. I was a self-centered asshole. You met me during my player years and, yes, you were just a notch on the belt. But now that those years are over [my real age you readers will never find out!], I’ve matured into a really good man. Let me know if you’d like to reconnect as a friend or on a deeper level. David”

Now this isn’t some Neil Young or Bruce Springsteen song, nor did I really write this email. And I really don’t think I dated 700 women…I might have, but who knows, and who remembers? The important thing is toembrace what you did and grow from the experiences you had.

The Bottom Line

But the bottom line here is this: To make a marriage successful, you have to know who you are first. None of this Jerry Maguire ‘you complete me’ crap. Enjoy your twenties. If you’re in your twenties right now, enjoy dating but enjoy the time getting to know yourself more. Also, don’t rush a family and the condominium on wheels (for those of you who don’t know what that is, that’s the overly obnoxious SUV – Yes, I live in California and yes I hate Hummers . . . though I do enjoy an occasional hummer).

So, take the time to get to know yourself before you get in that minivan. Because to have true love, you have to find true love with yourself first. For those of you over thirty who are in a marriage, you know exactly what I’m talking about here.

Last But Not Least

Just one last thing … I’m all about the biological clock, but can you at least wait until your late twenties to pound out the puppies and get married? Give yourself a few years to get to know who you are as a person. You’ll make a better wife and you’ll make a better lover. Because I’ve got to tell you that there is nothing more fun in bed than a woman over the age of thirty. I tell all my friends that they can have all the women in their twenties. I’m all about the hot sexy cougars.