This is an insightful article; however, as the research is geared towards the American culture, it may not be so application in Asian society just as Singapore.
However, it is still much fun fact. Click Here to access the article.
Happy Reading! :D
Showing posts with label Love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Love. Show all posts
Monday, October 13, 2014
Friday, February 28, 2014
The Difference Between Falling In Love When You Are Ready And When You Are Lonely
Although I have fallen in love several times in my life, I have really only been in love once. Doesn’t seem to add up, does it? Well, I have only fallen in love one time, at a point in my life when I wasn’t especially lonely. It was when I was much younger and when, to be honest, I was doing just fine without a female companion to share my life with. That was the first time I truly fell in love – and now that I think about it, the last.
This happens to all of us who have had no choice but to give up on a first love. It’s a sad truth: Once you’ve fallen in love deeply, you yearn for that love; you wish to find it again. You become lonely. You begin to fantasize and create a reality that doesn’t actually exist. Then you fall in love with someone unworthy of it.
That first time you fell in love can’t entirely be described in words. It’s as if the emotions, the state of your being and your state of mind became a different entity entirely. You go from being you, to being this other person — this person who needs this other person to survive. It’s as if you were just introduced to an organ that you rely on for life, which you never before even realized existed.
“Soul mate” is an understatement; it’s as if you have found a part of your soul that you didn’t know you had. It’s all incredibly overwhelming, to say the least. It is by far the most amazing, most intoxicating, most horrible and excruciating feeling in the world. And the second we get that first taste of it, we become addicts for life.
Unfortunately, as most stories go, we are forced into a withdrawal. I would like to say that more often than not it’s our own fault, but it’s never actually that simple. It’s you. It’s him or her. It’s the timing. It’s the situation. It’s the mistakes you made. It’s the mistakes you weren’t willing to risk. The stars didn’t align at the right moment in place and time, and hence, the two of your hearts cracked — metaphorically, of course. Physically cracking you’d expect would be swifter and less painful.
So you go on living your life the best you can, never truly forgetting about that taste, that incredible aroma that filled your soul. We never forget those perfect moments we lived with the person we loved. Then we spend the rest of our lives looking for our next fix.
Loneliness is a strong motivator. It moves us to make — I’m sorry to say — some very, very poor decisions. I can tell you right now that I am very likely to make yet another poor decision in a few hours, in the hopes of maybe, just maybe getting lucky enough to meet someone who I’ll not regret seeing when I wake up in the morning. Although we may love every single other aspect of our lives, being human makes us need the companionship of other people. And if we were lucky or unlucky enough to get a taste of real love, we’re going to search for that next fix until we find it.
Which is how we fall in love without ever actually being in love. “Falling into infatuation” would be more fitting terminology, but not quite as poetic. We meet someone who is great, beautiful, fun, interesting enough. And thanks to our brains being able to imagine grandeur and provoke emotional responses, we can take that previous feeling of love and warp it to fit the new mold.
The funny thing is, we actually believe we are in love. We think about the person throughout the day with intense positive feelings. We imagine ourselves with this person for the long run. We feel a need to see him or her and to spend time together. Yet, more likely than not, we eventually realize we aren’t compatible; loneliness had us raise our hopes up very high.
Things only get trickier as you go through these episodes of loving and mock-loving. After a few runs, you begin to question each new relationship and begin to anticipate the falling out. Then, the question is, would it have worked had your mind been in the right place, or were you really not compatible to begin with? Are your standards unrealistic? Or are you actually selling yourself short and settling?
The truth is, you won’t know until you find the next person you truly fall in love with. At that moment, your perspective comes into focus and you clearly see that most, if not all, of your previous loves weren’t actually loves. Until that point, you are likely to try to revert and reach out to past failed lovers in hopes that you can rekindle the flame.
So, do you hold yourself back from loving until you’re sure it’s real? No. If it ends up being real, then you’ve made it. If not, then you surely had a good time for a good stretch, and because you now know you weren’t in love, moving on will be easy. Live and love as much as you can. Those will be the stories you tell when you’re old and wrinkled.
***
You can read the actual article here
This happens to all of us who have had no choice but to give up on a first love. It’s a sad truth: Once you’ve fallen in love deeply, you yearn for that love; you wish to find it again. You become lonely. You begin to fantasize and create a reality that doesn’t actually exist. Then you fall in love with someone unworthy of it.
That first time you fell in love can’t entirely be described in words. It’s as if the emotions, the state of your being and your state of mind became a different entity entirely. You go from being you, to being this other person — this person who needs this other person to survive. It’s as if you were just introduced to an organ that you rely on for life, which you never before even realized existed.
“Soul mate” is an understatement; it’s as if you have found a part of your soul that you didn’t know you had. It’s all incredibly overwhelming, to say the least. It is by far the most amazing, most intoxicating, most horrible and excruciating feeling in the world. And the second we get that first taste of it, we become addicts for life.
Unfortunately, as most stories go, we are forced into a withdrawal. I would like to say that more often than not it’s our own fault, but it’s never actually that simple. It’s you. It’s him or her. It’s the timing. It’s the situation. It’s the mistakes you made. It’s the mistakes you weren’t willing to risk. The stars didn’t align at the right moment in place and time, and hence, the two of your hearts cracked — metaphorically, of course. Physically cracking you’d expect would be swifter and less painful.
So you go on living your life the best you can, never truly forgetting about that taste, that incredible aroma that filled your soul. We never forget those perfect moments we lived with the person we loved. Then we spend the rest of our lives looking for our next fix.
Loneliness is a strong motivator. It moves us to make — I’m sorry to say — some very, very poor decisions. I can tell you right now that I am very likely to make yet another poor decision in a few hours, in the hopes of maybe, just maybe getting lucky enough to meet someone who I’ll not regret seeing when I wake up in the morning. Although we may love every single other aspect of our lives, being human makes us need the companionship of other people. And if we were lucky or unlucky enough to get a taste of real love, we’re going to search for that next fix until we find it.
Which is how we fall in love without ever actually being in love. “Falling into infatuation” would be more fitting terminology, but not quite as poetic. We meet someone who is great, beautiful, fun, interesting enough. And thanks to our brains being able to imagine grandeur and provoke emotional responses, we can take that previous feeling of love and warp it to fit the new mold.
The funny thing is, we actually believe we are in love. We think about the person throughout the day with intense positive feelings. We imagine ourselves with this person for the long run. We feel a need to see him or her and to spend time together. Yet, more likely than not, we eventually realize we aren’t compatible; loneliness had us raise our hopes up very high.
Things only get trickier as you go through these episodes of loving and mock-loving. After a few runs, you begin to question each new relationship and begin to anticipate the falling out. Then, the question is, would it have worked had your mind been in the right place, or were you really not compatible to begin with? Are your standards unrealistic? Or are you actually selling yourself short and settling?
The truth is, you won’t know until you find the next person you truly fall in love with. At that moment, your perspective comes into focus and you clearly see that most, if not all, of your previous loves weren’t actually loves. Until that point, you are likely to try to revert and reach out to past failed lovers in hopes that you can rekindle the flame.
So, do you hold yourself back from loving until you’re sure it’s real? No. If it ends up being real, then you’ve made it. If not, then you surely had a good time for a good stretch, and because you now know you weren’t in love, moving on will be easy. Live and love as much as you can. Those will be the stories you tell when you’re old and wrinkled.
***
You can read the actual article here
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
I'm Letting My Wife Go
I read an excellent article; don't be fooled by the title - 'letting my wife go' here refers not to the physical sense, but rather the abstract/psychological space needed for your partner to grow into what she needs to become.
I will repost the article; but you can access the actual article here.
***
I’m sure it may come as a shock to some people, but I let my wife go. It was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do, but it was the right thing for the both of us.
No, we’re not getting a divorce and no, we’re not separating. Truth be told, the practice of “letting go” has actually brought us closer together. But in order to understand what I mean by “letting go,” you must first understand that Kim and I are two very different people.
In fact, the differences between us were Kim’s primary concern with us getting married. “Seth, a fish may love a bird,” she said. “But where would they live?”
I smiled at the comparison because it’s fairly accurate.
Kim and I are incredibly different people. She’s the oldest in her family; I’m the youngest in mine. She’s very responsible; I’m…very much not. She loves the city; I prefer the country. She loves healthy food; I love junk food. She enjoys school; I despise school. She wants to watch British dramas; I’d rather watch comedies. She loves to sing and dance; I’d rather not. She prefers flying; I prefer driving. She loves to be with people, and I’d prefer to be alone. Kim is a driven, career-minded, goal-oriented woman, while I, on the other hand, am a laid-back fellow who prefers gardening and writing over anything else.
To put it simply, Kim is an extrovert while I am an introvert. Frankly, it sometimes amazes me that Kim and I even met—let alone got married!
But after knowing Kim for ten years, I knew that I simply couldn’t live without her.
Despite their many differences, the fish loved the bird and the bird loved the fish.
So we put our faith in that love and did the only thing a fish and a bird could do: we got married and built a bird bath.
The bird bath is a symbol for our middle ground—the place where we come together—but it’s also the place from which we feel comfortable to let each other go. To “let go” of someone is to love them enough to let them fly or swim away (or to be themselves) and yet trust that they will always come back.
For if we truly love each other, we have to be willing to “let each other go” to become the best versions of ourselves. Kim encourages me to keep swimming (develop my talents), and I encourage her to fly higher (chase her dreams).
Abusive, one-sided relationships are heartbreaking to me. How can we claim to love someone and then try to limit that person’s identity? Marriage is a union, to be sure, but it’s a union that should liberate, not incarcerate. Real love shouldn’t limit a person’s potential, it should expand it.
Real love tells me to let Kim fly and trust that she’ll always come back. I have to let her go so she can chase her dreams, pursue her education, and develop her talents. Additionally, I have to let go of my fears that she might fly away and never come back. If the fish were to clip the bird’s wings, he would risk trimming her dreams and smothering her altogether.
That being said, I wish I could say that I’m perfect at letting my wife fly. But I’m not. In the end, we’re still two very different people. I have some deeply rooted insecurities, and we’ve had to learn to navigate each other’s personalities.
But while I certainly can’t tell you that I’m perfect, I can tell you that every time I’ve encouraged Kim to fly she loves me all the more for supporting her and having the faith to let her go.
So, if you truly love someone, have the faith to “let them go.” Encourage them to be the fullest measure of themselves, and you will be overwhelmed by the love that your spouse returns to you.
- Seth Adam Smith
***
I’m sure it may come as a shock to some people, but I let my wife go. It was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do, but it was the right thing for the both of us.
No, we’re not getting a divorce and no, we’re not separating. Truth be told, the practice of “letting go” has actually brought us closer together. But in order to understand what I mean by “letting go,” you must first understand that Kim and I are two very different people.
In fact, the differences between us were Kim’s primary concern with us getting married. “Seth, a fish may love a bird,” she said. “But where would they live?”
I smiled at the comparison because it’s fairly accurate.
Kim and I are incredibly different people. She’s the oldest in her family; I’m the youngest in mine. She’s very responsible; I’m…very much not. She loves the city; I prefer the country. She loves healthy food; I love junk food. She enjoys school; I despise school. She wants to watch British dramas; I’d rather watch comedies. She loves to sing and dance; I’d rather not. She prefers flying; I prefer driving. She loves to be with people, and I’d prefer to be alone. Kim is a driven, career-minded, goal-oriented woman, while I, on the other hand, am a laid-back fellow who prefers gardening and writing over anything else.
To put it simply, Kim is an extrovert while I am an introvert. Frankly, it sometimes amazes me that Kim and I even met—let alone got married!
But after knowing Kim for ten years, I knew that I simply couldn’t live without her.
Despite their many differences, the fish loved the bird and the bird loved the fish.
So we put our faith in that love and did the only thing a fish and a bird could do: we got married and built a bird bath.
The bird bath is a symbol for our middle ground—the place where we come together—but it’s also the place from which we feel comfortable to let each other go. To “let go” of someone is to love them enough to let them fly or swim away (or to be themselves) and yet trust that they will always come back.
For if we truly love each other, we have to be willing to “let each other go” to become the best versions of ourselves. Kim encourages me to keep swimming (develop my talents), and I encourage her to fly higher (chase her dreams).
Abusive, one-sided relationships are heartbreaking to me. How can we claim to love someone and then try to limit that person’s identity? Marriage is a union, to be sure, but it’s a union that should liberate, not incarcerate. Real love shouldn’t limit a person’s potential, it should expand it.
Real love tells me to let Kim fly and trust that she’ll always come back. I have to let her go so she can chase her dreams, pursue her education, and develop her talents. Additionally, I have to let go of my fears that she might fly away and never come back. If the fish were to clip the bird’s wings, he would risk trimming her dreams and smothering her altogether.
That being said, I wish I could say that I’m perfect at letting my wife fly. But I’m not. In the end, we’re still two very different people. I have some deeply rooted insecurities, and we’ve had to learn to navigate each other’s personalities.
But while I certainly can’t tell you that I’m perfect, I can tell you that every time I’ve encouraged Kim to fly she loves me all the more for supporting her and having the faith to let her go.
So, if you truly love someone, have the faith to “let them go.” Encourage them to be the fullest measure of themselves, and you will be overwhelmed by the love that your spouse returns to you.
- Seth Adam Smith
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Regrets (again) III: The Fear of Regret
The fear of regret on the other hand strikes with a vorpal blade
of paralysis, inflicting great terror of immobility to decision making. The
struggle of our current plight becomes less terrifying than the prospect of an
unknown decision leading to an adventuring route you have never traveled before.
That is therefore the fear of regrets; lassitude and ambivalent.
Just spring cleaned my room; it's always a cringing experience whenever I unearthed old stuff and read things I wrote more than a decade ago. I always cringed at my earlier poorly expressed juvenile writing and at this juncture, I am unable to comprehend my teenage state of mind/emotions when I wrote those nonsense.
Honestly, I cannot readily figure out how all that gathered and developed into my current state of thinking. Tried to recall back the pathway and it is an impossible task because of the sheer amount of refining done to my mind, which resulted in irrevocable changes.
I was writing emo-stuff. Loads of it. And regret of fear does pop out time to time. It is only until I have decided to make a choice to leave things behind... does things really get left behind.
The fear of regret then thus become an illusion.
I don't think it is reasonable to accept that things remain static or unchangeable permanently. At every given moment, we are confronted with choices that will shape our destiny. The fear in making choices - though might appear that we have deep seated fear of regrets - is really about our fear of assuming responsibility for the choice we make. In love, very often, we want others to make the decision instead (e.g. if he/she doesn't love me anymore, he/she should let me go).
However, that's quite a flawed thinking; nobody but ourselves is holding us back. If he/she doesn't love you, you can decide what you want to do with this information.
Non-action itself is thus a choice.
Just spring cleaned my room; it's always a cringing experience whenever I unearthed old stuff and read things I wrote more than a decade ago. I always cringed at my earlier poorly expressed juvenile writing and at this juncture, I am unable to comprehend my teenage state of mind/emotions when I wrote those nonsense.
Honestly, I cannot readily figure out how all that gathered and developed into my current state of thinking. Tried to recall back the pathway and it is an impossible task because of the sheer amount of refining done to my mind, which resulted in irrevocable changes.
I was writing emo-stuff. Loads of it. And regret of fear does pop out time to time. It is only until I have decided to make a choice to leave things behind... does things really get left behind.
The fear of regret then thus become an illusion.
I don't think it is reasonable to accept that things remain static or unchangeable permanently. At every given moment, we are confronted with choices that will shape our destiny. The fear in making choices - though might appear that we have deep seated fear of regrets - is really about our fear of assuming responsibility for the choice we make. In love, very often, we want others to make the decision instead (e.g. if he/she doesn't love me anymore, he/she should let me go).
However, that's quite a flawed thinking; nobody but ourselves is holding us back. If he/she doesn't love you, you can decide what you want to do with this information.
Non-action itself is thus a choice.
Sunday, January 05, 2014
Regrets (again)
Ah! Same old topic again.
Regret in love is one of the most lasting poignant feelings one could ever experience in life. The resolution of regret can be a very trying affair with good possibility of having no desired conclusion that we hope to gain.
It is often accompanied by a collective legion of sadness and intense remorse - akin to how the wings of plane are always found attached to the fuselage - often disrupting our otherwise humdrum phase of life.
There are two important distinctions when it comes to the form of regrets; one is our fear of regrets and the other being the pain of regrets. Regardless of its form, this emotion arises because of (1) our ability to recall experience and (2) our ability to make comparative judgment.
Hence, making logical comparison between present and future can produce fear of regrets (hypothesizing), while comparison between past and present can induce regrets (reflection).
Precisely because we have recollection powers, we have the condition to make comparative judgments and experience regrets.
Perhaps, if we are all like goldfish with 3-second memory span, then such emotion would be next to impossible.
I will share about each distinction in my upcoming posts.
Regrets (again) II: Pain of Regrets
Our past, albeit it has everything to do with where we are
at now, is but an illusionary aspect of our reality. Our mind thoughtlessly stored
memories of our past, creating a husk of an empty coconut whose original
function of protecting its content has been made redundant. Picking up the
shell no longer holds meaning, other than a cruel reminder of our choice we
made in the distant past.
That is therefore the pain of regret; helpless and wistful.
The Buddha has it right; truth is that all things are impermanent. The bad news is that good decision doesn't remain right all the time, while the good news is that our misery will not continue forever as well.
I will share a short story, which I feel that it captures that essence on the pain of regrets:
***
One day Buddha was walking through a village. A very angry and rude young man came up and began insulting him. "You have no right teaching others," he shouted. "You are as stupid as everyone else. You are nothing but a fake."
Buddha was not upset by these insults. Instead he asked the young man "Tell me, if you buy a gift for someone, and that person does not take it, to whom does the gift belong?"
The man was surprised to be asked such a strange question and answered, "It would belong to me, because I bought the gift."
The Buddha smiled and said, "That is correct. And it is exactly the same with your anger. If you become angry with me and I do not get insulted, then the anger falls back on you. You are then the only one who becomes unhappy, not me. All you have done is hurt yourself."
"If you want to stop hurting yourself, you must get rid of your anger and become loving instead. When you hate others, you yourself become unhappy. But when you love others, everyone is happy."
***
Regret, like anger, is a self-inflicted pain. Perhaps, it is not so much about being accepting about circumstances, much more than the realization in learning to let go of things that isn't meant to be.
The Buddha has it right; truth is that all things are impermanent. The bad news is that good decision doesn't remain right all the time, while the good news is that our misery will not continue forever as well.
I will share a short story, which I feel that it captures that essence on the pain of regrets:
***
One day Buddha was walking through a village. A very angry and rude young man came up and began insulting him. "You have no right teaching others," he shouted. "You are as stupid as everyone else. You are nothing but a fake."
Buddha was not upset by these insults. Instead he asked the young man "Tell me, if you buy a gift for someone, and that person does not take it, to whom does the gift belong?"
The man was surprised to be asked such a strange question and answered, "It would belong to me, because I bought the gift."
The Buddha smiled and said, "That is correct. And it is exactly the same with your anger. If you become angry with me and I do not get insulted, then the anger falls back on you. You are then the only one who becomes unhappy, not me. All you have done is hurt yourself."
"If you want to stop hurting yourself, you must get rid of your anger and become loving instead. When you hate others, you yourself become unhappy. But when you love others, everyone is happy."
***
Regret, like anger, is a self-inflicted pain. Perhaps, it is not so much about being accepting about circumstances, much more than the realization in learning to let go of things that isn't meant to be.
Friday, December 27, 2013
Why Weddings Have Become Meaningless Displays Of Pretense For Gen-Y
It’s the most important day of her life; the day she’s dreamed of since she was a little girl; the day her life as a woman officially commences; her big day…
It’s her wedding day.
What was once a paramount, sacred tradition that enabled a couple united by love to become joined together for life has now become little more than a grand exhibition of wealth.
In today’s society, this oh-so-special day has actually morphed into a sort of contest, and even can be considered a spectacle in a way.
Every bride-to-be believes that her wedding will outshine everyone else’s, and the obsession with how perfect things will be for others has surpassed the importance of the personal significance of this (hopefully) once in a lifetime milestone.
What was meant to be one of the happiest days of a hopelessly romantic couple’s life has become a practice in personal advertising to communicate the message: “Here we are, happily in love, and here is the carefully crafted wedding to prove it!”
Many couples believe that the more money they spend on this one-day event, the likely it will be a success and leave guests feeling satisfied. Weddings have become events for impressing others, instead of a celebration of the couple’s love.
The wedding industry has greatly expanded over the years, becoming a multi-million dollar industry that most brides and grooms buy into.
Of course, everyone deserves a beautiful wedding, but isn’t financial security and a debt-free future with your new partner better than spending all of your money on a wedding just to impress others?
The amount of money that is spent on excessive weddings can be used to supply the down payments for a home. Purchasing a home is an important step to building a future together and is not on a one-day event that everyone forgets about after anyway.
Details including the bride’s dress, the invitations, the venue, the menu, the cake, seating arrangements, and even those photos meticulously placed around the venue have all been cautiously directed, hand-crafted and planned. Not only is everything perfectly planned, it’s practically staged.
The entrance of the bridal party and groomsmen, the entrance and introduction of the bride and groom, the first dance, the eventual serving of the food, the toasts, the father/daughter dance, the cake cutting, the bouquet and garter toss, etc., etc.
These repetitive and generic wedding traditions make the receptions into really long, orchestrated and scheduled events, where you always find yourself as a guest wondering when the polite time to leave is.
The sad part is that when you really think of it, weddings do not reflect the reality of what they are supposed to mark, which is the beginning of a marriage and the joining and commencement of two people’s lives together surrounded by their closest friends and families.
It’s usually the opposite. People attending weddings these days have a sort of expectation, sort of like when people go to Las Vegas and just expect to come back with large winnings.
Most of the time these people aren’t even that close to the bride and groom, and are the ones criticizing every detail that was so carefully planned.
They might say the wedding dress is ugly, or the food sucks, or even complain about the décor. Most of the haters at weddings were only invited out of obligation to parents and other relatives.
These guests do not even truly matter to the bride and groom, but unhappy guests want everyone to know how much they are not enjoying the wedding.
The real purpose of a wedding reception should be to let the bride and groom celebrate their love and happiness with their guests (who should be actual family members and close relatives and real friends), as they have a bite to eat and get congratulated.
If the regimentation and control of every little detail of the event were lost, people (including the bride and groom) could actually enjoy themselves. I feel that weddings consist of a lot of waiting for the most part.
Waiting for the bride and groom to enter, waiting for the food to be served, waiting for the dance floor to open up…
The media has played a large part in creating the pressure to have large, impressive weddings. Reality shows such as TLC’s “Say Yes to the Dress,” and the ultra-shallow “Four Weddings,” which features four brides who attend each other’s weddings and literally rip apart each one, encourage brides-to-be to plan the most expensive and extravagant events imaginable.
If you need an example of how scary wedding culture has actually become, look no further than this scene that played out during “Four Weddings” where a contestant once rated another bride’s wedding a four out of 10 because she “got food stuck in between her teeth.”
Add the reality TV created “Bridezilla” mentality to the already stressful process of wedding planning, and brides feel that it is their duty to become complete B****** to ensure that everything goes their way and their weddings impress highly critical guests.
Brides literally obsess over precision planning, even though in the end, every single wedding is pretty much the same. Brides pick practically the same dresses, color schemes and floral arrangements, and most even choose nearly identical playlists.
Instead of brides glowing with happiness, they are actually most likely exhausted from getting no sleep the night before and having to wake up at 6 a.m. for to make sure their heir hair and makeup look perfect.
So in all this pre-meditated glitz and glamour that is used just to impress, the actual act of marriage and its meaning get lost in the craziness.
I’m not saying that all brides should get married in their backyards and serve hotdogs as a sign of their love, but I am saying that brides and grooms alike should not forget the reason behind the event that they are celebrating.
So please brides-to-be and friends of brides-to-be, reconsider your reasoning for planning over-the-top weddings and stop to think about what’s truly important.
You can access the actual article here
It’s her wedding day.
What was once a paramount, sacred tradition that enabled a couple united by love to become joined together for life has now become little more than a grand exhibition of wealth.
In today’s society, this oh-so-special day has actually morphed into a sort of contest, and even can be considered a spectacle in a way.
Every bride-to-be believes that her wedding will outshine everyone else’s, and the obsession with how perfect things will be for others has surpassed the importance of the personal significance of this (hopefully) once in a lifetime milestone.
What was meant to be one of the happiest days of a hopelessly romantic couple’s life has become a practice in personal advertising to communicate the message: “Here we are, happily in love, and here is the carefully crafted wedding to prove it!”
Many couples believe that the more money they spend on this one-day event, the likely it will be a success and leave guests feeling satisfied. Weddings have become events for impressing others, instead of a celebration of the couple’s love.
The wedding industry has greatly expanded over the years, becoming a multi-million dollar industry that most brides and grooms buy into.
Of course, everyone deserves a beautiful wedding, but isn’t financial security and a debt-free future with your new partner better than spending all of your money on a wedding just to impress others?
The amount of money that is spent on excessive weddings can be used to supply the down payments for a home. Purchasing a home is an important step to building a future together and is not on a one-day event that everyone forgets about after anyway.
Details including the bride’s dress, the invitations, the venue, the menu, the cake, seating arrangements, and even those photos meticulously placed around the venue have all been cautiously directed, hand-crafted and planned. Not only is everything perfectly planned, it’s practically staged.
The entrance of the bridal party and groomsmen, the entrance and introduction of the bride and groom, the first dance, the eventual serving of the food, the toasts, the father/daughter dance, the cake cutting, the bouquet and garter toss, etc., etc.
These repetitive and generic wedding traditions make the receptions into really long, orchestrated and scheduled events, where you always find yourself as a guest wondering when the polite time to leave is.
The sad part is that when you really think of it, weddings do not reflect the reality of what they are supposed to mark, which is the beginning of a marriage and the joining and commencement of two people’s lives together surrounded by their closest friends and families.
It’s usually the opposite. People attending weddings these days have a sort of expectation, sort of like when people go to Las Vegas and just expect to come back with large winnings.
Most of the time these people aren’t even that close to the bride and groom, and are the ones criticizing every detail that was so carefully planned.
They might say the wedding dress is ugly, or the food sucks, or even complain about the décor. Most of the haters at weddings were only invited out of obligation to parents and other relatives.
These guests do not even truly matter to the bride and groom, but unhappy guests want everyone to know how much they are not enjoying the wedding.
The real purpose of a wedding reception should be to let the bride and groom celebrate their love and happiness with their guests (who should be actual family members and close relatives and real friends), as they have a bite to eat and get congratulated.
If the regimentation and control of every little detail of the event were lost, people (including the bride and groom) could actually enjoy themselves. I feel that weddings consist of a lot of waiting for the most part.
Waiting for the bride and groom to enter, waiting for the food to be served, waiting for the dance floor to open up…
The media has played a large part in creating the pressure to have large, impressive weddings. Reality shows such as TLC’s “Say Yes to the Dress,” and the ultra-shallow “Four Weddings,” which features four brides who attend each other’s weddings and literally rip apart each one, encourage brides-to-be to plan the most expensive and extravagant events imaginable.
If you need an example of how scary wedding culture has actually become, look no further than this scene that played out during “Four Weddings” where a contestant once rated another bride’s wedding a four out of 10 because she “got food stuck in between her teeth.”
Add the reality TV created “Bridezilla” mentality to the already stressful process of wedding planning, and brides feel that it is their duty to become complete B****** to ensure that everything goes their way and their weddings impress highly critical guests.
Brides literally obsess over precision planning, even though in the end, every single wedding is pretty much the same. Brides pick practically the same dresses, color schemes and floral arrangements, and most even choose nearly identical playlists.
Instead of brides glowing with happiness, they are actually most likely exhausted from getting no sleep the night before and having to wake up at 6 a.m. for to make sure their heir hair and makeup look perfect.
So in all this pre-meditated glitz and glamour that is used just to impress, the actual act of marriage and its meaning get lost in the craziness.
I’m not saying that all brides should get married in their backyards and serve hotdogs as a sign of their love, but I am saying that brides and grooms alike should not forget the reason behind the event that they are celebrating.
So please brides-to-be and friends of brides-to-be, reconsider your reasoning for planning over-the-top weddings and stop to think about what’s truly important.
You can access the actual article here
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Why Developing Serious Relationships in Your 20s Matter
Are you in your twenties? Are you an entrepreneur? Have you been told by your friends, your advisors, and your professional peers that now is your time to build your own life and not worry about things like settling down and having children — especially if you’re a female entrepreneur?
It makes sense, right? This is the only time in your life when you have no ties, no mortgage, no kids to support. This is the only time you can really do something ambitious, if you’re being practical.
And let’s face it, you’re not ready anyway. You’re busy building your company, figuring out who you are, what you want. You get laid on a regular basis; it’s not like you don’t have a love life. A “love” life.
And everyone around you agrees. Everyone!
Now is the time to live! (By which you mean building the next change-the-world company, of course.) You’ve moved to New York. Or San Francisco. Or Palo Alto. Or Boston. With the express purpose of building something.
This is a noble cause. There is nothing more professionally satisfying as building something. Something you love. Something you can “get behind.”
But...
There was this girl. This guy.
Eh, fuck it. You’re busy. You have more important things to do. Changing the world is a full-time job and if you don’t do it now, when will you?
Here’s the thing: I know you. You’re probably one of the many people I’ve mentored or hired. On multiple occasions, you’ve explained to me (as if I were your batty old aunt, but I’m not taking it personally) that you have no time to get to know anyone because you’re busy doing your work.
This is a complete fallacy. Work and relationships are not incompatible. (Ask Mark Zuckerberg.)
I’ll wager that there is something about big transient cities that distorts everyone’s sense of time. You become convinced that you have time for everything you find challenging, that your ultimate horizon is infinite. This is only the beginning for you.
But you don’t know how much time you have. And even if things go well for you, your time is finite. You can’t figure out your professional life now and your personal life later. (Unless you’re the rare thirteen-year-old entrepreneur, in which case, I might demur.)
And here is why: As with coding and management and matters of finance and marketing, relationships have a learning curve. You learn the basics of “relationshiptiva” (note to copyed: yes, I made up that word): How to deal with sexual etiquette, mundane everyday things, scheduling, and appropriate meetings with close friends, and some equitable plan for who’s supposed to pay for dinner or wash the dishesthis time. These are basics. And if you’re learning them in your thirties, it’s going to be much harder.
Because in a few years, however young you think yourself (how old is thirty, really?), you will be approaching midlife and you won’t be as adaptable as you once were. There are reasons for this, many of which are biological. Your body won’t respond the same way. You’ll have knee problems that didn’t exist when you were running sophomore track. You can’t stay out till 4:00 a.m. anymore, because now the same alcohol intake has somehow resulted in a hangover that’s a multiple of what it once was — and you will never ever have appreciated a nice soft pillow more. And if you think you can fend these things off with diet and exercise, you should probably buy a good solid book on the aging process or find a professional athlete over the age of thirty to talk to. They will speak of massage therapists and bone density and necessary nutritional supplements. You can mitigate these things, but you can’t entirely avoid them.
But that is not the point. The point is that thirty (or thirty-two, or thirty-five) is not the age when you want to be practicing serious relationships for the first time. Because learning how to develop a meaningful, sustainable relationship and keep it healthy takes some extended practice. You have to get beyond the basics — the sexual negotiations and the decisions about whose clothes go where and how to talk about exes. You have to figure out how to fight well, how to negotiate major value conflicts (if you can — some are impossible), and how to deal with the inevitabilities that come your way.
And those inevitabilities are myriad: At some point, you and your partner will go through a period of disillusionment when someone else turns your head or your partner’s. Maybe you have an affair, maybe you don’t. At some point, one of you will have significantly more career success than the other. This will become a point of tension. As will the disparity in income that usually accompanies it. At some point, you will disagree on how to raise your child and you will each wield the child as the ultimate weapon in a battle of wills. (I’m just doing what’s best forour child!) And at some point, one of you will have a major life issue that costs you everything or close (cancer, financial ruin, miscellaneous crisis), and the other person will have to decide to commit to or not.
It’s not a question of whether each of these things will happen; it’s a question of when. And if you do decide to spend a life with someone, you have to decide that you are willing to face all of these things and acknowledge that some of them could happen sooner than you expect.
Relationships are too important to learn how to face those issues at the last minute. You have to go through a few of them to know how to properly conduct one. You have to fail. You have to date a few terrible people. You have to be the asshole yourself sometimes. You have to learn how not to be the asshole. You have to spend tons of time together — so much time that sometimes you feel indistinguishable from each other and you find that both reassuring and disturbing. You have to have a vicious fight and know it’s not ending you and that you’re going to have to work to repair it and that the effort is worthwhile. These things take time.
I’m not suggesting, mind you, that you settle down in your twenties. I don’t envision you in a ranch home in the suburbs at twenty-six, feeding your toddlers Cheerios and pureed organic carrots and carting them to and from soccer practice in the family [Missouri: Suburban; SoCal: Prius].
I’m just saying that it’s worth it to look at your romantic relationships nakedly. (Metaphorically, not literally. Unless that’s your thing — in which case, contemplate in the nude as much as you want.) Work at a relationship the way you work at your work. Spend the time. Make the effort.
You need the practice. You need to learn. Some of you can wait another ten or twenty years to do that. And some of you may be the rare bachelors and bachelorettes who have no intention of ever being in a serious committed relationship ever. But not most of you, especially if you’re envisioning a spouse and kids sometime before you can start collecting social security. You need time — and lots of it.
And you need to remember that work is not everything. I met my fiancé at work, which is not a way that Detached Professional Me would ever advise anyone to go about meeting people. Under the circumstances, we had to decide fairly quickly whether we were willing to get fired. What was more important: the job or the relationship? We picked the latter. Fortunately, nobody got fired. But if I had been sent packing, I wouldn’t regret it. Jobs are replaceable. People you truly love are not.
I think it’s fair to say — with no scientific evidence — that deathbed wishes rarely include, “If only I had put another twenty hours a week in at the office! That slightly cleaner product release would have made all the difference.” But that guy, that girl? You might regret that.
***
Good read! After all, our cosmic lesson in love tends to become more costly at we aged (and we think inflation applies only to economics).
For original text, you can access it from here
It makes sense, right? This is the only time in your life when you have no ties, no mortgage, no kids to support. This is the only time you can really do something ambitious, if you’re being practical.
And let’s face it, you’re not ready anyway. You’re busy building your company, figuring out who you are, what you want. You get laid on a regular basis; it’s not like you don’t have a love life. A “love” life.
And everyone around you agrees. Everyone!
Now is the time to live! (By which you mean building the next change-the-world company, of course.) You’ve moved to New York. Or San Francisco. Or Palo Alto. Or Boston. With the express purpose of building something.
This is a noble cause. There is nothing more professionally satisfying as building something. Something you love. Something you can “get behind.”
But...
There was this girl. This guy.
Eh, fuck it. You’re busy. You have more important things to do. Changing the world is a full-time job and if you don’t do it now, when will you?
Here’s the thing: I know you. You’re probably one of the many people I’ve mentored or hired. On multiple occasions, you’ve explained to me (as if I were your batty old aunt, but I’m not taking it personally) that you have no time to get to know anyone because you’re busy doing your work.
This is a complete fallacy. Work and relationships are not incompatible. (Ask Mark Zuckerberg.)
I’ll wager that there is something about big transient cities that distorts everyone’s sense of time. You become convinced that you have time for everything you find challenging, that your ultimate horizon is infinite. This is only the beginning for you.
But you don’t know how much time you have. And even if things go well for you, your time is finite. You can’t figure out your professional life now and your personal life later. (Unless you’re the rare thirteen-year-old entrepreneur, in which case, I might demur.)
And here is why: As with coding and management and matters of finance and marketing, relationships have a learning curve. You learn the basics of “relationshiptiva” (note to copyed: yes, I made up that word): How to deal with sexual etiquette, mundane everyday things, scheduling, and appropriate meetings with close friends, and some equitable plan for who’s supposed to pay for dinner or wash the dishesthis time. These are basics. And if you’re learning them in your thirties, it’s going to be much harder.
Because in a few years, however young you think yourself (how old is thirty, really?), you will be approaching midlife and you won’t be as adaptable as you once were. There are reasons for this, many of which are biological. Your body won’t respond the same way. You’ll have knee problems that didn’t exist when you were running sophomore track. You can’t stay out till 4:00 a.m. anymore, because now the same alcohol intake has somehow resulted in a hangover that’s a multiple of what it once was — and you will never ever have appreciated a nice soft pillow more. And if you think you can fend these things off with diet and exercise, you should probably buy a good solid book on the aging process or find a professional athlete over the age of thirty to talk to. They will speak of massage therapists and bone density and necessary nutritional supplements. You can mitigate these things, but you can’t entirely avoid them.
But that is not the point. The point is that thirty (or thirty-two, or thirty-five) is not the age when you want to be practicing serious relationships for the first time. Because learning how to develop a meaningful, sustainable relationship and keep it healthy takes some extended practice. You have to get beyond the basics — the sexual negotiations and the decisions about whose clothes go where and how to talk about exes. You have to figure out how to fight well, how to negotiate major value conflicts (if you can — some are impossible), and how to deal with the inevitabilities that come your way.
And those inevitabilities are myriad: At some point, you and your partner will go through a period of disillusionment when someone else turns your head or your partner’s. Maybe you have an affair, maybe you don’t. At some point, one of you will have significantly more career success than the other. This will become a point of tension. As will the disparity in income that usually accompanies it. At some point, you will disagree on how to raise your child and you will each wield the child as the ultimate weapon in a battle of wills. (I’m just doing what’s best forour child!) And at some point, one of you will have a major life issue that costs you everything or close (cancer, financial ruin, miscellaneous crisis), and the other person will have to decide to commit to or not.
It’s not a question of whether each of these things will happen; it’s a question of when. And if you do decide to spend a life with someone, you have to decide that you are willing to face all of these things and acknowledge that some of them could happen sooner than you expect.
Relationships are too important to learn how to face those issues at the last minute. You have to go through a few of them to know how to properly conduct one. You have to fail. You have to date a few terrible people. You have to be the asshole yourself sometimes. You have to learn how not to be the asshole. You have to spend tons of time together — so much time that sometimes you feel indistinguishable from each other and you find that both reassuring and disturbing. You have to have a vicious fight and know it’s not ending you and that you’re going to have to work to repair it and that the effort is worthwhile. These things take time.
I’m not suggesting, mind you, that you settle down in your twenties. I don’t envision you in a ranch home in the suburbs at twenty-six, feeding your toddlers Cheerios and pureed organic carrots and carting them to and from soccer practice in the family [Missouri: Suburban; SoCal: Prius].
I’m just saying that it’s worth it to look at your romantic relationships nakedly. (Metaphorically, not literally. Unless that’s your thing — in which case, contemplate in the nude as much as you want.) Work at a relationship the way you work at your work. Spend the time. Make the effort.
You need the practice. You need to learn. Some of you can wait another ten or twenty years to do that. And some of you may be the rare bachelors and bachelorettes who have no intention of ever being in a serious committed relationship ever. But not most of you, especially if you’re envisioning a spouse and kids sometime before you can start collecting social security. You need time — and lots of it.
And you need to remember that work is not everything. I met my fiancé at work, which is not a way that Detached Professional Me would ever advise anyone to go about meeting people. Under the circumstances, we had to decide fairly quickly whether we were willing to get fired. What was more important: the job or the relationship? We picked the latter. Fortunately, nobody got fired. But if I had been sent packing, I wouldn’t regret it. Jobs are replaceable. People you truly love are not.
I think it’s fair to say — with no scientific evidence — that deathbed wishes rarely include, “If only I had put another twenty hours a week in at the office! That slightly cleaner product release would have made all the difference.” But that guy, that girl? You might regret that.
***
Good read! After all, our cosmic lesson in love tends to become more costly at we aged (and we think inflation applies only to economics).
For original text, you can access it from here
Monday, June 17, 2013
There
"There" seeks to elucidate an episode of how/what a person thinks, at the beginning of a relationship, in Singapore.
We often describe this moment as the sweetest. During this period, when the relationship is about to begin, all they wanted was to know more about each other. It is the moment of exploration and aspiration for both the individuals.
This short film allows you to see what unveils in the mind of our character and what appears in his or her thought, just when the moment is about to begin and wanting to be There.
***
A short film done by my hommies; you can check out their FB page (wemerrygoround) @ here
:)
Thursday, May 09, 2013
Skeletons discovered holding hands in coffin together
You can read the actual article here
***
Archaeologists excavating the inner courtyard of a former Dominican monastery may have discovered a Romanian Romeo and Juliet after unearthing the bodies of a young couple who were buried holding hands.
Experts from the Cluj-Napoca Institute of Archaeology and History of Art are working on what they believe is the former cemetery of the monastery have already uncovered several bodies
But discovering the couple holding hands was a surprise as double burials were extremely rare in that period.
Main researcher Adrian Rusu said: 'It is a mystery - and rare for such burials at that time.
We can see that the man had suffered a severe injury that left him with a broken hip from which he probably died. We believe the injury was caused after he was hit by something very blunt and hard.'
Because of the fact that the young woman obviously died at the same time and was presumably healthy we are speculating that she possibly died of a broken heart at the loss of her partner.
Mr Rusu explained that becuase suicide was regarded as a sin in the Medieval Ages it is unlikely she killed herself - and if she had they would not have been buried together like the were in a holy place.
'They were obviously buried together as a tribute to the love they had for each other,' he said.
He estimated that the two bodies were buried somewhere between 1450-1550.
The body of a child was also found in the grave in Cluj-Napoca although this may not have been linked to the pair.
The lower leg bones of a fourth skeleton were also found in the burial plot.
Cheers
Thursday, April 25, 2013
The man who keeps falling in love with his wife
Just want to share an interesting read. The actual article can be found here
***
When a virus destroyed part of his brain, Clive Wearing was left with no memory. He is still trapped in an eternal present. Yet he does remember that he loves his wife, Deborah. Here she tells their heartbreaking story
Clive had no idea that Tuesday, March 26, 1985 would be his last day of conscious thought. We weren't ready. Did he feel his brain disappearing that night? Why didn't he wake me? By morning he could not answer a simple question or remember my name. The doctor said it was flu and a lack of sleep that was causing the confusion. He tucked him up with a temperature of 104 and a bottle of sleeping pills.
"No need to stay home," he said to me. "These'll knock him out for eight hours. Go to work."
I went to work. When I came home that night the bed was empty. His pyjamas lay crumpled in the middle of the bare sheet. I screamed his name. Running the length of the flat, I already knew something bad had happened.
"I'm never ill," Clive used to say. And he never was. Then all of a sudden he was. But instead of a normal illness, this one is rare, sneaky. Nobody knew what was wrong with him: not the taxi-driver who found him wandering the streets that night, nor the policeman who traced his address from his credit card and called me.
When we finally got him to St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, the doctors thought he was a goner. Only they didn't put it like that. They told me what they thought he might have, and said it had a high mortality rate. I didn't know if that meant probably live or probably die, and I didn't like to ask.
The diagnosis came 11 hours after our arrival at St Mary's. A virus had caused holes in Clive's brain; his memories had fallen out. The doctors said it was encephalitis, from herpes simplex, the cold-sore virus. The virus, they explained, lies dormant in most of the population. Once in a blue moon it slips its moorings, and instead of going to the mouth it goes to the brain. The brain swells up, and, before long, brain crushes against bone.
The virus does its damage before anyone knows it is there. Affected areas include temporal lobes, occipito-parietal and frontal lobes... thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdala; it just keeps on storming through. The part it wipes out completely is the hippocampus, Greek for seahorse. These structures are what we use for recall and remembering, and laying down new thoughts.
By the time they had figured out what was wrong with Clive and started pumping anti-viral drugs into him, all he had left where his memory used to be were seahorse-shaped scars. He could not remember a single thing that had ever happened to him, but he remembered me and knew that he loved me.
August, 1985: "How long have I been ill?''
"Four months."
"Four months? Is that F-O-R or F-O-U-R (ha ha!)?"
"F-O-U-R."
"Well, I've been unconscious the whole time! What do you think it's like to be unconscious for... how long?''
"Four months."
"Four months! For months? Is that F-O-R or F-O-U-R?"
"F-O-U-R."
"I haven't heard anything, seen anything, smelled anything, felt anything, touched anything. How long?"
"Four months."
"... four months! It's like being dead. I haven't been conscious the whole time. How long's it been?"
After two weeks, I decided it was legitimate to start saying, "Nearly five months," to skip the joke. It was all I could do to manage the dialogue itself, but finding the patience to react each time as if for the first time - so that he wouldn't feel that I was ignoring him - was sometimes beyond me.
Clive was constantly surrounded by strangers in a strange place, with no knowledge of where he was or what had happened to him. To catch sight of me was always a massive relief - to know that he was not alone, that I still cared, that I loved him, that I was there. Every time he saw me, he would run to me, fall on me, sobbing, clinging. It was a fierce reunion.
"I thought I was dead," he would say, "if I had any thoughts at all."
If I left Clive's side, the impact of my reappearance after a trip to the bathroom, a word with a nurse, was no less than at my first appearance that day. Clive was living in an abyss, and then out of nowhere, without any warning, I, his wife, would appear over the rim, right there in the room with him.
Sometimes his right arm shot up in the air and he would sing a high note, a little cadenza, he would lift me up and swing me round and laugh, then stop and hold me and look at me, study my face, grinning, searching to see if I had cottoned on to the fact that he was awake now, alive, truly seeing me.
"I can see you!" he'd announce triumphantly. "I'm seeing everything properly now!" It was hard to look excited and delighted for the umpteenth time on one visit, but being besotted with him helped. I was always delighted to see his face, to hold him and kiss him. Before he'd been ill, we would greet each other whenever we found ourselves in the same room together.
When we met at the end of the day or in the street or at rehearsal (Clive was a conductor and BBC music producer when the illness struck), we always hurried to reach each other, passionate and full of affection. So, although it was painful when Clive was so distressed, hugging him for some minutes after a visit to, say, the bathroom, was in keeping with our relationship.
In spite of Clive's amnesia, inside he retained his fundamental intelligence: the same intelligence that had propelled him throughout his career. He was often lucid and, apart from occasional episodes when he was full of rage, he was himself. That was what made his condition all the more horrific.
Clive no longer had any episodic memory, that is, memory for events. Clive did not have the brain parts necessary to recall anything that had happened to him in the whole of his life. But, as is the case with amnesia, he could remember general things. For example, Clive knew that he was married, although he was unable to recall our wedding - a civil ceremony in Camden Town Hall in September, 1983.
He could not have described my appearance, although he knew me as soon as he saw me. He knew he was a musician and conductor, but could not recall any concert. He knew his children by his first marriage - two sons and a daughter, all grown up - but expected them to be much smaller and wasn't sure how many he had. He was surprised to see that The Times no longer had personal columns on its front page, and thought it would cost fourpence, a pre-decimalisation price.
He knew his own name and the names of his siblings and childhood family. He knew facts about his childhood life: where he grew up, where he was evacuated to in the war. He knew that he went to Clare College Cambridge, on a choral scholarship, opting against King's because "everybody wanted to go there".
After that, his sense of his own autobiography got a bit hazy. It was just as well we'd been together six-and-a-half years, or he might not have been able to remember me.
We were looking around for treatment, a brain-injury rehabilitation programme that would take him on. But could rehabilitation stick when nothing else had? Clive could not remember the sentence before the one he was in. Conversation, watching television or reading were beyond him.
I learned that amnesic people have some residual learning capacity that is implicit; they can learn through a kind of conditioning process. A person can learn to respond to certain stimuli even if they think it is their first experience of the stimulus. For example, since the staff always gave Clive a small plastic beaker of water with his medication, he would expect it, raise the beaker and say every time, "Is this champagne, or real pain?"
Amnesic people can also recall by using "priming": that is, if they hear one thing or phrase associated with another, hearing the first prompts a statement of the second. So, if I said, "St Mary's," Clive could say, "Paddington," though he had no idea what it meant.
When Clive made the first entries in his diary it was at my prompting. But on Sunday, July 7, 1985 he made his first spontaneous entry: "Today: 1st CONSCIOUSNESS... Conscious for the FIRST TIME."
This probably marks the first time Clive was able to articulate to himself the strange phenomenon of immediate and blanket forgetting that he had experienced since he was brought into hospital.
Clive made entries in the diary every two or three minutes. People have sometimes interpreted that to imply a new awakening at two- or three-minute intervals. In fact the lapse between each entry signified only the time it took for the process of recording. It involved deciding to write down the fact of his awakening, pulling a pen from his pocket and writing; then a read-through of previous entries, scoring these out because he was sure he had been unconscious when he wrote them.
When he came to the last entry he checked his watch and saw that it was incorrect, so he amended it, reinforcing the last and only true entry by underlining it. Finally Clive would replace the top on his pen, put it back in his pocket and look around to get his bearings in the room. That process might take the few minutes between entries. His span of "consciousness" is actually a great deal shorter.
Every diary entry gives an eyewitness account of a life with no memory: "5.10am Conscusch FINALLY AWAKE AT - AM [a hotchpotch of successive times all scribbled out later] exactly. Newspaper arrived at 8.40am Medicines arrived at 8.45am AND I AWOKE properly AT 8.47am. And completely at 8.49am And became aware of the problems of understanding me."
I was reading medical books, but the cases I read about bore little resemblance to Clive's. For one thing, he started to talk backwards. It had the qualities of compulsion, as if it were his language of choice. He spoke backwards more quickly than anyone could decipher what he was saying. He thoroughly enjoyed this, and gave the staff a run for their money, giggling when they couldn't make him out. He didn't seem to be able to recall my name, but recognised it when he saw it.
"harobeD!" he said. "O harobeD, I evol ouy!"
The fact that Clive could spell and speak back-to-front with such facility and wit showed there was some real intelligence alive in there. His brain might be dark, and yet he was a crack backwards-speaker.
I was soon to discover that more of Clive's brain was intact. There were not many places to go off the ward with Clive but the hospital chapel was one of them, a familiar environment to Clive, who had spent his whole life singing, playing the organ or conducting in similar rooms.
I picked up some music and held it open for Clive to see. I started to sing one of the lines. He picked up the tenor line and sang with me. A bar or so in, I suddenly realised what was happening. He could still read music. He was singing. His talk might be a jumble no one could understand, but his brain was still capable of music.
This opened a door for Clive. He could sit down at the chapel organ and play with both hands on the keyboard, changing stops, and with his feet on the pedals, as if this were easier than riding a bicycle. Singing was in many ways easier than talking. It transcended language.
And the momentum of the music carried Clive from bar to bar. He knew exactly where he was because in every phrase there is context implied: by rhythm, key, melody. When the music stopped, Clive fell through to the lost place. But for those moments he was playing he seemed normal again.
I had long worried about Clive's future care. He continued to live in the same room in the psychiatric wing of St Mary's, but it was not ideal. Then, in 1992, a new residential unit for people with acquired brain injury opened that was just right for Clive: a beautiful house in the countryside in the grounds of a large rehab centre.
With Clive settled, I could begin to plan my own extrication from the brain-injury world. I thought leaving England would perhaps be a way of leaving all the pain. I'd been 27 when Clive got ill. I was now turning 35. I initiated divorce. I took a plane to Washington DC and sold the London flat. I planned to stay away forever, make a new life. It didn't work out quite that way.
Clive never knew we were divorced because he was incapable of knowing anything. His family and his consultant agreed it would only upset him at the time, and he would remember none of it afterwards anyway. Legally he could not give informed consent, so his son acted for him.
Everyone understood that the divorce was partly one of expedience, since I would not be in the UK to look out for Clive; and partly an action to help me move on to a life beyond Clive. But I would remain joint next of kin with his son, because I wanted to continue to be involved in taking decisions about Clive, to continue to be his advocate. His family supported me in that.
I continued to visit him. Nine years into the amnesia, there was some difference in our reunions. For the first few years Clive had always found them intensely emotional, bringing on either grief, high-note joy or furious anger. Now, when I came back from America, it was my turn to feel intensely emotional. I was longing to see him.
When I put my head round his door, his face registered a rush of delight and surprise as if he were about to dash to me as usual and lift me up and swing me round, but then he checked himself. He stood where he was, diffident. He knew enough about himself to realise that although it might seem like months or years of absence to him, I might only have been to the bathroom.
He seemed to be learning, through a kind of interior rehabilitation. He was developing a growing sense that he had asked and heard these questions and answers of awakening before. Though his stump of memory never allowed progression from first moment to sustained time, he understood enough of his situation to help him relate to others without constantly shouting to be let out of his amnesia. As I observed these subtle changes since my absence, I could not suppress a flash of hope. What else might he accomplish?
For the longest time little changed. Clive and I were each in a limbo of our own. But one night in 1999 I discovered, during a phone call to a friend, that God is real and who He is. Suddenly I knew what was important. I was beginning to know how to live, and discovered the power of prayer
Meanwhile Clive, from being withdrawn and morose in his room, became garrulous and outgoing. There were certain themes he stuck to, and some of what he said was rather odd, but he had come a long way from the years of the endless same few questions.
Now he would string all his subjects together in a row, and the other person simply needed to nod or mumble agreement. On days when he was in particularly good spirits, he might run through all his topics at once. Then I knew he was happy. If he was unhappy he would revert to the desperate old questions - "What's it like to have one long night lasting ...how long?"
Now that it had been 14 years, nobody liked to tell him how long. "It's like being dead!" The staff had come to call these his "deads", and they would count them and enter them in their records as a measure of how he was doing.
Clive was, granted, still perhaps the worst case of amnesia in the world, but there was no doubt he was learning new things and the difference it made to his quality of life to be able to converse more easily was significant.
One day I rang Clive and asked him how he'd feel about renewing our marriage vows. "What a lovely idea," he said.
And so, on Easter Sunday 2002, Clive and I dressed up to the nines. Clive's son Anthony came with his wife and two children, and so did Clive's care assistant, Laura. We had not made our marriage vows in church first time round so this would be much more powerful.
Clive was able to participate completely, remembering the Lord's Prayer and saying all that he wanted to say. The best bit was when we knelt down and our joined hands were wrapped in a golden sash. It went beyond a physical joining. It felt like we were touching something of eternity. Afterwards the tea room served us large slices of Victoria sponge and Clive, although he had no memory of what had taken place, was delighted, laughing and quipping and eating everything put in front of him.
Back at Clive's home, they had made up a bed for me in his room, strewn with red rose petals and balloons, like a fairy tale. The decorations made me sad. It's still sad - that he's like he is and that, apart from the heart-to-heart love, we have nothing resembling a regular marriage.
Even spending the night together in the same room doesn't work, as he wakes up constantly, several times an hour, wondering who the shape in the next bed can be.
Clive still writes his diary. The entries have barely changed, but the handwriting is calmer now. And his disposition is a lot happier. He knows he is in his place and I am out in the world.
"When are you coming?" is his regular refrain. But if I hesitate at all he reassures me that he is all right and he understands I have to do what I have to do.
"Get here at dawn," he says anyway. "Get here at the speed of light."
And one day I do arrive at dawn. I drive through the near-empty roads, hoping to be there when he wakes. But when they open the front door, he is there, already awake, and I am the first person he has seen and he clasps me to him and sings a high G and waltzes me into the living-room.
"My eyes have just come on," he says. "I can see everything normally for the first time."
"And I'm here!" I say.
He hugs me again, holds me at arm's length and smiles.
Later, when he makes me coffee, he knows where the cups are and where the milk is kept. I take him for a drive, and as we draw near to the house on the way back, he must recognise the place, for he unclasps his seat belt and offers to get out and open the gate.
When I leave that night my car doesn't start and I have to come in and call the breakdown service. We make a drink in the kitchen. Seven minutes after the last mention of my car Clive says, "Well, at least it means you can stay a bit longer!" Perhaps he had been rehearsing the event in his mind through those minutes. When the garage has repaired the fault and the engine is running, I come back in to get my things. Clive is ready to say goodbye and not hello.
"Remember I love you," I say.
"I can never forget you for a moment," he says. "We're not two people but one. You're the raison d'être for my heartbeat, darling. I love you for e-ter-ni-ty."
When I reach home several hours later I call him. I want to tell him I've arrived safely but he's forgotten I was there.
"When are you coming?" he says. "Please come at the speed of light!"
"I just got home from you," I say.
"Oh really? Well, come at dawn then..."
Tuesday, March 05, 2013
Romantic or Economic?
Straits Times wrote an article about undergraduates not putting love as their priority in life - not particularly surprising though since. You can read it here
FACEBOOK "confession" pages, which allow users to share secrets anonymously, may have helped lovelorn students express their romantic intentions to their objects of affection, but the majority of undergraduates do not want to date, a survey has found.
Some 400 undergraduates aged between 19 and 25 from the National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore Management University and SIM University were asked what was most important to them.
And romance was not anywhere on top of their minds.
The survey found that six in 10 respondents are not in a relationship. Of these, seven in 10 have no plans to actively pursue one.
Friday, January 25, 2013
3 Things I Wish I knew Before We Got Married
I used to think I had my stuff together. Then I got married.
Marriage is great—but it rocked everything I knew. I quickly realized my basic goal in life, prior to getting married, was to simply remain undisturbed.
This “disruption” came suddenly and was disguised as a 5-foot-nothing Swedish-Filipino woman. When I decided I’d rather not live without her, I proceeded to ask her to marry me—that is, to officially invite someone who wasn’t me to be in my personal space for the rest of my life.
This decision introduced my most significant experiences and most challenging experiences—none of which I would trade for the world.
However, I wish I’d had a bit more insight on the front end of our marriage to help me navigate it all.
According to most research, more than 50 percent of people who say “I do” will not be sleeping in the same bed eight years from now. And though Scripture is clear that adultery and abuse are reasons individuals might end a marriage, I’d be willing to bet that most challenges experienced in marriage are the result of unawareness. Most people—myself included—jump into marriage with suitcases full of misconceptions and bad theology, entirely unaware of the unique beauty and paradoxical intentions of marriage.
ALTHOUGH HAPPINESS IS OFTEN A VERY REAL BYPRODUCT OF A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP, MARRIAGE HAS A FAR MORE SIGNIFICANT PURPOSE IN SIGHT.
The following are three thoughts on marriage that friends and mentors have shared with me. I remind myself of them often in hopes of keeping this anomaly called marriage both enjoyable and healthy.
1. Marriage is not about living happily ever after.
Here’s the truth: I get annoyed at my wife. But this is more a reflection of me than her.
I’m intensely certain that nothing in life has ever made me more angry, frustrated or annoyed than my wife. Inevitably, just when I think I’ve given all I can possibly give, she somehow finds a way to ask for more.
The worst part of it all is that her demands aren’t unreasonable. One day she expects me to stay emotionally engaged. The next, she's looking for me to validate the way that she feels. The list goes on—but never ventures far from things she perfectly well deserves as a wife.
Unfortunately for her, deserving or not, her needs often compete with my self-focus. I know it shouldn’t be this way, but I am selfish and stubborn and, overall, human.
I once read a book that alluded to the idea that marriage is the fire of life—that somehow it’s designed to refine all our dysfunction and spur us into progressive wholeness. In this light, contrary to popular opinion, the goal of marriage is not happiness. And although happiness is often a very real byproduct of a healthy relationship, marriage has a far more significant purpose in sight. It is designed to pull dysfunction to the surface of our lives, set it on fire and help us grow.
When we’re willing to see it this way, then the points of friction in our marriages quickly become gifts that consistently invite us into a more whole and fulfilling experience of life.
2. The more you give to marriage, the more it gives back.
Over the past year, a few friends and I have had an open conversation about the highs and lows of marriage—specifically how to make the most of the high times and avoid the low ones. Along the way, we happened upon a derailing hypothesis that goes something like this: If one makes their husband or wife priority number one, all other areas of life benefit.
WHEN WE RETURN MARRIAGE TO ITS RIGHTFUL PLACE IN OUR PRIORITIES, IT CAN QUICKLY TURN INTO THE GREATEST ASSET TO EVERY OTHER LAYER OF OUR LIVES.
It’s a disorienting claim. Disorienting, because it protests my deeper persuasion that success as an entrepreneur, or any professional, requires that career takes the throne of my priorities and remain there for, at the very least, a couple of years.
However, seeing that my recent pattern of caring about work over marriage had produced little more than paying bills and a miserable wife, I figured giving the philosophy a test drive couldn’t hurt.
For 31 days, I intentionally put my wife first over everything else, and then I tracked how it worked. I created a metric for these purposes, to mark our relationship as priority, and then my effectiveness in all other areas of my life on the same scale, including career productivity and general quality of life.
To my surprise, a month later, I had a chart of data and a handful of ironic experiences to prove that the more you give to marriage, the more it gives back.
Notably, on the days my wife genuinely felt valued, I observed her advocating for me to invest deeply in to my work. She no longer saw our relationship and my career pursuits as competitors for my attention, and as she partnered with me in my career, I have experienced the benefits of having the closest person in my life champion me.
Of course, marriage requires sacrifice. And sometimes it will feel as if it takes and takes. However, when we return marriage to its rightful place in our priorities, it can quickly turn from something we have to maintain and sacrifice for into the greatest asset to every other layer of our lives.
3. Marriage can change the world.
John Medina, the author of Brain Rules and a secular biologist, is often approached by men looking for the silver bullet of fathering. In one way or another, they all come around to asking, “What’s the most important thing I can do as a father?”
Medina's answer alludes to a surprising truth.
In my previously mentioned experiment, I measured the effect that making my marriage priority number one had on different areas of my life. One of those areas was my 16-month-old son’s behavior.
What I found in simply charting my observations was that the majority of the time, my child’s behavior was directly affected by the level of intention I invested in my marriage.
Re-enter John Medina, the secular biologist. After years of biological research and several books on parenting conclusions, what is his answer to the question, “What’s the most important thing I can do as a father”?
“Go home and love your wife.”
Gary Ezzo and Robert Bucknam, the authors of Babywise, say it this way: “A healthy marriage creates an infused stability within the family and a haven of security for a child in their development process.” They go on to sum up their years of research by saying, “In the end, great marriages produce great parents.”
The point is that marriage has a higher goal than to make two people happy or even whole. Yes, the investment we make into our marriage pays dividends for us. But, concluded by Medina and his colleagues, the same investment also has significant implications for our family, our community and eventually our culture.
So men, women, the next time you find yourself dreaming about living significantly or succeeding in your career or being a better parent than yours were to you, do the world a favor: Go home and love your wife. Go home and and love your husband.
***
You can access the actual article here
Tuesday, January 08, 2013
Checklist Syndrome
ST last sat ran a report on Singaporeans and marriages. Boy, nothing written in the article surprise me. You can read more. I will paste a copy of the article below:
Perfect proposal? Still futile in the end.
***
The Checklist Syndrome
by Jessica Lim
A "checklist" syndrome is the biggest stumbling block when it comes to Singaporeans finding spouses, said dating experts.
This list of expectations applies not just for potential mates but also for themselves in, say, career.
Commenting on a survey's findings released earlier this week that found that singles yearned to tie the knot one day, but had not found their ideal partner, or wanted to focus on their career first, several dating experts The Straits Times spoke to blamed one thing: the checklist.
Owner of dating agency Clique Wise, Mr Jackiey Kwek, who has spoken to about 10,000 single Singaporeans since it opened six years ago, said: "They've hit a certain point in their career. They have a high-paying job, a big house, a nice car. They now want a soulmate who can fit into their lifestyle."
The 38-year-old has had clients with PhDs who insist on dating only PhD holders. Some give him a list of professions they want their prospective date to be in. Pilot, doctor, lawyer and banker come up tops in this list.
Dating agencies said women typically want a spouse who earns more, is taller and older, at least as educated, exudes confidence and has reached a certain rank within a company.
"I tell my lady clients, happiness doesn't always come at 1.75m," said Ms Violet Lim, founder of Lunch Actually, chuckling.
Men, on the other hand, typically hope to clinch a date with someone who is pleasant-looking, slim and family-oriented. Some also ask to date women lower on the career ladder than they are.
Associate professor of sociology at the National University of Singapore Paulin Tay Straughan, who teaches a module for freshmen called "The Social Construction of Romantic Love", thinks the checklists for women have become longer - the result of educated women wanting men who can add value to their lives.
"They want what is portrayed as the ideal match. Look at how love is portrayed on TV. There is hardly ever a show where a hero is shorter than a heroine," she said. "We are a slave to societal norms."
"The minute you have a relationship where friends think your partner is not good-looking, or parents think he is not good enough, doubts are seeded," she said. "Everyone is chasing a fairy tale."
Her advice is for singles to just go out with different people and not hold out for that ideal partner.
She said: "As long as you date and expand your social circle, in time, you will come to know what you really want and not what society says you should want."
However, expanding one's social circle may not be easy.
The owners of Lunch Actually, Clique Wise and other dating agencies like Affinity Again said most of their clients meet fewer than 10 new people a year.
The owner of Affinity Again, Ms Betty Goh, said: "They say they are working. After work, they go home and rest. When they do go out, it's with friends they already know."
Ms Susan Low, 28, a graduate in economics and finance from RMIT University in Australia, has been single for the past decade.
The bank manager admits that she does not meet many new people socially. She has gone on several dates set up by friends but these did not lead to anything.
Her checklist? An older man with at least a university degree and who is not overly religious. She is not particular about the job he holds.
Recounting a recent incident when she chatted someone up at a party and got monosyllabic replies, she said: "In Singapore... men don't strike up conversations that frequently. It's not easy."
So what are the solutions?
Ms Lim called it a "numbers game". "Out of 10 new people you meet, there may be mutual attraction with maybe four, and maybe in the end, one will work out.
"Go for singles events. Widen the number of people you meet. Be proactive."
Mr Kwek of Clique Wise suggests changes in three areas - at home, school and work. Schools can have more co-ed activities, he said, adding that employers can help staff mingle via, say, wine- tasting activities.
"Parents should also encourage relationships at school. Stop saying that studies come first."
Schools said they leave students alone when it comes to relationships. The senior director for marketing and communications at Singapore University of Technology and Design, Ms Corinna Choong, said its student population has a good mix of boys and girls. "The students mingle on their own and pair up by themselves. The school doesn't interfere in this aspect," she added.
***
Many single people brandish unrealistic wants; but it's no fault of theirs because it is how 'concept' are being taught to us in school - "Aim higher, study hard and you will achieve great results."
Somehow this mantra doesn't really work as effective in relationship as compared to studies.
The paradox of love is that aiming higher or dreaming of perfection does not always lead to satisfactory results. Also, hardworking folks labouring in love does not always lead to satisfactory result. One does not simply win in love by sheer hard work - it takes some level of wisdom and understanding to put all that effort to conjure the most amazing magical effect.
Many guys reckon that if one is rich, he can get any woman he wants. Not necessarily true. Below is the proposal of Flamboyant billionaire Jho Low surprise engagement proposal for Elva Hsiao. The proposal is rumoured to cost of £1m (RM4.9 million).
Details is as follows:
(1) The event took place on a private beach at pricey hotel resort Atlantis, The Palm – the most famous hotel on the island of Palm Jumeirah, off Dubai.
(2) Couple arriving in a black Rolls-Royce and strolling to the beach, where candles are laid out in a gigantic Valentine heart.
(3) The couple, holding each other, then proceed to dine on an luxurious set – claimed to be the work of Dubai’s architectural and interior design firm Ali Bakhtiar Designs – as a laser show outlines the couple’s silhouette.
(4) The couple enjoy their meal while being serenaded by a harpist and a violinist. It is no ordinary violin either, for it is studded with what appears to be precious stones.
(5) Breaking the romantic tone, several parachutists descend from the sky and land on the beach to present Hsiao with jewellery made by Swiss luxury brand Chopard.
However, the outrageous extravagance was reportedly not enough to move Hsiao’s heart. Apple Daily says it understands that Hsiao (right), 33, rejected the proposal and only saw Low, 31, as a “little brother”. The newspaper also reported that a spokesperson had denied claims that Low had proposed to Hsiao at the event, stressing that it was just a “romantic dinner”.
Penang-born Low, who is reportedly part of Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak’s inner circle, is best known for his attempts to woo American socialite Paris Hilton and hard partying habits with his A-list friends in the United States.
Low, whose real name is Low Taek Jho, is the son of a Penang tycoon who reportedly has close links with Middle Eastern investors.
Locally, he is reportedly involved with the Terengganu Investment Authority (TIA) – now known as the 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) – and UBG Bhd, which is owned by the family of Sarawak Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud.
Perfect proposal? Still futile in the end.
Monday, December 31, 2012
Attachment Theory & Relationship
I came across an article on daily mail, relating Attachment Theory to relationship. Ah yes! social work class again; however to readers outside the profession (counsellor/SW/etc), this is indeed a good read. You can assess the actual news here. But I will just repost the content for easy read.
***
How much love do YOU need? Knowing your ‘attachment type’ could be the key to making relationships last
By DR AMIR LEVINE and RACHEL HELLER
Ever wondered why you become clingy as soon as you have a partner? Or why you’re unable to stick in a relationship for long? New research has found that the way we act in relationships is pre-determined by which ‘attachment type’ we are.
By identifying whether you are an ‘avoider’, ‘anxious’ or ‘secure’, you can find your perfect match and transform your relationships.
Everyone - whether they have just started dating or have been married for 40 years - falls into one of these categories. By understanding which one you are, you can view your own behaviour and the actions of people around you in a new light.
If you’re single and looking for love, this knowledge can help you find the right match; or, if you’re already in a relationship, it can help you understand why you think and act as you do. In either case, you’ll start to experience change - for the better.’
Perfect match: Identifying whether you are an 'avoider', 'anxious' or 'secure', will enable you to transform your relationships
The science of attachment is based on the fact that we are all biologically programmed to find love. Although we live in a culture that tells us independence is good, nothing could be further than the truth. People in good relationships have been found to live longer, healthier lives.
The need to be near someone special is so important that the brain has a biological mechanism, called the ‘attachment system’, that consists of emotions and behaviours that ensure we stay close to our loved ones.
This system explains why a child parted from his or her mother becomes frantic, searches wildly or cries uncontrollably until he or she re-establishes contact with her. It also explains the way we behave in our adult relationships.
But while we all have this need for attachment, the way we show it differs.
In the Sixties, tests found that babies were either ‘secure’, ‘anxious’ or ‘avoidant’. If a secure baby’s mother left the room he would start crying, but as soon as she returned he calmed down and started to play again.
The anxious baby was distressed, but when the mother came back, he pushed her away and burst into tears. Finally, the avoidant baby acted as if nothing had happened when the mother left and returned to the room. But tests showed that his heart rate and levels of the stress-hormone, cortisol, rose.
Research has now shown that adults behave in a startlingly similar way to babies when it comes to romantic relationships. What type we are (which depends on our upbringing and adult experiences) determines how you react in romantic situations.
Basically, secure people feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving. Anxious people crave intimacy, are often preoccupied with their relationships and tend to worry about their partner’s ability to love them back. Avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and keep their distance.
By using attachment theory both your own behaviour and that of others no longer seems baffling and complex, but rather predictable... So, which attachment style are you?
ANXIOUS
You have the capacity for great intimacy. But you often fear that your partner does not wish to be as close as you would like. Relationships tend to consume a lot of your emotional energy. You are sensitive to small fluctuations in your partner’s mood and you take your partner’s behaviour overly personally.
You worry if you don’t hear from your partner regularly. When you feel like your partner is getting distant, you tend to express your anxiety by doing the following:
Calling, texting or e-mailing while waiting for a phone call, loitering by your partner’s workplace in the hope of running into him;
When they return calls, or come home, you punish them by ignoring them, rolling your eyes when they speak or leaving the room;
Threatening to leave in the hope he’ll make you stay;
Making your partner feel jealous by telling them about other men.
This is a sign of an overly-sensitive attachment system. Even a hint that something is wrong upsets you so much that you are unable to calm down until you get a clear indication from your partner that the relationship is safe.
AVOIDANT
It is important for you to maintain your independence and you often prefer autonomy to intimacy. While you do want to be close to others, you feel uncomfortable with too much closeness and tend to keep your partner at arm’s length. You don’t spend much time worrying about being rejected. You tend not to open up to your partner and they often complain that you are distant. In relationships, you are often on high alert for signs of control or impingement by your partner.
Whether you are single or in a relationship, you are always keeping people at a distance by using various ‘deactivating strategies’. These include:
Saying ‘I’m not ready to commit’- but staying together, sometimes for years;
Focusing on imperfections in your partner: the way he talks, dresses etc;
Pining after an ex or waiting for The One;
Flirting with others to introduce insecurity into the relationship;
Not saying ‘I love you’- while implying you do have feelings for them;
Pulling away when it’s going well (eg not calling after an intimate date);
Forming impossible relationships, such as with a married man;
Avoiding physical closeness - for example, not wanting to share the same bed, not wanting to have sex, walking several strides ahead of your partner.
If you’re avoidant, you use these strategies to make sure the person you love won’t get in the way of your autonomy. But, at the end of the day, these tools are standing in the way of you being happy in a relationship.
SECURE
Being warm and loving in a relationship comes naturally to you. You enjoy being intimate without becoming overly worried about your relationships. You take things in your stride, effectively communicate your feelings and are good at reading your partner’s emotional cues. You share your successes and problems with your mate, and are able to be there for him in times of need. You are:
A great conflict buster - during a fight you don’t act defensively or punish your partner and are quick to forgive;
Mentally flexible - being willing to change and respond to your partner’s needs;
You express your feelings openly and don’t play games;
You are comfortable with intimacy and sex.
We can all learn from your approach, but that doesn’t mean all your relationships are perfect.
You can find yourself in a bad relationship because you are more likely to forgive long-term bad behaviour and give your partner the benefit of the doubt.
WHAT IS YOUR PARTNER'S STYLE?
Understanding attachment theory will change the way you perceive new people you meet, but it will also give you surprising insight into an existing partner. You’ll no longer ask yourself: ‘Why is he always pushing me away?’ Instead you’ll say: ‘It really isn’t about me at all - he just doesn’t feel comfortable with too much closeness.’ Similarly, you’ll be less likely to invest time and energy in someone who is wrong for you. Does he send mixed signals? Does he say things like ‘when we move in together’ and then act as though you have no future? If so, he’s an avoider. People usually reveal everything about themselves early on - you just need to keep your eyes open.
Here are the signals to look out for...
ANXIOUS: Wants a lot of closeness; expresses insecurities - worries about rejection; unhappy when not in a relationship; plays games to keep your attention/interest. He also has difficulty explaining what’s bothering him. Expects you to guess; he is suspicious that you are being unfaithful.
AVOIDANT: Sends mixed signals in the relationship; values his/her independence greatly; devalues you (or previous partners) and uses distancing strategies - emotional or physical. He is also mistrustful and fears being taken advantage of by a partner; he doesn’t make his intentions clear and has difficulty talking about what’s going on between you.
SECURE: Reliable and consistent; makes decisions with you; flexible view of relationships; communicates relationship issues well. He can also reach compromise during arguments; is not afraid of commitment or dependency and doesn’t play games.
HOW CAN YOU IMPROVE YOUR RELATIONSHIPS?
By understanding your own attachment style you are now better able to understand what kind of person can make you happy.
Do not apologise for these needs. Contrary to popular dating books, there is nothing wrong with wearing your heart on your sleeve, saying: ‘I need someone who’s there for me and who I can I rely on.’ The response will speak volumes about your potential partner’s ability to address your needs now and in the future.
If you’re an anxious or avoidant person there are certain things you should and should not do. If you’re in a relationship, stop flying off the handle - take time to assess the possible reasons why someone might not be calling back or is late coming home.
Research shows that avoiders and anxious people are often attracted to each other, but they exacerbate the traits of the other and get into an endless cycle of the anxious person trying to get closer while the avoider pulls away.
That’s not to say they can’t be happy, but they both need to work at it. As a general rule, both anxious and avoiders work well with a secure person. If you’re anxious you might find secure people boring at first, because they don’t provide the exciting highs and lows, but stick around and you might realise you’ve stumbled across a relationship gold mine.
If you’re an avoider, you need to practise relying on people, giving them a chance instead of finding fault and pulling away. Stop idealising past partners or waiting for The One. Allow yourself to get close.
By being there for your partner, they won’t be so needy and you’ll get more independence. And while we can all learn a lot from the secure person, that doesn’t mean their relationships are without problems. Sometimes they can be too forgiving of anxious or avoidant behaviour.
However, most of the time secure people can have a magical effect on others because they do what all avoiders and anxious people want: they meet their needs, providing love and security while letting their partner go off to thrive in the world.
***
How much love do YOU need? Knowing your ‘attachment type’ could be the key to making relationships last
By DR AMIR LEVINE and RACHEL HELLER
Ever wondered why you become clingy as soon as you have a partner? Or why you’re unable to stick in a relationship for long? New research has found that the way we act in relationships is pre-determined by which ‘attachment type’ we are.
By identifying whether you are an ‘avoider’, ‘anxious’ or ‘secure’, you can find your perfect match and transform your relationships.
Everyone - whether they have just started dating or have been married for 40 years - falls into one of these categories. By understanding which one you are, you can view your own behaviour and the actions of people around you in a new light.
If you’re single and looking for love, this knowledge can help you find the right match; or, if you’re already in a relationship, it can help you understand why you think and act as you do. In either case, you’ll start to experience change - for the better.’
Perfect match: Identifying whether you are an 'avoider', 'anxious' or 'secure', will enable you to transform your relationships
The science of attachment is based on the fact that we are all biologically programmed to find love. Although we live in a culture that tells us independence is good, nothing could be further than the truth. People in good relationships have been found to live longer, healthier lives.
The need to be near someone special is so important that the brain has a biological mechanism, called the ‘attachment system’, that consists of emotions and behaviours that ensure we stay close to our loved ones.
This system explains why a child parted from his or her mother becomes frantic, searches wildly or cries uncontrollably until he or she re-establishes contact with her. It also explains the way we behave in our adult relationships.
But while we all have this need for attachment, the way we show it differs.
In the Sixties, tests found that babies were either ‘secure’, ‘anxious’ or ‘avoidant’. If a secure baby’s mother left the room he would start crying, but as soon as she returned he calmed down and started to play again.
The anxious baby was distressed, but when the mother came back, he pushed her away and burst into tears. Finally, the avoidant baby acted as if nothing had happened when the mother left and returned to the room. But tests showed that his heart rate and levels of the stress-hormone, cortisol, rose.
Research has now shown that adults behave in a startlingly similar way to babies when it comes to romantic relationships. What type we are (which depends on our upbringing and adult experiences) determines how you react in romantic situations.
Basically, secure people feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving. Anxious people crave intimacy, are often preoccupied with their relationships and tend to worry about their partner’s ability to love them back. Avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and keep their distance.
By using attachment theory both your own behaviour and that of others no longer seems baffling and complex, but rather predictable... So, which attachment style are you?
ANXIOUS
You have the capacity for great intimacy. But you often fear that your partner does not wish to be as close as you would like. Relationships tend to consume a lot of your emotional energy. You are sensitive to small fluctuations in your partner’s mood and you take your partner’s behaviour overly personally.
You worry if you don’t hear from your partner regularly. When you feel like your partner is getting distant, you tend to express your anxiety by doing the following:
Calling, texting or e-mailing while waiting for a phone call, loitering by your partner’s workplace in the hope of running into him;
When they return calls, or come home, you punish them by ignoring them, rolling your eyes when they speak or leaving the room;
Threatening to leave in the hope he’ll make you stay;
Making your partner feel jealous by telling them about other men.
This is a sign of an overly-sensitive attachment system. Even a hint that something is wrong upsets you so much that you are unable to calm down until you get a clear indication from your partner that the relationship is safe.
AVOIDANT
It is important for you to maintain your independence and you often prefer autonomy to intimacy. While you do want to be close to others, you feel uncomfortable with too much closeness and tend to keep your partner at arm’s length. You don’t spend much time worrying about being rejected. You tend not to open up to your partner and they often complain that you are distant. In relationships, you are often on high alert for signs of control or impingement by your partner.
Whether you are single or in a relationship, you are always keeping people at a distance by using various ‘deactivating strategies’. These include:
Saying ‘I’m not ready to commit’- but staying together, sometimes for years;
Focusing on imperfections in your partner: the way he talks, dresses etc;
Pining after an ex or waiting for The One;
Flirting with others to introduce insecurity into the relationship;
Not saying ‘I love you’- while implying you do have feelings for them;
Pulling away when it’s going well (eg not calling after an intimate date);
Forming impossible relationships, such as with a married man;
Avoiding physical closeness - for example, not wanting to share the same bed, not wanting to have sex, walking several strides ahead of your partner.
If you’re avoidant, you use these strategies to make sure the person you love won’t get in the way of your autonomy. But, at the end of the day, these tools are standing in the way of you being happy in a relationship.
SECURE
Being warm and loving in a relationship comes naturally to you. You enjoy being intimate without becoming overly worried about your relationships. You take things in your stride, effectively communicate your feelings and are good at reading your partner’s emotional cues. You share your successes and problems with your mate, and are able to be there for him in times of need. You are:
A great conflict buster - during a fight you don’t act defensively or punish your partner and are quick to forgive;
Mentally flexible - being willing to change and respond to your partner’s needs;
You express your feelings openly and don’t play games;
You are comfortable with intimacy and sex.
We can all learn from your approach, but that doesn’t mean all your relationships are perfect.
You can find yourself in a bad relationship because you are more likely to forgive long-term bad behaviour and give your partner the benefit of the doubt.
WHAT IS YOUR PARTNER'S STYLE?
Understanding attachment theory will change the way you perceive new people you meet, but it will also give you surprising insight into an existing partner. You’ll no longer ask yourself: ‘Why is he always pushing me away?’ Instead you’ll say: ‘It really isn’t about me at all - he just doesn’t feel comfortable with too much closeness.’ Similarly, you’ll be less likely to invest time and energy in someone who is wrong for you. Does he send mixed signals? Does he say things like ‘when we move in together’ and then act as though you have no future? If so, he’s an avoider. People usually reveal everything about themselves early on - you just need to keep your eyes open.
Here are the signals to look out for...
ANXIOUS: Wants a lot of closeness; expresses insecurities - worries about rejection; unhappy when not in a relationship; plays games to keep your attention/interest. He also has difficulty explaining what’s bothering him. Expects you to guess; he is suspicious that you are being unfaithful.
AVOIDANT: Sends mixed signals in the relationship; values his/her independence greatly; devalues you (or previous partners) and uses distancing strategies - emotional or physical. He is also mistrustful and fears being taken advantage of by a partner; he doesn’t make his intentions clear and has difficulty talking about what’s going on between you.
SECURE: Reliable and consistent; makes decisions with you; flexible view of relationships; communicates relationship issues well. He can also reach compromise during arguments; is not afraid of commitment or dependency and doesn’t play games.
HOW CAN YOU IMPROVE YOUR RELATIONSHIPS?
By understanding your own attachment style you are now better able to understand what kind of person can make you happy.
Do not apologise for these needs. Contrary to popular dating books, there is nothing wrong with wearing your heart on your sleeve, saying: ‘I need someone who’s there for me and who I can I rely on.’ The response will speak volumes about your potential partner’s ability to address your needs now and in the future.
If you’re an anxious or avoidant person there are certain things you should and should not do. If you’re in a relationship, stop flying off the handle - take time to assess the possible reasons why someone might not be calling back or is late coming home.
Research shows that avoiders and anxious people are often attracted to each other, but they exacerbate the traits of the other and get into an endless cycle of the anxious person trying to get closer while the avoider pulls away.
That’s not to say they can’t be happy, but they both need to work at it. As a general rule, both anxious and avoiders work well with a secure person. If you’re anxious you might find secure people boring at first, because they don’t provide the exciting highs and lows, but stick around and you might realise you’ve stumbled across a relationship gold mine.
If you’re an avoider, you need to practise relying on people, giving them a chance instead of finding fault and pulling away. Stop idealising past partners or waiting for The One. Allow yourself to get close.
By being there for your partner, they won’t be so needy and you’ll get more independence. And while we can all learn a lot from the secure person, that doesn’t mean their relationships are without problems. Sometimes they can be too forgiving of anxious or avoidant behaviour.
However, most of the time secure people can have a magical effect on others because they do what all avoiders and anxious people want: they meet their needs, providing love and security while letting their partner go off to thrive in the world.
Saturday, May 08, 2010
Effect of Cosmic Lesson in Love (feat Portia Nelson)
I finally found THE poem that accurately explain the stages of love in such concise and beautiful weave of words that I instantly fell in love with it. The way Portia Nelson tried to portray his meaning of life in this poem (Autobiography in Five Chapters) is just gruesomely apt - just that CloUdiSm explained that under the notion of love.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FIVE CHAPTERS
Portia Nelson
1) I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I fall in.
I am lost...
I am hopeless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.
2) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I'm in the same place.
But it isn't my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.
3) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in...it's a habit
My eyes are open; I know where I am;
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.
4) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
5) I walk down another street.
This is exactly the same concept in CloUdiSm when I talk about effect of our cosmic lesson in love. Yunnie divides these effects into five distinctive levels: (1) Ignorance, (2) Denial, (3) Awareness, (4) Recognition & (5) Evolution. However, it does not necessarily follow in this linear order because the multi-dimensional nature of our cosmic lesson is far too complex to neatly put all that stuff into fixed stages. Also, not everyone will experience all these effects in their lifetime; it is likely that they might encounter a mixture of some in various degree.
I always say something of this nature among the rambles I always talk about: you will not understand a shit of what I am saying until you are there yourself. Everything I have said sounded merely 'logical' as in the structure of the thoughts spoken is reasonable and philosophically grounded, which one would naturally concede because there is no compelling reason to believe otherwise.
But still it will not be understood because a person experiencing lower stage (e.g: Ignorance) cannot understand the perspective of those in the higher level (e.g: Recognition). It makes zero emotional sense for one in this world of ignorance to somehow pierce through the formidable illusionary screen of, say, a deceptive relationship because such essential wisdom hasn't been developed in the person yet.
Wisdom are learnt - not given. Hence, it's possible that some will appear to suffer the cosmic effect of ignorance throughout the entire course of their love life, perpetuate their suffering cycle in love. I think working in the social service will inevitably expose yourself to many unfortunate circumstances of relationship - directly or indirectly related to the subject of Love.
These are precious learning; for me to understand humanity and its relationship with love itself.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FIVE CHAPTERS
Portia Nelson
1) I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I fall in.
I am lost...
I am hopeless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.
2) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I'm in the same place.
But it isn't my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.
3) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in...it's a habit
My eyes are open; I know where I am;
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.
4) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
5) I walk down another street.
This is exactly the same concept in CloUdiSm when I talk about effect of our cosmic lesson in love. Yunnie divides these effects into five distinctive levels: (1) Ignorance, (2) Denial, (3) Awareness, (4) Recognition & (5) Evolution. However, it does not necessarily follow in this linear order because the multi-dimensional nature of our cosmic lesson is far too complex to neatly put all that stuff into fixed stages. Also, not everyone will experience all these effects in their lifetime; it is likely that they might encounter a mixture of some in various degree.
I always say something of this nature among the rambles I always talk about: you will not understand a shit of what I am saying until you are there yourself. Everything I have said sounded merely 'logical' as in the structure of the thoughts spoken is reasonable and philosophically grounded, which one would naturally concede because there is no compelling reason to believe otherwise.
But still it will not be understood because a person experiencing lower stage (e.g: Ignorance) cannot understand the perspective of those in the higher level (e.g: Recognition). It makes zero emotional sense for one in this world of ignorance to somehow pierce through the formidable illusionary screen of, say, a deceptive relationship because such essential wisdom hasn't been developed in the person yet.
Wisdom are learnt - not given. Hence, it's possible that some will appear to suffer the cosmic effect of ignorance throughout the entire course of their love life, perpetuate their suffering cycle in love. I think working in the social service will inevitably expose yourself to many unfortunate circumstances of relationship - directly or indirectly related to the subject of Love.
These are precious learning; for me to understand humanity and its relationship with love itself.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Terror Kid
I recently encountered a terror kid from hell.
When I saw her, my opinion is that she appeared like this cute little girl who displayed great expressive skills beyond kids of her age. She could accurately describe her feelings and thoughts clearly and I thought it was excellent.
But little cutie was little terror as well. And I literally mean TERROR with caps.
After this episode, my natural deductive mechanism started working its rounds; looks are terribly deceiving. I think we can learn a couple of lessons from 张无忌的妈妈(殷素素). Before she died, she said that "漂亮的女生都会骗人." The gist of her advice to her son was don't fringing trust woman, especially those you think is pretty, cute or both.
In my case, this also applies to a 4-years old.
But you see, looks is a critical factor to a woman's destiny. In a research (Smith, 1985) done on preschoolers, attractive preschooler girls were more often recipents of altruistic behavior and were less often recipents of aggressive behavior than were unattractive girls. I remembered I used this research to augment my sociology paper and got distinction for it. But frankly, this sole deterministic factor towards the looks department is way too reductive.
Now I will attack one point; it says 'altruistic behavior' - which probably suggest that people are 'helpful' towards woman that are attractive. Helpful in this case (although is a fringing general term) also promote the existence of a separate agenda, distinctive from the pure sense of 'being helpful'. I will adopt Thomas Hobbes perspective on this issue; simply phucking self interest. Period.
But here's an irony - although CloUdiSm does not dismissed the importance of physical beauty, it is of no guarantee to a happy and fulfiling love relationship. I will repeat; it is of no guarantee and in fact, woman who are attractive often faced the problem of men failing to know them deeper inside (not as in sex, but you know what I mean).
Some man hate me for thwarting their grand plans, because I always seek to expose some of the biggest shit these men have formulated and crafted so surreptitiously into their strategic plan. I think it helps because I always think like a bastard, although I often fail to act like one.
I am usually right with my gutsy little intuition and overactive analytical mind. I won't share scenario here but the conclusion is that there's no such thing as a good man - going by Smith's research, you are merely a recipent of an altruistic behavior because you are likely to be attractive by his standard.
And woman, before you get flattered by such manoeuvre, there is a clause to this effect: it is relative to all the women he knows in his social network. Once time has drastically reduced your 'physical value' and aggrandized by sheer comparison to the many others he might have acquainted within his social network - don't be surprised if the object of his 'altruistic behavior' is no longer you.
Unless your man loves you for who you REALLY are - which is something more lasting than our exterior self - the above paragraph might be a problem.
Then my attractive woman - how do you know if he loves you for what's inside more than what's outside?
Good question.
What do you think?
When I saw her, my opinion is that she appeared like this cute little girl who displayed great expressive skills beyond kids of her age. She could accurately describe her feelings and thoughts clearly and I thought it was excellent.
But little cutie was little terror as well. And I literally mean TERROR with caps.
After this episode, my natural deductive mechanism started working its rounds; looks are terribly deceiving. I think we can learn a couple of lessons from 张无忌的妈妈(殷素素). Before she died, she said that "漂亮的女生都会骗人." The gist of her advice to her son was don't fringing trust woman, especially those you think is pretty, cute or both.
In my case, this also applies to a 4-years old.
But you see, looks is a critical factor to a woman's destiny. In a research (Smith, 1985) done on preschoolers, attractive preschooler girls were more often recipents of altruistic behavior and were less often recipents of aggressive behavior than were unattractive girls. I remembered I used this research to augment my sociology paper and got distinction for it. But frankly, this sole deterministic factor towards the looks department is way too reductive.
Now I will attack one point; it says 'altruistic behavior' - which probably suggest that people are 'helpful' towards woman that are attractive. Helpful in this case (although is a fringing general term) also promote the existence of a separate agenda, distinctive from the pure sense of 'being helpful'. I will adopt Thomas Hobbes perspective on this issue; simply phucking self interest. Period.
But here's an irony - although CloUdiSm does not dismissed the importance of physical beauty, it is of no guarantee to a happy and fulfiling love relationship. I will repeat; it is of no guarantee and in fact, woman who are attractive often faced the problem of men failing to know them deeper inside (not as in sex, but you know what I mean).
Some man hate me for thwarting their grand plans, because I always seek to expose some of the biggest shit these men have formulated and crafted so surreptitiously into their strategic plan. I think it helps because I always think like a bastard, although I often fail to act like one.
I am usually right with my gutsy little intuition and overactive analytical mind. I won't share scenario here but the conclusion is that there's no such thing as a good man - going by Smith's research, you are merely a recipent of an altruistic behavior because you are likely to be attractive by his standard.
And woman, before you get flattered by such manoeuvre, there is a clause to this effect: it is relative to all the women he knows in his social network. Once time has drastically reduced your 'physical value' and aggrandized by sheer comparison to the many others he might have acquainted within his social network - don't be surprised if the object of his 'altruistic behavior' is no longer you.
Unless your man loves you for who you REALLY are - which is something more lasting than our exterior self - the above paragraph might be a problem.
Then my attractive woman - how do you know if he loves you for what's inside more than what's outside?
Good question.
What do you think?
Monday, April 19, 2010
Blinded
It's ironic when someone shared with me this surreal wondrous encounter with a man all suave and heavenly, but pointing evidences are directed towards signs of what I have deemed as a player.
It's facile to get yourself suck into a whirlpool of love, deluded that it 'must' be some kind of love, but these are in fact symptoms of confusion and insecurity. The derangement stemmed from temporal shutting down of our prefrontal lobe, which governs our critical thinking (if we even exercise them at all) or simply 'the rational way' of looking at things.
Which is why being in love makes us 'blind' - our executive thinking function is disabled.
Man loses his mind after four drinks; a woman: after four kisses.
What do you think?
It's facile to get yourself suck into a whirlpool of love, deluded that it 'must' be some kind of love, but these are in fact symptoms of confusion and insecurity. The derangement stemmed from temporal shutting down of our prefrontal lobe, which governs our critical thinking (if we even exercise them at all) or simply 'the rational way' of looking at things.
Which is why being in love makes us 'blind' - our executive thinking function is disabled.
Man loses his mind after four drinks; a woman: after four kisses.
What do you think?
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