Entries Tagged 'Romance' ↓

David DeAngelo, an American dating coach has a famous saying online, ?Attraction isn’t a choice.? Those words in fact became the title of the 2nd ebook he published after the hugely successful Double Your Dating. Both of these books were the starting point for what has turned into my life purpose, improving my own dating life, and in turn helping others improve their dating and relationships.

Let’s starts by giving attraction a definition: the force that brings people together. Repulsion is what pushes people away. Thinking about magnets you realise how opposites attract and similarities push apart. However, in human relationships you’ll notice that in the short term opposites may indeed spark attraction but its people who have more similarities who are the ones who stay together over the longer term. Someone once told me friendships last longer than most marriages. That is a certain ring of truth to that even without any supporting evidence in the 21st century.

What makes one person more attractive over another person? This is a mystery because philosophers and poets have written about it for thousands of years. And recently many scientists have contributed to the parade. Dr Paul Dobransky defines Attractiveness or Power as positive emotional energy and mature boundary function. In physics power or energy is the amount of work that can be done in a particular length of time. The more potent you are is a core metaphor for masculine power. It’s this potency men advertise to women that creates attraction without using any words or deeds. A woman notices a man, and says to her friend, “I don’t know what it about him…” referring to her initial experience of the masculine energy.

Self-esteem or self-worth is directly linked to attraction. The more self-worth, the higher your self-esteem, the more attractive you are to people. Again from Dr Paul, self-esteem is made up of confidence and well-being. Confidence is what you get from transforming your anxiety into courage. And as you look deeper into this you’ll realise removing uncertainty has the same effect. Well-being is more of a motherly energy. You have enough money, enough friends ? your needs is are met - enough peace, enough vacation. Mature adults need to learn to father themselves through courage and mother themselves through what’s called assertiveness. If you don’t have well-being you take anger you feel and you use it in the form of assertiveness. Assertiveness is defined as going out and getting what you need. Again the more assertive, the more attractive.

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Popularity: 81% [?]

This is an article I wrote in 2002 and I’m republishing it here now that we’re getting closer to Valentine’s Day where all women go cookoo and men fall over their feet to please them…

As we approach Valentine’s Day its imperative we re-look the meaning of love in modern society. Is love in the 21st century really the same thing as it always was throughout history? The love talked about in the great mythical tales of Romeo & Juliet and Anthony & Cleopatra. Lets look at the definition of love and proceed from there.

The common meaning of love is a deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness; a feeling of intense desire and attraction toward a person with whom one is disposed to make a pair; the emotion of sex and romance. However many people equate it with Sexual passion, Sexual intercourse or a Love affair; an intense emotional attachment, as for a pet or treasured object; a person who is the object of deep or intense affection or attraction; beloved. Often used as a term of endearment or an expression of one’s affection: “Send him my love.” It could also be a strong predilection or enthusiasm: “a love of language” and even the object of such an enthusiasm: “The outdoors is her greatest love.” In mythology it refers to Eros or Cupid, often Love in Christianity means Charity and in tennis, zero!

The premise of the movie “The Mirror Has Two Faces” resolves around the question, if marriage is the be all and end all of love? The answer follows that, in the 12 century there was a notion of courtly love, where 2 people come together for love and could not consummate it. This would normally take place between a knight and a lady of the court, which is already married. They would proceed to express their love in many different ways like writing poems to each other. The other strong point the movie makes is the effect that advertising (brainwashing) has on our modern perception of love and beauty. In the days before television and plush women’s magazines we are allowed to think for ourselves. After all beauty is no longer in the eye of the beholder, lets just face the facts.

In another movie “Don Juan DeMarco”, our hero lives life the way we all wish we could, in love, totally in-love. The kind of love that makes you feel like you exist only because the person that you love. The moral of this story is that we deny ourselves the love that is all consuming. We don’t realise what a wonderful experience it could be and to what madness it can drive us when taken away from us. In modern society we’re afraid of our “feelings being hurt” and “what other people may think”. So what do we do about it? We should take the risks because the rewards will be worth more then all the treasure of King Solomon’s mines. As the classic saying goes, it’s better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all.

Talking to most people they will tell you love is when that special person does small things to make you happy. Others will tell you its that burning desire to hop out of your clothes and get it on, as Marvin Gaye would say. Well honestly, everyone out there experiences on different levels and in different ways love. That is what makes human beings so unique. As we all know with animals instinct takes over and in the heat (sic) of the moment all composure is lost and they end up doing it doggy style.

So do you believe love is a myth or it is something real that can be experienced by everyone, like you and me? Do you believe love is when you kiss your girlfriend or boyfriend and you hear music like in the movies? Does it really matter that to fall in-love and be in-love you need to consummate it? There are so many questions to be asked about love and in real life there is no easy answers. So we look forward to your questions and comments about love, especially after this Valentine’s Day.

Some useful links

• The History of Valentine’s Day
• The full definition of love can be found on Dictionary.com

Popularity: 11% [?]

The story by Haruki Murakami, On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning was mentioned in a book I’ve been reading recently. It’s actually sad that grown men behave like this now that I have learned about Attraction being a choice. You can create attraction in a women by doing certain things. It’s not impossible, it’s not about seducing a women. It is more about making yourself so attractive that you draw the women into your world, instead of you being drawn into hers. So yes, this is a nice romantic story but don’t be a fool and think this fairytale is realistic.

Popularity: 12% [?]

It should come as no surprise that the subject of this book is of course, love. More specifically, Alberoni deals with those all-too-brief and utterly captivating moments when one first falls in love. He attempts to unlock all the rather bizarre and, sometimes, completely diotic, forces that drive our behaviour in this frenzied state.

For those lucky enough to be experiencing the first signs of true love, I doubt that this book will do the sensations they experience any justice, simply because words are no match for the real thing. For the rest of us (sigh), there is some element of truth in Alberoni’s analytical minefield.

The book transcends any real field that one may attempt to box it into. Instead, it incorporates psychology, sociology, science, philosophy, religion and plain and simple opinion. Written in poetic (though sometimes dreary) language, it transports the reader through time and place and asks questions not regularly given the time of day.

Falling in love, according to the author, is a universal experience. To Alberoni, it is the meeting not just of souls, but of minds as well. The book is particularly optimistic (and I mean that as a compliment) in its observances about human potential and the possibilities, within us all, to experience love, should we allow ourselves the opportunity to do so.

The book applies its theory to adolescent and adult, to man and to woman and to homosexual and heterosexual alike. Falling in love, according to the author, happens as the result of a basic feeling of inadequacy, shame and dissatisfaction with one’s existence. This dissatisfaction is, then, what leads one to seek out love in a sincere fashion, unlike many who wish to find love but are not willing to surrender themselves to that fundamental need to improve their condition. So depression and low self-esteem are, indeed, good for something. How comforting. It is a feeling of insecurity, then, that Alberoni sees as a prerequisite to falling in love. He uses the example of teenagers and their desperate desire for acceptance as a means of illustrating how this desire is translated into the “ignition state” of falling in love. For most of us, adolescence brings with it the most turbulent (read nerve-wracking) and exciting moments in our lives. During this period, we find ourselves at our most insecure and, yet, we feel the first and most frequent flutters of love. To Alberoni, this is no coincidence.

The author extracts from history the nature and structure of group dynamics throughout the book. He likens the couple to the most basic form of a group. The influence of our partners may thus be the influence of us forming an identity as part of the couple, sacrificing (wilfully or not) our individuality and becoming one with the other member of this rudimentary grouping.

Alberoni maintains that this fusion is then countered by the desire within each of us for individuality and independence, resulting in conflict. Sound familiar? This conflict, though, is not necessarily a negative. Instead, it creates that essential and most human of emotions, passion. What would love be without passion? Essentially, then, where would one find passion if there was no conflict? I know, I never thought of it that way either.

So what does it mean to fall in love? What happens to us? Where does it take us and, more importantly, how do we get there? Alberoni’s book is more a study than a guide. Falling in love seems like the easy bit. What so many of us need is a book (or a trick of some sorts, perhaps a magic potion even) on how to find it. In this case, the answer, supposedly, lies in the human drive to better one’s existence, which sounds like a lot of hard work. In love then, as in life, there seem to be no shortcuts. Damn. “Falling in Love” is a unique and stimulating piece of literature. Alberoni, with his background in sociology, provides insight and, importantly, hope. He is alarmingly honest, ensuring that the audience understands the pitfalls of love and the potential for failure. Romantics, though, will not be disappointed either. I leave you with a little trinket of wisdom from the book, “Life is like riding in a canoe…We don’t make the waves and we can’t change them…We manage to stay afloat…until we finally arrive back at shore…happy to have made it back.”

Download free ebook Falling in Love by Francesco Alberoni

Popularity: 12% [?]

by Nomfundo Mbaba

I have a small group of single friends and when we often get together we chat about our single lives in Sex-and-the-city style. Why are we single, why can’t we find a man, why, why, why. In one such discussion, one male friend says: “Maybe we want romance from the movies”

We all sat silently for a few seconds as waves of flashbacks of our most favourite romance movies filled our heards. Is that what many of us were searching for? A movie romance?

I remember my first experience with Pretty Woman, a Hollywood romance with a difference. My eyes filled with tears when an acrophobic “knight” Richard Gere (Edward Lewis) walks up the emergency staircase, branding an umbrella as a sword replacement on one hand and flowers on the other, to a patiently waiting Julia Roberts (Vivian ‘Viv’ Ward) or when Leonardo DiCaprio (Jack Dawson) gave his floating board (or was it a door?) to Kate Winslet (Rose DeWitt Bukater) in Titanic (My male and female friends cried during that one).

Even though those movies were released years apart, when I do see them again, I can’t help wanting to be a Hollywood whore and an English heiress at the same time. If Vivian and “Cinda-fucken-rella” could find love, there was hope for me and hope for all my single friends.

Perhaps there is hope, but in reality, romance is not as Oscar deserving as Hollywood would have us believe. The best place to put romance to the test is when a person proposes to their partner. For example, reality kicked in when three female friends recently got engaged. The words: “Alan and I got engaged this weekend” from a woman are often followed by synchronised gasps of: “Oh my god”, as eager women (single and non-single) swarm around the announcer. This is shortly followed by: “How did he pop the question?” We all want to know, perhaps to compare it to our other girlfriends or even…yes, compare it to Hollywood. Silently wondering: Did Alan jump out of a plane, pull the parachute chord to reveal the words:” I luv U. Will U marry me?” Or did he rent one of those planes that have the same words dragging behind the plane.

In all three engagements it was a sweet and somewhat normal proposal. A romantic dinner or a romantic picnic. The ring box in the pocket. The words I love you, and then …*drumroll* – the question. You get to realise that the joy of romance should not be compared to the movies but be enjoyed and appreciated as it is in your life. And for all my friends who are waiting for the ultimate Hollywood romance to knock them off their feet, and take them away in a white horse, into the sunset…fogertaboutit (said in an Italian accent)!

Popularity: 12% [?]