Posts Tagged ‘love’

I have always longed for love. I am a romantic who wants to feel the butterflies…

I am taking this literature course to complete a certificate. Hopefully this will help me increase my teacher’s salary. It is a very difficult course and I am having a hard time reading all this stuff from hundreds of years ago! But then, I cam across this poem… It made me think of D., how I want things to be between us and how I want our love to be… call me naive, I still think there me be a chance…

To My Dear and Loving Husband

If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let’s so persevere
That whenwe live no more, we may live ever.

Anne Bradstreet, 1678

My life is pretty weird right now. I spend one week with D. and the other one alone, like a single mom. It’s very bizarre.

I grew up switching from one house to another. I always hated it. As much as I don’t enjoy routine, I really hated having a double life. What’s really ironic is I’m living the same situation as an adult!

When we lived together, each week would be different. When my stepson would show up, life would be completely different… D. would be completely different. Now it’s different because we don’t live together, but I still lead this double life. Kind of like a superhero, but no heroic gestures and no superpowers…

D. seems happy with this new situation. He has been able to throw himself into work and become what he considers a success in his field. He can also throw himself in his role as a father, being 100% present at all times and devote himself entirely to his son that week. We have very different views of what it means to be a success and what it means to be a parent.

For me, being a success does not just mean being successful at your job. It’s being able to balance your life so that you have a job you enjoy, having a family, being in a relationship and having great friends. And all of that needs to be balanced. I don’t think D. can do that. He seems to see a family, friends and a relationship as something he cannot fit in his life and still be the type of father he believes he needs to be and be successful at work…

I don’t know where this relationship is going. I don’t know what this means for my life. I’m happy when I’m with D…. but what kind of life is this? How can I be two people. I don’t believe in this. I’m not at easy like D. is with this double life. I’m one person, whole and full of love and life… both weeks. Right now I feel as if someone is telling me that one week I get to eat great meals but the second week I get soup and maybe some bread and I need to wait for the following week to eat properly!

I don’t understand why there can’t be balance in our lives. I have found balance with him. I don’t feel like I’m neglecting anything or anyone. Yet, when he was with me , that’s how he felt.

So, this is my single mom week. I don’t mind being alone. I have a pretty good life, lots of things to do. I write, I study, I see friends and I like my life… but I don’t like this double life…So how do I fix this? Only D. could fix this but I don’t know how he could… I can’t offer any suggestions. So we will stay this way for now and I’ll try to adapt to this double life and see how it goes… but I don’t really have high hopes and dreams for this relationship…

I’m at a point in my life where I need to rethink everything. As a young woman, I had dreams, like everybody else. To me, life was simple. I grew up never feeling like I really had a home or a family. It hurts my mother deeply when I say this. She worked as hard as she could to create a home for us. But to me it wasn’t enough. She met a wonderful man and he filled in a place my dad never wanted to fill. But he wasn’t my dad. The one who was supposed to love me unconditionnally did not. I spent my whole teenage life longing for something else. For a family of my own. I knew I would love my kids unconditionally. I wanted to find a dad that would love them just the same. I wanted to find a man who would never leave, me or his kids.  Career wise, I did not care about fame and fortune. I wanted to find a fulfilling job. One that would give me enough money to live and enough time to devote to my family.

Things just didn’t turn out this way. I was blinded by wanting this family, so much so that I forgot to choose carefully. I recreated for my daughter a situation just as bad as the one I went through. Her dad took off when I was pregnant.  She feels left out, just like I did … and still do. I tried, like my mother did, to make up for this. I tried to be extremely present. But it wasn’t it. I had nobody to share the joy and the pain with. I was surviving. Struggling. I found a job that was exactly what I had planned. It gave me enough money to put food on the table and enough time to be present. But that’s all I had. No one loved me and my daughter enough… something was missing.

This time, I found a man who embodies everything that I should have looked for in the first place. But I’m just too late. The dream I had of a family, he has had already. Even though his family is broken, it satisfies him. It’s not what he is looking for anymore. The sadness I feel right now is immense. I feel lost. Completely and uterly lost. I will never be the type of mother and wife I wanted to be. I would need to focus on a career that fulfills me, but I just don’t care about that. I don’t want to value myself by how much money I make . I don’t want to wait for a boss to tell me I’m doing a good job. I want to feel it every day because my daughter is happy. Because my husband comes home every day. Because my newborn baby looks up at me and needs me.

I was heartbroken when everything fell apart with my ex. But never as much as I am right now. I still had hopes back then. I still thought that a family was possible. I know that what I have is a sort of family. But it will never be it. When my daughter graduates from universtity, I will be the only one with that immense sense of pride.  Yes, my man will feel happy for her, but never the way he will feel when his own son will graduate. We will both be grandparents, but separately. He will share his joys with his ex, the mother of his child. The one he lived the birth of his son with. They will share this feeling. They will know exactly how the other person feels. I will never have that. My daughter will never have real sibblings. She will never share that bond with anybody else. His son will, he already has a brother, a real one.

I know I should not place those barriers. Stepfamilies work out all the time. To my man, his failure came at the end of his marriage. Mine is happening every day. I will never get my second chance. It is just too late. My life will consist of doing my best for my daughter and being the best stepmom I can be. To love my man as much as I can. But I will never be content. Every day is just another day.  I don’t look forward to anything. I just live because I’m still breathing….

I just finished reading this blog entry and it brings up interesting issues. This is what I’m dealing with in my relationship right now (among other things…) I want the fairy tale. Yet my man is hesitant on getting married and does not want other kids. What??? Where is my: and they lived happily ever after and had lots of children? Where is my big wedding and my prince carrying me away. Instead, I get a big dose of reality: I have a child, he does as well. We have his ex to deal with on top of both of our families. He has a big successful career, mine is down the gutter. We have karate practice and dance lesson to go to. Where are the cute little singing birds and the long walks in the park?

I do however, have a great man. He is patient and kind. He loves me and I love him with all my heart. So why can’t I be content with this. Why do I want more. Maybe this blog entry has it right… we have been fooled into thinking that our prince is coming… It has made us blind to what we do have… Yet, I can’t help but feel depressed and dissapointed that this is my fairy tale… my not happy, not unhappy just what it is ending…

Drunk on Sleeping Beauty

Posted by Koraly on 14-12-2009

Lips that shame the red rose, hair of sunshine-gold. She’ll offer springtime wherever she goes. Arora is stunning, thin, the victim of Maleficent’s cruelty. Arora dances to ‘Once upon a dream’ deep in the forest with cute, furry animals. The prince sneaks up behind her. She’s hesitant – she can’t talk to strangers. But they’ve met before: once upon a dream. She lets her guard down, he takes her in his arms, and right there, and that precise moment, I want to throw myself into the Disney Classic and never return to reality again. The prince is noble, gallant, a little rebellious. It’s love at first sight. He fights the evil dragon, conquers Maleficent and wakes Arora with true-love’s kiss. It ends happily ever after and the prince and princess dance in the clouds to ‘Once upon a dream’.

Love, take me away…

But I know something’s not right when my three-year old daughter is obsessed with Sleeping Beauty. We fight daily – she wants to play the DVD, put on her dress (no pants because Arora doesn’t wear pants!) and twirl with her imaginary prince.  When she’s not waltzing, she stares at the screen quietly, absorbing every phrase. I wasn’t any different as a child, fixated on fairytales and Sleeping Beauty. But as I observe my daughter’s perception of love being moulded before my very eyes; when I hear of yet another couple breaking up, another ending in divorce; when I listen to single girlfriends whine that there are no decent guys out there; or girlfriends contemplating ending a relationship because they’re boyfriend isn’t romantic enough, should be more impulsive, has an annoying habit, isn’t more…something (they can’t put their finger on it), or they’re convinced they ‘can do so much better’, I have to wonder:

Did we all watch too much Sleeping Beauty?

Fairytales all have happy endings and these are the ideas we are instilling in our children. In the original version of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid the prince actually doesn’t choose Ariel and she turns to sea foam(dies). Disney rewrote the ending. But this craving for happy endings, of the man rescuing the damsel in distress, also extends to adult film and literature.

A few years back I couldn’t stop watching the TV series Sex and the City. I purchased the DVDs and watched it again and again. When I think back to that time I realise I was probably trying to make sense of why Big and Carrie end up together. In reality Big and Carrie never would have worked out. He was a commitment phobic. They had orgasmic sexual chemistry though. In terms of a life partner, Aiden was perfect for her and she blew it when she had a lustful affair with Big. We all want to believe that love=lust and maybe that’s why Sex and the City was so successful. After five years of making Carrie’s life a misery he finally(out of the blue) decided she was ‘the one’. The audience pay-off was huge – we got the happy ending and the hot sex too.

A recent example of this in literature is Toni Jordan’s Addition. It’s had huge success but does it have a realistic ending? Without spoiling the ending I can easily say that it is a Hollywoodisation of both love and mental illness. Are we censoring the reality of relationships by feeding this unrealistic craving for romance, lust, and the easy relationship where everything magically falls into place without complication? Are we feeding this notion that when you meet ‘the one’ you’ll know instantly and you’ll ride off together in the sunset? Are our films and literature showing us lust but calling it love? Love is about companionship, compromise, communication. Relationships are bloody hard but bloody rewarding. Are there any successful books or films out there that portray this(and by success I mean sold well). Should writers give readers what they want and ditch reality? Is that being socially responsible?

I can already hear the objections to this post, the ‘I haven’t waited all my life for Mr Right only to settle for second best’ and the ‘if he was the right guy for me we wouldn’t have so many problems’. To me it seems that relationships these days end at the slightest whiff of complication. Or don’t even start up because there was no ‘sexual chemistry’. But if the reality of relationships doesn’t seem to gel well with you and you’re still holding out for prince charming or the little mermaid, maybe you should shut up shop in reality and move into a Disney Fairytale.

http://web.overland.org.au/?p=2831

I’m at this point in my relationship where the illusions of a fairy tale start to fade. When you first meet someone, you dream of the fairy tale, not the routine and the daily life. Lots of stuff is being thrown our way. We love each other very much but everything is difficult, everything is a long tedious discussion. Because we do love each other, we look for solutions but the difficult part for me right now is losing this dreamy phase. It’s not the romantic ending I was looking for. I don’t dream of weddings and wedding dresses anymore. I don’t dream of little kids running around calling for mommy and daddy. We both have kids of our own. He was married before. We have to deal with homework and meals and the ex. It’s like Cinderella left her evil stepmother, only to go clean another castle.

I wish someone had warned me. I wished someone had told me that you can love someone so deeply and not live the fairy tale. That it’s that love that will make you both stronger. I found this article very interesting. I think everyone should read it before they get into any kind of relationship. Dreaming is all nice, but when you are sitting high up on a cloud, it makes it that much higher of a fall when you get off. I wish I had been a little more realistic… it wouldn’t hurt so much…

8 Things No One Tells You About Marriage

WebMD Feature from “Redbook” Magazine

By Ylonda Gault Caviness

The surprising, enlightening, and sometimes hard truths we all face after marriage, and how they teach us about what love really means.

“…And they lived happily ever after.”

You’re smart. You know life is no storybook. But admit it: Somewhere deep in your subconscious lurk romantic visions of Cinderella, or maybe Julia Roberts. The images may be sketchy and a little outdated, but you can still make out the silhouette of the bride and Prince Charming riding off into the sunset.

In real life, sometimes your Disney fairy tale ends up feeling more like a Wes Craven horror flick — and you’re the chick who keeps falling down and screaming for her life. I’ve been there. Let’s face it, marriage is not for the faint of heart. You want to believe your pure love for each other will pull you through. And it does. But it ain’t always pretty.

That may sound grim. But here’s a secret: Sometimes it’s the least romantic parts of marriage that have the most to teach you about yourself, your partner, and the nature of love. Read on for some simple truths that will unlock the surprising treasures and pleasures in your imperfect, unstorybook, real-life love.

1. You will look at the person lying next to you and wonder, Is this it? Forever?

When you get married, you think that as long as you pick the right guy — your soul mate — you’ll be happy together until death do you part. Then you wake up one day and realize that no matter how great he is, he doesn’t make you happy every moment of every day. In fact, some days you might wonder why you were in such a hurry to get married in the first place. You think to yourself, This is so not what I signed up for.

Actually, it is. You just didn’t realize it the day you and your guy were cramming wedding cake into each other’s faces, clinking champagne glasses, and dancing the Electric Slide. Back then you had no idea that “for better and for worse” doesn’t kick in only when life hands you a tragedy. Your relationship mettle is, in fact, most tested on a daily basis, when the utter sameness of day-in/day-out togetherness can sometimes make you want to run for the hills. That’s when the disappointment sneaks in, and maybe even a palpable sense of loneliness and grief. It’s not him. It’s just you, letting go of that sugarcoated fantasy of marriage that danced in your eyes the day you and your beloved posed in all those soft-focus wedding photos. You’re learning that marriage isn’t a destination; it’s a journey filled with equal parts excitement and tedium.

Waking up from a good dream to face the harsh morning daylight may not seem like a reason to celebrate. But trust me, it is. Because once you let go of all the hokey stories of eternal bliss, you find that the reality of marriage is far richer and more rewarding than you ever could have guessed. Hard, yes. Frustrating, yes. But full of its own powerful, quiet enchantments just the same, and that’s better than any fairy tale.

2. You’ll work harder than you ever imagined.

Early on, when people say, “Marriage takes work,” you assume “work” means being patient when he forgets to put down the toilet seat. In your naiveté, you think that you will struggle to accommodate some annoying habit, like persistent knuckle cracking or flatulence.

If only it were that easy. Human beings, you may have noticed, are not simple creatures. Your man has mysterious, unplumbed depths — and from where he sits, you’re pretty complicated, too. You have to learn each other the same way that you once learned earth science or world geography. And getting married doesn’t mean you’re done — it just means you’ve advanced to graduate-level studies. That’s because every time you think you’ve mastered the material, he’ll change a bit. And so will you. As two people grow and evolve, the real work of marriage is finding a way to relate to and nurture each other in the process.

“It’s like losing weight,” says Andrea Harden, 45, of Buffalo, NY. “You want it to be a one-time deal. You lost it, now just live. But then you learn it’s a lifestyle. That’s marriage. The effort is a forever thing.” So don’t be too hard on yourself — or him — on those days when you feel like you’re struggling through remedial math.

3. You will sometimes go to bed mad (and maybe even wake up madder).

Whoever decided to tell newlyweds “Never go to bed angry” doesn’t know what it’s like inside a bedroom where tears and accusations fly as one spouse talks the other into a woozy stupor until night meets the dawn. If this scenario sounds familiar, I’ve got three words for you: Sleep on it.

You need to calm down. You need to gain perspective. You need to just give it a rest. I’ve found that an argument of any quality, like a fine wine, needs to breathe. A break in the action will help you figure out whether you’re angry, hurt, or both, and then pinpoint the exact source. Maybe the fight that seemed to erupt over the overflowing garbage can is really about feeling underappreciated. Could be you’re both stressed out at work and just needed to unload on someone. Taking a break will help you see that, and let go. Or maybe you really do have a legitimate disagreement to work out. Without a time-out, sometimes a perfectly good argument can turn into an endless round of silly back-and-forth, rehashing old and irrelevant transgressions as you get more and more wound up.

Even when you do manage to stay focused and on topic, there are some fights that stubbornly refuse to die by bedtime. And if you stifle your real feelings just to meet some arbitrary deadline, your marriage will surely be the worse for it. “This was a huge lesson for me,” says Andrea. “As women we’ve been trained to make nice. But the whole kiss-and-make-up thing just to keep the peace was eating me up inside. I’d let things build up inside me until I just exploded. Now I wait a while to get hold of myself — let the emotions settle a bit — and state my position. Even if that means reopening the fight the next day.”

4. You will go without sex — sometimes for a long time — and that’s okay.

There are few men in the Western world sexier than my husband. And I don’t say this because I know he may read this article. I’ve seen women checking him out when they think I’m not looking. (Honestly, ladies, you don’t have to sneak a peek. I don’t mind if you stare.) That said, there are times that I just don’t feel like having sex — often for reasons that have nothing to do with Genoveso. (See? Even his name is sexy.) I can’t lie and say this is always okay with him. But the fact is, there are also plenty of nights when he’s not in the mood. So maybe a few days go by when we don’t do it. And then a few more. And…

Sexless periods are a natural part of married life. A dry spell isn’t a sign that you’ve lost your mojo or that you’ll never have sex again. It just means that maybe this week, sleep is more important than sex. (I don’t know about you, but between work, 3 a.m. feedings, the PTA, soccer, T-ball, and everything else, I sometimes crave sleep the way a pimply, hormonal adolescent longs to cop a feel.)

And don’t kid yourself; no one in America is doing it as often as popular culture would have you believe. Instead of worrying about how much you think you “should” be having sex, keep the focus on figuring out your own rhythm. “I used to think, What’s happened to us? We always used to be in the mood,” says 35-year-old Kim Henderson of Oakland, CA, who’s been married for five years. “Now I know better. Life happens. My husband just started a new job. He has a long commute, and we have two small children. I think we’re good.”

The key is to make sure that even if you’re not doing “it,” you’re still doing something — touching, kissing, hugging. Personally, my heart gets warm and mushy when my husband rubs my feet after a long, tiring day. He may not be anywhere near my G-spot, but that little bit of touch and attention keeps us connected even when we’re not having spine-tingling sex.

5. Getting your way is usually not as important as finding a way to work together.

I can be a bit of a know-it-all. There, I said it. It’s really not my intention to be hurtful or brash with people I love. It’s just that a lifetime of experience has taught me that in most areas, at most times, I am right about most things. What shocked me several years into my marriage, though, was the realization that the more “right” I was, the more discontented my husband and I were as a couple. See, oddly enough, throughout his life Genoveso has been under the misguided impression that he’s right most of the time (go figure!). So we’d lock horns — often. That is, until I learned a few things.

5. Getting your way is usually not as important as finding a way to work together. continued…

Namely, that when it comes to certain disagreements, there is no right or wrong — there is simply your way of looking at things and your husband’s. “I used to be very black-and-white earlier in our marriage,” says Lindy Vincent, 38, who lives in Minneapolis. “Now I see that I’m not all right and my husband is not all wrong. There’s more gray in life than I thought, and that’s taught me patience and the value of compromise.”

The more I get to know and appreciate my husband for who he is, the more I respect his positions. That doesn’t mean I always agree with him. But I can see the value in striking a balance that satisfies us both. And instead of harping on how wrong he is, I can usually swallow the verbal vitriol and simply say something like, “I see your point” or “I hadn’t considered that.” After I sincerely acknowledge his view, it seems to become easier for him to hear mine. And because I know I’m being heard, most of the time now, I don’t even want to prove how right I am anymore. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

6. A great marriage doesn’t mean no conflict; it simply means a couple keeps trying to get it right.

Maybe you think that because of my newfound wisdom, Genoveso and I never fight anymore. Ha! As important as it is to strike a balance, it’s also important to have a big, fat fight every now and then. Because when you fight, you don’t just raise your voices; you raise real — sometimes buried — issues that challenge you to come to a clearer understanding of you, your man, and your relationship. I wouldn’t give up our fights for anything in the world, because I know in the end they won’t break us; they’ll only make us stronger.

7. You’ll realize that you can only change yourself.

Ever seen the ’80s sci-fi cult classic Making Mr. Right? When the stylish heroine, played by Ann Magnuson, is hired to teach a robot how to act like a human, she seizes the chance to create a perfect guy. A hotshot commercial whiz, she uses her marketing prowess to shape John Malkovich’s android character into her personal version of the ideal man — sensitive, eager to please, and willing to listen.

There is a bit of that makeover fantasy in all of us — something that makes us believe we can change the person we love, make him just a little bit closer to perfect. We may use support and empathy or shouts and ultimatums, but with dogged conviction we take on this huge responsibility, convinced we’re doing the right thing.

7. You’ll realize that you can only change yourself. continued…

Whatever our motives, the effort is exhausting. Transforming a full-grown man — stripping him of decades-old habits, beliefs, and idiosyncrasies — is truly an impossible task. And you will come to realize, sooner than later if you’re lucky, that it is far easier to change the way you respond to him.

Here’s a perfect case in point: “I used to go off on my husband because he didn’t empty the sink trap when he cleaned the kitchen,” says Kimberly Seals Allers, 36, of Bay Shore, NY. “It got me nowhere; my rants only made him resentful. Now I come home and when the kitchen looks clean, I’m like, ‘Cool, now all I have to do is empty the sink trap.’”

8. As you face your fears and insecurities, you will find out what you’re really made of.

I’ve got issues. Trust issues. Control issues. And others, I’m sure, that I’ve yet to fully discover. I guess I’ve always known I wasn’t perfect. But in more than a decade of marriage, I’ve been smacked upside the head with the cold, hard evidence.

There were clues when Genoveso and I were dating, especially with the trust thing. Early on, I was supersuspicious of him. He used to say things like, “I’ll call you at 8.” Then, just to try to trip me up, he’d call at 8. I knew he was up to something, I just couldn’t figure out what. The same kinds of experiences followed after the wedding. Except occasionally he would actually mess up. And I had no sense of scale when it came to rating his offenses; everything was a major violation. Whether he teased me about a new haircut or came home late, I seethed for days and even let thoughts of divorce creep into my head. I figured, if he loved me — really and truly — this stuff wouldn’t happen.

I’d like to be able to say that this irrational behavior lasted only a few months and I eventually worked it out. Kind of, sort of, is closer to the truth. After years of looking deeply into my soul and talking to good friends and the best sister a girl could ever have, I’ve come to recognize certain things about myself. Not to get all Dr. Phil about it, but I’ve had to examine my history with an emotionally distant dad and a strong-willed mom and face up to all the ways, both good and bad, that those relationships have affected how I approach my marriage.

I still struggle as a work in progress. But I am completely clear in the knowledge that many of the deepest frustrations in your relationship are an opportunity for you to confront yourself. That can be difficult to accept — after all, it’s so much more comforting to keep a running tab of your hubby’s deficits and tell yourself that his failings are the only thing standing between you and a better marriage. But if you let it, this bumpy journey toward self-awareness can be one of the more fulfilling rewards of a committed, long-term relationship — you’ll learn to love your quirks and be compassionate toward yourself, just as you’re learning to do with him.

That’s the strange beauty of marriage: It’s full of hard times and hard lessons that no one can ever prepare you for. But in the end, those are the things that give richness to your life together — and make your love even deeper and stronger than when it began.

http://www.webmd.com/sex-relationships/features/8-things-no-one-tells-you-marriage

Read more at: http://thestepmomstoolbox.com/a-day-in-the-life-of/

Right now, my hamster is spinning on what it means to be the one and if I am it. Are we destined to be with one person that will fulfill our lives? If we have met that person, can we love again. I know that I have never loved anyone as much as I love my boyfriend. It is a real relationship. On that is built on trust, dialogue and I feel like we are respectful of each other. Is it the same for him though? It makes me freak out to think that I might not be the one for him.

Does he spend time thinking of how life would have been with his ex or another ex? Does he regret the fact that his relationships from the past have ended? I sure don’t!!! No one has ever treated me as good as he treats me. No one has made me want to be a better person the way he does every single day. Why all these questions about his reasons then? Because I feel insecure right now. It’s impossible for me to imagine my life without him. This is a relationship. This is how love should be… so what if it’s not the same for him?