Love Dissection: 2017

Love and Marriage

"I take you to be my wife/husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and cherish, till death us do part."

The merge of two "I" in one "we".

The Ceremony

Nowadays, marriage is a symbolic romantic ceremony between two people in love, to formally assume their relationship to the society.

It can be through an institution, like the church, or just the legal signing of the union contract, for the government.

After that, normally, comes the traditional celebration of the marriage - the wedding. Where both families and friends gather together to celebrate.

And as in every good party, there's always food, drinks, music and dancing.

Today, wedding is a business. An expensive party where people spend money they don't have, to impress people they shouldn't need to.. supposedly their close friends and family.

Then, the couple will celebrate their official union together in the honeymoon. That ideally should be in somewhere paradisiac and expensive.

After going through all these rituals and promising in front of the society: exclusivity, eternal love, companionship, honesty, commitment, obligations, starts the married life.

The Married Life

The newly married will, now, learn to live together, learn each other daily habits, deal with finances, responsibilities, disagreements, adversities, share new experiences, have children, help each other, fight together to achieve their dreams.

Write their own story together.

If they were living already in a non-marital partnership it's more a matter getting the legal rights.

Their reasons

Men marry looking for a second mother to make their food, wash their cloths, make their bed, clean the house, make the shopping and have children. They are taking theirs father's role.

Women marry to live the fairytale with their prince charming. The love story. The happy end.

These two creatures marry together having different perspectives of marriage and looking for different things in marriage.. but it works if the other fulfills their needs.

If the man makes the wife feel like a princess and the woman treats the husband like a baby, it will work. Cause that is what which one is seeking.

For both marriage is symbol of solid connection, stability, safety and comfort.

After years, both will realize that friendship and respect is what will maintain the marriage. Or it will be "I will stay with you till lust do us apart".

When your Roots are Rotting You - Love and the Past

Old wounds from the past that you want

to hide,
to forget,
drown inside yourself,
lock memories..

..To start fresh, be a new person. So, you begin filling your life with a bunch of nothing.. to not feel the emptiness..

..the pain

..but your unsolved past emotions is a burden too heavy, that you are carrying in your present and to your future..

That pain that lives inside you.

Stop the denial...

Face your truth..

....broken family

no affection...

..Guilt

..criticism...

loss....

....heartbreak...

...betrayal

rejection...

...violence

Hurtful experiences that don't let you live freely your emotions in your present.

Don't let your scars define you...

...Healing is a process...

...if you need to cry...cry...let it out...

What you don't let go, became bad memories that you relive several times, just like the fist time. So it's repetitively happening.

Let the healing starts:

- Acknowledge it.

- Release resentment, sorrow .. forgive who hurt you in your mind, for yourself and feel compassion for their unhappiness..for the long way they need to walk..

- Forgive yourself. Don't criticize yourself.

- Understand it as part of your life's learning process and growth.

- Accept that regret of what you did or said or didn't do or said is not going to change nothing, just make you live painful memories over and over again.

- Remove toxic people from your life.

- Feel grateful for what you have..the sun, the stars, the sea, the nature, a place to live, clothes to wear, food to eat, water to drink, for being able to see,... This feeling will bring love to your heart :)

- Guided meditation may help you. There are many in the internet for self healing. Just listen..

- Promote positive thoughts. Your thoughts will influence your actions.

There's no way we can totally avoid to have hurtful experiences . Because suffering happens when we develop feelings for someone, or even when we interact with people.
And people and feelings are unpredictable...changeable

But people and feelings make us happy too..

So, the best we can do, is to surround ourselves with people we feel good with.
We can suffer in the end, but at least we, both, have good intentions and are enjoying true feelings :)

Love and the Fear of Broken Heart

Love and the fear of loss always come together.

When we love we are always afraid of losing love.

We can lose our lover for distance, for our differences, for work, for expectations, for someone else, for death..

We don't want to lose what love make us feel..

So, we feel the need to control it.
It can be through the constant assurance of the "I love you", the physical affection, the making us needed, the knowing always where the other is or what is doing.

We need security. The way we feel, now, depends on how the other person makes us feel. It doesn't depend on us anymore.

We are vulnerable and that makes us anxious.

Can we rely our feelings to our partner?

But love imprisoned, controlled is not love. It becomes a possession.
We cannot turn ourselves into a slave of love and our partner into a prisoner of our love.

Love needs to be.. needs to just be love.. needs to breath..

Love is unpredictable. Because it's a feeling.
Isn't something you can buy and keep it in a safe place forever.

That's why love is so desired.. cause we cannot take it for granted..
What is taken for granted is not desired anymore..

What is easy is not desired.
It's the uncertain, that mystery that move us and keep us curious,
The naivety of believing,
That is what make it so desired.

We are not all the same. We don't have all the same needs and desires. And even the same person is not the same during her/his life. We change.
Our relationships are not the same and we behave different in each one of them.

We are in constant changing, so is love.

That's the beauty of love.. the experience, the growth

One day love can just leave us...but suffering in advance, worrying about the future is not going to avoid it.

It can provoke the opposite effect.. suffocate love.. and make it leave earlier...

...the jealousy, the controlling, the arguing, the resentment..

That will transform love in a battle field. Where the other needs to defend herself/himself because their freedom is being attacked.

Trust, believing, sharing, naivety, respect, romance, exploration feeds Love.

We cannot control it. But we can live it while it lasts, believing that is going to last forever.

Maybe it will, really, last forever.. we have no way of knowing it.

We can just believe

We can just live it

...that is happiness..living the now and enjoy its beauty...

Reflections of Esther Perel for Anyone Who has Ever Loved

"This is the culture of "I deserve to be happy". If we used to divorce cause we were unhappy, today we divorce because we could be happier."

"Adultery has existed since marriage was invented and so too, the taboo against it. It is universally forbidden but yet universally practised."

"Love rest on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness."

"Monogamy used to be one person for life, today is person at a time."

"Men cheat out of boredom and fear of intimacy and women cheat out of loneliness and hunger for intimacy."

"Treat your partner the way you treat your client."

"The verb for love is to have and the verb for desire is to want."

"It never been easier to cheat and never been so difficult to keep a secret."

"When trust is broken it implies the reintegrating of a new truth."

"If divorce carried all the shame, today choosing to stay when you should live is the new shame."

"The smaller we feel in the world, the more we need to shine in the eyes of our partner."

"Sometimes infidelity is not looking for another person, but for another self."

"When marriage was an economical enterprise, infidelity threatened our economical stability. But, now, that marriage is a romantic arrangement it threats our emotional security threatened."

"Before we used to turn to adultery to sough pure love, but now that we seek love in marriage, adultery destroys it."

"If we can divorce, why do we still have affairs? The typical assumption is that if someone cheats, either there's something wrong with your relationship or wrong with you (...) Assuming that there is such a thing as a perfect marriage that will inoculates us against the wanderlust. But what if passion has a finite shelf life?"

"(...) some affairs are death knells for relationships that were already dying on the vine."

"(...) If you put more and you became the one, you will make the other be more of the one."

"Healing begins when the perpetrator acknowledges their wrongdoing(...) quite a lot of people who had affairs may feel terribly guilty for hurting their partners, but they don't feel guilty for the experience of the affair itself. And that distinction is important."

"We have a romantic ideal, when we turn to one person to be fulfill an endless list of needs: to be my greatest lover, my best friend, the best parent, my trusted confident, my emotional companion, my intellectual equal. And I am it, I am the chosen, I am unique, I am indispensable, I am irreplaceable, I am the one. And infidelity tells me I am not (...) It's traumatic it threats our sense of self."

"(...) When we seek the gaze of another isn't not always our partner that we turning away from, but the person we have ourselves become. And isn't so much that we are looking for another person, as much as we are looking for another self. "

"Every affair will redefine a relationship and every couple will determine what the legacy of the affair will be."

"Betrayal in a relationship comes in many forms: contempt, neglect, indifferent, violence. Sexual betrayal is only one way to hurt the partner. In other words, the victim of an affair is not always the victim of the marriage."

"I look at affairs from a dual perspective: hurt and betrayal on one side and growth and self-discovery on the other. What it did to you and what it meant to me."

- Esther Perel, Psychotherapist
and Writer

Sources:
https://www.ted.com/talks/esther_perel_rethinking_infidelity_a_talk_for_anyone_who_has_ever_loved
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE4QQMyTrC0

Platonic Love

Mmmm...It's 10am! I need to get ready quickly or I am going to miss him in the bakery having coffee. I am just going to wear the new jeans I bought yesterday thinking of him...

...

There he is! Omg!! He looked twice today!! I need to look somewhere else...where? Oh, yes... to my juice! Right, I am drinking my juice.
..One day he will come at my table and will say: "Hi! We used to be in the same class! How are you? Do you mind if I have my breakfast with you?"and I will answer "Hi! Oh! yes, I think so. Please take a seat. I like the fresh juice, here. Do you come here often?".

Oh...he is leaving...

Wheee! This was the best saturday of my life! He looked twice!!
I love when we wears that t-shirt! That color goes so well with his dark hair.. he looked so handsome today!

...

Omg! Today, he asked me for the time!! And I just said: "No, I am sorry"...and I blushed...
..No, I am sorry!!!? Why did I say that? Everybody has a phone these days!! Arghhh...I should have said: "Sure, give me a second. It's 10:27. Time is always chasing us, isn't? hahaha!".
And blushed??? Nooooo! he must think I am a weirdo, now!

I need to stay away from him for a while, so he can forget this awkward moment..

Platonic love is a love story lived by just one person.

In the relationship with our imagination, we always say the perfect words, have the perfect dates, we never get hurt, we never make mistakes.

It's the perfect romantic relationship!
We feel happy just to see that person and fell happy to secretly believe the other feels the same.

But this platonic relationship just works while the "lover" is single in real life.. that's what makes the dreaming possible.

We are dreaming about the reality we would like to live.

And while the other person is single, we believe it can become true. Even though, we don't really want that to happen. Cause it would never be perfect.
We just don't have the courage to risk our perfect platonic love. It's so much safer and perfect like that..

When the other starts a real relationship, we suffer, feel jealousy and it's the end...this person is cheating on us!

Broke our heart.. and we realize that it was just a dream.. nothing more... the other never felt the same...

It will end platonically just like it started. It was real for you, but in reality it really never happened..

It normally will happens when we have so much expectations that you know isn't possible to achieve..So, unconsciously, we find a way to make it possible somehow.. maybe it's also the fear of rejection..

...dreaming while we are awake. Instead of repressing our desires.

The "what would be" will never matches "what we want it to be".

Famous Quotes about Love

"Without Love we fall ill." - Sigmund Freud

"Give the ones you love wings to fly, roots to come back and reasons to stay." - Dalai Lama

"Love never claims, it ever gives. Love ever suffers, never resents, never revenges itself." - Mahatma Gandhi

"There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"Love is fire that burns unseen." - Luis Camões

"Life without love, is no life at all" - Leonardo da Vinci

"Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies." - Aristotle

"Never love somebody who treats you like you're ordinary" - Oscar Wild

"At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet." - Plato

"If nothing save us from death, at least love save us from life" - Pablo Neruda

"When I saw you, I loved you long before / I found you again when I met you / I born for you, before the world was existed." - Fernando Pessoa

"Where you cannot love, do not delay" - Frida Kahlo

"Better to have lost and loved than never to have loved at all." - Ernest Hemingway

"One word frees us all of the weight and pain of life: Love" - Sophocles

"Love looks not into the eyes, but with the mind, and therefore is winged cupid painted blind." - William Shakespeare

"Women are the most beautiful chaos that exists." - Virgilio Castelo

"Love is the greatest refreshment in life." - Pablo Picasso

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that." - Martin Luther King

"Men want to be a woman's first love, women wants to be a man's last romance." - Oscar Wilde

"Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslave us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused." - Paulo Coelho

"Without love, life is just a clock ticking"

Short Melancholic Love Stories

A Romance - A Tear

A Joy - A Sadness

A Word - A Lie

A Kiss - A Disillusion

A Smile - A Deception

A Hug - A Goodbye

- Cathy Pain -

You're Welcome

From such sweet lips

I don't hear words

That can make me happy

You asked me for dessert

I brought you just a knife

..Ai! You said your last thank you.

- Cathy Pain -

Come to eat me .. wild lions

I want to be like you and learn from you

What one day comes to the mouth

Never lasts forever ..

- Cathy Pain -

From you, I liked what you didn't say,
What you said, I didn't like

- TM -

On the path of passion

I found a thousand and one love spies

that tried to take possession of my little heart

Sadness of the past that repeats again

So many good and bad actors that passed through me

I am the target of several attempts of premature madness

One second of happiness is enough for a lifetime of unhappiness

One year of unhappiness is what it takes for a second of happiness

...to destroy my hopes of being happy one day

- Cathy Pain -

Romantic things we don't do anymore

Today, everything is done through the internet, mobil phone, the social networks, pc, laptop, tablet.. faster and easier, but there are things that were so much romantic and meaningful before...

- Write handwritten love letters