Strong love for the ages!
In 1959, Charlie B. drove his brand new model-A Ford from North Carolina down to Florida, where a yearbook picture brought him and Penny together. Over fifty years later, the car has fallen derelict but his 50 year marriage with Penny has flourished.
This piece is a love story, told through the revival of an old car; it demonstrates the power of human connection.
Curated by Erbe
Original Source
First dates are awkward as it is, as trying to get to know someone can have it’s challenges in any situation. When it comes to choosing a place, here are 5 date pitfalls to avoid:
COMEDY SHOW
I am a comedian, and every time I see a couple on a date in the audience I think WHY??!! Not only can you not talk to the person, but you don’t really know anything about them yet, let alone their sense of humor. Both parties are always reluctant to laugh in fear of the other person taking offense.
Comedian: “You know that awkward moment right after you finish where it’s like UH COULD YOU NOT BE HERE RIGHT NOW”
(Guy looks at girl smiling nervously.)
After the show it’s only more awkwardness. As you’ve basically been sitting next to a stranger for the past two hours you really have no idea what to say. Going to a comedy show is something that you should do when you are comfortable with a person, i.e. AFTER you’ve gotten to know them. Save this night out for when you are committed and need a break from Netflix.
ANYTHING ATHLETIC
We want to avoid starting off a potential relationship by competing AGAINST one another. Also, not everyone is athletic. You could really end up embarrassing someone. Once a guy asked me to go bike riding in Venice Beach. I was too chicken shit to tell him “listen, it took me like 6 years to learn how to ride a bike that ended in my mom enrolling me in “biking school” which was basically an indoor gym for uncoordinated children to ride around with training wheels on.“ Needless to say, I shouldn’t have to bring my helmet and kneepads to get to know someone. Activities that require teamwork where you can excel/learn together tend to be better suited for dates, like a cooking class or wine tasting.
What do you like best about falling in love?
Scientific American traces the flow of chemicals in the brain during different phases of romance and describes surprising insights from the science of attraction.
Curated by Erbe
Original Source
One of the most common anxiety dreams that people have involves being the only naked person amongst the clothed masses, commonly at work or school. In dreams, nudity is symbolic of vulnerability, being exposed for what or who we really are; unable to conceal our true nature. I think this stems from the conditioning of culture, where we are taught that we must cover our natural state and avert our eyes from the flesh of our brethren, to be considered civilized and decent. To be naked and unashamed is rare, and I say THANK GOD.
I’m kidding, calm down. It’s just that I’ve spent years working nude, and have to say that if nudity was commonplace, if there was no air of cool mystery to it, if it wasn’t something that the majority of you found terrifying, I would’ve had a much more difficult time paying my rent without wearing a company-issued polo shirt and name-badge combo, and I’d probably still think there was validity to the idiom about no food tasting as good as being thin feels. I’ve been a nude figure model and a stripper for years, and being professionally naked taught me more about the realities of confidence and attraction than the entire published run of Cosmopolitan ever could. And now, I’d like to do my part to reduce your birthday-suit butterflies by sharing a few of the nuggets I’ve picked up during my time unclothed about how to feel better about being naked while not alone.
To begin, you must understand that our brains, filled with the sum total of our life experiences, are what attach feelings, thoughts, and judgments to those images that we take in with our eyes. So though we may all view the same person, place, or thing, we all see something different. My stripper friend, Tiffany, once quoted Anais Nin to me: “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
Size and shape are nothing until we’re told how to feel about them, and with all of the mixed messages fed to us from all of the various sources (parents, friends, media and advertisers), body image is, at best, a clusterf*** of chaos. With weight distribution, there is no baseline. You wear 130 lbs. differently than I do, which is differently than my cousin does.
You can never control how another person sees you, because you can never control the experiences of their past, so it’s futile to spend your time worrying or being upset about it. I learned this as a figure model at the Kansas City Art Institute. I’d walk around the room on my breaks, mind blown by the differences that I saw on the easels. One person’s drawing of a mountain of fleshy curves was another’s detailed shading of taut skin stretched over protruding hipbones. The only person whose perception you can rely on, or even productively care about, is your own.
An important institution for the people of Papua New Guinea is the courting ceremonies. This ritual lasts weeks. In Papua New Guinea tribes, incest is not permitted, so they have to look for other villages’ men. Women invite men from other tribes and look for their partner. While men are allowed to take as many wives as they can support, women may only have one husband.
Curated by Erbe
Original Source
What do you say to yourself when nobody else is looking? If you’re telling everyone that you’re the greatest thing since the iPod, but deep down inside you believe you are an eight-track player or the “chubby girl” who couldn’t catch a man with a net and a pack of hunting dogs, then you’re heading for more nights alone than a cloistered nun. You will generate the results that respond to your personal truth.
I mean it. I don’t care how polished your presentation is or how ironclad your argument; if you have a crummy personal truth, you can look like Miss Universe for all I care. If underneath it all, you believe you’re living a big lie because you’re really just an unlovable outsider who is destined to wander the planet alone, people will sense it in a heartbeat and run the other way. They will figure, “Hey, she knows herself better than anyone else, and if she thinks she’s worthless, who am I to argue? See ya!” Or maybe you’ll find some loser who doesn’t care who he’s with or who you are, just so long as he’s got somebody — anybody. That’s not what you want either. You deserve better. Trust me — there’s a world of difference between being with the one and being with someone. If you’re out there acting as if you’ll take whatever you can get because beggars can’t be choosers, you’re destined to wind up with the scraps.
When your personal truth is negative and riddled with doubts, distortions and shame, you scream that message to the world in a million and one nonverbal ways. What you believe is your “real deal” reflects itself in your body language, your facial expressions and your actions, which all conspire to contradict every word you say and the impression you strive to make.
So, you’ve broken up.
You’ve taken their number out of your phone so you don’t text in moments of weakness. When you drop your cat off at the groomer’s and they ask for an emergency contact you say, “I don’t have one. I guess if I don’t come back, you have to set the cat free.”
Best case scenario: you came together, you challenged each other to be your best, inspired each other, learned from each other, then evolved so much you grew apart and mutually decided to consciously uncouple. Worst case scenario: everything else.
Here are some tips to help you deal:
It could be that annual trip to Batfest in Austin, TX, it could be your aunt’s wedding in Boston, it could just be the new Iron Man movie. Notice and release your disappointment in each thing you won’t be doing together. You’re creating a new reality map in your brain without that person in it.
This might be the hardest part, because we all want to be supercool adult people. That doesn’t mean you need to see when this dude is out to dinner with a girl whose haircut is very similar to your own, and he doesn’t need to know when you’re out at karaoke singing the Stevie Nicks songs that he used to hear in the shower. You don’t have to delete them, but certainly turn their feed off for a couple of months while you get your head together. Even though it sometimes feels good to dwell on the object of your affection, scratching that itch will just contribute to an obsession and will delay your healing.
One of the hardest parts of a breakup, especially of a long relationship, is that you find that the person you used to get comfort from is the last person you should speak to. Talk to friends. Talk to family. Talk to your pastor. Don’t talk to each other. Part of your job right now is to get this person’s smell out of your nostrils, literally and figuratively. Once you stop hanging out with them, you’ll stop saying things like “but we’re so good together!”
If you have stuff of theirs that reminds you of them, and it bothers you, put it away. You can even throw it away, if you want. If something is in your house that makes you sad, get rid of it, unless he gave you a couch or something, in that case throw a blanket over it until it doesn’t make you feel sad anymore, because that’s a nice couch.
Have you ever run into someone you knew from school when you were in a different city? Even if you barely knew them before, you tend to act like you were best buds. That was what happened to me when I moved to a new city and unexpectedly ran into someone I had known from Montreal.
Antony had been a good friend of my sister’s, and also a friend of an old boyfriend. He had been married when I knew him last, and though we had socialized quite a bit I didn’t know him well. He was attractive and funny, and I liked him a lot.
Running into this old acquaintance when I felt lost and a little bit lonely, resulted in that acquaintance quickly morphing into my new best friend. Suddenly I had an ally, someone to say “…do you remember when…” and all too soon we were dating, and making plans for a mutual future.
Antony’s first marriage had been great, except for one thing, they couldn’t have kids. I don’t know all the details, but it eventually broke them up. He was a good Italian boy, and his Mama wanted grandbabies. I was listening to a ticking clock, and wanted to be a Mom.
I met his parents, they loved me, and soon, way too soon- we were engaged! When the fireworks stopped we realized that we didn’t really know each other. We had very little in common, and very different interests. I was a flower child, he was a rocker.
After six months we drifted apart, we saw each other a couple of times a week, but were finding excuses to be apart. He stopped buying me flowers every payday, and spent more time in his apartment than in mine.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a guy friend who I was into who I kiiiind of thought was into me too but I couldn’t really tell. Not because I’m oblivious but because it’s so easy to see those signs and not want to be That Person who assumes someone is totally into her when he’s actually just being a really good friend who happens to be a guy.
Because I tend to lean toward “maybe he’s just being nice!!!” and usually need to be beaten over the head with mixtapes, picnics, and quirky flower arrangements before I start to think, “Wait, does Jeff like me?” while everyone around me rolls their eyes and says, “Yes, are you kidding?” I can save you some of that time.
1. Your friends ask if you guys are a thing yet. One time I had a guy at a bar tell me he didn’t ask me out because he saw I had a boyfriend. The guy he saw was not my boyfriend, but he was a guy friend I thought might be into me. If total strangers and friends think you guys are giving off couple vibes, it’s because he’s absolutely wishing you two were a couple.
2. When he hugs you, it feels like he’s making out with you using only his arms. If your hugs used to be kind of standard, and now they’re longer and more affectionate, it’s because #feelings are there. New, or maybe not new, but definitely more intense #feelings. And not just of the “oh man, our connection as two platonic humans has truly intensified” variety.
3. You hang out one-on-one all the time doing, let’s be honest, couple-y things. Oh yeah, you’re just friends. Friends who go to lunch together, museums together, and movies together with just the two of you, hanging out for hours, with him silently wishing at some point he could hold your hand.
4. He brings up your inside jokes like they’re quotes from his favorite movie. Whether it’s conscious or not, he’s telling you he loves the connection you two have and is trying to slowly tell you, “Look at how much fun we have! Man, we have a cool connection. Possibly of the boyfriend/girlfriend variety. Just sayin’.”
Taking action and self reflection is key!
You have a soul mate. Someone you are meant to share a great love with. If you haven’t found this person already, it’s likely you’re interested in meeting him or her. Good. You can. I’m going to tell you how.
By bringing awareness to what you want in a relationship, you are more likely to receive it. In that sense, you have control over your destiny in love.
Here are five steps you can take to prepare yourself for the greatest love of your life:
Do you believe you can have a relationship that nourishes you, excites you, and keeps you coming back for more?
Do you believe that you have a soul mate?
I hope so, because believing in love is a crucial (and nonnegotiable) step in making it come true.
You can’t have a relationship that you don’t believe exists. Therefore, if you have any limiting beliefs about what is possible in love, you need to start challenging them ASAP.
If you find yourself thinking that an amazing relationship is not possible for you, tell yourself this: “No! This is a false belief. I know I am meant to have an amazing love.”
As you practice distinguishing your limiting thoughts, you’ll believe more and more that a great love is meant for you. And when this happens, anything is possible.
It’s necessary for you to get acquainted with your wounds if you’re going to move beyond them. In getting to know your setbacks, you can take steps to heal this part of yourself, allowing a more fulfilling love to come to you.
How do you do this? First, recognize what you struggle with in relationships. This is could be an issue such as feeling abandoned, trapped, or not good enough. Once you know what the issue is, you heal it by taking care of yourself in the way that you’ve felt hurt by others.
Let me give you an example. If you’ve felt rejected in relationships, then you have to take steps to stop rejecting yourself. This means accepting your feelings, being kind to yourself, and making room for all parts of who you are.
As you love yourself in the way that you want to be loved, these wounds will heal. Once they do, you’ll no longer need to play them out with other people in your life.
Freshman year of high school, I had a crush on a girl that we’ll call Julie. Julie and I had gotten to talking a lot on a choir class trip and we had flirted a bit, although I was 15 and dorky, so by flirting I really just mean she was willing to talk to me. But we had this joke, the kind of cute inside joke that had me convinced that Julie and I would definitely be together. At the time there was this weird rumor that green M&Ms were an aphrodisiac. I barely understood what that meant, but we had joked together on that choir trip about it and shared our green M&Ms with each other and laughed and laughed.
So, come Valentine’s Day, Julie and I had a date planned, and I wanted to get her something special to give her as a valentine at school. I bought one of those little plastic M&Ms dispensers, and sat down one evening with about a dozen big bags of M&Ms, spending careful amounts of time picking out each and every green one I could find, and re-filling the dispenser with just them. Let me make it perfectly clear that I did not think that this would make Julie suddenly go into heat and have sex with me right in the cafeteria. I knew it was a joke. I thought she would laugh, that was the goal. But it turned out she laughed not with me, but at me. She thought it was totally lame and not long after that she decided she wanted to date my best friend Andy instead of me.
I can’t really say that course of events has every really changed in my life. While I’ve landed pretty firmly in the cynical camp when it comes to romance now, I was for decades a card-carrying Hopeless Romantic. I was prone to wild, random, quirky romantic gestures that I can say never ended well. Some of them were relatively minor, driving across town to bring ibuprofen to a woman who was stuck at work with a major headache, only to have her barely muster up a thank you. Hunting down an ‘80s Transformers lunchbox on eBay for an obsessed fan who dumped me the day before I gave it to her.
My very last romantic act which I thought was fairly simple, somehow became the most complicated and convoluted, and likely expedited the breakup that happened less than a week later. In August 2012 I was dating Katie. She had started a new, stressful job that was demanding far more of her time than she thought it would. One of the complaints she often shared with me was that she could never get away from her desk long enough for a real lunch and was living off of granola bars and such. So I decided one day when she’d seemed extra stressed that it would be a really good day to go online and order her some sushi sent to her office. I picked out her favorite rolls, I tipped the driver in the purchase, and I left a note for the restaurant explaining what was going on.
Here’s the problem: the restaurant didn’t get the note that I gave to the online ordering company. They then sent a delivery driver who only spoke Japanese. I had put her name on the order but my phone number, and hadn’t told her it was coming because it was supposed to be a surprise (Note to anyone reading: surprises are almost always a bad idea.) This leads to me getting a phone call from the driver saying “Food is here,” with him then not understanding me when I explained, “Oh, it’s not for me, it’s a gift.” He responded with a very unsure “Okay,” and then continued to wait in the lobby of her building assuming that what I had said to him was some variation of “I’ll be right down.”
Great way to get sparks flying!
Stop reading for a moment, and think back to the first few weeks after you met your spouse or love partner.
Actually try to visualize an early date where you were cuckoo for CoCo Puffs about this amazing person. And they felt the same about you.
Remember how it felt falling in love, how happily distracted you were, how you couldn’t wait to see her — how everything he said was interesting and funny.
Remember how you felt the two of you were special? Meant for each other. Destined to be together.
And now . . . not so much.
Now you’ve been together for a while — maybe years. And the bloom is off the rose. What was once endearing or funny now gets under your skin like a bad rash. The differences you found so appealing now divide you like a knife. It’s past time to rekindle your relationship.
Frustration, resentments, hurt feelings, and unmet needs are always simmering just below the surface. One wrong word, one sideways glance, one exasperated sigh is all it will take to cause the lid to blow. And blow it has — many times. Too many times to count.
Bickering is a daily sport and full-blown fights dot the landscape of your marriage like bleeding soldiers on a battlefield. Whether your particular fighting style is a head-spinning screaming match or a silent treatment freeze-out, both of you are exhausted, hurting, and so tired of living this way.
How did it come to this? What happened to the joy, the fun times together, the great sex, the intimate talks? Where are those two people who fell so head-over-heels in love?
If you spend more time in your love life fighting or feeling angry, hurt, or resentful than you do enjoying the connection, then it’s past time to take action. Right now you must do something about it if you want to save the relationship.
Before you begin working the relationship, be very, very honest with yourself.
Do you really want this marriage to work?
Are you invested in it enough that you’re willing to make some changes?
Do you truly want to have a happy, healthy, intimate connection with this particular person?
If the answer is no, and you’ve been with this person a long time, go to counseling anyway to be absolutely sure it’s not just your anger clouding your judgment. Get professional support to help you navigate this huge decision whether to end the marriage or not.
However, if the answer is yes, and you know with certainty you want the relationship to work, then read on.
Both you and your spouse or partner must embrace this foundational premise: your relationship together takes priority over everything else in your life.
That includes your children, your parents, your friends, your work, your hobbies, your chores, your television, your computer, and your egos.
The relationship itself must be viewed as a separate living, breathing force that the two of you are charged with care taking. I’m not suggesting you lose your individuality. But as two individuals, you are jointly responsible for nurturing your connection as you would your child.
If your relationship isn’t solid, everything else in your life will be negatively impacted. Your happiness as a couple is essential to the security and happiness of your children, your job performance, and your mental health.
PASSION. Definition: strong and barely controllable emotion. Is passion a good thing? How much do we want of it in a relationship?
Often times, women feel like they have to make a choice between the hot and heavy/ tumultuous relationship and the boring/stable one. The real question is, why is passion paired with feelings of anger and jealousy and stability paired with feelings of boredom and dissatisfaction. What is it about the reliable man that unconditionally loves and supports us that makes us want to run the other way?
We don’t want to be in a relationship completely void of passion, so we might have to rewire ourselves. Here are 5 things about stable men that we should feel passionate about.
This might seem a little obvious, but any person who gets up every day and goes to work deserves some respect. He’s not “figuring things out.” His employer counts on him to be there, and he’s there. That means he is a reliable person. THAT IS HOT. When you call, he answers. He’s not “so high he fell asleep.”
The stable man is always down for a night out with your friends. He’s not living for himself and his own pleasure. He likes being part of a team. THIS IS HOT. You don’t want the guy who ditches you last minute because “my buddy wants to watch the game.” You want a guy you can MAKE PLANS WITH, who is capable of saying things like “I can’t tonight, maybe another time.”
It’s simple. When you talk, he listens. “Huh?” and “sorry babe, what?” is not something that happens often after you have been talking for an extended amount of time. Not listening is a sign of disrespect. It is NOT HOT. It means they are prioritizing whatever they are doing or thinking over you. Unless of course, you are a total chatterbox, in that case it is you that might have a little work to do.
His place is tidy; he has furniture. He has a box spring, AND A BED FRAME. THESE ITEMS ARE HOT. Who wants to do it on a mattress on the floor whose sheets haven’t been changed in ages? Having your place together means you have your life together and that you aren’t looking for a mother to manage your life, you are looking for a partner to share your life with.
It is shocking to me how many women will put up with this during an argument. It is absolutely unacceptable to use profanity in any way or call your partner names. This is a sign of a person that is not evolved = NOT HOT. Plus, it sets the tone for your relationship. Once you condone this kind of behavior, it is easy to go downhill from there. The balanced man knows how to express his concerns without going to a dark place. His tone may be firm, but he is not disrespectful.
How do you expand your sexual thinking?
Sex is everyone’s own creation story, everyone’s personal Big Bang.
Before you looked at this website, before you got up this morning or the day or year before, before you read or said your first word, two people you’d never met — couldn’t have met, since you weren’t a you yet —went through a series of intimate or strained or casual or confused or loving series of movements and gestures that created you.
That means that your being, along with everyone else’s, is literally composed of sexual motion and desire, because the cells that split and aggregated to make your body were set into motion by sex. When people have sex, the laws of biology and form pay attention. Sex weaves itself in and out of our daily thoughts, the art we encounter, the feelings we have for each other. Is it any surprise that we think about sex so often?
But if sex is a fact of life, the fact of life that life springs from, why is our culture so screwed up about it? Why is sex so legislated, one might say legislated against, misunderstood, and confusing, culturally? There are hundreds of laws set up by the state, regulating sexual content, sexual behavior, sexual freedom. And there are the unspoken laws, often just as constricting, in every relationship we have. Sex shame in our lives and sex shaming in our cultural sphere are intimately tangled. Instead of telling you the right way to put a condom on or how to please your lover, this series will examine the lives and theories of thinkers who were interested in pushing sex forward in some cultural way, in bringing what they’d learned from the mystery of sex to the cultural sphere to transform both.
Brilliant people have been working on improving our sexual culture for a long time. If we want to have a more thoughtful sexual culture, a healthier one that respects sex and sexuality in its infinite forms, we have some powerful, radical thinkers to choose from. These are people who have led the way, pushed the boundaries, cared enough about the darkened realm of sex to illuminate it for us.
You probably haven’t heard of many of these thinkers. And you probably haven’t heard of many of them because the powers that be discredited them or provided them with unpleasant ends.
Everyone, even the radical researchers and thinkers in this series, absorbs the sexual prejudices, shames, and confusions of their time and place. They might deftly avoid one bias and passionately speak out against it, all the while carrying around a whole host of others that they’re totally blind to. Of course, I’m guilty of this too. Since the current conception of sex is contaminated, getting new seeds requires, at first, growing crooked plants from polluted ground. It’s going to take some time.
Some of the most important thinkers are kind of crazy.
This, in fact, is a large part of what makes them important. To come up with new possibilities for the world, you have to hang out in the impossible and the imagined quite a bit. You have to say outlandish things to see if they’re true. To stand outside the depressing weight of our reality requires deep and intense encounters with your own imagination and seeing things that others don’t see.
Is Facebook the new Public Display of affection?
But please—don’t go overboard with the photos
Couples that broadcast their love on Facebook may be annoying, but they seem to have their relationships figured out. According to a study out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, people who are loud and proud about their significant others on Facebook are more likely to stay with their partners.
The research, published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, And Social Networking, and released online last week, looked at how 180 undergraduates reflected their relationships online, as well as how long they stayed smitten. The students in the study, who were all in couples, first answered questions about their age, sex, length of relationship, and level of commitment. Then they logged into their Facebook profiles and allowed researchers to record the number of photos they had posted with their partners, whether they had indicated that they were “in a relationship,” how many times each person in the couple wrote on the other’s wall in the last month, and the number of mutual friends they shared. Six months later, researchers asked the students by e-mail whether they were still in that relationship.
After controlling for age, sex, and relationship length, the study found that people who said they were “in a relationship” and posted a lot of photos with their partners were more likely to be deeply committed and still together.
