Now, as human beings we value freedom. We value it so much that we fail to truly understand it many times, and, generally, we realize it’s gone only in the most trivial, obvious cases. Truth is, we lose it each time we refuse to fully understand a situation, each time we trade realism for idealism because idealism sounds so much better, only to end up with a deformed perception on reality – like a clear image on it would be easily achievable, anyway…

We love chocolate for the delicious reward that it is, shopping for the illusions of beauty and infinite seduction it brings for our narcissistic selves, idealism for its righteous passion, and we love love. Many of our addictions are originally natural and nonetheless useful things. Even blackjack – I know someone who made a living for his family out of it, during the hard period following World War II. But when we can’t resist emptying our debit & credit cards at the mall, we lose ourselves. Even more when we can’t see the reality and refuse to understand the whole depth of people in their purely human greatness and even more human misery or mediocrity – an addiction to idealism leads fast enough to a taste for misconceptions and prejudice. And even more when love ceases to be generous and becomes dependence and obsession (great article here, by the way, although it only covers erotical love).

Someone told me recently that everyone is an addict, and if they should be addicted to something, they would chose love and ideals. My firm belief is that nicotine would be better.

I find it perfectly fair and democratic that women can vote, work and support themselves, make their own decisions and have each and every right a human being is entitled to. This is a great thing Modern Times have done for women, and this moral achievement was both necessary and liberating. In some contemporary societies there still are many, many women for which these rights are nothing but a distant dream,  and fighting to impose them is simply vital. I also have all the respect in the world for the works of Simone de Beauvoir or Virginia Woolf.

The Western World, however, is going too far on this. As I’ve been recently travelling by train, carrying quite a heavy suitcase, I found myself struggling to put my luggage up in the luggage rack, while my western male friends were simply watching. Since we’re equal, we’re equal, right? Even if, as a woman, I have a significantly inferior muscular strength and I could use some help.  One could argue this is an isolate case, but no, I’ve met numerous similar situations in Western Europe.  It’s a behavioural trend.

I’ve been watching Sex and The City with my female friends, and I guess no one would disagree with me on it being a good expression of the mainstream feminism in our society.  Let us now remember one thing from the movie: Samantha leaves her handsome, much younger boyfriend, who loved her truly and had morally supported her through chemotherapy, and she does that because of his busy schedule. Like seriously, that’s all you can do, right? When a relationship faces some challenge, you have to think of your own happiness and move on, since a little effort on reviving it, a little well-deserved devotion would be so uncool, right?

What I’m trying to say here, by these examples, is that we are heading towards extremism. When feminists such as Marlene Dixon say that marriage leads to the oppression of women, or when neofeminist groups opinion against vibrators reproducing the shape of the penis and thus perpetuating phallocracy, well… it sounds like it’s time to stop and take a deep breath.

Femininity, my dear friends, is also weakness, and we have to accept that, since it’s biologically built-in. Is seduction and devotion towards our male fellows, and it is also need for love. It is a precious gift that is part of our identity, and, also, is a feature we just wanna waste, since our attractivity is closely related to our femininity. Therefore, while the core values of feminism and femininity go hand in hand, everything is fine and perfectly sane. When contradictions appear, it is a sign that feminism has gone too far, heading towards misandry and its values have turned weird and distorted.

It seems that only about 40% of married couples have sex at least once a week, while around 15% of married people, both male and female, are basically chaste. Of course, this is an average value, and people in the age group 18-35 are expected to be above this estimation when it comes to sexual activity. My question is, however, why? Why does this happen?

We know people neglect their sexual lives due to stress related issues, relationship troubles or even health problems. If health-stuff is a no-way-out kind of situation, it is also only temporary in most cases, and probably the least frequent of the three. When it comes to relationship issues, the question is why staying in a relationship with someone that doesn’t inspire you to have sex with? Why quarreling and why getting bored? Why wasting your time and stamina in such a limbo? If
you’ve got good stuff there, do something about it, fight to revive it. Otherwise, just go ahead and break the tie. You’ll probably find someone else to be happy with, or maybe not, but if you stay in a bad relationship you’re just giving up this chance for good.

But there are also a lot great relationships out there, that just struggle with the real world-love conflict of interests. That suffer from today’s speed of living because their “involved ones” just put affairs less stringent aside.

Why don’t we *do* it? Because we are so often forgetting how important it is. When your job is very demanding, little energy is left for hot bedroom delights, but, just as you make time to have lunch/dinner, or go grocery shopping, you can spare a couple of hours for lovemaking. It takes some planning effort maybe, but it’ll be the best spent hours of the week, it’ll relax and rejuvenate you, and will do wonders for your mood and your relationship. Because there’s no way your career can match the importance of your loved one – or something is very, very wrong.

You can wake one hour earlier in the morning, and just be spontaneous about it – it’ll be worthed, and who could imagine a better, more shining start for your day? Or you can give up once in a while those extra-office hours, leave the rest of the work for tomorrow, and spend a relaxing evening in the hot tube, with your loved one. Or you can arrange short getaways at the end of the week. These are the little things that will keep the fire burning in your yard, and you won’t have to blame yourselves, years later, for growing apart. It really matters. And no, getting old doesn’t count as an excuse: studies have shown that couples in their 50s and 60s can have fulfilling sexual lives, if they have been actively maintaining them so.

“Proving your love”

God, I’ve heard this phrase a million times or more. I’ve heard it from my family, I’ve heard it from my friends, I’ve heard it from close or distant relatives, and, of course, I’ve heard it from lovers up to a point where I had to say: “OK… now I’m feeling a little bit abused.”

What does it actually mean “proving it”, anyway? Of course I would gladly offer my support to my loved ones when they are in trouble, and of course I wouldn’t mind doing it, but I wouldn’t call this “proving my love”, because it’s actually something different, it’s like acting on an impulse: you want that person to be safe and sound, ’cause whatever it hurts her it would also hurt you. You just have to do it. It’s organic. It happens because, whatever it is that is bounding you to the other, is or has grown so strong that it somehow enlarged your self in that person’s direction, assimilating her. She is now contained in your extended self, enriching your life with things you wouldn’t know before. And making you feel each and every of her pains.

This is what they mean when they say: “You are a part of me”. It describes a wonderful, natural process that characterizes close human relationships. When it happens you would do anything that could legitimately help the other, out of impulse. And I guess this is prone to be interpreted as a proof of love.

However, when someone is asking you to “prove” your attachment… well, that brings me an emotional black-mailing flavour. Usually it won’t involve things that are absolutely necessary, things that you would instantly have done for him or her. Usually it’s all about caprices, extravagances, insecurities, lack of understanding that you do have a life beyond them, lack of respect for you as a person, as a free and free-willed individual, and, ultimately, lack of love. Because when you really love someone you would never ask them something that would go against their values, against their inner world or against their possibilities.

Therefore, love-proving? It’s in impulsive acts, in small gestures, in one’s eyes or in one’s kiss. It is never in one’s black-mail or one’s response to it.

Ever wondered what’s wrong with the world? Lately?

“Oh, not the voices again!” I hear you crying. “Not another financial-crisis article, pleeease. Cool down, relax, and just give us a speech of sex, luxury and refinement, ’cause that’s the way we want it.”

Trouble is this crisis seems to be ruining our lives more than just economically. First, it is excessively mediatised, over discussed, and so goddamn annoying. Secondly, it is basically everywhere and it’s affecting us all. Its main evilness: does not only produce inflation, debt and unemployment, but it also produces a large amount of stress and anxiety. We can live with inflation: we’ll simply cut some of our expenses and limit spending our cash on basic items. We can live with debt. We can live with unemployment, too: there are various ways to earn money and with some smarts and some little bit of creativity one can always make a living. However, living with the stress and anxiety produced by this conjecture is the worse part of it.

Worrying kills, they say. Truth is worrying kills everything. The uncertainty of tomorrow is making us less open to life. We just don’t seem to enjoy things the way we used to, and we don’t get the same courage and energy out of our leisures and hobbies. We don’t love less but we less express it and, also, less savor it. Because we are not free to, we are too busy worrying and worry has already taken us for good. Our relationships grow colder because of it, when it is in times of trouble we should lay more on others and others on us. Our mind starts producing risk-free solutions and scenarios, working for safety and stability, when one should think and fight for his own, sacred, personal development. When risk-free actually means freedom-free, slave to the stronger ones, their mechanisms and their laws.

Lets keep ourselves out of this, dear friends, for the love and sake of all beautiful things out there, for the true marvels the world and the human spirit so genuinely contain. Let us hope for better us. Let us love and let us not forget our friends, our sweethearts, our spirit and our happiness. Let us not work for a safer future, but for one that is richer in good will and humanity. Let us allow ourselves to forget stocks and to never forget or underestimate intimacy, in its deepest, most fulfilling sense. Let us be free and human despite everything, ’cause if there is a reason we were born for, it is love.

Here we are, back to the courtship theme and all its marvelous issues. Because, dear friends, there are some things we find unacceptable in our tiny little world, that may be lacking innocence, but not charm, not daydreaming, not elegance. So, let us share to you all the very phrase that arouse our indignation: Am I courting you?

Sans Innocence is not the kind of narcissistic freak committed to believe all men should be courting her, and she did not receive this rather ingrate response from some random friend/acquaintance/guy on the street or someone else’s man. No. Sans Innocence got the aforementioned phrase from her boyfriend, with whom she manages to share a one-year-pretty-nice-relationship. And, in his defense, one must say he is really charming, graceful, polite and truly loves our main character here.

Further developments of The Phrase: Oh, yes, indeed, I was courting you at the beginning, when we started dating. This translates to me as: Well, we’re only using that very pleasing romantic ritual at the beginning, when we don’t know the girl very well and want to impress her, but after we reach some intimacy level with that lovely creature we just don’t see the point of courting her anymore, ’cause the relationship would go on anyway. Really? I mean, most successful couples I know have reached a certain number of years together because they actually kept dating. (Note: of course, each other, not other people…). How can you keep your butterflies in your stomach for longer if you stop regarding your significant other as some fascinating, mysterious stranger? How can you avoid taking his/hers love for granted? How not to be slipping into a boring routine?

To cut a long story short, my point is this: one should never get to think of The Other as a private possession, a part of him/herself or anything else one might dare to neglect. The Other is a wonderful and desirable fortress which is never truly ours, and which must be conquered again, every dawn. Therefore courtship, as you may see, is a must.

PS: the photo above is our way of recommending www.michaelfairchild.com for those of you interested in wild life photography and not only.

For instance, when we fall in love out of the blue it happens because we have met someone close enough to our Anima/Animus for it to project itself upon him or her. And so, for us, that person suddenly becomes the very incarnation of Masculinity or Femininity, as we understand and desire it, because it is our own Anima or Animus we are identifying her/him with. That’s why, in those moments, we feel that we are irresistibly drawn towards that wonderful, promising creature, that seems to have locked inside the very secret of our happiness, our fate, our meaning. When, later on, we unfortunately fall out of love, the whole initial magic doesn’t make sense anymore, sometimes the attraction we once felt gets beyond any understanding and there are also many unpleasant things about our former lover we can’t explain not having seen before.

The Myth of the Androgyn has its roots here, although the other half we are so eagerly looking for during our lifetime actually lies inside us. Being together with one or another of its projections may bring us temporary relief, may bring us human warmth and long moments filled with love, but when until the spell breaks we’ll still be incomplete.

However, when we become truly aware of our Anima/Animus, when we manage to understand it and to integrate it into our self, then we’ll get strong, real, wise, complete. It’s that very moment when we find ourselves, that very moment that sees our greatness as a wonderful, luminescent whole. We obtain a peace that will clear away all pain and fear. We enlarge out conscience and rise ourselves beyond this world’s delusions. We reach our true self, and everything that will happen afterwards will be different, meaningful. The love we’ll get will be itself more complete, because we’ll be able to see our significant other not only as a reflection of our Anima or Animus but for what he or she really is, and adore it as a whole. Our compassion and understanding will enlarge and our world will be richer and much more colorful.

But in order to get there we need long hours of introspection, of self-awareness in which to understand, accept and integrate what is different, and hidden, and yet, still within ourselves.

As the long, hot summer we’ve been through has finally ended, leaving room for some more refreshing times down here, we started taking serious concerns less seriously, and that involves the global warming issue, that we had previously been haunted by for weeks. I mean, it is bad… but Sans Innocence just had some huge amounts of white tea, lying in that old, cozy armchair and wishing the world would give her a break. With the catastrophes, at least.

Besides, there are other phenomenons related to the post-industrial era that sadden us in a similar degree. Phenomenons referring to people, interactions, relationships, communication. It’s like we’d be dealing with some kind of compensation’s law here: the earth is getting warmer, the people are getting colder. Yeah, thermodynamics… (surely, man is giving heat away to his environment, remember some physics principles here?).

However, it’s ironic that in the glorious times of email, instant messenger and micro-blogging people are more and more keen on growing apart from each other. How many truly significant relationships are you currently having? Or ever had? How high would you rate them, as for the quality of closure and of sharing them all? The fast, instant communication our modern stuff is offering us was designed to suit our fast, terribly fast way of living. Jobs, businesses, meetings, studies, trips are on the run. Live itself is on the run. Friendship. Love. Instant communicating offers us the sheer illusion we are somehow keeping in touch with people, and even establish a whole net of new connections – social networking, they say -, but the reality is those quick pings are nothing but life support to old friendships, while newly born ones get to have a development that reminds me of artificially nurtured fruits: no matter how big and pretty might seem, they’re absolutely tasteless. It takes time, lots of time, sincere involvement, honesty, mutual respect and confidence, and many other things in order to build a reliable friendship. You can’t put your eggs in IM’s basket, it takes real, face-to-face interaction. And same goes for love. The Internet abounds nowadays with dating and meeting-people networking, but ties grown here usually lead only to short flirtations and empty affairs, and that has a huge success because is exactly what everybody wants: having it fast and easy, and nevermind any quality concerns.

We run from place to place in our cars, spreading CO2 all over and rising global temperature, while in the same run we manage to cool down what was supposed to be our oasis of peace and well-being – our personal relationships. Bad choice, this speed of living. It is my ferm belief that we don’t actually need it (How many hours have lately you wasted in front of the TV? Or randomly surfing the net?) and that we really can take our time, make things right and give our social/romantic self the best it deserves. It is also my ferm, irrevocable belief and all we have to do is try, and let ourselves seduced by how great it gets. After all, it is our choice whether we want to submit to society’s self-destroying habits or stand up and dare to be free. Isn’t it?

However, since bright colours were successfully invented, there is no such a thing as black and white worlds, if we exclude from this affirmation early film-making and photography. It’s abstract, unfair, and by no means representative, and that goes for modern Hollywood thrillers too – technical details won’t matter. Besides, duality seems to be taking its force out of mixing stuff: maniheistic legends, for instance, take a point out of combining Darkness and Light, Spirit and Matter in a forever enchanting struggle and “underground” collaboration – and these guys were most radical when it came to contrasts. Wonderful laws does the nature have.

Therefore, as you’ve probably heard more than often, the phrase “every man has a feminine side and every woman a masculine one” is more than just politically correct. Julius Evora, in The Metaphysics of Sex defines Femininity and Masculinity as some kind of strong, genuine opposites, resembling magnetical field’s poles in action and energy. There is impossible to find pure Femininity or pure Masculinity in any living creature, but, the more Femininity does a woman have, the more she embodies the warmth and attraction of it, the closer she will be to Perfection. Also, the more a man becomes the incarnation of powerful male archetypes, the more will he find himself above other weaker, less sexual men. However, as this equation’s poles are as far apart from each other as Antarctica and Greenland prove to be, in every genre’s exponent there will be a nice little – or not so little – leak of opposite energy. He or she may ignore it all lifelong, but it’ll be there, playing tricks on them from its sweet well-hidden place.It will never disappear, and it will grow stronger and stronger, feeding itself from the owner’s denial, like a smart outlaw would steal electricity from an energy plant. And this, my friends, is beautiful, and great, because, ultimately, the oh-so-neglected side of ours is an useful instrument, able to make us whole, if we let it.

Carl Gustav Jung named man’s feminine side Anima and woman’s masculinity Animus. They are important, base concepts in his work and ones of most significance in psihanalysis’s efforts of understanding the dynamics of human inner and outer relationships. Normally, a man will only be able to understand women and their behaviour through his Anima, which generates the proverbial irrationality, uncontrolled emotions and unpredictability view. It’s not the way women are, it’s the way Anima is and the interface it offers to real-world Femininity. Same, if no level of higher awareness is met, women have their impressions of men established through their Animus – the Animus is a source for ready-made logic, rigidity, judgementalism and when a girl shows off her list of prejudices, yes, sir, it ’s her Animus at work there. Sounds like a lot of trouble in male-female interactions, doesn’t it? Well, at this level, yes, it definitely is and as we all know from experience genre conflicts are not actually light-and-easy, right?

Still, solving the duality brings peace and freedom, and that’s why we must take things further on and go deep, deep, deep.

[to be continued]

Because almost-sexual relationships always come to a turning point. There ain’t such a thing as keeping them safe and private forever. It’s the same as in physics: the tension between point A and point B won’t manage to grow and grow without some discharge, sooner or later, stronger or milder. A lightning, maybe, if we’re charged enough.

Real world seems to be having some rules when it comes to any knowable, existing stuff. You can say: “ok, nice chatting, but there’s somebody waiting for me at home whom I really love.” and end it right there, or at least end the temptation and sentence future guilty excitement to death. When you have something really great with a significant other, you simply know it. Grass may seem greener on the other side, but, no, error, it ain’t. Love is what makes the world go round, and loved ones deserve our loyalty and respect. Or you can find yourself in the position to understand that you were not having the relationship you desired, that you were not in love or that you were wasting your time on something dead and dry. Here, temptation is useful and it helps you find your freedom. You may try giving up your current lover and start seeing your “temptation”, or you can just leave your relationship and go looking for your great, precious self instead. That would be totally worthed. Thrill and temptation are prone to bring good things in one’s life, but it takes some lucidity and some management skills to make it work. When it does, it’s great.

Two more possible situations may the victim of temptation encounter, not out of her will, but lack of. The temptation may turn into an affair, while the lying and cheating gets serious. It’s more than difficult to be involved with two people at once, and one would make a big mistake in offering herself as subject of this emotional torture. You will loose something anyway, at some point, and it may hurt a thousand times more. Same goes for trying to escape the decision, and pretend not to see what’s going on, while continuing with the flirting thing after it has already shown obvious signs of becoming dangerous. Duplicity hurts. Lies hurt. And there are two, wait, no, three people you have to show respect to in this story: your lover, your “temptation”, and yourself.

As for my dear old friend I was telling you about, she somehow managed to keep the thrill and throw away the temptation. I guess she realised it wasn’t quite worthed, and I also believe that, having gone through this, the overall relationship with her boyfriend actually improved. There are moments when you need to get on the edge in order to better see what you’ve got and what you could loose. And these are the very moments when you start loving more.