Love: Friend Or Foe?

And here we are in February! What does this mean? Valentine’s Day! As usual I’ve been thinking a lot on things (This is what I get for having too much free time on my hands).

Valentine’s Day is the day we celebrate our love towards our better half. It is a day where most people are happy for having someone to share their love. But what about those that don’t have love in their lives at this particular date? I dedicate this column to all of those that cannot bear the thought of Valentine’s Day and are tired of watching others publicly expressing their love. Come on, I am a hopeless romantic but I completely understand that some people strongly dislike this day, not because of what it represents but because it reminds them what they don’t have.

So first things first:

Check out the full article on Feb/March issue of G-Life Magazine pages 14-20.

Open Relationships: Lack Of Love Or Selflessness?

Throughout the centuries the core of relationships has remained pretty much the same: a loving commitment between two individuals who promised to love each other and share their lives till their deaths (this is the most romanticized version of relationships, I know).

If we go back in time, a loving relationship was only shared, publicly, between a man and a woman and when they got married the wife became the husband’s property. We can also discuss the arranged marriages which main purpose was to economically or politically benefit the families, but I am focusing on loving relationships between 2 individuals. Nowadays we see all different types of relationships: straight, gay, lesbian, transgender, etc. They might look different on a first glance but if there’s love the roots remain the same: loving one another so much they need to be together and vow to forever be together.

However a new type of relationships has become more “popular” over the past years: Open relationships. We have been hearing more about this, either portrayed on film or even among some of our friends. But how can we describe them?

Click here to read the entire article on G-Life January Issue Page 32!

Sometimes our heart plays with our mind and makes us suddenly feel sad...

Why is that?

Love or Lust At First Sight?

I’ve been thinking a whole lot these past days and one thing that really made me wonder was the “myth” of love at first sight. I would like to know who came up with that notion of falling in love at first sight. I mean the idea sounds lovely but let’s not fool ourselves, love at first sight is a myth. One can at the very least get infatuated at first sight. Come on love, LOVE is more than a first connection. Now lust is a totally different subject.

Lust at first sight I truly believe it exists. Come on, the human being is another animal in this planet. As an animal Man (and by saying man with capital M I mean mankind) has physical urges that are taken care of via sexual relations. Lust… lust is truly something that can happen at first sight anywhere you may be. It might be on the street, gym, etc, basically you are drawn to a person (let me say a man as an example) and your body responds to him just with one glance. You see a guy with a great body and cute face and the little head downstairs is telling you “I want that please”! And it can be also something simpler, maybe the eyes of someone is what tickles your fancy, but it all comes down to lust. Lust can exist without love but we can’t say the opposite (okay there might be love without lust but I am talking about the LOVE for someone that you can’t seem to be apart for too long and also that you can’t get enough of in the bedroom).

How can someone believe that love can arise from a first glance? I want to know that person’s definition of love. To me love is enjoying a person’s appearance, intellect, company, basically feeling that someone completes you in all ways both sexually and emotionally. And we can’t love someone that we haven’t even held a conversation before. How can you love someone you never met and never talked to? I am 100% a romantic guy and would love to fall in love at first sight. It would be so easy.  But no, life’s not easy, there’s no challenge in that. Loving involves a whole process that can take weeks, months, and maybe years to truly reach LOVE. Before all that we start a journey getting to know that person both physically and intellectually. In this getting to know process we have lust and passion, but not LOVE.

So let’s leave love at first sight for fairy tales, shall we?

Can one stay friends with someone they love?

Is it really possible to stay friends with someone you love? Can one really handle to know that the person they love no longer feels the same for them and is in love with someone else? That pain in the heart, like there's a hole in it, does it really go away? I don't know about you guys but it is sooooo hard to just be friends with someone you love. Being with that person and not be able to kiss him/her, listening to them talking about their new loved one... That hurts so much that sometimes it would be better if they didn't want to remain friends. I mean... You might really love someone so much at the point you just want them to be happy even if not with you. However don't tell me it doesn't hurt because it does. Our happiness is also important, we also deserve to be happy. The easy way is really not to stay in touch, however some of us aren't that strong. I'm not. For me it is better to stay friends than never seeing that person ever again.

 Maybe with time it gets easier to live with the fact that the relationship will never be more than friendship, I believe that to be true. Nevertheless we always have those weak moments where we remember the good happy days and realize we'll never have them, not with that person.. Why are the matters of the heart so complicated? Why is it always pain, either before or after the relationship? Sadly the expression no pain no gain has some truth to it. Anyway some of us might be a bit masochists since staying friends right after a break up is hard (for the one that is still in love). Don't worry my friends, things get better, they have to. I don't believe that God would want us to suffer.

Maybe the right person is still to come; maybe our soul mate is still out there. These words are just a quick pain relief from the reality that we are alone, with a void in our hearts. Maybe questioning why we're still alone, if we are the problem, what we could do to change... And so on. From personal experience I know that questioning will drive us mad, but some of us cannot stop questioning... I envy those that move on so easily, I don't mean they didn't feel love but for them it is somewhat easier to move on and just take the good out of all of it. The happy moments might have been a few but we should at least give credit that we had happy moments. Maybe they weren't as long as we wish them to be but they were, nevertheless, happy moments.

So is it possible to remains friends with someone you love? Well it all depends on the person and how the breakup went but I honestly think we can remain friends, maybe not as soon as wished but in the near end I think it is possible. If you love someone, even if they don’t feel the same for you, you will want them to be happy. Let's cherish the happy moments we spent with that person and hope for the best. Our time will come.

Relationships

Do you know one thing that upsets me? Those people that are in relationships and tell you’re better off. Whenever I would complain/bitch about not being in a relationship all my friends that were in relationships would just tell me that I was better off single. How come??? They claim to be happy and what not, and still say one is better off single than in a relationship? Am I the only one confused? All I can conclude about this is that they’re not as happy as they advertise or that there are still benefits on being on your own.

Single life can be somewhat of a care-free life, no worries about what the other person would think, no worries about hurting their feelings… just being free to do what we want and with anyone we want. As much as some people make me think that being single has all these benefits I still want a relationship. The human being wasn’t made to be on his own. It is built on all of us the need to share something with others, forgive me the cliché but… the need to be complete is innate on all of us. You all know those legends than explain how we all had 4 arms, 4 legs, 2 heads… and then we were broken apart and now face a lifetime to search for our lost soulmate. What happens to those that live an entire life without knowing love? Is it because their soulmate wasn’t on this earth? I believe one can love more than once in life however there’s always that one true love, the one that never leaves our heart and mind! So we can call that love our other half from those old legends. But now facing reality… a relationship can be somewhat of an exhausting experience for some, starting from the early stages of simply dating. Have you ever met someone that fit all of your “requirements” on a woman/man and then the cracks start to unveil? What happened to Mr./Mrs. Perfect? Well, pure and simply there’s no such thing as perfect!

That’s just a myth created by the eternal singles that set extremely high standards on the person they want but never get since does not exist in this world!! What about those people that say that want a relationship and are tired of just dating and want to settle down? Those seem to be great people, if we’re on the same page of course. However I’ve noticed that some of those that want to be in a relationship never experienced years without being in one. So one can assume they’re more in love with being in a relationship rather than being in love with the other one in the relationship. And what about those who say they’re not ready to be in a relationship but really care a lot for you? Ever met those? I’ve had my share of people like that, just stringing you along and make you believe they will commit but never do. What’s their problem? Why do people do that? I think they’re really mean because they know the other one is in love with them and waits for them to be ready to commit again but they really don’t want that. They just string them along, give them hope, take advantage of their feelings and then end it abruptly! Why??? Why?? Wouldn’t it be better just to come clean and say even though they care for them they just don’t want a relationship? That is so much more of a humane thing to do rather than just winding us up. I honestly believe they might have some feelings, but it is not fair for the other person to be fooled like this.

Talking about relationships really gives me a headache. It can be such a complicated thing sometimes. Something that is portrayed as a great thing can really make one feel extremely bad. I’ve always heard that it is best to suffer from love than never having love to suffer, or something like that. Well that can be true, but nobody wants to suffer, nobody wants the pain. Everybody wants and deserves happiness in this world. Why do we complicate things? Still there are those exceptions to all of this, those that really connect on a deep level and just cannot picture their lives without that person. And really relationships aren’t made to be difficult, we are the ones that make them difficult either due to trust issues or just simple personality clashes. So I just say that if we ever find ourselves in a situation like that we should all take some time and really think if it is really worth living this way just because of our feelings towards someone. Sometimes love isn’t enough to maintain a good relationship, sometimes it’s just not meant to be. And this is extremely hard to hear sometimes. Truth hurts! And yet we do it over and over again… Sometimes I wonder why we put ourselves through such pain and just come to think that we must enjoy inflicting pain on ourselves, otherwise we would learn not to do the same mistakes all over again. Some things are better said than done, right?

Problem With Being Original

We’re all immersed in a time where pretty much everything has been thought, has been either done on written about. That doesn’t leave much to our imaginations. Globalization is a great thing, still it makes hard for anyone to be 100% original. Just look at people like Lady Gaga, a singer that rose to stardom just a few years ago. Not even her name is 100% original, so this makes us think what is now original. The word has no longer the same meaning as it had before since now pretty much everything has been done. Now we call original the act of taking some ideas and put them together to create something new, however with not so original elements. Still what can we do? This is the world we live in now, we work with the things we can. So it is a bit hard for me to try and do something new with the writing since pretty much everything has been done. I’ve decided that I would pretty much write whatever I was thinking and then would see what can be done with this.