The seduction survey (see separate tab above) is now open. The aim of the survey is to try to understand what are the factors, tendencies and behaviours that are conducive to an active sex life in modern long-term romantic relationships. The survey is anonymous and takes about five minutes. I hope that the questions themselves will be useful to you as they cover a broad array of tendencies. Click here to take the
…Blog Posts
“Love, at the very heart of a couple relationship, is a state that is often far from realistic – it can be full of idealisation, blurred boundaries, fantasy and illusion”. Julie Friend
Finding who the other really is often brings surprises, some of which are gratifying whilst the others challenging. And so, it seems to me that love alone is not enough for a fulfilling relationship – what is required is that we recognise and respect a sense of purpose in the other that is beyond the relationship, that we cherish the other’s deepest values and dreams.
…In an article in the New York Times, the writer Jonathan Franzen wrote that “the prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking. And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. When you consider the alternative — an anesthetised dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived”.
I believe that the capacity to connect
…Every relationship has hidden promises within it, ones that are seldom talked about. During the lifetime of every relationship, some of these promises are kept and some are broken. If we don’t talk openly about the broken silent promises we risk behaving like two warriors fighting each other with invisible weapons.
…A quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be”.
…Polish Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska, writes in an essay on Great Love that “detached observers always ask what does she (or he) see in him (or her)? Such questions she writes “are best left in peace: great love is never justified. It’s like a little tree that springs up in some inexplicable fashion on the side of a cliff: where are its roots, what does it feed on; what miracle produces those green leaves? But it does exist
…This is a fun and creative video describing what happens in our bodies during sex.
…In his book Political Ideals (1917, 2008), the British Philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote “It is not finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active”.
This makes me think of a vision for a good relationship – any relationship. It is not about reaching s Utopian state, problems and tensions will most likely arise, but about approaching each other creatively and with hope, beyond the stereotypical views we so easily develop on the people so close to us.
Gilead
…“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain as he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought and could be”. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being”. John Joseph
…We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
E.E.
…