The Love Goddess Blog

ON THE JOY OF BEING SINGLE

     Before we move headlong into the high holy day of love, which of course is meaningful to your Love Goddess (mostly because my son, Cupid, is such a pivotal figure in it), I want to put on the breaks for a moment in honor of living single. I want to stress the joy of it, not only because there are now 90 million singles in your country—an unprecedented number—but because many of those 90 million are dating....but emphatically NOT in love. They will NOT have chocolates and baubles on Valentine’s Day. They will NOT feel Cupid’s dart urging them into love and commitment. And they will, some of them, feel bereft because the day has become such a huge celebration of love.

     They mustn’t feel left out.

     I’ve spent centuries trying to be free; trying not to be controlled. I’m a huge fan of women’s independence and hate seeing women panic because love, romantic love, is eluding them. (I once married the god of fire—not even remotely cute, that god—just so I wouldn’t be controlled!) To you independents I say, take the whole day—yes, Valentine’s Day—to celebrate the fact that you are free to write your own script; free of having to follow the narrative of any other woman; free to fall in love tomorrow-- or not to fall in love ever.

    This isn’t a booby prize, my lovely friends. Freedom is more and more important as you go along in life. And did you know that, despite the hype about happily ever after,  single women are far happier than most married women? In fact, the only other cohort as happy as single women is married men.....for, as you know, men thrive in marriage more than women do, and suffer more outside it, too. This isn't to say you can't feel free in a committed relationship, or in a marriage, but it's vastly different.

     So revel in these single days. Respect them and feel the entitlement to fun and exploration they afford you....the material, sexual, gustatory and sartorial freedom that you can only have when you’re autonomous, and which is a glorious state to be in in this particular culture. (As opposed to, say, Mumbai.)  Just think what your great-great grandmother would have given to be able to improvise her life rather than follow the script that was already written for her! Yes,  the love-and-marriage script is safe and often wonderful; but nowhere else on the planet can an unmarried woman be the narrator of her own deeply satisfying story as you down there in

America

can.

      So write that story for yourself. It’s your life! And on Valentine’s Day? Celebrate with your buddies. Or your mom. Or just go out to a restaurant and order your favorite food and drink, all by yourself. And think of me, your wildly autonomous Love Goddess, toasting you every step of the way.

     CHEERS, singles!   --TLG

 

Love Never Hurts Us. WE hurt us.

     The Goddess has taken yoga lessons for thousands and thousands of years. And with each teacher I learn something radical and wonderful.

     Ned, one of my all-time favorite teachers, stresses one theme again and again: Yoga is not work. It is not “exercise.” It is not about no-pain-no-gain, feel-the-burn working out; on the contrary, it’s about pleasure. “If it’s not pleasure,” Ned says, clearly referring to other things as well as to yoga, “don’t bother with it.” Ned teaches this pleasure principle not only because he hates exercise but because, after fifty years of doing yoga, he hates the idea that we might hurt ourselves and then say, “Yoga hurt me.” Yoga never hurts you, he says; you hurt yourself by pushing too hard. You push too hard because you feel defective, flawed, fat, unfit, whatever, and so you think, “I’ve gotta work out like crazy today to be BETTER.”

         Ned believes we’re already perfect, and that Yoga offers us the opportunity to experience our perfection. Not in a goofy, blissed out way (although sometimes that, too). The poses, thanks to the ancient wisdom that created them, allow us to feel the energy, the antidepressant energy, we already have in our bodies, but that sometimes just needs to be freed. Not by killing ourselves. Just by noticing it. Helping it course through us…but gently.

       And breathing with it. The word “conspire” means “To breathe with.” Isn’t this the best possible lesson about love? That all you have to do is breathe with it? To conspire with your lover to have fun together? To be conspirators in the art of pleasure? To paraphrase Ned, love doesn’t hurt us. We hurt ourselves when we do the feel-the-burn exercise of knocking ourselves out to prove to ourselves we’re worth being loved, or to prove ourselves to our lovers. Nothing needs to be proven—it’s already good enough (notice I didn’t say perfect); and if we can go with that, a whole lot of unpleasurable things vanish.

       This Valentine’s Day, as everyone makes a run for the stores, please remember that you don’t have to prove anything. You don’t have to be pleasing. And once you feel this freedom, you won't require your lover to prove anything or be pleasing, either. Just be together, if you can. Breathe with each other. Conspire to do whatever feels good together, even if it’s nothing at all, and just feel the pleasure of it.

        ---TLG

Ten Days Left to Rethink Valentine's Day

   Saks Fifth Avenue has sent your Goddess its Valentine’s Day page, as have all the other stores, showing gifts to give my Valentine.  On this page here is a Morgan Cycle Retro Scooter; a Victorinox Swiss Army Watch; a Bowers & Wilkins Zepplin IPOD speakers; Mariebelle Vanity Purse Chocolates. Does Jove want any of this stuff? I ask him.

    “He picked up his thunderbolt and the heavens shook with lightening and thunder. "Does this stuff make you as tired as it does me?” he shouted grumpily.

    "Yes and no," I said as I so often say when he makes that particular statement. I’m indeed tired of stuff. But on the other hand, hey, I love stuff.

     But right now my feelings about stuff are so ambivalent….doesn’t all this stuff smack of just what the culture is suffering from—too much irrelevant, unneeded, drummed-up-to-surprise-you-with-little-promise-of-pleasure STUFF?

    I have an idea.

    Ditch the stuff. For Valentine’s Day. All of it. Even the chocolates and flowers. Don’t buy a thing except some art supplies. Then tell your lover you don’t want anything at all except a love letter that he makes and creates, and that you’ll do the same and you’ll exchange cards over a lovely dinner. (Okay, you go out for dinner. But that’s not the same as buying STUFF.) It can’t be a love letter you or he buys, with a maudlin or cute message provided by Hallmark, but a love letter made and written by him for you and by you for him. You make up the terms. My friend Michael  suggests that it be one thing each of you did or said this last  year that meant a lot. That’s what I’m doing with Jove. He did something s meaningful that I even can tolerate that thunderbolt he keeps with him all the time.  

      And then, once you name the one thing (like, say, that he called when it was snowing to make sure you got out of the driveway; or that she drank, on a dare, four beers without stopping….whatever), you have to articulate why that one thing was so meaningful. That’s the hard part. Excavating the feeling, and then the words, that made that private part of you deep inside, usually not available for articulation, say, Yeah: That’s My Guy. Can you imagine how good he’ll feel hearing how he succeeded so brilliantly in making you love him—even if he did so only once this year?

    Now that’s romantic. That’s saying, Hey, lover, you’re the best

    So much better than stuff. 

TLG

Uh-Oh, Valentine's Day is 11 days away.....

        I, The Love Goddess, am not a lover of Valentine's Day. For one thing, my son is Cupid, and I'm not fond of all the little cherubic pictures of him with stupid little arrows in his quiver. He's a much more handsome young man than Hallmark thinks he is, and, well, just imagine having YOUR kids depicted as a chubby little creature in a diaper. That said, my more pressing concern is all my darling lovers down there who are worried about Valentine's Day the way they worry about Christmas. What should I get her? What's he going to bring me? How much will it cost? Are chocolates okay?

      My friend Andrew, who lives in San Francisco, tells me of a woman he once went out with whom he took out on Valentine's Day, arriving with flowers and taking her to a lovely restaurant. He was proud of his evening plans and sure he'd please her. But no. She was mad from the moment he picked her up. "Why didn't you send flowers to my OFFICE?" she complained as he handed her a dozen roses at her door. To her, the point of flowers were to impress her coworkers. For him, a rose was a rose was a rose--and far more romantic when presented in private. You know how I feel about expectations--how they're the death knell of real romance.

     Dear ones, don't get into the commercial part of Valentine's Day. It's a holiday that takes advantage of my good name and my son's, too. The Love Goddess is a far, far better woman (as Cupid a far, far better boy) than anything Hallmark can devise. So, listen: Tomorrow we'll talk about some really romantic things to do for Valentine's Day--"romantic" as defined by me, the real thing, not by either Hallmark or Godiva.

     TLG

  

DEAR GODDESS: DOES EVERY WOMAN FALL IN LOVE?

     A reader who says she has been in four serious relationships, but none of them totally satisfying, asks, “Are there some women who never fall in love?”

      Of course there are. And while they don’t want to admit it, some women have needed to claim they’re in love or have had to convince themselves they’re in love in order to have the marriages or families they yearn for. Some women have fallen in love fleetingly; some have spent their lives fantasizing about an unrequited love. The variations of what we call “love” are endless, and being IN love is not everyone’s birthright. People marry—and I’ve studied this—for reasons as varied as wanting to build character, to wanting to pass on a particular religion. In fact it is only recently that love—certainly being IN love—is considered a prerequisite for marriage. For centuries, women have gotten married and you might well ask, as Tina Turner did, What’s love got to do with it? 

       “Being in love”—however it’s defined-- is surely an experience only some of us have—and not always so happily.  Many people experience it as something akin to, say, cholera—a deadly illness, something that makes them dizzy, nauseas, crazy, sleepless….Thanks, but do we all want this?

       Some do, some don’t. Some never expect it. Think of Charlotte Lucas, dear friend of Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, who decides to accept the marriage offer of the loathsome Mr. Collins—an offer made three days earlier to her friend Elizabeth. While

Elizabeth

refused him in horror,

Charlotte

accepts without skipping a beat. In love? Hardly. But she tells

Elizabeth

:

     “I am not romantic, you know; I never was. I ask only a comfortable home; and considering Mr. Collins’s character, connections, and situation in life, I am convinced that my chance of happiness with him is as fair as most people can boast on entering the marriage state.”

     Isn’t it heavenly that you can have serious relationships, decide they’re not satisfactory, and move on—without marrying an odious Mr. Collins? Isn’t it wonderful that you can ponder the question of love—but not feel unbearable societal pressure to experience it? Isn’t it fantastic that you can be happy without ever falling in love?

      And you can.  

     There was a time when a young woman was doomed to poverty and dull spinsterhood if she didn’t marry; and so a woman like Charlotte Lucas never felt she had a choice. She had to marry. So she married without love.

      For those who fall in love, bravo: They have a life experience that they wouldn’t want to have missed. But you are just as lucky to have a life that allows you joy and happiness and plenitude without it.

       TLG     

 

THE PHOTOS I'D LIKE TO HAVE SEEN

     in yesterday's post (sorry for the layout; the blog software didn't provide paragraphs...i threw out the machine!), I pointed out that the photographs accompanying an article on women's desire in The New York Times were all of women. They looked desirable, but had little to do with what women desire. For that, according to the piece itself, the photos should have been of men. Men's faces thrown back in ecstasy, perhaps. Men's stomachs and chests. Not women's.

      Freud said women's desire was "a dark continent." No, it is a continent obscured by the insistence of one point of view over another. Unfortunately, that point of view is not women's.

     TLG

Women's desire....oops, or is it men's desire?

I love reading articles on female desire, because of course I’m the Love Goddess and want to encourage pleasure, and women’s pleasure has remained more elusive over the centuries than men’s. Haven’t we all spent lifetimes reading “What Men Want” and obsessing over it? (I’ve been pleasing Jove now for thousands of years.) So yesterday’s New York Times Magazine cover story, “What is Female Desire?” looked promising, as once again we try to answer the question Freud deemed impossible: What do women want?. The “postfeminist generation of researchers” busily “discovering things Freud could never have imagined” looked exciting. The prospect of men now starting to obsess over what pleases US was magnificent. And then, and then…..there it was, right on the cover: The picture of a woman’s face apparently experiencing desire. And four more photos inside, again, either of a woman’s face or her body. So before we applaud these postfeminist discoveries about our desires, I’d like to offer a plain old feminist discovery of my own, and I want my darlings down there on earth to listen up, because it’s important. Whose point of view are we witnessing when we see these five photos of women supposedly feeling desire? Certainly not a woman’s. No, we get no sense, in a story where the subject is women, of what a woman sees, what she imagines, what she desires! See? Once again, we’re stuck being seen, looked at through the male gaze, in this case the eyes of the (male) photographer. We are merely imagined by that photographer, in the familiar open-mouthed, sexy-to-men, desirable state that has characterized men’s fantasies of women’s desire for centuries. So the pictures illustrate not what a woman wants, but a male fantasy of what men want a desiring woman to look like—which, may I say, even the article’s contents suggest is NOT what she looks like and certainly not what she feels. Notice the shot of the woman’s soft belly and curved thighs: Please, ladies, for the sake of our sanity and our children’s understanding of love, look at this photo shoot and ask yourselves: Who wants what here? Who’s desiring whom? As a young friend said to me, “I hate to say it, goddess, but isn’t this, um, objectification? Yes. Yet again. And if the big question, the one Freud was stumped by and felt couldn’t be answered, What Do Women Want? is only obscured yet again by men’s desire, we have gotten nowhere—despite postfeminism. Young women continue to have to see themselves through the male gaze, looking as men apparently would like to see them, in a state men have decided is women’s sexual arousal. No wonder women have had a hard time expressing what they want! Photographs accompanying an article are important. They tell us what’s being seen and whose point of view is considered important. they also suggest what we're supposed to feel when we see the photos and read the story. Here, when the subject of the story is women, but the point of view is men’s, the editors are continuing not only the unconscious and pervasive objectification of women that old-time feminists fought so hard to end, but adding to the confusion so many women feel when they try to express what they want. TLG

Say it. "I'm really, really sorry!"

   What has happened down there on your planet--doesn't anybody know how to apologize for wrongs they've done? Here's Bernard Madoff, who's ruined peoples lives; and government officials who remain willfully, stubbornly unaccountable for their unthinkable, ruinous actions--refusing to offer even the smallest statement of regret, let alone to acknowledge wrongdoing.

     I know families and friends who have hurt each other and don't speak for 20 years.

      Not apologizing may well be dumbest, stubbornest, stupidest insult to love in the world.

      I don't mean the new form of "apology"--"If I hurt anyone, I regret it"--a sentence structure that suggests only that the hurt party is oversensitive, and that hurting party is being grudgingly magnanimous: "Jeez, you're sure touchy, aren't you? Who knew?"

      No, my loved ones, no. For the sake of relationships big and small, whoever you are, you MUST acknowledge wrongdoing. In the name of love.

       So: An apology has at least two components: an acknowledgment of what you did (state it: "I'm sorry I was so harsh yesterday"), and an explanation of why YOU KNOW it was offensive ("I know how it feels to be ridiculed like that.") A better apology--one that will be accepted and appreciated (and gratefully remembered) adds your  intention not to do it again. "I was horrible. I really have to stop that."

      But watch how one woman ruined it with her lover: "I was horrible," she said, "but you were talking so much…."  Apology sabotaged. She rekindled the original slight, adding to it, as if she just couldn't help her behavior; she was rescuing him from being a deadly bore.) You never bring in the other's behavior. Not during your apology. "I'm sorry" is never followed by, "but you were….."

       Any apology worth its salt takes full responsibility for the behavior and doesn't recount what caused it. It's a clear, focused admission of guilt--WITH NO JUSTIFICATION FOR IT.  Clean. Heartfelt.

       Ah, but the state-of-the art apology separates the women from the girls. It seeks reparation. It is hellbent on fixing what's broken--even if the breakage isn't entirely your fault. It's lavish, generous, afraid of nothing, not even groveling, and wants the good feelings back beyond all things. It is to "Hey, I'm sorry, okay?" what a long passionate affair is to a brief, unfortunate one-night stand.

       A friend of mine did something hurtful to her lover, and he moaned about it for weeks. Instead of saying, "I told you I was sorry. What do you want from me?" she said, very seriously, Tell me what I can do. I will take all the time in the world to do it. Please allow me to get rid of your anger, which I understand and deserve…..but please help figure out what to do."

         I won't tell you what he came up with. Suffice it to say they're still very much together.

         With love to my earthly lovers,

         TLG

         

     

      

JUST ONE NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION--AND ONE ONLY

It's New Year's Day and I've been resisting the RESOLUTIONS blog because I so hate the idea of suggesting, along with the rest of the world, that you improve yourself. Good God, isn't that what we spend most of our time doing? Who wants to fail yet again?

          So, and I've thought hard about this: My only One New Year's resolution suggestion is one that promises to make you happier--as opposed to better. 

            It's simple, it's hard, and it will change your life.

            Resolve not to repeat familiar complaints to people who already know what they are. Couples, lovers, families, and friends fight endlessly about the same things--money, housework, sex, kids, whatever. To wit: My own god, for example, throws our expensive Wusthof knives in our heavenly dishwasher, knowing that they're not supposed to go in and, more to the point, that I hate it when they go in because I don't want to have to replace them anytime soon. Moreover, I have asked him not to, maybe a thousand times. (Yes, I know, some of you are thinking I should kiss his godly feet for loading the dishwasher at all.)  Be that as it may, I ask him not to put the knives in, all the time. I take them out in the morning and say, "I asked you not to put these in the dishwasher," and he says, "Huh? Oh. Yeah. I thought if they went on the top shelf it would be okay." It's a dull little routine.  

              This year, 2009, I will say nothing. I have resolved now that if the knives wear out, or dry out, I will buy new ones. On his bill. (It's OUR bill, but you get the gist: I've resolved the issue in my head ahead of time, so there's a genuine solution to the knife problem, if not the compliance problem.)

               Your guy or your friends or your parents or your kids EXPECT you to say what you always say. So stop with the "Please put the toilet seat down," or "Don't leave the car keys in your pocket where I can't find them," or "If you're coming to my house for dinner, would you kindly next time bring a bottle of wine?" or, in my case, carping about the knife thing. Decide what your fall-back position is (keep another set of keys where only you can find them; stock more wine. For me, it's a nice catalogue with wildly expensive, top-of-the-line, chefs'-favorite knives.) 

           You're wondering why people who love you don't comply with your requests. Yes, well. Hmmm. Do you have a coupla hours to talk about passive aggression? And a few more to discuss OUTRIGHT aggression?, and about being set up to be a nag?

               Ah, but my lovely darlings, with last year's insanity in Iraq and in the market and with jobs and global warming, we're way above all this lightweight silliness by now, right? (No, we're not, but we shall pretend, in the name of taking the higher ground and in the name of our own wellbeing and happiness.) It's incredibly disarming to go on about your business and not mention what you're so used to mentioning and he's so used to hearing. Step out of the setup. Stifle it for a month and he'll be amazed. Stifle it for six months, and he'll probably put the toilet seat down. Stifle it all year and he'll probably do all the stuff you've ever asked him to do. Studies prove that if you change one half of a two-sided interaction, the whole interaction changes.

              Try it. And let me know. I will, of course, keep you abreast of the  knife thing.

        

               HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!

               TLG