The Love Goddess Blog

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

On Turning TO Your Lover

    I'm struck by some words the Reverend Joseph Lowery uttered in his  inauguration address today.  "Turn to each other," he said, "not on each other."  How this point of politics resonates in the world of love!

     If you've ever been involved in an affair with a narcissist--and I mean a real narcissist, not merely a self-centered person--you know what it feels like to be turned on, not turned to. You know what it means to be treated without empathy--that sympathetic understanding so vital to friendship and love. Your actions, your feelings, your every move is thrown at you as though you had the worst intentions; as though your feelings were nothing more than an assault to this person; as if, in fact, nothing you feel or do can be comprehended in a spirit of love. That's, in fact, the core definition of a narcissist: A person with no empathy. A person who feels only his own feelings--never yours. Which is why being "loved" by one is such a lonely, alienating experience. The narcissist reads you as his enemy; and your actions as enemy fire.

      As you magnificent Americans pull together today in a way this ancient goddess hasn't seen in a thousand years, remember that you do so because your new President, Barack Obama, has consistently made clear that he has empathy--for those who govern differently, for those who don't agree with him, for those who don't agree with or even like each other, for those who even bitterly oppose and have attempted to hurt him. His empathy towards all those people is what has made Americans feel freed to turn to each other, not on each other.

      It's his appeal to our "better angels" and it can last. But only if we learn how to bring those angels into our own homes. My grandmother (a goddess who knew even more than I about love!) used to say about my grandfather whenever we were mad at him, "You don't understand. He didn't mean to be hurtful. He's just, well, an angry god at the moment." Her empathy for him, her often infuriating insistence that he meant well even if we didn't see it that way (and even if he perhaps didn't mean so well!), was a generosity born of her desire to understand him. She really felt for him; felt what he was feeling when he did what he did and said what he said. Once you have that kind of empathy for a lover, you never again feel the desperate loneliness of being willfully misunderstood. What therapists call "conflict resolution" becomes easy because you're on each other's team. You can be mad as hell, but empathy makes you inclined to turn to one another.

       I'm not stretching this connection between love and politics. Uniting as a nation means a consistent, difficult sympathy and generosity--an empathy that's a mere momentary fantasy if we can't show the empathy toward one person.   

 TLG  

         

TERMS OF ENDEARMENT: WHEN TO CALL HIM "HONEY"

         It's the goddess's birthday today, and my beloved Jove has called me my favorite endearment, "Darling", at least six times already. I love it. Such a wonderful, grownup term, "darling" is, kind of 1930s--something Fred Astaire would say to Ginger Rogers, or  Laurence Olivier to anyone lucky enough to be on stage with him.  I can't imagine anyone else saying it with such ease.

      So you want to know: When does a man first call you "darling"?  Usually, in bed. The guy who up till then called you by your given name, now holds you close and says, "Baby," or "Honey," or, in my case, "Darling." Then, mysteriously, wondrously, it sticks. He phones and says, "Hey, Sweetheart, it's me….." and you know that your own name no longer sounds intimate enough, possessive enough. It's become too formal; too public.

    But the name only a lover has the right to utter is not to be introduced too soon. Never force it. Premature coziness can make an otherwise lovely person suddenly skittish and scared; like discussing wedding plans can. Better to keep calling him "Robert" for a year or two and sound too formal than to introduce a "Honey" that makes him feel he's being swarmed by the whole hive. The syllables of the endearment must run off your tongue with ease, organically, as they say; and it must feel like the right one, not a global term like the "sweetie" you say to your girlfriends; nor, if you’re a guy, a "babe" that a construction worker might say to all women passersby. Remember that any pet name you use is only as adorable as you are to him--and vice versa. If you hate the term "Tootsie" and you suddenly hear it, he's in danger of being hated, too.

     Endearments are utterly, totally, irrevocably personal. Not to be used lightly.    

     So you've settled on one? Keep it to yourself. Sexual endearments ("Love Dart" comes to mind) are only darling to the two of you; keep your friends out of it. Ditto cutesy endearments ("Honeybunch"? "Lambiekins"?). Ditto suggestive ones ("Pussy willow"). Ditto ones that requre explanation ("Toe girl." Like, do you really want to know?)

         An endearment used thoughtlessly can actually endanger your affair. Don't try to stake a claim with ANY endearment too soon. It signals bad taste as surely as it can signal welcomed intimacy. It shows that you've entered the secret, wonderful world of couples. And, like all good things, it can wait. Let it do so until you actually have entered that world--and not a moment sooner.

       TLG  

Sexual Gossip: Please, Don't Tell Me!

     A woman I met at a party--call her Wendy--turned to me, after I said that she seemed happy with her new date, and said, "He's cute. But he has a penis the size of my PINKY."

    Goodness. What does a goddess say to that? Was I to press for more details ("Awesome. And is that working for you?") or to give the kind of advice she seemed to want ("Well, I'd just shoot the guy.")?

     If a goddess spoke that way of a god and he got heavenly wind of it she'd be turned into a tree fast as you can say "pinky" and she'd wish for all eternity that she'd have shut up.

     And what was I to do when the cute man returned with her drink: Stare at his crotch?

      Really, ladies. We all do our share of sexual gossiping. But ethically, don't you owe more to your date than to another guest you just met? What if Mr. Pinky said to the guy at the bar, "She's okay, I guess, but she's flat."

     Loose talk about a lover is not only tacky, but it can so backfire. Talking about your sex life, as a goddess friend of mine found out after loose talk about her romps with Bacchus, can actually turn others on….and then, pinky or no,  send them straight into bed with your supposedly useless date.

     Some people talk too much to get reassurance("Don't worry so much about the sex. Worry about his kindness"). Others, to feel in control, or to convey a sense that they're not as invested in the relationship as they appear. Others, merely to be cute. But watch: Because such confidences are usually rooted in fear, they both undermine the man AND the confidante. That would be you.  If she says those things about a lover, what will she say next about you?

   And what if she ends up marrying Mr. Pinky? How will she feel about having every woman staring at her husband? Can't you see the thought bubbles: Did she mean when erect? Or flaccid?

    And another thing. Wendy knows she said too much, right? She knows I was uncomfortable. So guess who I became to her? The Goddess Who Knows Too Much. And people get uncomfortable with people they blabbed to and, humiliated at last, doom them--as Wendy doomed me--to the ranks of the people they embarrassed themselves in front of an need to avoid.

     Keep quiet about your lover. So you and your friends can look one another--and, more to the point, him--in the eye.   

    TLG

THE GODDESS ON GOOD GRAMMAR

  The goddess is grumpy about grammar. Yes, grammar. What does this have to do with love? Follow me here for a minute.

   In a riveting and potentially tragic piece on the front page of the New York Times this morning,  a story links an Austrian banker named Mrs. Kohn to Bernard Madoff--and states that she is missing, possibly in hiding from billionaire Russian investors, whom she apparently unwittingly led astray and into the giant global Ponzi scheme Madoff initiated.

    "Mrs. Kahn's background could not have been more different than that of Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villebuchet, the French aristocrat who committed suicide in New York last month after his firm, Access International, lost $1.4 billion," the story says. And indeed Mrs. Kohn attracted a different kind of investor to her funds--banks, rather than kings and princes. But the sentence should read, "different from," not "different than."

     And in a terrific column by Maureen Dowd on Caroline Kennedy, in which she asks the question, Why, when we want so much to change the ways of Washington, are we suddenly asking Caroline Kennedy to be the kind of politician we essentially hoped to vote OUT?  "She's smart, cultivated, serious, and unpretentious," Dowd writes. I agree with everything she says, including her vetting of Ms. Kennedy as just the sort of person we should be welcoming--but the word is cultured, not cultivated. Ms. Kennedy is not a plant.

     I have noticed an increase in bad grammar in our most illustrious papers and magazines. I've seen, in The New York Times, the phrase "myriad of" in editorials recently--a piece of faulty grammar that would send anyone educated in the English language--at least up here in the Pantheon--up the wall. It doesn't upset the Times's editors, evidently.

     And that won't do.

     Why is this important? Why speak well, when there's so much else to focus on? And what has grammar got to do with love, or sex, or dating--the goddess's natural subjects?

      Speaking well, knowing how to express yourself properly, is one of few ways we let each other know who we are and what matters to us. Language matters a great deal in every relationship we have. It's hard enough for lovers and friends to communicate to one another. If our language deteriorates, if we accept the slow erosion of proper speech and writing, we erode--even if slowly--one of our few and most precious vehicles for communicating.

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

OF NICE AND MEN, PART 2

      So let's get back to nice men. Not because it's a charitable act to like nice men rather than their "cooler" contemporaries--on the contrary; it's totally self-serving. How many women can claim to feel what my friend Amy feels:  "I'm going out with a man who listens to me. He notices what matters to me. He pays attention. I know that sounds, well, basic, but it's a first for me. And he acts on those feelings and preferences! Being observed so tenderly has made me feel…cherished."

           Do you feel cherished, all ye who are dating men whom everyone calls "hot" and"sexy"--or do you feel a little nervous? Isn't hot and sexy meaningless unless he makes YOU feel fabulous? Do you believe the price of being with a worthy lover is to be forever walking on eggshells?

        If that's what your experience is, then I urge you to go against type; to try a another kind of man. A man who makes you feel good.  Enough with trying to extract kindness from a withholding man! Enough with hiding your real self because you feel "too big" or "too loud" or too something with a man. Enough with feeling you have to hold yourself back, or lose weight, or keep your opinions to yourself, lest you …what? Lest you overwhelm him.    

     Please! 

     Listen, we learn early that we're supposed to be the guardians of relationships; the fixers and softeners and smoothers--the tamers of men. This is an old role, which I can explain in another blog.  I remember working so hard, years ago, to get a young, very handsome god to trust me, that all I could think of was, "Yes, he's withholding. Yes, he's suspicious. Yes, he doesn't see that I'm really a good person because he thinks all women are terrors and man-eaters…..but I"LL PROVE TO HIM THAT I'M TRUSTWORTHY." And there, my friends, is the problem. A nice man never assumes you're untrustworthy! He gives you the benefit of the doubt--just as you give him the benefit of the doubt.

       And a smart woman doesn't fall for the guy who makes her prove she's worthy (or kind, or loving, or whatever); because such a guy has a need to great to fill. And you, sadly, will simply fall into the abyss of that need.

       Here's the acid test: If a man is nicer to everyone else than he is to you (and there are many incredibly attractive men whom everyone adores, who are kinder to their public than to their lovers)--then, my dear ones, you're in trouble. A man who blames you for his problems is a man you will have a nightmarish time with. But a man who may blame others, or the world, or his parents, or himself for his troubles--but knows you're the best thing he ever met--now there's a guy you have a chance with. Because? Because the person he loves is the person he's nicest to. Which is the only way love can work. A relationship is a commitment, right? And if he isn't committed to being sweet to you, then what's a nice girl like you doing in a place like that?

      Happy New Year, dearest earthly lovers--may you find love in abundance in 2009.

      TLG