Posted 11:33 AM by Blah blah

Here's my second plug for you to read Minnie (near Atlanta, a profound and eloquent Dr. Love if I ever saw one), Elen (with a journalist's background, she tries to adjust to married life in Austria from the Philippines), and Sharon (a chemist in Britain with a wry sense of humor).

Is This a Chick Blog?

This has become such a "chick blog" recently. You know, I could talk about business, politics, the World Cup, car maintenance, real estate, the Israeli suicide bombings, and all that other stuff too. But I am trying to write for the broadest audience, and the audience here seems to be mostly female. Plus, after digging deeper into more intimate subjects, shop talk---which I could do with my eyes crossed---seems cheaper, for some reason. Anyway, maybe you come here to get away from the pressures of the day for a few minutes. To relax and let your mind get a slow massage for a while. Think of Tiger Cafe as brain massage, and I as your masseur. And I'm not gay. Can you beat that? Didn't think so.

Without further ado, onward with the chick blog! From the book Why Can't I Fall in Love?...
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Why is it so hard to fall in love?...

- As a culture, we have become shallow.
We have lost our respect for depth, for truth and beauty. Our criteria for allowing ourselves to fall in love are based on superficial values that don't strike to our core. And in our shallowness we have become boring. We're bored with each other, bored even by ourselves, certainly bored with the whole dating ritual.

- Each of the two sexes has lost its sense of wonder about the other.
We have lost respect for the differences between men and women; at the same time, we have lost respect for the harmony that men and women are capable of achieving together. By becoming oh-so-familiar with each other, ironically, we have become oh-so-distant from each other. We have become brothers and sisters, not lovers.

- We have declared our independence from each other.
We shun the notion of need. Needing someone else---for love and support, for physical affection and emotional attention---has been reclassified as a bad thing, a sign of weakness. And in our society, showing signs of weakness, exposing our vulnerabilities, is a very bad thing.

- Our unwillingness to show weakness has robbed us of our innocence.
Another irony: though as a culture we're more willing and eager every day to bare all in every forum imaginable, from Calvin Klein ads and MTV videos to Jerry Springer romps, as individuals we've grown deathly afraid to go emotionally naked before each other....The innocence required to bare one's soul before another, one of our most valuable qualities, is now dismissed as naivete.

- We have become fiends of premature judgment, the sitting justices on the Supreme Court of Relationships.
We approach each encounter with the opposite sex with a list of nonnegotiable requirements. Fail to meet one item on the list? Next! And how did we grow so unforgiving? Because judgment, of course, is hard to resist as a short-term defense; it is the quickest and cheapest way to avoid the humiliation of being judged first ourselves.

- We have deluded ourselves into thinking we deserve the best relationship we can find.
You may be happy at work, satisfied with the station you've reached in life. And yet, ask yourself: Do you have the best job you could possibly have? Do you live in the best neighborhood in America? For that matter, are you the best person you know? We have forgotten that good---not better, not best---can be wonderful.

- We have come to view love as a luxury rather than a necessity.
Nice work if you can get it, but not worth any real sacrifice. Our parents understood the importance of marrying the right person even at the wrong time or even in the wrong place; today, on the other hand, we put the timing of our careers and education, and the place we want to live, well before romance and love.

- We love with our head rather than our heart.
We have become so "smart" about love and romance---thanks to magazine articles, books, tapes, lectures, and the collected street wisdom of the armies of singles who have gone before us---that intellect now rules over gut instinct. Our minds talk us out of relationships, with reason and logic, before a spark of passion can get ignited in our hearts.

- We have lost faith in the institution of marriage.
...The children of divorce approach marriage with all the enthusiasm of a visit to the dentist.

- We have become a disposable society.
...Issues that can't be resolved? Who has time? Time for a trade-in! Spouse putting on a little weight? Trade up! We have lost the willingness to accept flaws, to take responsibility for regular care and maintenance of each other.

- We have also become a distractible society.
Blame it on information overload, the quick-cut imagery of MTV, too many choices, too little time. We have lost the appetite for concentration; with so many stimuli floating around us, it can feel impossible to pay attention to one other person, much less to our own minds.

- We have pigeonholed the pursuit of love, made it a mere pastime.
We've penciled it in on our Day Planner: Next week I'll turn thirty; next year I'll be ready to fall in love. On alternate Tuesdays, between kick-boxing class and group therapy, we schedule blind dates. Rather than approaching love as an all-encompassing state of mind and heart, learning to build it from the inside out, extending one's love from oneself to family and friends and then to a lover, we treat it like a hobby, fitting it in where convenience allows.

In short, we have lost touch with the essential qualities that Adam and Eve learned in the Garden: comfort with our own nakedness, a respect for innocence, an appreciation of the pain that comes from loneliness, a sense of wonder, compatibility, selflessness, respect for the differences between the sexes, and an understanding that closeness comes from shared experience....

It will involve flying in the face of some of our strongest cultural currents. Yet those are the very currents that all too easily pull us into the sea of unhappiness. I am recommending that you abandon the deeply ingrained patterns that have deprived you of lasting love.
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