Marry a man who loves you more than you love him.

My mother once told me:

When you hold a man’s hand and he makes your heart beat faster and he makes you feel giddy and excited, walk away from this man. He is not the man for you. If you hold a man’s hand and he makes you feel warm, safe and secure, hold onto him. This is the man you are going to marry.

I was 16 when my mother told this to me. At that time, I thought it made absolutely no sense and I told my mother that she was insane if she thought I was going to be some mechanical, unfeeling being who would pick the “safe” choice over the great love affair that burns with a passion deep enough to consume us.

I have always been someone who gets carried away by her feelings. When my mother said that I should marry a man who loves me more than I love him, I thought it an impossible feat. By nature, I have always been the one who over-invests in a relationship and thus, I felt that I would always be the one who will love the other person more.

But as I grew up, I began to tear the veil from my eyes and see that love is not just some Walt Disney movie with a fairytale ending. Love is hard. Relationships are hard. We do not always get what we want and often, a burning passion is not enough to make a relationship work.

The other day, a friend and I were having our weekly lunch at Uni, and the topic of love came up. She mentioned that unlike her previous relationship, she felt no great overwhelming passion for her current boyfriend and it was definitely a case of her boyfriend loving her more than she loved him. Yet, it felt good. She was learning to love him more each day and she felt it was something that would last longer.

And she was right…
Somehow, along the way, we grew up and so did our ideas of love. When we were young and feckless, we thought love had to be the kind that encompassed great passion and had to be highly dramatic and we were all entranced with the idea of “as long as we love each other, everything will be fine”.

Things change…and suddenly passion was no longer desired but the feeling of security was.

My parents did not marry because they were in love. Like many of their generation, they got married because it was time and both were suitable parties. Yet, in 32 years of marriage, they have learnt to love each other and are comfortable with each other.

My father is not a romantic man. He does not extend romantic gestures towards my mother and yet, it is in the little things that he does for her everyday that shows how much he loves her. My parents like to go for a morning walk, time permitting, around the Botanic Gardens. On one such occasion, my mother’s shoelace came loose and my father, a prominent business man and 10 years her senior, squatted down in public at a traffic light to re-tie them for her because he knew she had a knee problem that would have prevented her from tying them herself. When my parents go on trips, my father often leaves my mother to sleep in while he goes out to buy her breakfast.

My mother is not big on expressing sentiments either. Once, my mother came to visit me in Australia, and I asked her if she would miss my father. Her response was a vehement “No, of course not! I won’t miss the snoring!!!” But her actions said otherwise. My mother would call my father at least once a day while she was in Australia to check in on him. And I realized that despite my father’s frequent traveling, my parents did not spend more than 24 hours apart without at least one phone call.

When I was younger, I told myself that I would not be like my parents and that I would marry for love. Now that I am older (and hopefully wiser), I realize that what I really want is a marriage like my parents; One where we are comfortable with each other and learn to love each other more each day.

A relationship that starts at the peak with an all-consuming passion has a higher risk of burning out quickly. It is my belief that a relationship that starts on a strong foundation of moderate love, mutual respect, shared beliefs and tolerance has a greater potential of growing better each day…just like fine wine.

As the saying goes…

I love you more today than I did yesterday, but not as much as tomorrow.

i love you so much, i never want to fall in love with you...ever

I love you so much that I never want to fall in love with you…ever.

I confess to being incapable of truly loving any man up until now. My past relationships, in all honesty, have been based on the (desperate) need to feel loved and not surprisingly, have ended in disaster. You could say that on some level, I have sabotaged all my relationships because they started fundamentally for the wrong reasons.

Love comes in many forms and often one tends to think of a love between a man and woman as one that can only possibly bear fruition in the form of a romantic love. I do not doubt that a man and woman can share a truly platonic relationship but that it is often rare. In most circumstances, the common belief is that friendship to a BGR is the natural progression between a relationship between a hetero man and woman.

I have been blessed in that I found that rare friendship between a man and a woman where the relationship is purely platonic. Although we started on rocky beginnings, our friendship managed to ride out the wave of awkwardness that came in the form of unrequited love in the nascent stages.

It started as a crush so obvious that even he knew that I had feelings for him. But I was lucky that he was a true friend in persisting with the friendship and I am glad that I made the decision to be friends.

I have always been someone who puts family first, followed by friends then, relationships. As much as I’ve been hurt badly in relationships, I’ve always been able to pick myself up and move on. The one thing that truly fells me is the betrayal of friendship; the pain of it kills me more than a failed relationship would.

In any case, I have been truly blessed in my friendship with him. It was only after he left for good, that I truly realized just how much he meant to be. He is, to me, the only man who I’ve ever truly loved. One I (literally) cried myself sick over.

For the 1.5 years that I’ve been doing my masters’, I’ve complained deeply about my lack of a boyfriend and it was only on the night before his departure that I realized that I did have a boyfriend, we just did not have a conventional relationship that had a sexual side to it.

We often went out on a one-on-one basis, in fact, we often eschewed group social events with many of our social friends in favor of spending quality personal time together. He was the one I turned to when I was upset. Even at three in the morning, I knew I could call him and talk and even drive over to his place and cry on his shoulder. He tells me things that he never shares with any of our other friends. He calls for no reason at all, other than just to chat. He makes me do crazy things I would normally never do.

One of our favorite things to do is to have DVD nights. We’d lie on my (our) couch – it’s a long story but the gist is that he claims joint custody of it – and watch DVDS till late. In between, we’d break and have long chats. I could lie on him while watching DVDs and not feel any sexual tension at all. We share the intimacy of a couple who have been married for 50 years without feeling as if the other is “making a move”. He holds my hands publicly and around the uni when I’m cold with no worry if anyone gets the wrong idea. Why? Because we know that we’re truly friends and nobody else’s opinion matters.

And that is why I never ever want to fall in love with him…ever. I want the love I have for him to last forever. I never want to risk losing it with a relationship that I cannot guarantee will last.

A Woman's Downfall

A woman's downfall is that she will always be felled by her emotions. From what I see amongst most of my friends and acquaintances, the girl will always love the guy more than he loves her. A woman can say that she will not allow her emotions to rule her but she is lying or living in denial. At the end of the day, she will not be able to separate the emotional from the physical and she will end up hurt.

A woman's tears can make a man feel bad but it cannot guarantee that it will make him do something to make up for the tears he has caused her. I remarked to a friend that it takes a right woman to change a man but she corrected my assumption with the addition that it takes the right woman to make a man OPEN to changing.

And I wonder how long I'd last in this game. Because I think at the end of the day, my heart's too soft to play the consummate player's game.

I was almost happy again...

There is a certain macabre pleasure in languishing in your own private den of misery. One's id tends to stoke the fires of self-pity and encourages the feelings of "poor me" within. It is a twisted proposition of the inability to be happy unless one is unhappy.

Is it selfish to dwell on one's petty problems? To delve into the minutiae and cling onto every little bit of resentment felt, conceived or otherwise? Given the greater issues of the world at stake, are we perhaps a bit too self-indulgent in thinking only of the self and the now?

If you were the one allowed to issue the choices, then, perhaps you would be better in control. But if you were on the other end of the short stick, and been issued the choice... then perhaps you're not quite as well off as you wish you could be.

A little drama to spice up a mundane life: It's all a tangled web of confusion, uncertainty and yet, that tiny bit of excitement and anticipation is enough to keep you going back for more. Unconsciously, you allow yourself to fall into a vicious cycle.

Till it all unravels...

When it happens, do you play the cinematic “hero” and drink till you forget or will you accept that it is ok to be content with an unassuming life?