Month: July 2020

Don’t Be Afraid – Show Your Love

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The opposite of war is love and the opposite of love is not hate, it is fear.

What is love? Love is the basis for a healthy relationship, and every healthy relationship is a garden, a mystery that happens, for example, between two people, a garden that depends on both people to flourish. In this encounter where a new universe is created, in that encounter where phenomena happen and where both people are exchanged and transformed. This is a lot easier than it sounds when you understand love, what it does for you and how one embraces it inside the context of a relationship.

When two people meet they are two separate worlds, how they meet and if they hit it off is something sometimes tremendously complex. Each person is a world unto themselves, a complex mystery throughout their past and their finite future.

When we enter into a relationship, no matter how close, it is initially located on the periphery border of our experiences. If it is allowed to grow it will reach intimacy, it will become deeper, and it will have an impact on our future. If you are in your center and the other person is at its center, those two centers will begin to get closer and closer and something we call love with unite the two. This is the opposite of war, which tears apart and destroys it does not create.

When the encounter is peripheral we can say that we are only befriended. Even here we can touch each other, we can even have sex, but it will be from the edges of our borders, that's an intimately close acquaintance This "friend with benefits," should not be seen as somebody we are in love with, as intimacy and lust is something else entirely when it does not flow from love.

No, love is so much more than simple lust or desire.

To get to know a person, to reach that center is to go through a great change personally, something that takes time; this profound inner revolution which occurs because if you want to get to know a person at their center you will have to allow this change to happen. And that change is the longing, the with that we all make, to get to know that person, to let them help us get another perspective, a companion for life who helps us avoid the holes and heal wounds that we all have.

If you want a relationship, one that is deeper, that it is not a peripheral but profound you have to allow that person to also get to know you (the real you), for which you must become a vulnerable, open person, and this demands a greater risk, it is dangerous because you never know how much that person could harm you by knowing your deepest secrets, everything that we have hidden for a long time, not only to others, but to ourselves and now that can be exposed, and that's where fear comes in, so it's not very easy to open up, because fear directly touches our vulnerability, our feeling of rejection, of failure. It leaves us thinking "I'm going to expose myself and they may leave me."

What we're hiding is an idea of what's inside of us, maybe it's not good and, when they really know me, maybe they're going to "abandon me," so there are so many people who have this mechanism of protection that rationalizes ending relationships before anything happens, before that idea has to end the relationship, people who stay on the periphery border because they are unable to deepen a relationship, because deep down the relationship has never taken hold, leave the relationship before the relationship has a chance to leave them. This is to abandon before being abandoned. Why? Because we want to be hurt, we are not willing to risk finding out.

There are married couples, there are lovers both who have been together for many years and who are only known on that superficial level, who have never really connected with each other; and there are situations where the more you live with someone, the more you forget that center of balance you built with your partner early on. They remain lovers on the periphery of their lives, even if they are lovers of years they know nothing about each other.

Sex is the same, as it can be making love on the periphery. Unless the centers are united, sex results only in the encounter between two bodies and not at the soul.

Sex is only love when both people feel it in a sexual relationship, when the are at their center truly in love, in that case not only is sex love, but sex is sublime, it is eternal.

And when we allow someone to enter our center:

We're without out fear.

The person oriented towards love is someone who does not fear the future, who does not fear the one who stands next to them, who opens up, who is exposed and does not fear the result or the consequences of opening themselves up to someone else.

Milka: The World’s Best Milk Chocolate

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I love Milka, for me there is rarely a chocolate that lives up to the taste and texture of the Milka chocolate. But while I love it, I am often (still) surprised to learn that not everyone knows about it. SO I am trying to fix that today. No they haven't bribed me with a truck load of chocolate (hint, hint, nudge, nudge) but they don't need to either. It has established itself in my life since I was a child. It was the first (that I remember) chocolate that my grandmother bought me. And it has been our special treat ever since.

With this original bars getting popular again it appears that Milka aims to give value to the brand beyond the one it already had, they want the brand to be associated with tenderness, good gestures with friends and family, as well as remembrance (my grandmother and I fit into this category).

In addition, it appears that they carried out another promotion recently they embrace the act of sharing. Specifically, the commercial with the last piece of chocolate. Showing that the last ounces of chocolate are just as important as the first and have quite a lot of value when they are allowed to. For me it stated that if you share it with someone it will be because you really care.

With these messages at the heart of Milka's intentions, it is clear to see that they are regarding the brand, the value given to the consumer is pretty clear. In addition, Milka has focused on "tenderness" which as been the main theme since the 1960s, they want the public not to think of Milka as a simple brand of chocolates, rather the brand comes to mind from a loved one and their endearing actions, this tenderness that is imparted through their intentions.

That is an idea I can fully support.

Age Disparity in a Relationship

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Today I wanted to hit on a topic that still seems un-addressed. Age disparity in relationships that cause a power imbalance. The list contains ten reasons why it's wrong to fall in love with someone older… This contributes to a theory several friends and I came to several years ago, which we began to see embodied in how many of us date.

The age difference in a sexual relationship is a common feature in many modern relationships. Social acceptance of age difference and concept about what is considered a significant age difference has varied over time, and also depends on different cultures and different legal systems, not to forget ethical reasons.

According to a 2010 study of 22,400 subjects in North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan, women showed no preference for much younger men. According to this study, women are generally interested in men of the same age or slightly older. This study also supports the different types of relationships (e.g. Enjokasai, Sugardaddy, Trophy Wife) that younger women with older men enter into for various reasons. An earlier study had also shown this result.

While the findings are more favorable for this construct we as a society often look less favorably toward the reverse.

While terms like mistress and girlfriend are the common words used to describe an older man and younger woman. Woman are see as cougars, sugar mommies (with Boy Toys), or MILFs. This is how our culture describes different types of women's interests in younger male sexual partners or vice versa, and are supported, for example, by a 2003 study by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). After that, 34% of women over the age of 40 meet with younger men. Likewise, many older women have been paying younger lovers for sexual adventures in many of the tourist resorts in the Caribbean, Asia and Africa for several decades.

According to another 2003 study by the Office for National Statistics for England and Wales, the number of women married to younger men rose from 15% to 26% between 1963 and 1998.

According to the US Census Bureau, there were fewer than half a million couples in the United States in 1997 with an age difference of at least ten years. In 2003, however, there were about 3 million couples in which the man was at least six years younger than the woman. International online dating services, such as match.com with about 20 million members, note an increase in the proportion of women in their databases who would like to meet a man who is at least ten years younger.

In today's Western society, many divorced older women are socially and financially independent.

Whether or not this type of relationship structure will become more normalized in our society is yet to be seen.

One point that is still relevant, however, is the problem that age disparity (10 years) plays in a relationship.