love and intimacy is the cause of all our happiness and sorrow; our well-being and sickness, and of all our pain and healing. To give up one is to give up the other. If you deny yourself love for fear of the pain, you would undoubtedly be depriving yourself of all the ecstasies too. Surely the high that love alone can swing you to is worth the risk of pain?
   And then, there is a beauty to even the pain that love brings. Its beauty lies in the depth of emotion we experience and to the way we respond to it. Some of our most beautiful poetry, songs and art have been the result of emotional turmoil resulting from rejection in love. In fact many creative artists work on perfecting the art of wallowing in melancholy. The world’s greatest love stories have ended in pain and separation. Does that stop us from idolising Romeo & Juliet, Tristan & Isolde, Heer Ranjha or Paro Devdas?
   There are those who say that love never ends. Two individuals may choose to end a relationship, yet if they truly loved each other, the love lasts beyond their togetherness. It is an emotion that you can revisit and wrap around yourself as a comfort in times of loneliness and despair. Love imbues two individuals with a sense of wellbeing, happiness and confidence that rest of the world cannot penetrate. And when they separate, why must they also give up all the positive strokes love brought them?
   Whether or not you are able to smile at shared happy moments later and retain the positive feelings really depends on the way two individuals choose to end their relationship.
   Dr Brian Weiss in Only Love is Real, the book Princess Diana read just before she took off on her last holiday with Dodi, explains that love is a powerful, reuniting energy. If you believe in love as the be-all and end-all of our existence; as both the beginning as well as conclusion of the journey of life, you would agree that we need to go through any number of relationships in life because we learn our life’s lessons through them — “forgiveness, understanding, patience, awareness, non-violence…We have to unlearn other traits, such as f e a r … a n ge r … . g r e e d … h at r e d … pride… ego which result from old conditioning.’
   If that’s so, then the very purpose of the beginning and ending of a relationship must be to enable us to learn valuable lessons. And, if we don’t understand that, we would be doomed to a series of loves that keep ending in grief!
   Love sharpens our senses and mental faculties. It increases our capacity for giving as well as receiving emotion. Love brings with it enlightenment and a lightness of being. And when love creeps away, it leaves us with a depth of emotion that is just as meaningful and necessary to our existence, to the very fabric of our lives…
   I hold it true, whate’er befall;
   I feel it, when I sorrow most;
   ‘Tis better to have loved and lost
   Than never to have loved at all.
   — Lord Tennyson

 by       : vinita dawra nangia

source : timeslife.

What does a woman want? This is a question that perennially tortures a man. He asks himself; he asks other men, he asks God — and yet there’s no answer. Recently, when a group of young bureaucrats got together, the men wondered yet again and a discussion ensued. After the usual bawdy comments and ribbing, they became serious and then turned to women colleagues to figure out an answer, if there was one.
Some high-itched squabbling later, what came through loud and clear was that what women most desire is love and attention. As one lady bureaucrat put it succinctly to the group, “What a woman wants is — a touch, a look and a word. That translates to — affection, attention and communication…”
Another elected for “exclusive care, attention and the feeling of being desired.” As I kept asking women, it was clear a woman does need to be told again and again that she is desirable and desired — and that she’s the only one! It was almost like they had been waiting to be asked. And, once the floodgates were open, there was no stopping the flow.
Consider this from a colleague, “I expect my partner to make allowances for my moods and forms of madness. To know that nagging is an expression of love, to recognise that the little girl inside me needs occasional expression; to never take me for granted… and even if he is interested academically in other women, to know I’m the only one for him!”
Most women acknowledged that even when they are mad with their partner, all it takes is a touch, an apologetic smile and a teasing word to set things right again! It does all seem to boil down to affection, attention and communication! If that’s all a woman desires, we are truly dealing with just the realm of emotions. And indeed women, unlike men, are emotional creatures. They were meant to be so, we are told, because going back in time, she was the nurturer and protector of her family while the man was away hunting. She could never be sure he would come back to her safe and sound. So she socialised and formed connects and bonds to ensure support.
And that’s perhaps the reason women seek reassurances all the time. The reason a woman keeps asking, “Do you love me?” Think back… we would do it as kids, when we asked parents, siblings and best friends how much they loved us. Am I your best friend? You are mine — and the degree of satisfaction once answered in affirmative… You never found a boy asking those questions, did you? Well, not much has changed today. It’s just that grown women don’t ask parents, siblings, friends anymore. They ask a lover or a husband…
And it’s not because they trust him any less or are insecure. It’s just that they enjoy the emotional connect with him far more. Whereas a man may think his physical presence is good enough, it’s not so for a woman; she craves an emotional connect.
And one of the fastest ways to get a man emotionally charged is to get him to say, “I love you.” It is one of the few times a man lets down his guard and gets his vulnerable, slightly silly expression, which alone indicates to a woman how she affects him. And as we know, a woman is most affected by a man who acknowledges how she affects him…
And so, if a look, a touch and a word is all it takes — is it such a great mystery and such an impossibility to achieve, guys? What’s it that you don’t understand?
says vinita.nangia