Love You To Death

A frantic call from an old friend yesterday kinda turned me into an agony aunt. This friend from my high school days called an emergency meeting last evening to discuss a very crucial issue when it comes to lifelong relationships – ‘How important is physical attraction when all the other connections seem to just click right?’

My friend is picking himself a girl the old fashioned way – through matrimonial adverts and family/friend linkages. But he does manage to date them a few times (in the defined ‘appropriate’ way, of course) before he can shortlist any. So far it is forty down & he grumbles that the love bug has not yet even stung him once.

But he met one interesting girl that he can connect with on the intellectual and emotional platforms. He says the comfort level is high & but the physical attraction low. Although he thinks she may make him a good wife and a great friend, he still hasn’t fallen in love with her yet. So what should he do?

My first instinct would tell him to keep looking and not settle so soon. My second instinct would ask him if he finds this girl- repulsive. To which he promptly replied that he doesn’t – he loves her hair, her height, her figure, her smile…

That brings me to another question – what exactly is physical attraction? According to another friend, it is when you want to be with someone and love everything about him including his flaws. Wait a minute… isn’t that blind love? And so is physical attraction- blind in some way, she explained.

A guy may have the most gorgeous body and everything perfect yet you find yourself not attracted to him at all. And then there will be this guy who wouldn’t be defined ‘sexy’ in the conventional way. Yet something about him would make him irresistible to you. In a nutshell, he might not look like Tom Cruise but somehow generate the same response Tom did in the ‘butt cheek popping – trouser (almost) dropping’ scene in the movie Far & Away. Get the picture! ;)

But how long can just the physical attraction make a relationship last? And how soon can the lack of it kill a relationship? It’s probably a double edge sword- If it is just the physical attraction, it will tire you soon. If it is only emotional – then just stay friends. And if you get both, well, you have hit the jackpot!

My friend Anna married a guy she thought she was in love with after she met him a couple of times and the family found him a perfect match. Yet the eight years they have been married, they barely spent a year together (after first five years apart).

When I met her after the year long ‘honeymoon’ with her husband, her talks about sex would not stop. The graphic details were a little embarrassing to hear (and in retrospect I wonder if they were true) but she was so excited to talk about it all just like a newlywed.

Yet, it was obvious that the guy cleverly sent her back alone and had to intention of returning to her. In fact, he never even felt any remorse. There seems to be no emotional connect or a physical desire to be together and yet my dear friend lives her life alone waiting for her husband to someday remember she exists.

Sometimes I wonder how she got there. Why not walk separate roads when you no longer can walk together? And if you get no physical or emotional love, why stay? She is now in her early thirties and has plenty of chances to find love again. But she refuses to do so. No wonder, her favourite television show was ‘Love you to death’ on 'happy' love marriages with terrible endings.

Another close friend after a gruesome divorce is trying to put his life back in order. He was a victim of what is called a ‘parent trap’. What I do admire in him is that he refused to get ‘killed’ in a marriage that was headed for doom. He tried to make it work but when it just wouldn’t, he had the strength to put an end to it & not get sucked in any other traps.

I know he’ll find his perfect match someday. I’m proud of him for being so brave through the terrible divorce ordeal and giving himself another chance at happiness. I wish Anna could do the same.


So back to my friend who is probably on another blind date to find the perfect wife, here’s a thought:
Love can exist & also bloom without a marriage. But a marriage without love (both physical & emotional) is like a coffin in which only a corpse lies.

Girlfriends Anonymous

There is something quite therapeutic about a night in with your girl friends. Never mind how wasted you get, how atrocious your behaviour is and how many secrets you spill, you never feel stupid & you never regret what you say. And the conversation always revolves around sex & men!

You would think, in a decade we would have found something else to chat about - but well not really! Through school we talked about guys with the freckles & shiny new bikes that flirted with us or the sexy boyish grins that we had a thing for. Now, its men in pilot uniforms & sex toys that know just what to say & what to do to turn us on! So while earlier love was just a little crush and childish pranks, now it is about empty flats, bleeding hearts and commitment scares.

But what hasn't changed over the years is the sheer insane fun we always have when we get together. Add to it a lot of booze (some rather questionable cocktails!) and behaviour not apt to describe in a public forum. But what do you expect with four girls, high on booze, locked in a room - uncensored! (Key shouts: 'take off your clothes', 'I so want to do it…', 'where did you put it?', 'it hurts!' ) Ya ya, I know the boys have their imagination running wild but what the hell, enjoy!

Anyways for my three darling friends who hopefully have recovered from their hangovers (& found what we lost that night) - I love you guys! We’ve stayed on different continents for several years now, went into different universities in different countries, changed many jobs, made many more friends but even today it seems nothing has really changed- N still easily gets bruised, F as always is the one responsible for N's bruises and M is always the first one to sleep through it all. And of course, my love life is always the conversation starter!

So can men ever replace what you have with your girl friends? Can your best guy friend ever take over your best girl friend? Through my university years in London, I had more guy friends than girls. In fact since we were housemates, we were basically stuck together for long. In that sense we should have been best friends but we weren’t. There was a sense of respect & care for each other that came with living on the same property, but there was never the closeness & insanity that comes with living with your girl friends.

Even my best guy friend then has drifted apart now and not just because he moved to another continent but perhaps because we were never really that close in the first place. But in London, he was my friend, philosopher & guide. And the man I fought the most with :)! Today, he is just a fond memory.

That brings me back to my question - Can a guy friend ever be as close to you as your girl friend? Perhaps, if you really love him & if you share closeness that stood the test of time. Yet there will always be something that you will not be able to say & do with him that you can with your girl friends. There will always be a time when you would hesitate to express because... come on, we all know how much men hate women who are 'emotional'.

Yet with your girl friends you can just be it all. Men might tell you what they think you like to hear, but a girl friend will tell you on your face when you are being a real bitch or an emotional fool. They will give you the strength to break up from a suffocating relationship or the encouragement to test new heights. And when you are feeling down & lonely, they will also kick your ass & get you back on your feet.

A close friend once told me that her boy friend always hated her girl friends and would get annoyed every time she spent time with them. In fact it always ended up in a big fight. I guess her boyfriend was only trying to protect his place under the sun. A girl in love may turn blind towards his follies, but the girl friend will see right through & when the time comes to see clearly, my friend chose to peep through her girl friend's lens and reality emerged. The rest (including him) is history!

So if the battle lines are drawn, a boyfriend’s worst opponent will be his girl's girl friend & she would win hands down!

Monster in Pink

Once a woman's favourite and the fantasy of every man – ‘Pink Slip’ today has turned to be the most dreaded word on the block for men & women alike.

I returned to work after a great two week holiday, to an office engulfed in fear and colleagues waiting for a slow but painful death. I don't know if any of the fears are legit as the management maintain a stoic face on matters like this yet every few days injects the 'anything could happen' phrase when they talk about the future.

So a rather bubbly office full of laughter & frolic has now turned into a shrink's chamber where people discuss their dwindling bank balances, home loans repayments and higher financial anxiety with a new born on the way.

My colleague who just made a down payment on a flat checks her email a million times a day dreading to find a ‘pink slip’ slowing slipped into her inbox.

So, you can just imagine what morale is like around my office: one minute we were the cutting edge media of the world; now the Gestapo has arrived. No one is hiring and everyone is firing, I hear everyone say. There is fear, there is sadness, there is anger and most importantly there is helplessness.

I first heard about pink slips when someone I know was caught in its web when it hit the United States way back in the end of 90s. He escaped the first five rounds of pink slips but was caught in the sixth one. He was devastated and his family heartbroken. He had recently married and bought a new house and the bills were mounting. But he soon found a better job and pulled himself up again. The pink slip did set his immigration back a little but he says life only got better. The worst part, he says, was the fear and uncertainty that gripped him during the first five rounds. He was relieved when he was given the boot because that meant he could stop worrying and do something about it.

So does the pink slip monster have the power to drag everyone into the black hole of misery or is there an escape? Can we choose not to be a part of dreaded funeral? Not because we are elusive and will escape the pink slips, but perhaps because we refuse to be trapped and we refuse to anguish over something that we may not be able to do anything about. Worrying didn’t help the millions that were laid off lately all over the world in the name of recession. What can make a difference, however, is to use this downturn to upturn your life- reinvent yourself, let your creative juices flow and let a new you be born.

Years ago, Keith had told me when he quit his high paying job in the merchant navy to settle for an unpredictable business opportunity in pharma that he 'needed time to smell the rose'. Keith was a marine, didn’t know anything about meds yet he plunged into it head first. Many thought he was foolish and would not survive but he did. Today I hear he is doing fantastic. His business is growing so is his family. He lives happily with his wife and two young daughters in a beautiful suburban Chicago home with his own rose beds finding plenty of time to enjoy them.

So with the recession shutting one door, somewhere I'm sure another one would open. Sometimes we get so cozy in our jobs we simply settle and though we may be growing vertically, our horizontal expansion stops. We limit ourselves and stop exploring new waters because we are afraid of losing the comfort our job brings.

But, the real growth begins when you don’t have a cushion to fall back on. You venture, you get hurt, you learn and you grow. It builds your character, it builds your perseverance and gives you the self confidence that no pink slip can take from you.

My friend once told me that her first business venture made her around 100,000 and the next one made her lose 100,000. But what she learned from both the experiences was worth a million bucks and the adrenalin rush invaluable. Yet somewhere down the line she stopped experimenting and settled for a job that paid her enough to live well. She knows she may never be able to give up the security her job brought but somewhere secretly hoped the pink slip could do the trick. Because, she says, she stopped really enjoying her life when she began doing what everyone expected her to do.

So to my friends who are scared to death of the pink slip monster, here is a little magic trick from our good friend Harry Potter: when the ‘bogart’ turns into your worst fear, imagine it in its funniest avatar and laugh about it- that will destroy him.

So take your pink slip monster, dress it up in a skimpy lacy pink negligee with puffy pink lips and a big pink bow on one ear. Imagine it standing in shocking pink stilettos on top of a huge flight of stairs. Then slowly go behind it and give a little shove. It will trip and roll into… oblivion. And you can have the last laugh!

Five Men to Love?

‘……Listen my girl of great merit. A woman of one husband, knows nothing of love…’ My friend’s husband quoted her this excerpt from a poem ‘A bending lotus’ from the Kamasutra – the ancient manual on lovemaking.

I was told it was an unintentional quotation that concluded a long poem he was reading on sensuality. Far from turning the mood on, it unfortunately only sparked off a debate on adultery. Is really one person all you need for life? Will enjoying the physical with another person destroy a marriage? Is marriage all about being faithful or should marriage & sex be considered different?

My friend and her husband were college sweethearts who fell in love and soon got married. Since then, we always found them together. They were always fun, honest, understanding and pretty much soul mates. And they say they never had anyone else in their life. They both knew only the sex that they shared. Was it time to explore other waters? They both emphatically said ‘No’!

I got the Kamasutra and read that poem. ‘Lend your ears to those profitable words O beautiful girl. Great is the virtue of serving others. She who never encounters rupture outside marriage may her face stay away from my path. A girl who is unaware of the happiness of love with at least five men is as unholy as an evil spirit.”

The poem talks about the virtue of serving others and yet somehow it claims that unless you indulge in sex with several men you are unholy. To me it is just a way of justifying slavery and sexual exploitation. It reminded me of an old classic movie called ‘The Other Boleyn Girl’ where a poor married woman was asked to sleep with the King as a duty to his desires. They kind of used the same fundas.

If the poem gave the woman the freedom to love another man without feeling obliged to love him but for the pure joy of indulging in love, rather than calling her evil if she doesn’t, I wouldn’t be such a critic. For two consenting adults can do anything they please and no one should be allowed to judge.

My friend Amy says she has lost count of her relationships – some good, some bad & some downright ugly. Amy has always been the more adventurous one, so when I asked her to pick her five best lovers, she shot right back with the list. It included a professor that lasted as long as the school term, her school boyfriend she bumped at a reunion after a good five years, a guy she met at a work conference that didn’t go beyond a weekend, a struggling musician who turned her apartment into a work studio and Tom who she is currently dating.

So have you found you’re perfect love in five men? I asked. To which she replied without a moment’s hesitation, they were all fun, but I’m yet to find my perfect man.

It made me wonder if a woman really does need five men to know what love truly is? I would have thought that perfect lovemaking would need strong emotions: Passionate love, deep respect, unspoken understanding, irresistible chemistry and of course a mind open to experimenting. It’s a tall order. You might be able to find one man that fits the bill, two if you are extremely lucky. But five, where?!

So, I asked an old friend what she thought about this. She said she believed that a woman can need five men to know what love truly is. Over the years, she said she realized that the one man she loves played several different roles in her life and each time he was as exciting as the first.

As a child he was her best friend as they snogged in the car- her first kiss that put her lips on fire. Then as rebellious youngsters they made out at friends’ homes exploring each other’s sexuality. When they grew older, got jobs, lived apart, they indulged their wild fantasies through phone sex. They later married, moved in together and discovered that reality was much more exciting than fantasy.

What happened to the fifth man, I asked teasingly? To which she smiled and replied, the fifth man will come when I turn too old to do anything physical. We’ll sit in our rocking chairs holding hands and reliving all this. And her faced glowed with blissful content.

Well, I dare say I agree, you perhaps need only one man to make you reach the pinnacle of love and that man has to be your best friend and more!

Falling In High Heels!

Why is it, that every time you pick one from many, the other options look incredibly tempting? Well, old folks would say its an illusion reinforcing it by adding that the grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence but it often is not. But what if the grass is greener elsewhere? What if you chose wrong?

My friend bought a rather expensive & fabulous pair of 5 inch high stilettos as opposed to her usual pair of sensible pumps. She said it was love at first sight, she couldn’t resist. It was a special occasion. She had picked up a beautiful Marc Jacob dress that showed off her stilettos perfectly. The restaurant was uptown and always packed to the brim with the whos who of the fashion world. She felt like a princess and holding her head high, smiling coyly, she gracefully walked down the stair knowing that several eyes were on her. It was a page out of Cinderella …..until….. boom! She fell right on her face!

Amidst helping hands and sighs of pity, she stood up again only to find her heel broken into two. Suddenly, the pumps she didn’t chose danced before her eyes – laughing at her & mocking her agony. She went back and bought the ballet pumps vowing never to try stilettos again.

But every time we trip and fall, we run to find safe options, wont we be running forever and from everything? And if we give up trying nothing would ever work. Just like the pair of stilettos, relationships are difficult to walk into. But the fun is to try, to walk a mile in them and see if they grow on you. Usually they do and then they are just a piece of cake. But if they don’t, can you discard them as easily as your shoes? Perhaps not!

That is why most people have one pair of sensible shoes that they can rely on to walk over rough terrain. It may not be their favourite pair and probably not one they would walk the red carpet in. But it would be a pair that they trust never to let them down!