Romantic weekend? Stick to the traditional tried and tested

If your significant other were to propose a weekend away, what would come first to your mind? The traditional romantic getaway would be to sunny places and beaches, to lie on the sand, experience the call of the waves, wind in your hair, rays of the sun under a shade of a palm tree. According to the website blue-mist.co.uk, the town of St Ives would be your ideal location, with its harboured coasts and beaches. There are many things to do away from the coast, such as arts and crafts.

But what if you were looking for something different, but still wanted the option of the coast? Another location you might want to consist is Brighton in East Sussex, where you can see the British coastline, shaped by natural forces for over centuries. The website spooky origins of Brighton. Go on a ghost walk, and hold your hands tightly!

One thing you may wish to avoid is your traditional pursuits on a special weekend, no matter how enticing they may be. Yes, I’m talking about shopping. If you’re going to have a short break away, why waste two or three hours in the shops? Furthermore, it is a recipe for breakup, above all else.

My personal experience has shown that men are incapable of sustaining the shopping momentum for prolonged periods above an hour and a half. Now when you go shopping you need time to take in all the options available and make a decision. There is not much point looking on the internet beforehand because the true surprises aren’t listed there, especially for small shops who are more focussed on sales than maintaining their website. So you have to walk around to take in what’s available, hold it in your mind and then make a decision.

Unfortunately this concept cannot be grasped by the average man, a one-track minded individual incapable of multi tasking. The next time you go shopping with your other, watch what happens after the hour and a half mark. His concentration starts to wane, he becomes a completely different creature, borders on irritation, and then you are rushed into making a decision to placate him. The problem, as we know, is that rushed decisions are bad decisions, so we end up buying something else that in hindsight isn’t a good decision. And the other hand blows up when he realises it is back to the shops again to exchange for something else.

I’ve lost count of the many times when I’ve wanted to say “If you just gave me a few more minutes to decide, I would have bought the correct thing and we needn’t have gone back”. And spending time to consider all options isn’t something only women do. Ever followed a man to a computer shop to buy a laptop? The next time he complains about your shopping, tell him.

So, yes, shopping on a short weekend away is probably not a good idea, unless you were looking for a reason to break up with someone. It is better to stick with something traditional and safer!

Nurturing emotionally balanced children

What causes you the most stress? If you are a single woman, apparently the greatest stressor could be moving house, even greater than looking for a job or a partner!

And if you had children, child care is likely to be among the top of your concerns. It is not just the hunting down of a good nursery, one that provides adequate care for your child that causes stress, but when they are just there your stress levels do go up slightly, lurking in the background, fearful of a call that says something may have happened. The lack of control over the midst important things is a recipe for heightened stress.

And if you were expecting? Try not to get too stressed.

Researchers have found that mothers who have stressful second trimesters are prone to transferring these thoughts of anxiety and stress to their unborn child. In a study conducted by the University of California, a group of women were monitored throughout their pregnancies and those who reported experiencing stressful situations in that period later had children who were more sensitive to stress triggers. That is to say, the children were more prone to anger and behavioural issues as well as mood swings.

What can you do if you are pregnant? Well, for starters, be a little selfish and look after yourself. Actually that is not being selfish, it is a way of looking after your unborn child and shielding it from stresses that it cannot really deal with. In a dark world that echoes with muted sounds, the unborn child learns to interpret your reactions and feels how you do. How you feel and react to things around you are passed on to the child.

If you just happen to have a stressful pregnancy, all is not lost though. The researchers found that with the correct post natural care, babies whose mothers experienced stressful pregnancies can attune to a calm world around them and develop a sense of calm so that their stress receptors are not overly active.

Children develop in response to the world around them. They physically experience stress triggers from the environment around, but if the mother is calm, then this association and state of reaction is synapsed into the child’s psyche. How you deal with stress as the child’s mother influences how the child reacts to it. A calming motherly influence can go a long way into preventing a child from developing behavioural problems in the later life.

A escape from the day to day needn’t involve much

Everyone gets this feeling from time to time – you know, the feeling of being overrun with work and other assignments or commitments? If you have family and young children to look after, you may find it fairly tiring to be moving from one thing on to another, ticking off the to-do list, which by the way, never seems to end!

But it is not a good idea to continually live under that kind of stress. You may enjoy whizzing by on the surf of the adrenaline rush, but one day that way will get too big for you, all your life may just come to an abrupt snap. We all hope it will never come to that, of course, but who among us is to say we have never experienced that kind of “losing it” emotion?

We can all sense when we are getting to that point – we feel increasingly hassled and fed up, we snap at the people around us, which really doesn’t do any good because it only creates an even more tense situation that ramps up the pressure.

So what can we do?

One of the things we could consider is just taking a short break. I always recommend two or three days. Of course I would recommend more if you could afford it – and I’m not talking about the cost. I’m talking about the time. Could you really afford more than three days away from work? If you are self-employed, probably not. If you work for someone, then you may have two weeks annual leave, but taking three days in a go means you have shorter periods for the rest of the year, which may mean you might be under pressure later on and have no avenue for escape.

A day break is really not a good idea. By the time you factor in the travel and all that, you might find that you really exerted yourself for an unrewarding few hours – you might have well have stayed home and done nothing.

If you live in the city, try heading to the coast. There are plenty of nice places such as in the beautiful seaside towns of St Ives, or Brighton. Just sit on the beach and chill, or do some arts and crafts; doing something away from the usual routine can give your mind some down time and a chance to feel refreshed when you get back to the daily life.

If you really can’t afford more than a day away, then maybe visit somewhere in your local town that you don’t usually go to. The spa? Pamper yourself once in a while. Or maybe simply head for a coffee in a quiet cafe and read for a couple of hours – losing yourself in a good book is a good way of not having to be too physically active; if you spend a lot of time running around, actually this rest might do you good!

You have to look after yourself so you can give to others more. This is especially true if you have children. Sure, you must run after them and they are your responsibility, but if you give yourself fully to your children and don’t reserve a tiny smidgen for yourself, you will be run down, ill, and have nothing to give – and no good to your children.

So take a bit of time for yourself. It need not cost much in terms of time or money. But choose activities that relax you, not ones that cause you even further stress. If a holiday de-stresses you, go for it. But if the packing and planning for the holiday causes you so much that the holiday is merely to recover from the planning itself, then try another activity instead!

 

Women of Inspiration: Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende was born in Lima, Peru. She is the author of twenty-three books in her native Spanish, which have been translated into thirty-five languages. Her award-winning works include The House of the Spirits, City of the Beasts and the international bestseller, Paula.

Allende has received numerous awards, including the 2010 Chilean National Prize for Literature and the 2014 United States’ Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1996 – in memory of her daughter, Paula – Allende established the Isabel Allende Foundation to support initiatives aimed at preserving the rights of women and children.

‘People have this idea that we come to the world to acquire things – love, fame, goods, whatever. In fact, we come to this world to lose everything.’

Q. What really matters to you?

It’s people – women especially. I have been a feminist – a feminine feminist – all my life, and my main mission has been to care for women; I have a foundation that works for the empowerment of women and girls. Justice matters to me. And stories – I love to listen to people’s stories.

Q. What brings you happiness?

Love, romance, passion, sex, family, dogs, friends – all that brings me happiness.

Q. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

On a universal level – speaking outwardly – I would say that there are many depths of misery, but the worst is probably slavery. When you are a victim of absolute power and are living in constant fear, that is the worst.

On a personal level, I would say that the lowest depth of misery is when something happens to your child and you have absolutely no power to control it. It is when your child is behind a door and you don’t know what someone is doing to her – when you have no say, when you can’t be there and when you can’t even touch her.

My daughter, Paula, had a rare genetic condition called porphyria, which my son and my grandchildren also have. It is manageable and should not be lethal at all. Paula took very good care of herself but, when she was newly married and living in Madrid, she had a porphyria crisis. She went to the hospital, and they f**ked up the whole thing: they gave her the wrong drugs so she fell into a coma, then they didn’t monitor the coma, then they tried to hide their negligence.

For five months, I lived in the corridors of the hospital waiting for them to bring my daughter back to me, and everybody kept promising that she would open her eyes and recover. She suffered severe brain damage. By the time they admitted this and gave me back my daughter, I decided to bring her back to the United States. She was married, but her husband was a young man who couldn’t take care of her. I told him that, in her condition, she was like a newborn baby. I said, ‘Give her back to me.’ He did – that’s something that I will always be grateful for. I was able to bring her back to California on a commercial flight – today that would be impossible, but this was before 9/11. I sectioned off a part of the plane, and we flew with a nurse and all the necessary equipment.

But how do you come into a country with a person who can’t apply for a visa? We came to Washington, DC, where Senator Ted Kennedy sent two people from his staff to wait for me at the airport – I don’t know how, but they got us in. When we got to California, we went directly to the hospital. After a month, it was absolutely certain that Paula wasn’t going to react to anything. She was in a vegetative state, so I brought her home and decided that I would take care of her – because that’s what mothers do. I created a little hospital in the house, and I trained myself – we had her there until she died.

That experience, culminating in Paula’s death, changed me completely. It happened when I turned fifty, which is the end of youth. Menopause followed, so it hit me at a moment when I was ready to change, to finally mature. Up to that point, I had been an internal adolescent. It made me throw everything that was not essential in my life overboard. I let go of everything. With Paula, for example, I let go of her voice, of her charm, of her humour. I cut her hair short, then, eventually, I let go of her body and her spirit, then everything was gone. I learned the lesson that I am not in control.

People have this idea that we come to the world to acquire things – love, fame, goods, whatever. In fact, we come to this world to lose everything. When we go, we have nothing and we can take nothing with us. Paula gave me many gifts: the gift of generosity, the gift of patience and the gift of letting go – of acceptance.

Because there are things you can’t change: I couldn’t change the military coup in Chile or the terror brought about by Pinochet; I can’t change Trump; I can’t change the fate of my grandchildren; I can’t change Paula’s death; I can’t even change my dog!

Now, no matter what happens, it is nothing by comparison to the experience of Paula’s death. I loved my husband intensely, for many, many years, but two years ago we separated. When people wanted to commiserate, I thought, ‘This is not even 10 per cent of what I went through with Paula.’ Nothing could be so brutal, to me, at least. It gave me freedom, in a way. It gave me strength and an incredible resilience I never had before.

Prior to that, many things could have wiped me out. ‘Love, romance, passion, sex, family, dogs, friends – all that brings me happiness.’

Q. What would you change if you could?

I would change the patriarchy – end it! All my life, I have worked towards a more egalitarian world, one in which both men and women are managing our global society – a place in which feminine values are as important as masculine values.

Q. Which single word do you most identify with? Generosity. Years ago, my therapist said that I had very low self-esteem. He told me to go to ten people and ask them to write five things about me – whatever they wanted. It was a very difficult thing to request from people; it seemed like an exercise in vanity and narcissism, but I did it. Everybody mentioned generosity as my first trait, so maybe there is something true in that. The mantra of my foundation is, ‘What is the most generous thing to do?’ This is because of my daughter. She was a very special person and a psychologist. Whenever I was going through something trying, she would ask me what the most generous action I could take was. She used to say, ‘You only have what you give.’

Choosing a partner for life

How do we choose the people we fall in love with? The Romantic answer is that our instincts naturally guide us to individuals who are kind and good for us. Love is a sort of ecstasy that descends when we feel ourselves in the presence of a benign and nourishing soul, who will answer our emotional needs, understand our sadness and strengthen us for the hard tasks of our lives. In order to locate our lover, we must let our instincts carry us along, taking care never to impede them through pedantic psychological analysis and introspection or else considerations of status, wealth or lineage. Our feelings will tell us clearly enough when we have reached our destiny. To ask someone with any degree of rigour why exactly they have chosen a particular partner is – in the Romantic worldview – simply an unnecessary and offensive misunderstanding of love: true love is an instinct that accurately settles on those with a capacity to make us content.

The Romantic attitude sounds warm and kind. Its originators certainly imagined that it would bring an end to the sort of unhappy relationships previously brokered by parents and society. The only difficulty is that our obedience to instinct has, very often, proved to be a disaster of its own. Respecting the special feelings we get around certain people in nightclubs and train stations, parties and websites appears not to have led us to be any happier in our unions than a medieval couple shackled into marriage by two royal courts keen to preserve the sovereignty of a slice of ancestral land. ‘Instinct’ has been little better than ‘calculation’ in underwriting the quality of our love stories.

Romanticism would not at this point, however, give up the argument quite so easily. It would simply ascribe the difficulties we often have in love to not having looked hard enough for that central fixture of Romantic reverie: the right person. This being is inevitably still out there (every soul must have its soulmate, Romanticism assures us), it is just that we haven’t managed to track them down – yet. So we must continue the search, with all the technology and tenacity necessary, and maybe, once the divorce has come through and the house has been sold, we’ll get it right.

But there’s another school of thought, this one influenced by psychoanalysis, which challenges the notion that instinct invariably draws us to those who will make us happy. The theory insists that we don’t fall in love first and foremost with those who care for us in ideal ways, we fall in love with those who care for us in familiar ways. Adult love emerges from a template of how we should be loved that was created in childhood and is likely to be entwined with a range of problematic compulsions that militate in key ways against our chances of growth.

We may believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in childhood – and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on was confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier wishes. How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right – in the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding and reliable – given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearned. We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration.

Psychoanalysis calls the process whereby we identify our partners ‘object choice’ – and recommends that we try to understand the factors semi-consciously governing our attractions in order to interrupt the unhealthier patterns that might be at play. Our instincts – our strong undercurrents of attraction and revulsion – stem from complicated experiences we had when we were far too young to understand them, and which linger in the antechambers of our minds.

Psychoanalysis doesn’t wish to suggest that everything about our attractions will be deformed. We may have quite legitimate aspirations to positive qualities: intelligence, charm, generosity … But we are also liable to be fatefully drawn towards trickier tendencies: someone who is often absent, or treats us with a little disdain, or needs to be surrounded all the time by friends, or cannot master their finances.

However paradoxical it can sound, without these tricky behaviours we may simply not be able to feel passionate or tender with someone.

Alternatively, we may have been so traumatised by a parental figure that we cannot approach any partner who shares qualities with them of any kind, even ones disconnected from their negative sides. We might, in love, be rigidly intolerant of anyone who is intelligent, or punctual or interested in science, simply because these were the traits of someone who caused us a great deal of difficulty early on. To choose our partners wisely, we need to tease out how our compulsions to suffering or our rigid flights from trauma may be playing themselves out in our feelings of attraction.

A useful starting place is to ask ourselves (perhaps in the company of a large sheet of paper, a pen and a free afternoon) what sort of people really put us off. Revulsion and disgust are useful first guides because we are likely to recognise that some of the traits that make us shiver are not objectively negative and yet feel to us distinctly off-putting. We might, for example, sense that someone who asks us too much about ourselves, or is very tender or dependable, will seem eerie and boring. And we might equally well, along the way, recognise that a degree of cruelty or distance belong to an odd list of the things we appear genuinely to need in order to love.

The myth of Romantic love

To fall in love with someone feels like such a personal and spontaneous process, it can sound strange – and even rather insulting – to suggest that something else (we might call it society or culture) may be playing a covert, critical role in governing our relationships in their most intimate moments.

Yet the history of humanity shows us so many varied approaches to love, so many different assumptions about how couples are supposed to get together and so many distinctive ways of interpreting feelings, we should perhaps accept with a degree of grace that the way we go about our relationships must in practice owe rather a lot to the prevailing environment beyond our bedrooms. Our loves unfold against a cultural backdrop that creates a powerful sense of what is ‘normal’ in love; it subtly directs us as to where we should place our emotional emphases, it teaches us what to value, how to approach conflicts, what to get excited about, when to tolerate and what we can be legitimately incensed by. Love has a history and we ride – sometimes rather helplessly – on its currents.

Since around 1750, we have been living in a highly distinctive era in the history of love that we can call Romanticism. Romanticism emerged as an ideology in Europe in the mid-18th century in the minds of poets, artists and philosophers, and it has now conquered the world, powerfully (yet always quietly) determining how a shopkeeper’s son in Yokohama will approach a first date, how a scriptwriter in Hollywood will shape the ending of a film, or when a middle-aged woman in Buenos Aires might decide to call it a day with her civil servant husband of twenty years.

No single relationship ever follows the Romantic template exactly, but its broad outlines are frequently present nevertheless – and might be summed up as follows:

  • Romanticism is deeply hopeful about marriage. It tells us that a long-term marriage can have all the excitement of a love affair. The feelings of love that we are familiar with at the start of a relationship are expected to prevail over a lifetime.
  • Romanticism took marriage (hitherto seen as a practical and emotionally temperate union) and fused it together with the passionate love story to create a unique proposition: the lifelong passionate love marriage.
  • Along the way, Romanticism united love and sex. Previously, people had imagined that they could have sex with characters they didn’t love, and that they could love someone without having extraordinary sex with them. Romanticism elevated sex to the supreme expression of love. Frequent, mutually satisfying sex became the bellwether of the health of any relationship. Without necessarily meaning to, Romanticism made infrequent sex and adultery into catastrophes.
  • Romanticism proposed that true love must mean an end to all loneliness. The right partner would, it promised, understand us entirely, possibly without needing to speak to us. They would intuit our souls. (Romantics put a special premium on the idea that our partner might understand us without words …).
  • Romanticism believed that choosing a partner should be about letting oneself be guided by feelings, rather than practical considerations. For most of recorded history, people had fallen into relationships and married for logical pragmatic sorts of reasons: because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing grain business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text. And from such ‘reasonable’ marriages, there flowed loneliness, infidelity and hardness of heart.

For Romanticism, the marriage of reason was not reasonable at all, which is why what it replaced it with – the marriage of feeling – has largely been spared the need to account for itself. What matters is that two people wish desperately that it happens, are drawn to one another by an overwhelming instinct and know in their hearts that it is right. The modern age has had enough of ‘reasons’, those catalysts of misery. The prestige of instinct is the legacy of a collective traumatised reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable ‘reason’.

  • Romanticism has manifested a powerful disdain for practicalities and money. Nowadays, under the influence of Romanticism, we don’t like such elements to be at the forefront of the mind around relationships, especially in the early days. It feels cold – un-Romantic – to say you know you’re with the right person because you make an excellent financial fit or because you gel over things like bathroom etiquette and attitudes to punctuality. People, we feel, only turn to practical considerations when all else has failed (‘I couldn’t find love, I had to settle for convenience’) or because they are sinister (the gold-digger, the social climber).
  • Romanticism believes that true love should involve delighting in a lover in their every aspect. True love is synonymous with accepting everything about someone. The idea that one’s partner (or oneself) may need to change is taken to be a sign that the relationship is on the rocks; ‘you’re going to have to change’ is a last-ditch threat.

This template of love is a historical creation. It’s a hugely beautiful and often enjoyable one. The Romantics were brilliantly perceptive about some facets of emotional life and were extremely talented about expressing their hopes and longings. Many of the feelings had existed before, but what the Romantics did was elevate them, turning them from passing fancies into serious concepts with the power to determine the course of relationships over a lifetime.

We can at this point state boldly: Romanticism has been a disaster for love. It is an intellectual and spiritual movement which has had a devastating impact on the ability of ordinary people to lead successful emotional lives. The salvation of love lies in overcoming a succession of errors within Romanticism. Our strongest cultural voices have – to our huge cost – set us up with the wrong expectations. They’ve highlighted emotions that don’t tell us very much that is useful about how to make relationships work, while drawing attention away from others that offer more constructive guidance. We deserve sympathy. We’re surrounded by a culture that offers a well-meaning but fatally skewed ideal of how relationships might function. We’re trying to apply a very unhelpful script to a hugely tricky task.

This Romantic script is both normative and at points delusional. In order to be thought normal in the age of Romanticism, many of the following are meant to happen:

  • We should meet a person of extraordinary inner and outer beauty and immediately feel a special attraction to them, and they to us.
  • We should have highly satisfying sex, not only at the start, but forever.
  • We should never be attracted to anyone else.
  • We should understand one another intuitively.
  • We don’t need an education in love. We may need to train to become a pilot or brain surgeon, but not a lover. We will pick that up along the way, by following our feelings.
  • We should have no secrets and spend constant time together (work shouldn’t get in the way).
  • We should raise a family without any loss of sexual or emotional intensity.
  • Our lover must be our soulmate, best friend, co-parent, co-chauffeur, accountant, household manager and spiritual guide.

Knowing the history of Romanticism should be consoling – because it suggests that quite a lot of the troubles we have with relationships don’t stem (as we normally, guiltily end up thinking) from our ineptitude, our own inadequacy or our own regrettable choice of partners. Knowing the history invites another, more useful idea: we alone are not to blame; we were set an incredibly hard task by our culture, which then had the temerity to present it as easy.

It seems crucial to systematically question the assumptions of the Romantic view of love – not in order to destroy love, but to save it. We need to piece together a post-Romantic theory of couples, because in order to make a relationship last we almost have to be disloyal to many of the Romantic emotions that get us into it in the first place. The idea of being ‘post-Romantic’ shouldn’t imply cynicism, that one has abandoned the hope of relationships ever working out well. The post-Romantic attitude is just as ambitious about good relationships, but it has a very different sense of how to honour the hopes.

We need to replace the Romantic template with a psychologically mature vision of love we might call Classical, which encourages in us a range of unfamiliar but hopefully effective attitudes:

  • It is normal that love and sex may not always belong together.
  • Discussing money early on, upfront, in a serious way, is not a betrayal of love.
  • Realising that we are rather flawed, and our partner is too, is of huge benefit to a couple in increasing the amount of tolerance and generosity in circulation.
  • We will never find everything in another person, nor they in us, not because of some unique flaw, but because of the way human nature works.
  • We need to make immense and often rather artificial-sounding efforts to understand one another; that intuition can’t get us to where we need to go.
  • Spending two hours discussing whether bathroom towels should be hung up or can be left on the floor is neither trivial nor unserious, and there is a special dignity around laundry and time-keeping.

We need to accept that love doesn’t necessaily mean always feeling positive emotions, being whisked off to romantic locations such as St Ives or Brighton and watching romantic sunsets forever while bathed in the warmth of the beach. It also involves a “head” approach to the running of the day to day. The attitudes reflected above, and many more, belong to a new, more hopeful future for love.