Every February, across the country, candy, flowers, and gifts are exchanged between loved ones, all in the name of St. Valentine. But who is this mysterious saint and why do we celebrate this holiday? The history of Valentine's Day — and its patron saint — is shrouded in mystery. But we do know that February has long been a month of romance. St. Valentine's Day, as we know it today, contains vestiges of both Christian and ancient Roman tradition. So, who was Saint Valentine and how did he become associated with this ancient rite? Today, the Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred.

One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men — his crop of potential soldiers. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.

Other stories suggest that Valentine may have been killed for attempting to help Christians escape harsh Roman prisons where they were often beaten and tortured.

According to one legend, Valentine actually sent the first 'valentine' greeting himself. While in prison, it is believed that Valentine fell in love with a young girl — who may have been his jailor's daughter — who visited him during his confinement. Before his death, it is alleged that he wrote her a letter, which he signed 'From your Valentine,' an expression that is still in use today. Although the truth behind the Valentine legends is murky, the stories certainly emphasize his appeal as a sympathetic, heroic, and, most importantly, romantic figure. It's no surprise that by the Middle Ages, Valentine was one of the most popular saints in England and France.

While some believe that Valentine's Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine's death or burial — which probably occurred around 270 A.D — others claim that the Christian church may have decided to celebrate Valentine's feast day in the middle of February in an effort to 'christianize' celebrations of the pagan Lupercalia festival. In ancient Rome, February was the official beginning of spring and was considered a time for purification. Houses were ritually cleansed by sweeping them out and then sprinkling salt and a type of wheat called spelt throughout their interiors. Lupercalia, which began at the ides of February, February 15, was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.

To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at the sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would then sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification.

The boys then sliced the goat's hide into strips, dipped them in the sacrificial blood and took to the streets, gently slapping both women and fields of crops with the goathide strips. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed being touched with the hides because it was believed the strips would make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city's bachelors would then each choose a name out of the urn and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage. Pope Gelasius declared February 14 St. Valentine's Day around 498 A.D. The Roman 'lottery' system for romantic pairing was deemed un-Christian and outlawed. Later, during the Middle Ages, it was commonly believed in France and England that February 14 was the beginning of birds' mating season, which added to the idea that the middle of February — Valentine's Day — should be a day for romance. The oldest known valentine still in existence today was a poem written by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt. The greeting, which was written in 1415, is part of the manuscript collection of the British Library in London, England. Several years later, it is believed that King Henry V hired a writer named John Lydgate to compose a valentine note to Catherine of Valois.

In Great Britain, Valentine's Day began to be popularly celebrated around the seventeenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth century, it was common for friends and lovers in all social classes to exchange small tokens of affection or handwritten notes. By the end of the century, printed cards began to replace written letters due to improvements in printing technology. Ready-made cards were an easy way for people to express their emotions in a time when direct expression of one's feelings was discouraged. Cheaper postage rates also contributed to an increase in the popularity of sending Valentine's Day greetings. Americans probably began exchanging hand-made valentines in the early 1700s. In the 1840s, Esther A. Howland began to sell the first mass-produced valentines in America.

According to the Greeting Card Association, an estimated one billion valentine cards are sent each year, making Valentine's Day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year. (An estimated 2.6 billion cards are sent for Christmas.)

Approximately 85 percent of all valentines are purchased by women. In addition to the United States, Valentine's Day is celebrated in Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, France, and Australia.

Valentine greetings were popular as far back as the Middle Ages (written Valentine's didn't begin to appear until after 1400), and the oldest known Valentine card is on display at the British Museum. The first commercial Valentine's Day greeting cards produced in the U.S. were created in the 1840s by Esther A. Howland. Howland, known as the Mother of the Valentine, made elaborate creations with real lace, ribbons and colorful pictures known as "scrap".

Every February, across the country, candy, flowers, and gifts are exchanged between loved ones, all in the name of St. Valentine. But who is this mysterious saint and why do we celebrate this holiday? The history of Valentine's Day — and its patron saint — is shrouded in mystery. But we do know that February has long been a month of romance. St. Valentine's Day, as we know it today, contains vestiges of both Christian and ancient Roman tradition. So, who was Saint Valentine and how did he become associated with this ancient rite? Today, the Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred.

One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men — his crop of potential soldiers. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.

Other stories suggest that Valentine may have been killed for attempting to help Christians escape harsh Roman prisons where they were often beaten and tortured.

According to one legend, Valentine actually sent the first 'valentine' greeting himself. While in prison, it is believed that Valentine fell in love with a young girl — who may have been his jailor's daughter — who visited him during his confinement. Before his death, it is alleged that he wrote her a letter, which he signed 'From your Valentine,' an expression that is still in use today. Although the truth behind the Valentine legends is murky, the stories certainly emphasize his appeal as a sympathetic, heroic, and, most importantly, romantic figure. It's no surprise that by the Middle Ages, Valentine was one of the most popular saints in England and France.

While some believe that Valentine's Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine's death or burial — which probably occurred around 270 A.D — others claim that the Christian church may have decided to celebrate Valentine's feast day in the middle of February in an effort to 'christianize' celebrations of the pagan Lupercalia festival. In ancient Rome, February was the official beginning of spring and was considered a time for purification. Houses were ritually cleansed by sweeping them out and then sprinkling salt and a type of wheat called spelt throughout their interiors. Lupercalia, which began at the ides of February, February 15, was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.

To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at the sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would then sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification.

The boys then sliced the goat's hide into strips, dipped them in the sacrificial blood and took to the streets, gently slapping both women and fields of crops with the goathide strips. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed being touched with the hides because it was believed the strips would make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city's bachelors would then each choose a name out of the urn and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage. Pope Gelasius declared February 14 St. Valentine's Day around 498 A.D. The Roman 'lottery' system for romantic pairing was deemed un-Christian and outlawed. Later, during the Middle Ages, it was commonly believed in France and England that February 14 was the beginning of birds' mating season, which added to the idea that the middle of February — Valentine's Day — should be a day for romance. The oldest known valentine still in existence today was a poem written by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt. The greeting, which was written in 1415, is part of the manuscript collection of the British Library in London, England. Several years later, it is believed that King Henry V hired a writer named John Lydgate to compose a valentine note to Catherine of Valois.

In Great Britain, Valentine's Day began to be popularly celebrated around the seventeenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth century, it was common for friends and lovers in all social classes to exchange small tokens of affection or handwritten notes. By the end of the century, printed cards began to replace written letters due to improvements in printing technology. Ready-made cards were an easy way for people to express their emotions in a time when direct expression of one's feelings was discouraged. Cheaper postage rates also contributed to an increase in the popularity of sending Valentine's Day greetings. Americans probably began exchanging hand-made valentines in the early 1700s. In the 1840s, Esther A. Howland began to sell the first mass-produced valentines in America.

According to the Greeting Card Association, an estimated one billion valentine cards are sent each year, making Valentine's Day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year. (An estimated 2.6 billion cards are sent for Christmas.)

Approximately 85 percent of all valentines are purchased by women. In addition to the United States, Valentine's Day is celebrated in Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, France, and Australia.

Valentine greetings were popular as far back as the Middle Ages (written Valentine's didn't begin to appear until after 1400), and the oldest known Valentine card is on display at the British Museum. The first commercial Valentine's Day greeting cards produced in the U.S. were created in the 1840s by Esther A. Howland. Howland, known as the Mother of the Valentine, made elaborate creations with real lace, ribbons and colorful pictures known as "scrap".

Last summer, when I lived in the country, an ad for a local dating service would come on the radio every time I drove around. "But I'm as pretty and interesting and nice as my friends. Why am I single?" a petulant voice would say. Then an announcer would cut in and tell her to go to speed-shuffle date night; her friends would soon be choking with envy, he'd imply, and each time I'd think, Yeah, right. Okay, she existed in drive-time and was doomed to lament her situation every 15 minutes, but that wasn't what made me doubt that she was heading toward paired happiness. It was the question. She was asking the wrong one.

If you've been without a partner for a while and aren't happy about it, it's natural to wonder why. But put that question to yourself, and the result is you find yourself confronted with obstacles—some considerable. You're single because you moved to New York, where the odds are tipped in favor of men, and not to Alaska, where they aren't. Or because you take jobs that keep you at the office till the dead hours, or because you keep falling for married men, or because your husband died, or because you're over a certain age, which, beginning at about 25, is generally ten years less than what you are right this minute. Then what do you do? You consider cashing in your career and moving to Anchorage, or signing up to be a mail-order bride to China—and then you weep.



Don't Fixate on the Question
I'm not saying that any of these obstacles are permanent or insurmountable. We all know stories of people who found flaming happiness exactly when everyone was convinced they wouldn't. I recently heard—true story, I swear—of a woman in her 60s who was widowed unexpectedly and two years later married a Canadian mountie.

But what's the point of finding happiness after years when you can find it right now? "Yeah, right," you say. How? Easy. And hard: You change that question.

Consider, for starters, what happens when you ask yourself, Why am I still single? You immediately lump yourself in with a designated sorry category that, I'm going to argue right here, doesn't truly exist. Let me explain. In all those social science studies of singles versus marrieds, everyone knows that the singles group is considered the unfortunates. That's why it's always news when they find—who would believe it?—that the single women have managed to eke out some happiness in their otherwise bleak lives. And yet, in actual terms, there's no such thing as single as a bloc. It's not a solid category like Armenian. It's not a fixed characteristic like shoe size. If anything, it's a false social construct. Nowadays we're all single at some points in our lives, involved at others, which is why it gets you a whole lot farther to ask yourself, How can I make the most of whatever stage I'm in? And then set about to figure out the answer.



Embrace Your Current Stage and Banish "Out There" from Your Vocabulary

Now here comes the hard part. To find answers, you have to truly embrace this stage you're in now. Do that and, paradoxically, you're more likely to end up with a boyfriend—for reasons I'll explain—but you can't be doing it to get a boyfriend. You have to relish where you are right now, without a view to side returns—something of a Zen conundrum. How are you going to "be here now" when you're bombarded with all the single-woman messages? "You'd better hurry up and find someone." "Time's running out." "There are no men out there." "Watch out, he's about to cheat on you." (Oh, wait, that's the one the married women get.)

To begin with, you're going to banish the words "out there" from your vocabulary and mind. For all the discussion we give to it, it's easy to forget that it's not a real place. Out there has a lot in common with Narnia, in fact: It's fraught with peril, and it's invisible. I've been at tables of women where we've spooked ourselves all night with discussions of out there ("Once you reach a certain age, you begin to try to make it work with anyone, because you realize there are no men out there"), then we've turned to the single among us and advised, "You know, you just have to get yourself out there." (All conversation guaranteed verbatim.)

Start to pay attention to your thoughts when you're freaking, and you'll begin to see how often you're getting flummoxed by unnecessary fear. The question, Why am I single? sends you in one direction and one direction alone: toward a zone of fear. The implication is, you're failing. You're in the void. That kind of thought is a trap. "Has anything good and strong ever come out of fear?" my friend Sarah asks. "It's a bad motivator. It always drives you into things that are wrong." For instance, and above all, the next bad relationship. Leap into another just to shore yourself up from the last, and a nasty cycle sets up. Because you're in the new relationship for shaky reasons—to salve the pain from the first—the second's pretty much guaranteed to fall apart. At which point, if you don't step back, you'll end up scrambling for a third that's destined to self-destruct.


Meditation Activities Are a Good Start

If, at that same panic point, you say to yourself, All right, this is just where I am. How do I get the most out of this part? You're putting yourself in a very different place, a zone of possibilities and expansiveness.

There are things you can do to help yourself enter that zone. A meditation practice is one of them. "One thing meditation's shown me," says Sharon Salzberg, author of Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience and cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society, "is that experience is one thing and our interpretation of it is another. The interpretation seems so solid and comes so quickly, we don't realize that there's space in there and that we have a choice of responses: compassion versus impatience, positive versus negative." To illustrate the difference between experience and interpretation, she laughingly gives the following example: "The other night, I was walking in the rain toward the class I teach, when I saw this guy coming toward me on a bicycle. My first thought was, Oh, this poor guy, out in the rain on a bike. Then he splashed me. My next thought was, Oh, how ridiculous to be out in the rain on a bike."

When you can separate incident from interpretation, she continues, you see more clearly, with more heart. "You learn to dare to say, What happens if I try viewing this event from this angle instead?" she says. "It becomes like an adventure. You say, Wow, I spent all those years catering to the needs of this other person. Look at this: I'm going to be myself. Or I'm going to write my book. Or I'm going to reach out to these other people." If you think happiness can lie in only one thing, she concludes, you miss all the available happiness.


You'll Be More Attractive with a Full Life

When you're in that zone of expansiveness, you become more generous with others and yourself. You give yourself time to figure out what you want. "The longer you're not with someone just to be with someone, the more you get a better sense of what's negotiable for you and what's not," says my friend Sarah, who, through allowing herself a breather, came to understand, "I can't hook up again with someone who doesn't love dogs. Or who wouldn't think of doing some sort of charity work, since that bespeaks a kind of stinginess at a spiritual level. Someone who has a lot of money—I don't care about that. On my own, I've learned these things about myself."

Generosity is a higher form of power, one that no one can give you but that you can freely take. Another friend did just that when she decided to stop telling herself, I want to find someone to love me, and tried saying, I want to find someone to love. Not long after, she did.

When you expand yourself, you expand your world. And that's why you do it, why you shift into a generous realm, not to get a boyfriend, though there's a good chance that will be one result. (You're a lot more attractive with a wide, full life than when you're judging each man by what he can give you.) You do it for the broader vision, for the expansion itself, which will build on itself till your life will have levels and depths you never thought possible. You do it in order to be fully present at each moment of your life. When you are, anything can happen. When you're shut down by fear, not much will. And you do it because when you're in that larger place, you get to see, once and for all, there's really nothing out there.




By Katherine Russell Rich


Original Source: http://www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/omag_200502_alone

Last summer, when I lived in the country, an ad for a local dating service would come on the radio every time I drove around. "But I'm as pretty and interesting and nice as my friends. Why am I single?" a petulant voice would say. Then an announcer would cut in and tell her to go to speed-shuffle date night; her friends would soon be choking with envy, he'd imply, and each time I'd think, Yeah, right. Okay, she existed in drive-time and was doomed to lament her situation every 15 minutes, but that wasn't what made me doubt that she was heading toward paired happiness. It was the question. She was asking the wrong one.

If you've been without a partner for a while and aren't happy about it, it's natural to wonder why. But put that question to yourself, and the result is you find yourself confronted with obstacles—some considerable. You're single because you moved to New York, where the odds are tipped in favor of men, and not to Alaska, where they aren't. Or because you take jobs that keep you at the office till the dead hours, or because you keep falling for married men, or because your husband died, or because you're over a certain age, which, beginning at about 25, is generally ten years less than what you are right this minute. Then what do you do? You consider cashing in your career and moving to Anchorage, or signing up to be a mail-order bride to China—and then you weep.



Don't Fixate on the Question
I'm not saying that any of these obstacles are permanent or insurmountable. We all know stories of people who found flaming happiness exactly when everyone was convinced they wouldn't. I recently heard—true story, I swear—of a woman in her 60s who was widowed unexpectedly and two years later married a Canadian mountie.

But what's the point of finding happiness after years when you can find it right now? "Yeah, right," you say. How? Easy. And hard: You change that question.

Consider, for starters, what happens when you ask yourself, Why am I still single? You immediately lump yourself in with a designated sorry category that, I'm going to argue right here, doesn't truly exist. Let me explain. In all those social science studies of singles versus marrieds, everyone knows that the singles group is considered the unfortunates. That's why it's always news when they find—who would believe it?—that the single women have managed to eke out some happiness in their otherwise bleak lives. And yet, in actual terms, there's no such thing as single as a bloc. It's not a solid category like Armenian. It's not a fixed characteristic like shoe size. If anything, it's a false social construct. Nowadays we're all single at some points in our lives, involved at others, which is why it gets you a whole lot farther to ask yourself, How can I make the most of whatever stage I'm in? And then set about to figure out the answer.



Embrace Your Current Stage and Banish "Out There" from Your Vocabulary

Now here comes the hard part. To find answers, you have to truly embrace this stage you're in now. Do that and, paradoxically, you're more likely to end up with a boyfriend—for reasons I'll explain—but you can't be doing it to get a boyfriend. You have to relish where you are right now, without a view to side returns—something of a Zen conundrum. How are you going to "be here now" when you're bombarded with all the single-woman messages? "You'd better hurry up and find someone." "Time's running out." "There are no men out there." "Watch out, he's about to cheat on you." (Oh, wait, that's the one the married women get.)

To begin with, you're going to banish the words "out there" from your vocabulary and mind. For all the discussion we give to it, it's easy to forget that it's not a real place. Out there has a lot in common with Narnia, in fact: It's fraught with peril, and it's invisible. I've been at tables of women where we've spooked ourselves all night with discussions of out there ("Once you reach a certain age, you begin to try to make it work with anyone, because you realize there are no men out there"), then we've turned to the single among us and advised, "You know, you just have to get yourself out there." (All conversation guaranteed verbatim.)

Start to pay attention to your thoughts when you're freaking, and you'll begin to see how often you're getting flummoxed by unnecessary fear. The question, Why am I single? sends you in one direction and one direction alone: toward a zone of fear. The implication is, you're failing. You're in the void. That kind of thought is a trap. "Has anything good and strong ever come out of fear?" my friend Sarah asks. "It's a bad motivator. It always drives you into things that are wrong." For instance, and above all, the next bad relationship. Leap into another just to shore yourself up from the last, and a nasty cycle sets up. Because you're in the new relationship for shaky reasons—to salve the pain from the first—the second's pretty much guaranteed to fall apart. At which point, if you don't step back, you'll end up scrambling for a third that's destined to self-destruct.


Meditation Activities Are a Good Start

If, at that same panic point, you say to yourself, All right, this is just where I am. How do I get the most out of this part? You're putting yourself in a very different place, a zone of possibilities and expansiveness.

There are things you can do to help yourself enter that zone. A meditation practice is one of them. "One thing meditation's shown me," says Sharon Salzberg, author of Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience and cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society, "is that experience is one thing and our interpretation of it is another. The interpretation seems so solid and comes so quickly, we don't realize that there's space in there and that we have a choice of responses: compassion versus impatience, positive versus negative." To illustrate the difference between experience and interpretation, she laughingly gives the following example: "The other night, I was walking in the rain toward the class I teach, when I saw this guy coming toward me on a bicycle. My first thought was, Oh, this poor guy, out in the rain on a bike. Then he splashed me. My next thought was, Oh, how ridiculous to be out in the rain on a bike."

When you can separate incident from interpretation, she continues, you see more clearly, with more heart. "You learn to dare to say, What happens if I try viewing this event from this angle instead?" she says. "It becomes like an adventure. You say, Wow, I spent all those years catering to the needs of this other person. Look at this: I'm going to be myself. Or I'm going to write my book. Or I'm going to reach out to these other people." If you think happiness can lie in only one thing, she concludes, you miss all the available happiness.


You'll Be More Attractive with a Full Life

When you're in that zone of expansiveness, you become more generous with others and yourself. You give yourself time to figure out what you want. "The longer you're not with someone just to be with someone, the more you get a better sense of what's negotiable for you and what's not," says my friend Sarah, who, through allowing herself a breather, came to understand, "I can't hook up again with someone who doesn't love dogs. Or who wouldn't think of doing some sort of charity work, since that bespeaks a kind of stinginess at a spiritual level. Someone who has a lot of money—I don't care about that. On my own, I've learned these things about myself."

Generosity is a higher form of power, one that no one can give you but that you can freely take. Another friend did just that when she decided to stop telling herself, I want to find someone to love me, and tried saying, I want to find someone to love. Not long after, she did.

When you expand yourself, you expand your world. And that's why you do it, why you shift into a generous realm, not to get a boyfriend, though there's a good chance that will be one result. (You're a lot more attractive with a wide, full life than when you're judging each man by what he can give you.) You do it for the broader vision, for the expansion itself, which will build on itself till your life will have levels and depths you never thought possible. You do it in order to be fully present at each moment of your life. When you are, anything can happen. When you're shut down by fear, not much will. And you do it because when you're in that larger place, you get to see, once and for all, there's really nothing out there.




By Katherine Russell Rich


Original Source: http://www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/omag_200502_alone

Last summer, when I lived in the country, an ad for a local dating service would come on the radio every time I drove around. "But I'm as pretty and interesting and nice as my friends. Why am I single?" a petulant voice would say. Then an announcer would cut in and tell her to go to speed-shuffle date night; her friends would soon be choking with envy, he'd imply, and each time I'd think, Yeah, right. Okay, she existed in drive-time and was doomed to lament her situation every 15 minutes, but that wasn't what made me doubt that she was heading toward paired happiness. It was the question. She was asking the wrong one.

If you've been without a partner for a while and aren't happy about it, it's natural to wonder why. But put that question to yourself, and the result is you find yourself confronted with obstacles—some considerable. You're single because you moved to New York, where the odds are tipped in favor of men, and not to Alaska, where they aren't. Or because you take jobs that keep you at the office till the dead hours, or because you keep falling for married men, or because your husband died, or because you're over a certain age, which, beginning at about 25, is generally ten years less than what you are right this minute. Then what do you do? You consider cashing in your career and moving to Anchorage, or signing up to be a mail-order bride to China—and then you weep.



Don't Fixate on the Question
I'm not saying that any of these obstacles are permanent or insurmountable. We all know stories of people who found flaming happiness exactly when everyone was convinced they wouldn't. I recently heard—true story, I swear—of a woman in her 60s who was widowed unexpectedly and two years later married a Canadian mountie.

But what's the point of finding happiness after years when you can find it right now? "Yeah, right," you say. How? Easy. And hard: You change that question.

Consider, for starters, what happens when you ask yourself, Why am I still single? You immediately lump yourself in with a designated sorry category that, I'm going to argue right here, doesn't truly exist. Let me explain. In all those social science studies of singles versus marrieds, everyone knows that the singles group is considered the unfortunates. That's why it's always news when they find—who would believe it?—that the single women have managed to eke out some happiness in their otherwise bleak lives. And yet, in actual terms, there's no such thing as single as a bloc. It's not a solid category like Armenian. It's not a fixed characteristic like shoe size. If anything, it's a false social construct. Nowadays we're all single at some points in our lives, involved at others, which is why it gets you a whole lot farther to ask yourself, How can I make the most of whatever stage I'm in? And then set about to figure out the answer.



Embrace Your Current Stage and Banish "Out There" from Your Vocabulary

Now here comes the hard part. To find answers, you have to truly embrace this stage you're in now. Do that and, paradoxically, you're more likely to end up with a boyfriend—for reasons I'll explain—but you can't be doing it to get a boyfriend. You have to relish where you are right now, without a view to side returns—something of a Zen conundrum. How are you going to "be here now" when you're bombarded with all the single-woman messages? "You'd better hurry up and find someone." "Time's running out." "There are no men out there." "Watch out, he's about to cheat on you." (Oh, wait, that's the one the married women get.)

To begin with, you're going to banish the words "out there" from your vocabulary and mind. For all the discussion we give to it, it's easy to forget that it's not a real place. Out there has a lot in common with Narnia, in fact: It's fraught with peril, and it's invisible. I've been at tables of women where we've spooked ourselves all night with discussions of out there ("Once you reach a certain age, you begin to try to make it work with anyone, because you realize there are no men out there"), then we've turned to the single among us and advised, "You know, you just have to get yourself out there." (All conversation guaranteed verbatim.)

Start to pay attention to your thoughts when you're freaking, and you'll begin to see how often you're getting flummoxed by unnecessary fear. The question, Why am I single? sends you in one direction and one direction alone: toward a zone of fear. The implication is, you're failing. You're in the void. That kind of thought is a trap. "Has anything good and strong ever come out of fear?" my friend Sarah asks. "It's a bad motivator. It always drives you into things that are wrong." For instance, and above all, the next bad relationship. Leap into another just to shore yourself up from the last, and a nasty cycle sets up. Because you're in the new relationship for shaky reasons—to salve the pain from the first—the second's pretty much guaranteed to fall apart. At which point, if you don't step back, you'll end up scrambling for a third that's destined to self-destruct.


Meditation Activities Are a Good Start

If, at that same panic point, you say to yourself, All right, this is just where I am. How do I get the most out of this part? You're putting yourself in a very different place, a zone of possibilities and expansiveness.

There are things you can do to help yourself enter that zone. A meditation practice is one of them. "One thing meditation's shown me," says Sharon Salzberg, author of Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience and cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society, "is that experience is one thing and our interpretation of it is another. The interpretation seems so solid and comes so quickly, we don't realize that there's space in there and that we have a choice of responses: compassion versus impatience, positive versus negative." To illustrate the difference between experience and interpretation, she laughingly gives the following example: "The other night, I was walking in the rain toward the class I teach, when I saw this guy coming toward me on a bicycle. My first thought was, Oh, this poor guy, out in the rain on a bike. Then he splashed me. My next thought was, Oh, how ridiculous to be out in the rain on a bike."

When you can separate incident from interpretation, she continues, you see more clearly, with more heart. "You learn to dare to say, What happens if I try viewing this event from this angle instead?" she says. "It becomes like an adventure. You say, Wow, I spent all those years catering to the needs of this other person. Look at this: I'm going to be myself. Or I'm going to write my book. Or I'm going to reach out to these other people." If you think happiness can lie in only one thing, she concludes, you miss all the available happiness.


You'll Be More Attractive with a Full Life

When you're in that zone of expansiveness, you become more generous with others and yourself. You give yourself time to figure out what you want. "The longer you're not with someone just to be with someone, the more you get a better sense of what's negotiable for you and what's not," says my friend Sarah, who, through allowing herself a breather, came to understand, "I can't hook up again with someone who doesn't love dogs. Or who wouldn't think of doing some sort of charity work, since that bespeaks a kind of stinginess at a spiritual level. Someone who has a lot of money—I don't care about that. On my own, I've learned these things about myself."

Generosity is a higher form of power, one that no one can give you but that you can freely take. Another friend did just that when she decided to stop telling herself, I want to find someone to love me, and tried saying, I want to find someone to love. Not long after, she did.

When you expand yourself, you expand your world. And that's why you do it, why you shift into a generous realm, not to get a boyfriend, though there's a good chance that will be one result. (You're a lot more attractive with a wide, full life than when you're judging each man by what he can give you.) You do it for the broader vision, for the expansion itself, which will build on itself till your life will have levels and depths you never thought possible. You do it in order to be fully present at each moment of your life. When you are, anything can happen. When you're shut down by fear, not much will. And you do it because when you're in that larger place, you get to see, once and for all, there's really nothing out there.




By Katherine Russell Rich


Original Source: http://www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/omag_200502_alone

Last summer, when I lived in the country, an ad for a local dating service would come on the radio every time I drove around. "But I'm as pretty and interesting and nice as my friends. Why am I single?" a petulant voice would say. Then an announcer would cut in and tell her to go to speed-shuffle date night; her friends would soon be choking with envy, he'd imply, and each time I'd think, Yeah, right. Okay, she existed in drive-time and was doomed to lament her situation every 15 minutes, but that wasn't what made me doubt that she was heading toward paired happiness. It was the question. She was asking the wrong one.

If you've been without a partner for a while and aren't happy about it, it's natural to wonder why. But put that question to yourself, and the result is you find yourself confronted with obstacles—some considerable. You're single because you moved to New York, where the odds are tipped in favor of men, and not to Alaska, where they aren't. Or because you take jobs that keep you at the office till the dead hours, or because you keep falling for married men, or because your husband died, or because you're over a certain age, which, beginning at about 25, is generally ten years less than what you are right this minute. Then what do you do? You consider cashing in your career and moving to Anchorage, or signing up to be a mail-order bride to China—and then you weep.



Don't Fixate on the Question
I'm not saying that any of these obstacles are permanent or insurmountable. We all know stories of people who found flaming happiness exactly when everyone was convinced they wouldn't. I recently heard—true story, I swear—of a woman in her 60s who was widowed unexpectedly and two years later married a Canadian mountie.

But what's the point of finding happiness after years when you can find it right now? "Yeah, right," you say. How? Easy. And hard: You change that question.

Consider, for starters, what happens when you ask yourself, Why am I still single? You immediately lump yourself in with a designated sorry category that, I'm going to argue right here, doesn't truly exist. Let me explain. In all those social science studies of singles versus marrieds, everyone knows that the singles group is considered the unfortunates. That's why it's always news when they find—who would believe it?—that the single women have managed to eke out some happiness in their otherwise bleak lives. And yet, in actual terms, there's no such thing as single as a bloc. It's not a solid category like Armenian. It's not a fixed characteristic like shoe size. If anything, it's a false social construct. Nowadays we're all single at some points in our lives, involved at others, which is why it gets you a whole lot farther to ask yourself, How can I make the most of whatever stage I'm in? And then set about to figure out the answer.



Embrace Your Current Stage and Banish "Out There" from Your Vocabulary

Now here comes the hard part. To find answers, you have to truly embrace this stage you're in now. Do that and, paradoxically, you're more likely to end up with a boyfriend—for reasons I'll explain—but you can't be doing it to get a boyfriend. You have to relish where you are right now, without a view to side returns—something of a Zen conundrum. How are you going to "be here now" when you're bombarded with all the single-woman messages? "You'd better hurry up and find someone." "Time's running out." "There are no men out there." "Watch out, he's about to cheat on you." (Oh, wait, that's the one the married women get.)

To begin with, you're going to banish the words "out there" from your vocabulary and mind. For all the discussion we give to it, it's easy to forget that it's not a real place. Out there has a lot in common with Narnia, in fact: It's fraught with peril, and it's invisible. I've been at tables of women where we've spooked ourselves all night with discussions of out there ("Once you reach a certain age, you begin to try to make it work with anyone, because you realize there are no men out there"), then we've turned to the single among us and advised, "You know, you just have to get yourself out there." (All conversation guaranteed verbatim.)

Start to pay attention to your thoughts when you're freaking, and you'll begin to see how often you're getting flummoxed by unnecessary fear. The question, Why am I single? sends you in one direction and one direction alone: toward a zone of fear. The implication is, you're failing. You're in the void. That kind of thought is a trap. "Has anything good and strong ever come out of fear?" my friend Sarah asks. "It's a bad motivator. It always drives you into things that are wrong." For instance, and above all, the next bad relationship. Leap into another just to shore yourself up from the last, and a nasty cycle sets up. Because you're in the new relationship for shaky reasons—to salve the pain from the first—the second's pretty much guaranteed to fall apart. At which point, if you don't step back, you'll end up scrambling for a third that's destined to self-destruct.


Meditation Activities Are a Good Start

If, at that same panic point, you say to yourself, All right, this is just where I am. How do I get the most out of this part? You're putting yourself in a very different place, a zone of possibilities and expansiveness.

There are things you can do to help yourself enter that zone. A meditation practice is one of them. "One thing meditation's shown me," says Sharon Salzberg, author of Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience and cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society, "is that experience is one thing and our interpretation of it is another. The interpretation seems so solid and comes so quickly, we don't realize that there's space in there and that we have a choice of responses: compassion versus impatience, positive versus negative." To illustrate the difference between experience and interpretation, she laughingly gives the following example: "The other night, I was walking in the rain toward the class I teach, when I saw this guy coming toward me on a bicycle. My first thought was, Oh, this poor guy, out in the rain on a bike. Then he splashed me. My next thought was, Oh, how ridiculous to be out in the rain on a bike."

When you can separate incident from interpretation, she continues, you see more clearly, with more heart. "You learn to dare to say, What happens if I try viewing this event from this angle instead?" she says. "It becomes like an adventure. You say, Wow, I spent all those years catering to the needs of this other person. Look at this: I'm going to be myself. Or I'm going to write my book. Or I'm going to reach out to these other people." If you think happiness can lie in only one thing, she concludes, you miss all the available happiness.


You'll Be More Attractive with a Full Life

When you're in that zone of expansiveness, you become more generous with others and yourself. You give yourself time to figure out what you want. "The longer you're not with someone just to be with someone, the more you get a better sense of what's negotiable for you and what's not," says my friend Sarah, who, through allowing herself a breather, came to understand, "I can't hook up again with someone who doesn't love dogs. Or who wouldn't think of doing some sort of charity work, since that bespeaks a kind of stinginess at a spiritual level. Someone who has a lot of money—I don't care about that. On my own, I've learned these things about myself."

Generosity is a higher form of power, one that no one can give you but that you can freely take. Another friend did just that when she decided to stop telling herself, I want to find someone to love me, and tried saying, I want to find someone to love. Not long after, she did.

When you expand yourself, you expand your world. And that's why you do it, why you shift into a generous realm, not to get a boyfriend, though there's a good chance that will be one result. (You're a lot more attractive with a wide, full life than when you're judging each man by what he can give you.) You do it for the broader vision, for the expansion itself, which will build on itself till your life will have levels and depths you never thought possible. You do it in order to be fully present at each moment of your life. When you are, anything can happen. When you're shut down by fear, not much will. And you do it because when you're in that larger place, you get to see, once and for all, there's really nothing out there.




By Katherine Russell Rich


Original Source: http://www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/omag_200502_alone

Is there a double standard when it comes to dating? Dr. Phil's guests say it's hard for them to find Mr. Right.

 

 Dr. Phil polls his audience. The majority believe there is a stigma attached to older women dating younger men, but not vice versa.

“Is there a double standard?” he asks an audience member named Cindy.

“Most definitely,” she replies. "Men want younger women."

“If you see a woman with a younger man, they think it’s his mom,” Dr. Phil sympathizes.

Another audience member, Susan, shares her thoughts. “I want to be able to go out with younger men and not have people look at me and go, ‘Is that his mother?’” she says.

A woman in a green blazer has a different viewpoint. “There are too many women out there who date younger guys. I’ve done it. They didn’t look at me funny,” she tells Dr. Phil as the audience cheers.

“Do you mind saying how old you are?” he asks.

“Sixty-five,” she replies.

“How much younger were the young men?” Dr. Phil inquires.

“Always 10 or 11 years younger,” she answers.

Another audience member, Lynn, joins the discussion. “They take away from us,” she says, referring to younger women decreasing the pool of available men.

A woman in a blue shirt says it's not a big deal for older women to be courted by younger suitors. “Before, you looked at older men dating younger women and it was almost like, ‘Well, she’s after her sugar daddy,’ or ‘He wants this trophy.’ Now they see older women with younger men, and they go, ‘Go, girl!’ It’s a great thing," she tells Dr. Phil. 

“The problem with dating somebody a whole lot younger is the aging curves are different. Once you get to be, like, 50, you age a lot faster between 50 and 60 than you do between 20 and 30, or 30 and 40,” Dr. Phil explains.

 

Original Source: http://drphil.com/slideshows/slideshow/4699/?id=4699&showID=1151

 

 Please visit http://www.drphil.com for more videos and articles on relationships, sex, dating and family.

Is there a double standard when it comes to dating? Dr. Phil's guests say it's hard for them to find Mr. Right.

 

 Dr. Phil polls his audience. The majority believe there is a stigma attached to older women dating younger men, but not vice versa.

“Is there a double standard?” he asks an audience member named Cindy.

“Most definitely,” she replies. "Men want younger women."

“If you see a woman with a younger man, they think it’s his mom,” Dr. Phil sympathizes.

Another audience member, Susan, shares her thoughts. “I want to be able to go out with younger men and not have people look at me and go, ‘Is that his mother?’” she says.

A woman in a green blazer has a different viewpoint. “There are too many women out there who date younger guys. I’ve done it. They didn’t look at me funny,” she tells Dr. Phil as the audience cheers.

“Do you mind saying how old you are?” he asks.

“Sixty-five,” she replies.

“How much younger were the young men?” Dr. Phil inquires.

“Always 10 or 11 years younger,” she answers.

Another audience member, Lynn, joins the discussion. “They take away from us,” she says, referring to younger women decreasing the pool of available men.

A woman in a blue shirt says it's not a big deal for older women to be courted by younger suitors. “Before, you looked at older men dating younger women and it was almost like, ‘Well, she’s after her sugar daddy,’ or ‘He wants this trophy.’ Now they see older women with younger men, and they go, ‘Go, girl!’ It’s a great thing," she tells Dr. Phil. 

“The problem with dating somebody a whole lot younger is the aging curves are different. Once you get to be, like, 50, you age a lot faster between 50 and 60 than you do between 20 and 30, or 30 and 40,” Dr. Phil explains.

 

Original Source: http://drphil.com/slideshows/slideshow/4699/?id=4699&showID=1151

 

 Please visit http://www.drphil.com for more videos and articles on relationships, sex, dating and family.

Is there a double standard when it comes to dating? Dr. Phil's guests say it's hard for them to find Mr. Right.

 

 Dr. Phil polls his audience. The majority believe there is a stigma attached to older women dating younger men, but not vice versa.

“Is there a double standard?” he asks an audience member named Cindy.

“Most definitely,” she replies. "Men want younger women."

“If you see a woman with a younger man, they think it’s his mom,” Dr. Phil sympathizes.

Another audience member, Susan, shares her thoughts. “I want to be able to go out with younger men and not have people look at me and go, ‘Is that his mother?’” she says.

A woman in a green blazer has a different viewpoint. “There are too many women out there who date younger guys. I’ve done it. They didn’t look at me funny,” she tells Dr. Phil as the audience cheers.

“Do you mind saying how old you are?” he asks.

“Sixty-five,” she replies.

“How much younger were the young men?” Dr. Phil inquires.

“Always 10 or 11 years younger,” she answers.

Another audience member, Lynn, joins the discussion. “They take away from us,” she says, referring to younger women decreasing the pool of available men.

A woman in a blue shirt says it's not a big deal for older women to be courted by younger suitors. “Before, you looked at older men dating younger women and it was almost like, ‘Well, she’s after her sugar daddy,’ or ‘He wants this trophy.’ Now they see older women with younger men, and they go, ‘Go, girl!’ It’s a great thing," she tells Dr. Phil. 

“The problem with dating somebody a whole lot younger is the aging curves are different. Once you get to be, like, 50, you age a lot faster between 50 and 60 than you do between 20 and 30, or 30 and 40,” Dr. Phil explains.

 

Original Source: http://drphil.com/slideshows/slideshow/4699/?id=4699&showID=1151

 

 Please visit http://www.drphil.com for more videos and articles on relationships, sex, dating and family.

Is there a double standard when it comes to dating? Dr. Phil's guests say it's hard for them to find Mr. Right.

 

 Dr. Phil polls his audience. The majority believe there is a stigma attached to older women dating younger men, but not vice versa.

“Is there a double standard?” he asks an audience member named Cindy.

“Most definitely,” she replies. "Men want younger women."

“If you see a woman with a younger man, they think it’s his mom,” Dr. Phil sympathizes.

Another audience member, Susan, shares her thoughts. “I want to be able to go out with younger men and not have people look at me and go, ‘Is that his mother?’” she says.

A woman in a green blazer has a different viewpoint. “There are too many women out there who date younger guys. I’ve done it. They didn’t look at me funny,” she tells Dr. Phil as the audience cheers.

“Do you mind saying how old you are?” he asks.

“Sixty-five,” she replies.

“How much younger were the young men?” Dr. Phil inquires.

“Always 10 or 11 years younger,” she answers.

Another audience member, Lynn, joins the discussion. “They take away from us,” she says, referring to younger women decreasing the pool of available men.

A woman in a blue shirt says it's not a big deal for older women to be courted by younger suitors. “Before, you looked at older men dating younger women and it was almost like, ‘Well, she’s after her sugar daddy,’ or ‘He wants this trophy.’ Now they see older women with younger men, and they go, ‘Go, girl!’ It’s a great thing," she tells Dr. Phil. 

“The problem with dating somebody a whole lot younger is the aging curves are different. Once you get to be, like, 50, you age a lot faster between 50 and 60 than you do between 20 and 30, or 30 and 40,” Dr. Phil explains.

 

Original Source: http://drphil.com/slideshows/slideshow/4699/?id=4699&showID=1151

 

 Please visit http://www.drphil.com for more videos and articles on relationships, sex, dating and family.