The Battlefield of Love

“ A wife should be beneath her husband in four things or else she will despise him: age, height, wealth and lineage. She should be better than him in four others: beauty, manners, character and scrupulousness in matters of religion.”

I found this in the 29 November 2008 issue of The Week , the source is The Sunday Telegraph . Don't be fooled by the movies and leave falling in love to chance. We take action in other areas of our lives - falling in love should be no different. Stop waiting for The One. Searching for an ideal soulmate means you subject partners to impossible standards. However, you should identify areas you are not prepared to compromise on, such as wanting children or levels of fidelity. There are certain skills that are key to a successful relationship, such as good communication and managing stress, so you are less likely to take things out on those closest to you. By learning these skills, you will give any relationship a better chance. Love is about "making yourself vulnerable to another person". People often fall in love in war zones owing to the bonding that takes place in scary situations. But less extreme experiences, such as watching horror films together or going on rollerco...

I am now formally declaring that I have given up on love in the romantic sense, but not on love in the platonic and more enduring sense. Applications for the vacancy of a Domestic Partner - a cross between a housemate, critical friend and business partner - are invited. Sex and fidelity are optional, ie neither compulsory nor prohibited. Each "transaction" is deemed to be a one-off so that both parties are kept on their toes. There would be no assumption that either party would be spending, for example, St Valentine's Day with each other as a matter of course. So few people like this idea that the person, male or female, who says to me "My word, this is just the sort of relationship I have been looking for all my life!" without a hint of irony or sarcasm, would probably be The One . Domestic Partnership - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership

The end of Western civilisation really cannot be that far off! Instead of addressing the problem of family breakdown in society and the abdication of parental responsibility and moral authority in every sphere of public life, one of my occasional readers and commentators has recommended Princess Bubble , written by two unmarried and retired trolley-dollies. It is a story for women who have ended up single and need a happy ending as they contemplate growing old alone. The blurb: With wisdom gleaned from their careers as single, globe-trotting flight attendants, first-time authors Susan Johnston and Kimberly Webb have crafted a modern-day book that celebrates singleness. A contemporary fairy tale for all ages, Princess Bubble was written to reduce the overwhelming sense of failure, self-doubt, and despair that some single women face. Knowing how low self-esteem and depression plague many single females, we wanted to spread the message that happily ever after can occur even before Princ...

I know too many single women who never intended to be single but have found themselves, for one reason or another, without a man and unable to become a wife and mother. A cartoon of a career woman saying: "Eeek! I forgot to have children!" is telling, funny and sad. Yet, when one tries to address this issue, one is accused of giving ignorant "mumsy" advice, ie the advice that all women should make a point of finding a decent man who might be induced to marry them by the time they are 25. No doubt if I had given this advice to these now single women in their late 30s when they were in their 20s they would all have told me to mind my own business! I doubt if the mothers of these women would have given any such advice anyway. Most mothers have, to my knowledge, not been giving their daughters advice of any sort for several decades. Why is that, I wonder? Is it because they think all the rules have changed and that their advice would be considered old-fashioned, irrelev...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/children_shealth/3506668/More-babies-being-born-with-Downs-syndrome.html This curious phenomenon suggests the following of British society:- 1. Increasing numbers of couples view the having children as similar to having pets. (We expect nothing of our pets except their ability to be obedient, grateful, forever dependent and never leave us. Pets, you see, have no use except to gratify the ego of the pet-owner and to stave off feelings of loneliness and uselessness that we all might have from time to time.) 2. These parents expect very little from their children, because they appear to have the luxury of being able to treat their children as pets. 3. The waste and purposelessness of such an unrewarding venture - that of bringing up a child who will never achieve full independence and who will always be a source of worry, particularly if they do not predecease their parents - is not being questioned enough by parents, because of the cushion of...

Please choose the answer (or place your answers in an order of preference) that most corresponds to your immediate emotional response. 1. Do you regard yourself as an Alpha Male/Female? · Yes · No · In my dreams · Never heard that term before. 2. Do you fear rejection? · Used to it · Doesn’t everyone? · I deal with this by making a point of avoiding rejection. 3. Do others regard you as an Alpha Male/Female? · More the beta kind · Of course · A bit of a loser at times really 4. What do you associate most with being an Alpha Male? · Getting what I want. · Getting the woman/man I want. · What other people think I am not. 5. Do women think you are an Alpha Male? · Only if they see me with my car and possessions · My wife/girlfriend does · Probably not 6. Do you feel life is unfair? · Life’s a bitch and then you die! Didn’t you know that?? · You make your own luck. · Unfairness has a way of targeting life’s losers. · You make life fairer by being fair to as many people as you can. 7. What ...

The following are ostensibly the questions we are asked to consider. http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?forumID=5677&edition=1& ttl =20081119101730 Should it be a crime to pay for sex? The British government wants to make it illegal to pay for sex with prostitutes who are controlled by pimps or have been trafficked to the UK. Will this move protect vulnerable women? Men who pay for sex could be publicly identified and even charged with rape, if they knowingly have sex with a woman forced into prostitution. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said it would 'be a good thing' if the measures deterred men from visiting prostitutes. Sex workers have criticised the proposal, saying they could be at greater risk if they have to work alone or in remote neighbourhoods. Should the sex-trade be subject to tougher laws? Or would decriminalisation be a better move? How should governments prevent trafficking? "Should an officious woman who indulges in gesture politics be allowe...

"Now, we have become the men we would like to marry." Explain and discuss.

Dear Reader What do you think might be the problem(s) with you/men/women that might prevent you from being in a long-term relationship? I can't trust them. They don't trust me. I don't understand them. They don't understand me. I don't know what I want. They don't know what they want. I am easily bored. They are easily bored. I have no money. They have no money. I am not conventionally attractive. I lack the ability or will to be pleasant, reliable and appreciated as a partner. I have a drink/drug/gambling addiction problem. They have a drink/drug/gambling addiction problem. I am a poor judge of character I can't seem to get them to do what I want or be what I want them to be. They are OK at the beginning and then start to go wrong. I lack self-esteem and tend to take whatever I can find, ie a low-quality partner. In other words, I am a victim of my own low standards. It is impossible getting them to love me and my pet(s) as I am neither fabulously wealthy ...

http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/sreguidance/sexeducation.pdf is where the official version can be found. Can anyone not trained in education create a sex and RE syllabus and sell it to the government? Here is one I have just devised. THE 15 KEY AREAS OF KNOWLEDGE: 1. what the Abrahamic religions say about extra-marital and recreational sex (integrated with the study of Deuteronomy, Leviticus, Romans, the Koran where it mentions the punishment of adultery and homosexuality) 2. why they say what they say about extra-marital and recreational sex 3. why adultery could be considered qualitatively similar to homosexuality (being recreational and extra-marital sex) because of the way it is treated and punished in the Old Testament - both incur the penalty of death by stoning. 4. why adultery (caused by the deadly sin of lust) was considered injurious to society (It breaks up families and impoverishes the next generation as can be seen in the decline of Britain as a nation. British employers prefer fo...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-473633/Why-intelligent-women-fools-love.html # Why are intelligent women such fools in love? By ANNA PASTERNAK Last updated at 08:09 08 August 2007 Last month, I turned 40. I didn't have a big celebration because, being single, I couldn't face dancing with my friends' well-meaning husbands all night. I never envisaged that at my 40th, not only would I not have a partner, but I wouldn't even have a date. When I waltzed out of Oxford University nearly 20 years ago, throbbing with a sense of my potential, this wasn't what I had in mind at all. But now, taking stock, I can see that while my career as a writer has flourished, I have floundered massively in the relationship stakes. My romantic CV makes shockingly depressing reading - I was married at 32, divorced by 34, became pregnant by a new partner at 36 and was left by him as a single mother at 38. Hardly surprisingly, I've been too scared for the past two years to risk m...

Some men might find this contract amusing and attractive. Women will no doubt find it rather one-sided .... http://www.nomarriage.com/marriage_contract.html Canadian Bar Association recommendations can be found at http://www.cba.org/bc/public_media/family/162.aspx

Excerpt from Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848): Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things find its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians , and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty. But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social. And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by intervention of society, direct or indirect, by means of scho...

extracted from Kathleen Parker's Save the Males: Between weak families, absent fathers, a culture that signalizes the innocent, and government bureaucracies that are designed to grow themselves, one doesn't have to be paranoid to envision a time when freedom as we have known it will be compromised beyond recognition. Already free speech has suffered as those who mis -speak - who challenge the orthodoxy of the prevailing ism - are silenced. When former Harvard University president Lawrence H Summers dared to suggest that women's lesser accomplishments in math and science might be explained in part by innate differences in the sexes, he was effectively shown the door. When Dr Miriam Grossman's book Unprotected http://www.amazon.com/Unprotected-Miriam-Grossman/dp/1595230459/ref=dp_return_2?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books came out in 2006, she published as "Anonymous" because she feared professional repercussions for reporting that political correctness had...

From The Sunday Times August 3, 2008 Where have all the real men gone? Top American columnist Kathleen Parker is causing a furore with her new book Save the Males, in which she argues that feminism has neutered men and deprived them of their noble, protective role in society http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article4448371.ece I know. Saving the males is an unlikely vocation for a 21st-century woman. Most men don’t know they need saving; most women consider the idea absurd. When I tell my women friends that I want to save the males, they look at me as if noticing for the first time that I am insane. Then they say something like: “Are you out of your mind? This is still a male-dominated world. It’s women who need saving. Screw the men!” Actually, that’s a direct quote. The reality is that men already have been screwed – and not in the way they prefer. For the past 30 years or so, males have been under siege by a culture that too often ...

In an online interview with FrontPage magazine, Dalrymple (whose writings can be found at http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/authors.php?author=Theodore ) explained: In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious l ies* is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself . One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to. * for example, avoiding the conclusion that women should not serve with ...

In 1920 GK Chesterton explained why the family is, in essence, an anarchist institution against the totalitarian state: The ideal for which [marriage] stands in the state is liberty. It stands for liberty for the very simple reason ... [that] it is the only ... [institution] that is at once necessary and voluntary. It is the only check on the state that is bound to renew itself as eternally as the state, and more naturally than the state ... This is the only way in which truth can ever find refuge from public persecution, and the good man survive bad government.

Arranged Marriages in the cause of patriotism? How to do Britain a favour? A helpful suggestion by an Asian Briton which should be of interest to British Nationalists up and down the country: To those who scoff at arranged marriages I only have this to say: look at your own dilemmas of family breakdowns, divorce, human despair and what your children are up to. And if you want to secure ongoing continuity of love, comfort and support in your old age, go for an arranged marriage. You could save yourself and do Britain a favour at the same time...... http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/sep/13/family1 First person Arranged marriages fascinate people in the UK 'like watching horror films'. Don't scoff, says Ziauddin Sardar, British society could learn a lot from the Asian experience I have always been married. My mother harboured a specific plan for my marriage before I was even born. I was married generations before my birth, just as my wife, Saliha, was destined to be ...

In my time, perfectly masculine men - men who say they will not back down from a fight, for example, have recklessly confessed to me and other romantic prospects a fear of flying. (Jean Paul Getty might get away with admitting this foible, but not, I'm afraid, less-financially well-endowed men.) A man once said to me that he prefers to leave politics alone because it upset him too much. For some reason, a woman can confess a fear and loathing of politics to me without sacrificing too much of the affection and regard I might have for her because she is after all "only a girl". A man making that confession is absolutely damaged goods and will never have my respect again. Ditto a man wearing a baby sling or carrying his child like a beast of burden using one of those backpacking child-carriers. Another man who could have been forming romantic intentions towards me recently informed me that all men want to be mothered. This I have no doubt, as all women want to be protected a...

McCain has chosen as his running mate a woman unable to pass on the traditional values that the Republican Party stands for, which I assume to include marriage. Sarah Palin's daughter is expecting and unmarried, yet this is somehow brushed aside as an irrelevance, even by Obama. It's OK, Obama, to lay into Palin even though your mother was a much-divorced woman. It is the ones who don't even bother getting married before having babies who should be pelted with rotten vegetables and fruit. Or perhaps it is those who still think it is OK to have a child outside wedlock who deserve the pillory and stocks. Like you, Obama? Why is marriage desirable in the context of bringing up children? If you are a Darwinian, you would understand. When we have sex, it is for the pleasure of it. Babies are not an erotic goal - in fact the very opposite. The male has to compete to win the hand of the female most likely to be a good mother and wife, ie the one most beautiful, sexy, clever, kind ...

A review of it can be found at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/07/17/btfemale117.xml of this funny, sharp, relevant and wise satire on feminism as an ideology. Echoing the life voyages of the likes of Germaine Greer and Fay Weldon, the stages of feminist thought can be summarised as follows: Women must free themselves from the yoke of man-made restrictions - Phase 1 Women must become like men to free themselves, ie have careers and sexual freedom, earn money, and no longer be in the home - Phase 2 Women should therefore abandon their traditional path of fulfilment and empowerment, ie marriage and motherhood - Phase 3 Women must acknowledge their failure to become happier after abandoning marriage and motherhood, or acknowledge that marriage, motherhood and career is the privilege of that rare being, the highly motivated and talented time-manageress - Phase 4 Women should re-embrace their traditional roles and once again become happy and fulfilled feminine bei...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2130668/Male-priests-marry-in-Anglican-church Male Priests' Civil Partnership Blessed in Church by Rector Two men "marrying" each other in a mosque could never happen in any Koran-compliant mosque because the Koran specifically states that sodomy is a sin to be punished, in rather the same manner as adultery. To allow same-sex couples to "marry" would be to make a mockery of marriage since the purpose of marriage is to have legitimate children and it is biologically impossible for two people of the same sex to sexually reproduce with each other. It is for this reason that extramarital sex is forbidden in all the five world religions and sodomites traditionally treated as sex offenders. Extramarital sex includes all forms of recreational sex enjoyed between people not married to each other whether heterosexual or homosexual. HOW EXTRA-MARITAL RECREATIONAL SEX IS PUNISHED IN ISLAM 4 witnesses would be required in th...

The Chinese do not call each other "bastard" as a term of abuse, it is more subtle than that. What they in fact say, literally translated, is "it is the mother's" ("ma te " are the two syllables that convey this sentiment.) What is the mother's? Filling in the blanks and completing the sentence, the full translation is this: "The problem I am having with you originates from the morals and behaviour of your mother." For the sake of balance, I quote Shakespeare's apparently sympathetic defence of bastards through the words of the villainous Edmund in King Lear : EDMUND : Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law My services are bound. Wherefore should I Stand in the plague of custom, and permit The curiosity of nations to deprive me, For that I am some twelve or fourteen moon-shines Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base? When my dimensions are as well compact, My mind as generous, and my shape as true, As honest madam's issu...

A message from Jill Rhodes-Harvey, sent 03 June 2008 18:36: I'm astonished at your blog, or I presume it's your blog, and ask you to remove my name, agency name and url link from it, and any other literature pertaining to my agency, including quote about the imbalance of data-base introductions agencies. It is quite apparent from further reading this blog, that you, or whoever has written it has absolutely NO idea whatsoever about dating...Perhaps that is why you produced a blog? As for my agency suggesting same sex relationships to my clients..I am fuming that this has been posted on this so called blog! I have copyright to ALL text on my website and YOU have copied it, if you do not remove it I shall report this matter to the relevant people for copyright in this country. Jill Rhodes-Harvey I must say I was a little taken aback by Jill's conclusion that I must know nothing of dating and romance just because I happen to have a blog, as if bloggers are by definition all d...