Showing posts with label romance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label romance. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Bringing in the New Blood

 When a senior finds a new romantic partner late, it’s a tremendous occasion for both. Romances later can give a considerable desired source of togetherness and passion that could be missed if the senior has suffered a spouse or is progressing through their golden years alone. But it’s natural for youngsters to feel some apprehension when they see their parents enjoying the company of another in their lives. And helping the children to accept your new sweetheart or companion, especially if that romance is going to result in marriage.

Part of your children’s resistance to your dating comes from anxiety about losing their parent, which may be just as deep and lasting grief as you had in losing your wife or husband. It may seem strange, but often it is the children of the marriage who go through the longest grief when a parent passes on. You may have already moved along in your processing of that loss much more than they. To children, the parents are a permanent institution and the idea that one of them would go away seems inconceivable. And this feeling often survives well into adulthood.

So that is the first big change your family has to make when they see you enjoying the company of the opposite sex. You must assure them you will not replace mom or dad in their hearts and that this romance will never remove the love you cherish for that departed spouse. To the children, that love must endure forever because it is the foundation of their concept of family, which is a big part of their own identity as well, even though one parent may have passed away.

This is the next step in life that calls for you, the senior citizen and the wise old Grandma or Grandpa in the family mix to use some of that sensitivity and wisdom of your years to help your children and even grandchildren accept your new romance and evolve with you to a new phase of life. If you have the chance as you begin a new relationship, the time to begin the acceptance process is before that friendship becomes a romance.

By sitting down with your children and discussing that this will happen, even before it happens, you begin the acceptance process. In their minds and emotional systems, they understand your need for companionship and for love and romance. You need that as much as they do. So you explain it to them.

Then, as you see a romantic interest, be open with the family about what you are doing. Adult children can even get to where they will be your advisor and your cheerleaders as you enjoy a new era of dating and romance. Once that area of life is open, then when you do “bring home the date to meet the family”, it won’t be such a difficult thing. 

But by keeping the adult children always in the loop, they can talk with one another, agree that this is the best possible thing for you and even work to help the grandkids accept your new romance. Before long, he or she will come for dinner, join in the holidays and really become part of the family. Just as you opened your heart when your kids were dating and finding new loves, you will teach your kids to open their hearts to someone who is becoming important to you. It’s a cycle of life, but if we handle it lovingly and honestly, it’s a good cycle.

Friday, January 19, 2018

Bringing in New Blood

One of the realities of being our age, is that we lose life partners or our partners decide that they want to go on a different path then we do, and there is a parting of the ways. We are social creatures and so we, will after some time after a loss, seek out a new partner.
When we find a new romantic companion late in life, it’s a wonderful moment.  Romances late in life can provide a much-needed source of companionship and love that may be missing if the senior has lost a spouse or is going through their golden years alone.  But it’s common for children to go through some anxiety when they see dad or mom enjoying the company of another romance in their lives.  And getting the kids to accept your new girlfriend or boyfriend, especially if that romance is going to result in a wedding.
Part of your children’s resistance to you dating comes from anxiety about losing their parent which may be just as deep and lasting a grief as you had in losing your wife or husband.  It may seem strange but often it is the children of the marriage who go through the longest grief when a parent passes on.  You may have already moved along in your processing of that loss much more than they.  To children, the parents are a permanent institution and the idea that one of them would go away seems inconceivable.  And this feeling often survives well into adulthood.
So that is the first big adjustment your family has to make when they see you beginning to enjoy the company of the opposite sex.  They must be assured you are not going to replace mom or dad in their hearts and that this romance will never remove the love you cherish for that departed spouse.  To the children, that love must endure forever because it is the foundation of their concept of family which is a big part of their own identity as well, even though one parent may have passed away.
This is the next step in life that calls for you, the senior citizen and the wise old Grandma or Grandpa in the family mix to use some of that sensitivity and wisdom of your years to help your children and even grandchildren accept your new romance and evolve with you to a new phase of life.  If you have the chance as you begin a new relationship, the time to begin the acceptance process is before that friendship becomes a romance.
By sitting down with your children and discussing that this will happen, even before it happens, you begin the acceptance process.  In their minds and emotional systems, they begin to understand your need for companionship and for love and for romance.  You need that as much as they do.  So, you explain it to them.
Then as you begin to see a romantic interest, be open to the family about what you are doing.  Adult children can even get to the point that they will be your advisor and your cheerleaders as you enjoy a new era of dating and romance.  Once that area of life is open, then when you do “bring home the date to meet the family” it won’t be such a difficult thing. 
But by keeping the adult children always in the loop, they can talk with one another, agree that this is the best possible thing for you and even work to help the grandkids accept your new romance.  Before long, he or she will be able to come for dinner, join in the holidays and really become part of the family.  Just as you opened your heart when your kids were dating and finding new loves, you will teach your kids to open their hearts to so

Saturday, May 29, 2010

There is always some madness in love

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness. Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Reading and Writing"

Back in 2006 the folks at National Geographic ran an article that showed the Nietzsche may have been correct. 
"To be madly in love might be exactly that—madness. The term “lovesick” is surprisingly accurate, claims a cover story in this month’s National Geographic magazine, citing research published over the last several years.  People experiencing romantic love have a chemical profile in their brains similar to that of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, noted the author, psychologist Lauren Slater.

The Science quoted in the article is below:
  • Love lights up areas of the brain linked to reward and pleasure, the ventral tegmental area and the caudate nucleus. It releases chemical messengers such as dopamine that, in the right proportions, provoke intense energy, focused attention, recklessness and exhilaration.
  • Doing novel things together triggers dopamine in the brain, stimulating feelings of attraction. So first encounters that involve a nerve-wracking activity, like riding a roller coaster, are more likely to lead people to pursue a relationship.
  • Love also could be as simple as following our noses. Swiss researchers asked women to choose which T-shirts worn by a variety of men smelled the best. They found women preferred the scent of a shirt worn by a man whose genes were most different from their own—genes possibly linked to an immune system that has something theirs does not. In this way a woman may boost her chance of having healthy offspring.
  • Love and obsessive-compulsive disorder could have a similar chemical profile: low levels of the brain chemical serotonin. Thus, love and mental illness may be hard to tell apart.
  • For those wishing to escape the grip of runaway passion, there is hope: Prozac, the medication that increases the amount of the serotonin available at the junctures between brain cells. Prozac jeopardizes one’s ability to fall in love, and stay in love, by dulling the keen edge of love and its associated libido. 
  • Studies around the world show that passion usually ends. Biologically speaking, the reason romantic love fades may be found in the way our brains respond to the surge and pulse of dopamine. Perhaps the brain adapts to the excessive amounts, and the neurons become desensitized.
  • Anthropologist Helen Fisher of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J., suggests relationships often break up after about four years because that’s how long it takes to raise a child through infancy. Fisher is the author of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, a 2004 book.
  • Oxytocin, a chemical thought to be plentiful in long-term couples with warm, comfortable relationships, is a hormone that promotes feelings of connection and bonding. It is released when we hug our children or our long-term spouses or when a mother nurses her infant. In long-term relationships that never get off the ground, chances are the couple has not found a way to stimulate or sustain oxytocin production.
  • Fisher has also proposed that human romantic love evolved out of an “attraction system” shared by mammals and birds.
  • “Mammals and birds express mate preferences and make mate choices,” Fisher and two colleagues wrote in the Oct. 27 issue of the Journal of Comparative Neurology. Data suggest this attraction system is linked to reward-processing brain areas that use dopamine, as in humans, they added. 
  • “We propose that this attraction mechanism evolved to enable individuals to focus their mating energy on specific others, thereby conserving energy and facilitating mate choice.”
Interesting reading for all of you in love, so if the scientists are able to analyze the nature of love, as Peggy Lee asked Is that all there is?

The romantics, the writers of love songs, and love stories,  and the poets would beg to differ and I am on the side of the romantics and the people who are mad on this point, aren't you?