Seven Signs He Is Falling in Love

By: Robin Cockrell from Divinecaroline.com

When a man begins to fall in love, suddenly he becomes more attentive, more available and his actions will speak volumes. If a man is into you and considering taking the relationship to the next level he will step up and assume the role of boyfriend often without saying a word. Below are seven signs he is falling in love.
1. He makes sure he has a date scheduled with you on the weekend. The weekend is prime real estate. If you have a date with him every weekend and not last minute hook ups, he is moving in your direction.
2. He calls you almost daily and is interested in your day. He asks questions about you and is sincerely interested in you and your life. If he shows much interest in you it is a sure sign he is falling in love with you.
3. He texts or calls randomly to share something about his life. If he is doing this, he sees you as a part of his life.
4. He does little things for you. He may cut your grass, hang a picture, or change a light bulb you can’t reach. When he starts doing little things for you to make your life easier, he is falling for you.
5. He pays. If a man parts with the cash in his wallet he sees you as a good investment. Men will spend their hard earned money when he is falling in love.
6. He wants to see you even if it’s for a few minutes. He may find a reason to stop in at your work, or drop by your house.
7. He comes and pick you up and does not expect you to go out of your way to see him, he will gladly go out of his way to see you. A man falling in love does not call you late at night for a booty call, he thinks way to highly of you for that.
If your man is doing the above things, chances are good he is falling in love. He sees a possible future with you. What you do and how you respond to him can make all the difference in the world as to whether he takes the relationship to the next level. A man needs to feel safe with you before he makes a commitment. The way you handle the dating phase can make all the difference as to whether you go from a girlfriend to a wife.

How much would you give for sex?

I find it surprising how much men are willing to give, how many sacrifices they are eager to make in order to get laid. I find it even more surprising how little of those they are willing to give for a relationship of any kind, and how women are the exact opposite.

A man would skip work, travel for 2000 kilometers, pay for a hotel room and other expenses, to meet a woman with the only purpose of having sex, maybe even just a quick session. He would invent nice compliments, he’d pay attention, and he’d be a really great guy. The same man would find it difficult to spend a nice evening, pay for dinner and the movie and have a long walk with a woman who actually likes him and who would actually be good for him as a long term partner. He’d forget to make plans, to compliment her and to pay attention in this case.

Anna* has this friend who invited her in a romantic weekend in a really romantic city. He was a great host and presented himself as a really reliable and lovable person, while clearly stating that he was not interested in a relationship. She stopped seeing him when she realized he did not want the same things as her. It has been years since and the guy keeps inviting her for other trips, from time to time... he doesn't give up and he keeps on trying to convince her that she needs sex...hmmm. I wonder whom of the two really need it.

Cristina* knew Jim* for 6 years and there has always been attraction and flirting between them, but timing was never right- he was in a relationship; when he broke up with that other girl, she was in another country; when she came back, he was involved again; when he broke up, she had someone, etc. But for 6 years he never stopped talking to her about sex and how attracted he felt to her and how great he considered her to be.

No promises, though, in both cases. Never any real promise of a relationship! Just a really nice behavior, the type you, the girl, would fall for as leading towards something more serious, like a relationship. Both my girlfriends felt disoriented when, after having sex with the guy, his behavior completely changed... and it was just when she finally let herself have feeling for him and allowed herself to start hoping.

Why the act? Why would you put in so much time and effort for something even you can find everywhere? Wasn’t the conquest meaning something completely different a couple of decades ago, like getting the girl? Does the conquest now mean just getting in the girl?

On the other side, a woman is not even considering putting too much effort into arranging her evening schedule just to meet a guy she finds attractive, would like to have sex with, but does not seem to have a relationship potential. But in the perspective of a real relationship, she would skip work, travel the world and meet the guy, wearing the best looking outfits and lacy lingerie. We are the exact opposites in this matter.

Yes, we both have that therapeutically hormonal balancing sexual partner who is good in bed but we don’t really want them as our life partners. The difference is the attitude. She will ask him to pay a visit if he calls when he is in the neighborhood, while he will do grand and expensive gestures, send her the plane ticket and arrange to pick her up from the airport for the same purpose or he will pursue her with constancy for no matter how long.

How important is casual sex to men? It makes no sense to me. Why would I go through any effort for something that is so available everywhere, like casual sex? Why would I invest anything more than a bikini wax and a condom and why would I spend more energy than answering a phone call and talking for 30 seconds? How can be casual sex so important for men and so unimportant for women?

And the thing that really needs time and effort which is building a relationship, how come it is so rarely considered by men and (unless he really feels she is the one) thoroughly avoided?

I am not saying that men want only sex and women only want relationships, although it is applicable in most cases. I am just astonished by the huge difference in importance of casual sex to men and women. So my friend, if you are frustrated that he is not paying the desired attention to you, he does not seem to be really into you, but yet he seems to want you, don’t wreck your brain so much – he maybe is not into you, but he surely is into getting in you. Now, if you want a relationship with him, chances are you won’t get one. So it is up to you to decide…

*name was changed

Death to Chivalry, Hello to Hostility

Another article that is well written, using the right arguments...

By: Jennifer Lubell (View Profile)

Against my better judgment, I once decided to play matchmaker with my best friend.

Anna* is slim and delicate, with a good-natured personality. I thought she’d be a great match for Scott, a slightly broody computer programmer with an artsy side. He was tall and dark-haired, just her type.

To keep things casual, my friend Henry—one of Scott’s good friends—and I came along to play the convenient chaperons. As we waited for our dates to arrive, I couldn’t help but indulge in a few ill-fated daydreams, hoping that my friend would finally meet her prince.

My expectations fell dramatically when the fallen prince arrived a half hour late, complaining about the rain and traffic jams. He took one look at Anna, decided he wasn’t interested, and all good graces and common decency went out the window. He ordered his food first, started digging into his plate even before the rest of our entries arrived, and treated my friend like she was invisible.

Anna, bless her heart, tried gallantly to draw Scott in by asking him questions about his job and his hobbies. In this department, he was all too happy to oblige—and talk about himself.

When the bill came, we were a few dollars short after everyone had thrown their money in (Dutch treat was a given, considering how the evening was going). I thought the boys would offer to help. Instead, I got a helpless look from Henry, whose wallet had mysteriously run dry, and a defiant glare from Scott. Obviously, since I hadn’t come up with the woman of his dreams, he wasn’t going to contribute another red cent to the evening. So Anna and I did what any upstanding gentleman would do: we paid the difference.

Like other yentas whose fix ups have gone horribly wrong, I wanted to cover my head with my babushka scarf and hide underneath the table. I felt badly for Anna, not just because her date turned out to a selfish, arrogant jerk.

Once again, she had become the unlucky recipient of bad manners and lack of social graces from the opposite sex.

Several months ago, she drove twenty miles from Maryland on a weeknight to meet an Internet date in Virginia. Just like Scott, the man stared stonily into his drink for an hour and wouldn’t talk to her. In an email conversation with another Internet prospect who also lived in Virginia, she asked if he ever came up to Maryland on business. Perhaps they could meet for a drink.

His huffy response was: “I guess it’s too much to ask that you drive halfway to meet me?”

I got an email from her shortly after this exchange. “Chivalry is dead,” she wrote.

In an age where it’s perfectly acceptable to delete someone’s online profile with a touch of a finger, and dismiss someone at a speed dating event after talking to them for exactly three minutes, it’s not surprising that old-fashioned manners have been replaced by modern-day hostility and a sense of entitlement.

Men are no longer required to open doors for women, pay for dinner on a first date, or drape a coat over us when it’s cold. The men reading this are undoubtedly thinking, why should we act like gentlemen? What’s in it for us? Women make as much money as we do. They steal our jobs, have babies on their own. They’re big girls. They should be paying for our dinners, shouldn’t they?

And some of the women, in their high-powered suits and beepers and palm pilots are sneering that they don’t want to go back to the days when they had to act like mindless ninnies and drop handkerchiefs on the floor.

Quaint romanticism may be silly, but in my opinion, it’s the ingredient that once made dating a special event. Nowadays, nothing is special anymore. A typical date has the aura and significance of withdrawing money from an ATM machine.

I remember having similar experiences to my friend Anna during my single days. I got yelled at by an attorney in a Chinese restaurant for “asking too many questions,” and on another date sat there starving for half an hour, because the guy couldn’t decide what he wanted for lunch.

One man kept bringing up the fact that I was “very short,” even though he had mt me in a bar a few weeks beforehand, and I was wearing flat shoes at the time.

Absence of chivalry doesn’t just create callousness in men. Apparently, it makes them less observant.

As I write that sentence, I realize that modern-day hostility and entitlement has bred new germs of its own: cynicism and hopelessness.

Somehow, in this sea of sharks and online dating terrorism, I managed to find that needle in a haystack. My husband and I met on a bike ride, and he called me the next day to ask me out. A year later, we were engaged. Our courtship wasn’t perfect, but it was based on an old-fashioned romantic formula that doesn’t seem to exist anymore.

It may seem sexist, but honestly, I don’t think it’s too much to ask for a man to pull out a chair for a woman on a date and treat her decently, even if he doesn’t plan on asking her out again.

And a chair, guys, only weighs a few pounds. I think you can handle it.*Name has been changed.

http://www.divinecaroline.com/22070/79607-death-chivalry--hello-hostility

Why We Kiss?

I came across this article and I found it really interesting.

Why We Kiss: The Science of Sex
By: Brie Cadman
Pecking, smooching, Frenching, and playing tonsil-hockey—there are as many names for kissing as there are ways to do it. Whether we use it as an informal greeting or an intensely romantic gesture, kissing is one of those ingrained human behaviors that seems to defy explanation. Its many purposes—a blow and peck for good luck on dice, lips to ground after a rocky boat ride, kisses in the air to an acquaintance, and the long slow smooches of Hollywood—have different meanings yet are similar in nature. So why is it that we love to pucker up?

A Kiss Isn’t Just a KissPhilematologists, the scientists who study kissing, aren’t exactly sure why humans started locking lips in the first place. The most likely theory is that it stems from primate mothers passing along chewed food to their toothless babies. The lip-to-lip contact may have been passed on through evolution, not only as a necessary means of survival, but also as a general way to promote social bonding and as an expression of love.

But something’s obviously happened to kissing since the time of the chewed-food pass. Now, it’s believed that kissing helps transfer critical information, rather than just meat bits. The kissing we associate with romantic courtship may help us to choose a good mate, send chemical signals, and foster long-term relationships. All of this is important in evolution’s ultimate goal—successful procreation.

Kissing allows us to get close enough to a mate to assess essential characteristics about them, none of which we’re consciously processing. Part of this information exchange is most likely facilitated by pheromones, chemical signals that are passed between animals to help send messages. We know that animals use pheromones to alert their peers of things like mating, food sources, and danger, and researchers hypothesize that pheromones can play a role in human behavior as well. Although the vomeronasal organs, which are responsible for pheromone detection and brain function in animals, are thought to be vestigial and inactive in humans, research indicates we do communicate with chemicals.

The first study to indicate that chemical signals play a role in attraction was conducted by Claud Wedekind over a decade ago. Women sniffed the worn t-shirts of men and indicated which shirts smelled best to them. By comparing the DNA of the women and the men, researchers found that women didn’t just chose their favorite scent randomly. They preferred the scent of man whose major histocompatibility complex (MHC)—a series of genes involved in our immune system—was different from their own. Having a different MHC means less immune overlap and a better chance of healthy, robust offspring. Kissing may be a subtle way for women to assess the immune compatibility of a mate, before she invests too much time and energy in him. Perhaps a bad first kiss means more than first date jitters—it could also mean a real lack of chemistry.

Men Sloppy, Women ChoosyBehavioral research supports this biological reasoning. In 2007, researchers at University of Albany studied 1,041 college student and found significant differences in how males and females perceived kissing. Although common in courtship, females put more importance on kissing, and most would never have sex without kissing first. Men, on the other hand, would have sex without kissing beforehand; they would also have sex with someone who wasn’t a good kisser. Since females across species are often the choosier ones when it comes to mate selection, these differences in kissing behavior make sense.

Men are also more likely to initiate French kissing and researchers hypothesize that this is because saliva contains testosterone, which can increase libido. Researchers also think that men might be able to pick up on a woman’s level of estrogen, which is a predictor of fertility.

Crazy for CanoodlingBut kissing isn’t all mating practicality; it also feels good. That’s because kissing unleashes a host of feel-good chemicals, helping to reduce stress and increase social bonding. Researcher Wendy Hill and colleagues at Lafayette College looked at how oxytocin, which is involved in pair bonding and attachment, and cortisol, a stress hormone, changed after people kissed. Using a small sample of college couples that were in long-term relationships, they found cortisol levels decreased after kissing. The longer the couples had been in a relationship, the farther their levels dropped. Cortisol levels also decreased for the control group—couples that just held hands—indicating that social attachment in general can decrease stress levels, not just kissing

Looking at oxytocin levels, the researchers found that they increased only in the males, whereas the researchers thought it would increase in both sexes. They hypothesized that it could be that women need more than a kiss to stimulate attachment and bonding, or that the sterile environment of the research lab wasn’t conducive to creating a feeling of attachment.

Kissing, therefore, plays a role not only in mate selection, but also in bonding. At an Association for the Advancement of Science meeting on the science of kissing, Helen Fischer, an evolutionary biologist, posits multiple reasons for lip locking. She believes that kissing is involved in the three main types of attraction humans have: sex drive, which is ruled by testosterone; romantic love, which is ruled by dopamine and other feel-good hormones; and attachment, which involves bonding chemicals like oxytocin. Kissing, she postulates, evolved to help on all three fronts. Saliva, swapped during romantic kisses, has testosterone in it; feel-good chemicals are distributed when we kiss that help fuel romance; and kissing also helps unleash chemicals that promote bonding, which provides for long term attachment, necessary for raising offspring.

Sniff, Snuggle, and Turn RightYet, not all cultures or mammals kiss. Some mammals have close contact with each others’ faces via licking, grooming, and sniffing, which may transmit the necessary information. And although chimps may pass food from mother to child, the notoriously promiscuous bonobos are apparently the only primates that truly kiss. And while it’s thought that 90 percent of the human population kisses, there’s still the 10 percent that doesn’t. So it seems that as much as we use kissing to gather genetic and compatibility information, our penchant for kissing also has to do with our cultural beliefs surrounding it.

Whether we live in a place where kissing is reserved for close acquaintances, or somewhere where a casual greeting means a one, two, or three cheeker, one thing does remain highly consistent: the side to which people turn while kissing. It’s almost always to the right. A 2003 study published in Nature found that twice as many adults turn their heads to the right rather than the left when kissing. This behavioral asymmetry is thought to stem from the same preference for head turning during the final weeks of gestation and during infancy.

One of the best things about kissing, however, is that we don’t have to think about any of this. Just close eyes, pucker up, and let nature takes its course.

http://www.divinecaroline.com/22081/76045-kiss--science-sex/

Did I marry the right person?

Article pasted from one of my received e-mails. I think it is relevant for most relationships.

During one seminar, a woman asked a common question. She said, " How do I know if I married the right person ?"I noticed that there was a large man sitting next to her so I said, " It Depends. Is that your husband?"In all seriousness, she answered " How do you know?"Let me answer this question because the chances are good that it's Weighing on your mind. Here's the answer.EVERY relationship has a cycle. In the beginning, you fell in love with Your spouse. You anticipated their call, wanted their touch, and liked Their idiosyncrasies.Falling in love with your spouse wasn't hard. In fact, it was a Completely natural and spontaneous experience. You didn't have to DO anything. That's why it's called "falling" in love... Because it's happening TO YOU. People in love sometimes say, " I was swept of my feet." Think about the Imagery of that _expression. It implies that you were just standing There; doing nothing, and then something came along and happened TO YOU. Falling in love is easy. It's a passive and spontaneous experience. But after a few years of marriage, the euphoria of love fades. It's the Natural cycle of EVERY relationship. Slowly but surely, phone calls Become a bother ( if they come at all), touch is not always welcome ( when it happens), and your spouse's idiosyncrasies, instead of being cute, drive you nuts. The symptoms of this stage vary with every relationship, but if you Think about your marriage, you will notice a dramatic difference between the initial stage when you were in love and a much duller or even angry subsequent stage. At this point, you and/or your spouse might start asking, " Did I marry The right person?" And as you and your spouse reflect on the euphoria of The love you once had, you may begin to desire that experience with someone else. This is when marriages breakdown. People blame their spouse for their Unhappiness and look outside their marriage for fulfillment.Extramarital fulfillment comes in all shapes and sizes. Infidelity is The most obvious. But sometimes people turn to work, church, a hobby, a friendship, excessive TV, or abusive substances. But the answer to this dilemma does NOT lie outside your marriage. It lies within it. I'm not saying that you couldn't fall in love with someone else. You Could. And TEMPORARILY you'd feel better. But you'd be in the same situation a few years later. Because ( listen carefully to this):THE KEY TO SUCCEEDING IN MARRIAGE IS NOT FINDING THE RIGHT PERSON; IT'S LEARNING TO LOVE THE PERSON YOU FOUND. SUSTAINING love is not a passive or spontaneous experience. It'll NEVER just happen to you. You can't "find " LASTING love. You have to "make" it day in and day out. That's why we have the _expression " the labor of love."Because it takes time, effort, and energy. And most importantly, it Takes WISDOM. You have to know WHAT TO DO to make your marriage work. Make no mistake about it. Love is NOT a mystery. There are specific Things you can do ( with or without your spouse ) to succeed with your marriage.Just as there are physical laws of the universe ( such as gravity),There are also laws for relationships. Just as the right diet and exercise Program makes you physically stronger, certain habits in your Relationship WILL make your marriage stronger. It's a direct cause and effect. If you know and apply the laws, the results are predictable... You can " make" love.Love in marriage is indeed a " decision"... Not just a feeling.