Forgiving Infidelity and Adultery

I am sure any one of us can write a thousand pages on adultery but in this article I just want to focus on the issue of forgiving and moving past the act of infidelity.

Would you forgive your cheating partner? Should Tiger's wife forgive him?

Definition:

For purposes of this article, let's define adultery or infidelity as relating to voluntary sexual intercourse between a married individual and another that is not a lawful partner.

I am certain that all of you have either experienced infidelity first hand or know someone that has had to deal with a cheating partner. You don't have to be religious to appreciate the inappropriateness of this act and the damage it causes to others.

Before looking at forgiving and moving past the act of infidelity we need to quickly review some of the reasons partners may cheat. I think being aware of these reasons could make individuals more able to move past the act. I think some of the reasons people cheat include:
- low self esteem
- some do it for lack of spiritual wisdom and knowledge
- selfishness
- unfulfilling or unsatisfying current relationships
- biological reasons. wild animals rarely practice monogamy so maybe there is something in our DNA that drives us to desire more than one partner

Forgiveness:

Infidelity is one of the most difficult offenses in a relationship to forgive. This maybe because it's an offense that makes us feel betrayed, unloved and definitely violates the trust bond that, in my view, is an essential adhesive that keeps the relationship structure glued together and stable.

Please don't get me wrong; I am not advocating staying with a cheating partner. I think you have many choices to deal with infidelity including but not limited to counseling, separation, divorce. What I am advocating in this article is that you MUST forgive your cheating partner. My view has always been that you should not empower that individual by letting their weakness and sin control your emotional and spiritual well-being. You have to free your mind from negative clutter and take control of your emotional and spiritual health. The problem with not forgiving your spouse is that you often replay the hurt in your head and by so doing stunt your own personal growth and of-course the relationship's growth. Most importantly you continue to harm your emotional and spiritual well-being as you continuously relive the hurt in your head. Most people superficially forgive their partner instead of completely and truly forgiving and therefore never truly recover from the hurt. To completely forgive your spouse would mean to completely banish the offense from your mind and heart.

So the MOST IMPORTANT REASON you must forgive your cheating partner in my view is so that you can empower yourself and move past the hurtful and damaging act of infidelity.

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Making Love Versus Having Sex

Is there a difference between making love and having sex?

I am guessing more women than men are concerned with clarifying this issue but who knows? Maybe this blog will prove my assumptions wrong! i am curious to know what the blog community out there thinks in regards to the idea of sex versus making love; are they different? or really the same thing? Before you kiss your teeth and blurt out what you think, take a moment to really think about the definitions of both.
- Do you have to be in love to make love to someone? in other words can you make love to a one night stand?
- Can you have tenderness and caring during sex but not when making love?
- Is sex always animal and rough in nature?

I often start by providing a generally accepted definition of the topic I am blogging about but not in this instance! Oh no, I have decided to jump straight into the discussion without foreplay;) I used to be one of those people that believed the two were different! Maybe you are where I was back then, you know, believing that you have sex with strangers and make love to your partner/lover! Well, I don't believe that school of thought anymore!!!

In general people say you have sex with strangers or people you don't know very well and sex has less emotions involved. I have heard and read where some have said sex is purely physical. Well is it at all possible that you could make love to a stranger and have sex with your partner but the stranger walks away thinking that was great animal sex and your partner wakes up thinking that was the best love making in the world?


So, is it the physical and emotional acts that define making love and differentiate it from having sex?

Or is the definition so arbitrary that it is dependent on one individual's feeling at that moment? This would then mean two people being intimate in the same bed could have different experiences!!! While you think you are making love to your partner, your partner could be thinking this is just sex! or maybe the definition is dependant on the relationship between the two people! To make love you have to be in a committed relationship?

Some have said potato - potato!

I wonder when these two definitions were first realized. Do you think a bushman first discovered you could make love as opposed to having sex or maybe a pharaoh and his queen did. Hmmm…

Anyways I hope the blog community will come up with some clever and innovative definitions that will be beneficial to all so that everyone can really understand when they are involved in one versus the other if they are indeed different;)

…let me get back to researching fraud prevention and detection in an automated environment;)

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Sign The Prenup If You Love Me!!!

How can you say you love and trust your spouse and yet ask him or her to sign a prenuptial agreement???

Definition:

A prenuptial agreement, often referred to as a ‘prenup’, is a legally binding agreement between a couple prior to marriage that provides for an agreed upon distribution of assets in the event of a divorce.

Tradition:

Once upon a time people got married, had kids and lived happily ever after. When divorce occurred, it was dealt with fast and swiftly. Whether the settlements were fair is another story. There was a time in the US, for example, when everything a woman owned or inherited was transferred to her husband and if he died or they divorced, she risked losing it all. Thanks to the notion of fair versus unfair divorce settlements, prenup contracts were born!

Prenups have existed for thousands of years! For example, Dowry and Lobola in Africa and some Asian cultures is a form of prenup. I know a few of you are ready to string me by the neck but consider the purpose of a prenup and you will see that Dowry and Lobola also fulfil this purpose. If A is equal to B and B is equal to C then it must follow that A is equal to C!

Today’s Reality Check:

Today marriage can be a business venture! Yes I said it, a lucrative business undertaking! I know some people are probably thinking ill of me because of the preceding but the truth of the matter is that divorce is now too messy and there is money to be made by lawyers and one of the spouses. And you know when someone makes cheese, someone else loses theirs!!! Here are some examples that will show you that prenuptuals can be man’s second best friend:

• Madonna paid $76 million dollars to settle her divorce to ex-husband Guy Ritchie.
• Michael Jordan (His Airness) paid $168 million to settle his divorce to ex-wife Juanita Vanoy
• Steven Spielberg settled his divorce to ex-wife Amy Irving for a lump sum of $100 million.
• Michael Douglas paid $45 million to settle divorce with ex-wife Diandra Douglas so that he could move on to marry Catherine Zeta-Jones.
• Kenny Rogers who gave us the famous lyrics “You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, know when to run!", paid $60 million to settle his divorce to ex-wife Marianne Rogers.
• Rupert Murdoch paid ex-wife Anna Murdoch $1.7 billion to settle his divorce.

Sign a Prenup or not?

The last part of the reality check section above, highlights the costs of a divorce excluding lawyer fees!!! So I am not sure given such examples why people marry without signing prenup agreements! First of all a prenup does not mean one of the spouses walks away with nothing, it just sets a rational legal process that should be followed should divorce ever occur. Many people think that signing a prenup means that you don’t love your partner or that you don’t trust him or her. To me that sounds ludicrous because I am sure there are many people out there that trust their health, or their Volvos or their houses but we still get insurance in case something happens. We get insurance just in case, no matter how unlikely it maybe that we will use that insurance, but it gives us comfort to know that should something happen that is out of our control then we will be covered! So then I ask myself: Why would you not want to be insured by a prenup so that no matter how unlikely, you will have coverage to ensure your interest is best attended to in the event of a divorce?

Just because you buy travel insurance does not mean you are going to die during your vacation to Bora Bora Island!!! It simply means you want assurance that your responsibilities will be taken care of should you die or get sick or lose your assets during the trip! So a relationship is like a vacation in the sense that it is a journey with many things that could occur that will be out of your control! And unfortunately some of these occurrences result in divorce and we all know that messy divorces are a reality! It seems logical to me that you should sign a prenup and insure yourself against a possible thunderstorm divorce and get some assurance that your responsibilities are well covered and accounted for.

In closing, prenup to me sounds like just another form of insurance...

What do you think about prenups? Do they depreciate the love between couples? Do they automatically curse the relationship? Would you sign a prenup agreement? Why or why not?

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Evolution of Relationships

Since my blog post on “The Right process to build a family”, another fairly interesting subject has been lingering in my mind - The evolution of relationships! This is important to discuss because society has evolved yet we seem to resist or choose to ignore the evolution of relationships. Relationships are a subset of society and it follows that they too must evolve as society does.

I think it is accurate to say most people have always believed that you enter into a relationship in hopes to find the one individual that you will spend the rest of your life with. You should also become absolutely loyal to that relationship choosing only to be intimate with that one person till death do you part.

History and Cultural Influence:

At some point in history it was customary in some cultures that men had more than one wife, in some cases as many as 30, yes thirty wives for one lad! Look at Africa and you don’t have to go too far back to understand that this was a way of life for many and most importantly it was both legally and socially acceptable for a man to marry as many wives as he could afford (I use the term afford because men traditionally pay lobola before they can marry in most of African Culture). Of course there are cultures that legally and socially believed in one man and one woman only. Now you can imagine the major differences in the dynamics of those relationships!

Today’s Reality Check:

Today, the most socially acceptable marriage relationship is between one man and one woman. Even some cultures in Africa have adopted this custom of one husband and one wife. I intentionally used the phrase “most socially acceptable”. Of course there are societies where it is both socially and legally acceptable for same sex marriages and/or common law. Common law is sometimes referred to as de facto marriage or informal marriage. In a common law relationship, no legally recognized ceremony is performed; no civil marriage contract or civil registry is entered. In some jurisdictions common law is legally binding while in others it is not.

Exclusive or No Strings Attached:

Could it be that relationships are slowly evolving from exclusive to no strings attached types? Have you watched the movie Vicky Christina Barcelona? Or the movie Revolutionary Road? I like both these movies because they deal with issues that this article is trying to address.

In Vicky Christina Barcelona, a couple had a horrible marriage but when they divorced and continued to be intimate with each other and one additional lady they had the best relationship with no fights or arguments. For them, this setup worked perfectly!
In Revolutionary Road, a husband and wife get into a relationship that is socially and legally acceptable where the husband goes to work and the wife is a great wife but they have a miserable relationship. The wife gets pregnant and the husband decides to keep the baby because society expects that they should have kids! The husband cheats on his wife. Eventually they both realise how miserable they are in this socially acceptable relationship.

Look at the divorce rates within 30 years of marriage. In the US it is 44% while it is 38% in Canada. Maybe people are getting tired of expectations to love and cherish one individual for the rest of their lives! I mean how many jobs have you had thus far? How many best friends have you had? How many cars have you had? What makes us as a society think that we can be married to, devoted to and be intimate with one individual for a life time? Should relationships come with a term contract? Date exclusively for 2 years and review the contract then and either renew the contract, or edit and sign a new contract or terminate it with that individual if you so choose? It scares me to think how relationships would be defined today were it not for diseases such as AIDS!!! I am sure it would be a ______ fest out there!

What do you think about “no strings attached” relationships? Are they the new Gucci?

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A Penny For Your Romantic Thoughts

Yes I have to admit I am one of those lads that love romance and believe you can never get enough of it. I love getting it as much as I love giving it. But it’s amazing how many people don’t quite understand how to be romantic. Wait, let me back up! It’s shocking to know that there are so many people that don’t know the meaning of romance! Well in that case how can you give something you don’t understand and sadly in some cases something you have never experienced? Hopefully this blog will bring to light enough material to make people understand romance and give it without depreciating its value in the process.

And yes, even a man’s man can be romantic!!!



The Definition:

Have you ever looked up the dictionary definition of ‘Romance’?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary:
Romance refers to a pleasurable feeling of excitement and wonder associated with love, a love affair, a quality or feeling of mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life and it means to court or pursue amorously.

Wow! Now I finally understand the meaning of romance. All these years I have lived believing in a definition that I conjured up in my head, but mind you it was fairly close to this dictionary definition; it’s just eye opening to see the dictionary definition. More people should read that first paragraph at the very least!

The Transaction:

With romance you could give it as you are simultaneously receiving it. Note however, that this is one transaction where you must not give it with the expectation of being acknowledged or immediately receiving a reciprocal gesture because that depreciates the value of the romantic gesture! Merely thinking it depreciates the romance; so be romantic because that is what you want to do, because it is fulfilling for you to see your partner experiencing a pleasurable feeling of excitement and wonder associated with your gesture!

When was the last time you were romantic? When was the last time you were a recipient of a romantic gesture? How can you romance?

Ofcourse there are millions of ways to romance your partner but here are a few of my all time favourites ;)

Tell her she is beautiful –
Women love... (Oh wait, so do men!). Anyways, women love to know that you find then attractive! That is why she buys all those clothes and oh yes, shoes!!! So tell her how hot she looks and how every-time you look at her, your heart smiles and does a little cha cha cha because she is a part of your life.

Write her a hand written letter –
In this age of technology we are bombarded with test and email spam and yes even your sms love notes can be taken as spam because sms, text and email are delivered in the same method as the impersonal spam that we all hate. So take some time to do it the old fashioned way. Trust me, she will love the thought. I wonder if some people remember how to write. Just to make sure you do please write the letter ‘q’ on a piece of paper and have someone review your hand writing.

Cook a dish you have never made before –
“How?” you might innocently ask me. Google it!!! Cook something you have never made and have a picnic right on your living room floor and enjoy a wonderful chick flick! Yes I said it! Chick flick!

Take her on a second first date –
Who said you can only renew your marriage vows? Renew your first date!

Give her a flower and no not a cactus! –
Don’t wait for valentines to give her flowers, do it on a random day like ummm in the middle of PMS. And be creative by getting her unique or exotic flowers. How about roses with poetry written on the rose petals (trust me on this one).

Pamper her! –
Ok I know some people have no idea what it is to pamper, and that is ok. Your first step to therapy is admitting you don’t know. Here is an over the top example -> Make her a warm milk bath and have her favourite chocolates on the side for her to enjoy while in the bath and fill the bathroom with scented candles and rose petals.

Go on conversation walks –
This means instead of staying home and having the regular conversation on the couch, instead go on a walk around the neighbourhood and talk about random topics then and enjoy the fresh air or city smog.

Try to never get tired of giving romance, instead outdo your last romantic gesture and put on that creative hat and make it a more romantic day.

In The Comments:

Comment on this entry and your thoughts regarding romance?
What do you understand it to be and is it misunderstood?
Do you think romance is overrated?
What are some of your MOST memorable romantic gestures that you both gave and/or received?
Suggest a romantic gesture?

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The “right” process to building a family

Do you think that an individual (man or woman) might at some stage in their life be ready to have kids but not be ready to have a life partner? And if so, is that ok for them to act on this feeling/desire/need? Read on to understand a little more...

I have had this conversation with a few of my close friends now and I am finding it difficult to come across people that have different ideas than the traditional methods of building a family! So I am turning to survivordate.com readers for some insight.

Conventional method:

Traditionally, we are raised to find that special someone that we fall in love with and then get married to! At some point in the marriage we decide to have kids and so the family grows in that manner. The key point in the traditional beliefs is that first comes love, and then comes marriage, and then children and the cycle should continue with our kids. Ofcause there are socially acceptable slight variations to this ideal belief, infact pick 10 random people you know that are not related to each other and review their family structure. You will notice that there are several variations to the ideal family building process. You could find a family that has both parents that had their kids after getting married or a family that may have had kids first and then a wedding, or a family that is made up of a single parent and last but not least, you may come across a family that is made up of two same sex parents!

The Unconventional Idea:

I think that there is absolutely nothing wrong with finding yourself in that state where you are ready to have kids and but you have not found your ideal partner or you are just not ready for that type of commitment.

Why should people that are financially, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually stable not act on that desire without people thinking they are crazy! I think that the world today is so diverse and continues to evolve and it’s time for us to reassess the “ideal” process of building a family. I think that if, for example, a guy is ready to have kids but not ready for a lifetime partner then he should seek adoption or a surrogate mother and raise a child or children alone and if at some point he meets the woman of his dreams then he can at that point get married and she becomes part of the family. There are many 30, 40, 50 and 60-something year olds that would love to have a 10year old kid by now but they don’t have that because they are still waiting to meet their lifetime partner!!! WTH??? Why should those people miss out on parenthood because they are waiting for the “perfect/appropriate partner”?!?!?! I hope and wonder if our society will someday look at this method of building a family as another normal avenue that people are free to choose from!

Is the unconventional method really different?

I know many people don’t like this unconventional idea of seeking to have kids and then hopefully finding a partner because they believe amongst other things that kids should have both parents. Well, how many kids grow up in unstable abusive environments with both parents? I think the worst thing is for a child to grow up watching aggression and negativity at home. A home is supposed to be a child’s safe zone (a not fly zone for aggressive and negative flights!). Now the child has to escape elsewhere for peace and harmony!!! THAT IS NOT FAIR ON ANY CHILD!!!

How many people do we know that were raised by single parents? Here is a good example: President Obama! Look where he is today! If he had been raised by both parents it is quite possible that he would not be the US president today. Ok before you take out your big guns, I am not saying he would not be the president but I am saying that he might not be. The abuse from his dad as described by his brother Mark Obama Ndesandjo may have cultivated a different Barrack Obama than the one we know today as President Obama.




My final remark is that it does not matter how the family comes to be, whether one individual seeks to have kids and then a wife/husband/partner BUT the important thing is how the kids are raised!

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Engagement Rings – A waste of Money?

This is one of a guy’s most important questions he will have to ask himself in regards to his relationship! Should I buy her an engagement ring and if so how much should I spend on my future wife??? You could get a beautiful engagement ring made from cubic zirconia from about 40$ or you can get a real diamond that can be as expensive as your wallet can stretch. Seriously, some of these engagement rings can buy your family members and mine fully furnished houses for each individual family member!!! Yes I said each family member! If you don’t believe me then Google engagement rings and look for the priciest or better yet research how much some of this celebs have spent on their engagement rings! I wish they would realise that they put unnecessary pressure on the everyday person that may not be able to afford the top of the line diamond! So if you get your girlfriend a cubic zirconia as opposed to a diamond does that mean you love her less? And if you buy her a 1000$ diamond ring as opposed to a 10,000$ ring does that mean you don’t think she is worth 10grand?!?!?!

Anyways, I am curious to know what people out there think about the whole issue of engagement rings!

Here are a few more questions:
- Can I give her a choice of a down payment on her dream home or the engagement ring for 15,000$?
- Some cultures e.g. most African cultures traditionally did not have engagements! You either got married or you did not! So do I offer her the choice of an engagement ring or for example lobola/roora/dowry and never both?
- Do I spend 15,000$ - 25,000$ on the engagement ring and nothing on the wedding?
- How can anyone spend 25,000$ on the ring, 40-50,000$ on the wedding, and afford a down-payment on the dream house?!?!?!
- Will anyone be able to tell the difference between a cubic zirconia and a real diamond? lol

Hey cyber community, share your thoughts on this!!!! Expect this Blog to evolve fairly fast and really discuss some small but big issues related to relationships. Welcome...

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Welcome to the very first post on the Survivordate blog!

I figured the very first blog should give readers a little background on why this blog came to be and the name survivordate??? Well in one way or another I like to think that we are all survivors when it comes to the dating game because I am sure many of you will agree there are some crazy weirdos out there!!! So if you have ever sat through that atrocious date counting down the minutes or you have stayed in that relationship that you dreaded going back to and found every excuse in the books to work later or take on projects as far away from the relationship as possible or, well you get the picture. We will leave the rest for future stories and eventually all of us, yes including you, will become each other’s little Relationship Coaches;)

Well this is the power of the internet! The ability to source opinions from millions of people from different backgrounds and cultures to solve one simple problem! My hope is that all of you survivordate bloggers out there will engage on this blog and offer your opinions based on your past observations, successes and failures; we can all pool our knowledge and then individually decide a better course of action! Who knows? You maybe one decision away from the love of your life and one of the posts on the survivordate blog might play a major role in influencing that decision!!! If that happens we want to hear about it!!!

Note that the web address for this blog will at somepoint change from survivordate.blogspot.com to survivordate.com.

Without further ado let me blog about the first topic on my mind and I am sure it is a common concern that many of you have...