Love, Devotion and American Idol

Anyone who has been following the latest season of American Idol would already be aware of who Chris Medina is. but for the sake of those who don't watch Idol, Chris Medina is one of those singing hopefuls who showed up at the Idol auditions in Milwaukee.

Chris Medina certainly has talent and I wouldn't be surprised to see him in the finals. What made him memorable, though, is his devotion to his fiancée, Juliana Ramos. Before they could get married, Juliana suffered a tragic accident that left her with traumatic brain injury. Instead of leaving her, Chris chose to be one of her caretakers.

That choice, to me, is a mark of true love.

People have different reasons for getting into a relationship, and usually it's because they fancy themselves in love. But sometimes, when the relationship hits a rocky patch, the people in it are all too quick to fall out of love and call it quits.

The challenge that has befallen Chris Medina and Juliana Ramos is more than just a rocky patch; Juliana's accident is an event that changed their lives forever. But instead of running away from the situation as most have done, Chris stood by his lady. It reminds us of what the phrase "for better or for worse" should really mean. Juliana is a lucky woman to have such a man by her side.

Chris Medina will be one of the more memorable American Idol contestants this season. I wish there are more men like him around.

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Communication in Relationships – Talking Keeps the Love Alive

I've been watching a lot of Mad Men lately. At first it's because I was intrigued and wanted a glimpse of how the world of advertising worked in the 1960s, way before the Internet changed the world. And then I became fascinated by the characters and how they all interacted with each other. I'm especially fascinated by the interaction between Don and Betty Draper.

I've only just started on Season Two of the show, but I already have an idea of what's going to happen to these characters later on. The signs were all there as early as Season One. Betty is unhappy because there's no one she could open up to when it comes to what she really feels and thinks. Don isn't exactly unhappy, but he's totally incapable of sharing himself with others.

People who have tracked Mad Men up to its latest season would know what happened to this couple. Although the show was set in the 1960s, when mores and gender roles are different from what they are now, the underlying problem in the Draper marriage is still something that many couples experience today. Really, if you can't talk to your spouse or the person you consider your significant other, your relationship is doomed.

Communication Is Essential in Relationships

It's been said before and it bears repeating: Communication is essential in relationships. Communicating with your partner on a regular basis keeps the relationship alive. It's not about sex, it's not about having kids together, and it's not really about spending a lot of time together. If the two of you don't talk honestly and openly with each other, you might as well pack your bags and go.

If two people who are supposed to be together stop talking with honesty and openness with each other, one or both will soon feel shut out from the other. This lack of communication, in turn, generates suspicion, erodes trust in the relationship, fosters loneliness, and makes two people who are supposed to be intimate with each other become strangers.

How can one be happy with a stranger?

Talking Keeps the Love Alive

Needless to say, the only way to keep the communication alive in your relationship is to talk with your partner. This doesn't mean calling or sending your partner texts, instant messages or tweets every five minutes. Taking the time to see how the other is doing often goes a long way.

My parents are the same age as the Draper children – Sally and Bobby – would have been. But after 34 years of marriage, I think they got their communication thing right, somehow. They fight, as all married couples do, and they have followed their own careers.

But they have established their communication rituals over the years, like having coffee together in the morning before leaving for work, eating dinner together on weekends, and calling each other during lunch breaks. Whether we believe it or not, we are all creatures of habit and little rituals like these go a long way in keeping the love in a relationship alive.

And then, there's the fact that your significant other should also be your best friend. No matter how it is or what it is, you should be open to your SO about what you're thinking and feeling. Even though we have girlfriends and male friends, our SO should not have to learn from other people something he or she should have heard first from you.

Communication is essential in relationships. This is one thing we should always remember.

When did you last talk to your SO?

(Image: Breaking Curfew)

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First Love Never Dies

Do you still remember your very first love?

Poets and songwriters alike say that first love never dies. You never forget that first person who made your heart beat incredibly fast, who made you go through many a sleepless night, who filled your mind to the point that it's impossible to spend a day without thinking of him/her, who made you yearn for things you have never dreamed of before.

More often than not, your first love is also the first person who broke your heart.

Now, let's fast forward to ten years down the line. As if by some cosmic joke, you meet your first love again, quite by chance. Both of you have grown older and, hopefully, wiser. You have built lives apart from each other. And yet, the spark that drew the two of you together that very first time is still there.

What would you do?

You typically have two choices when you come to this crossroad. You either drop everything you've got going right now and find a way to rekindle that spark into the white-hot flame it once was.

Or you could let things stay the way they are right now and let your first love remain as they have always been all these years – a bittersweet memory.

The first choice is very easy. All you need to do is follow your heart, throw everything to the wind and rush into your first love's arms. Then you and your first love can live your happily ever after as if it was meant to be.

The second choice requires you to be sensible. It requires some cold thinking and putting your mind over your heart. You have built a life away from your first love all these years. That life may mean a spouse, kids, a home, a career. It's a matter of weighing if your first love is worth giving up everything just to relive that old love again.

First love never dies – that much is true. If there aren't any strings attached, then maybe your first love can be the one love of your life. But life never gives us anything in neat packages like that. There are choices that need to be made, and choices sometimes need some sacrifice.

Do you still remember your first love? What would you do if you chanced upon him/her again?

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Older Women, Younger Men

Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher

I was surfing channels last night when I chanced upon a movie starring Filipino actress Nora Aunor that illustrates the struggles a woman has to go through when she falls in love with a man much younger than herself. Even without the wide age gap, the protagonist and her man were literally worlds apart – she's a judge enjoying some wealth and influence while he's a taxicab driver supporting his widowed mom and a number of siblings.

Given that the movie was produced at least 15 years ago, it's not surprising that there's a lot of negativity surrounding the issue of an older woman getting it on with a much younger man. It's as if the relationship was unnatural, if not evil. The pair in the movie was ridiculed and ostracized; it hurt much more for the woman because she's a person with a high profile.

Today, relationships between an older woman and a younger man are becoming more and more commonplace, judging by the number of female celebrities dating or marrying younger men. We've got Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon, Madonna and current boyfriend Brahim Zaibat, among others.

This doesn't mean, though, that society has become entirely accepting of such relationships. It's still such a big deal if a woman starts dating a man younger than herself. People raise eyebrows at her, talk about her behind her back, call her names like "cougar" and "sugar momma," and make jokes about her sex life.

No one says anything about the younger man, though. Sure, he gets his share of criticisms and insults for getting it on with an older woman, but his share is minuscule compared to that received by the woman. It's not unheard of for these young men to be congratulated by their buddies for catching the eye of a cougar.

And no one would bat an eyelash if the situation is reversed and the couple is an older man with a younger woman.

As one such woman who is with a younger man, I have this to say: Age is only a number. What's more important is how the two people involved in the relationship deal with each other. As long as these two people share the same values, have common interests, and are more than willing to communicate openly with each other, they'll be just fine.

What do you think of relationships between older women and younger men?

(Image: tophollywoodtop.blogspot.com)

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Do You Still Believe in Marriage?

Do you believe that marriage as an institution still fits today's society? Or do you think that marriage is losing its relevance and is now on the fast track to becoming obsolete?

According to a survey co-conducted by Pew Research Center and Time Magazine on November last year, one in four Americans think that marriage has become obsolete. Sure, these folks still think that it would be nice to get married someday, but marriage per se is no longer necessary to attain love, companionship and all those benefits that people used to get exclusively from tying the knot.

But what is marriage, anyway? What defines a couple as married? Do we strictly consider the ring and the signed contract as the ultimate definers of matrimony? Or is the mutual though publicly undeclared understanding of commitment and devotion enough?

If we define marriage only in terms of the ring and the contract, then we are probably in trouble. Tangible objects such as finger jewelry and a sheet of written legalese may make us feel secure and comfortable, but these objects are totally without meaning if the commitment and devotion are absent in the marriage. On the other hand, a relationship that is built on commitment, devotion and trust can definitely stand on its own, with or without the ring and the paper.

It all depends on how you look at marriage itself and how you have experienced it in the past. For example, if you are the child of parents who have been happily married for years and years, then you may have a rosy-colored view of what marriage is all about. It may be a different thing altogether if you're a child of divorce or have experienced a messy divorce previously yourself.

Whatever the Pew/Time survey says, marriage will never be obsolete. It's more like the way we define marriage is changing.

(Image: Gracie Stinson/MorgueFile)

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Being Thankful of Relationships You Have to Work Hard For

What was the hardest relationship you have been in?

I have mentioned once or twice in this blog that I am engaged to be married. Of all the relationships I've been in, this is the one where I was – and am – the happiest. Oddly enough, this relationship is also the hardest I've ever been in.

The reason I said that is because fate must have thrown every possible challenge imaginable our way (so far). My fiancé and I are in a long-distance relationship; I live in Manila and he lives in Hawaii, thousands of miles away. The relationship is also interracial; he's Caucasian and I'm Asian. He's an atheist while I'm a non-denominational Christian. He's conservative while I'm probably a liberal. And we have a ten-year age gap, with me being the older one.

From the looks of it, we are two people who shouldn't be together. The LDR challenge alone is enough to drive anyone crazy. But here we are, after almost five years – still together, still committed to each other, and still going strong.

I'm not saying that we're the ultimate success story when it comes to dating and relationships. We are still working towards our happily ever-after and that one is a difficult day-to-day job. What I'm trying to say is that if there are couples like us who find keeping the love alive on a daily basis really hard work but are still together nonetheless, why are there couples who don't have the same level of difficulty in their relationships but couldn't make the relationship last anyway?

But maybe that's just it. People typically don't value something they got so easily and didn't work so hard for. They don't make that deep an emotional investment in that something to give it any value. And if one doesn’t have an emotional investment in something, it's all too easy to let go.

Maybe I'm lucky, then. I am fortunate enough to have been given something to work so hard for every single day. I certainly enjoy every minute of my relationship with my fiancé, even all the arguments we had over Skype and AIM. This relationship is something I worked hard for, and I'd be stupid to let it go away.

Did you have a relationship that you've worked so hard for? How did it go?

(Image: Click from MorgueFile)

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New Year's Resolutions – Will You Make Changes on the Way You Handle Your Dating and Relationships?

Do you have any New Year's resolutions for your dating and relationships? If yes, what are they? What changes will you work on when it comes to that aspect of your life?

I've never put much value on New Year's resolutions. I've never even made a list in my life. Why wait for the New Year to get started on whatever life changes you plan on making when you can make these changes today? But I guess for a lot of people, New Year's Day is a chance for them to think things through – to reflect on how the old year has been to them and what they should look forward to when the new year comes.

So I suppose it won't hurt to write that list down.

New Year's Resolutions Tend to Be Forgotten

The thing with New Year's resolutions, though, is that after they've been written down, we tend to forget about them. Or we may go through the motions of implementing the changes we want, but then again we get bored or sick of them so we fall back on our old habits.

Let's say you've made the resolution to find more opportunities to date this 2011. For the whole month of January, you go out for drinks every Friday and Saturday night in the hopes of hitting it off with someone. February rolls by and you still haven't found someone to be with. By the time March comes along, you would have given up and told yourself that there's really no one out there for you.

New Year's resolutions – or making life changes, for that matter – don't work that way. When we decide to change something in our lives for the better, we stick to our guns and charge until the change has happened.

Make the Change

If you have made New Year's resolutions for your dating and relationships – or for your life in general – this 2011, attack those resolutions with persistence until those resolutions become truly a part of you. It would help a lot if you:

1. Keep your list somewhere where you get to see them first thing in the morning and for most of the day. Maybe you can print out your list and put it in a picture frame that you can place on your bedside table and on your desk at the office.

2. Mull over your list for five minutes every single day. This will keep your resolutions from going out of sight, out of mind. The best time to do this is right after waking up.

3. Break down your resolutions into smaller, doable goals. For example, if your resolution is to establish a deeper level of intimacy with your partner, you can start with things like spending 15 minutes having coffee with your partner every morning before heading off for work and scheduling date nights every week.

If you have New Year's resolutions for your dating and relationships or for your life in general, don't just write them down and forget about them. Work on them so you will be able to live out the life-changing experience that you want to happen this 2011.

How do you plan to carry out your New Year's resolutions this 2011?

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