Speed Dating Events

Note that the commandment emphatically uses the words ‘every thing’ in prescribing the act of coveting. There is a profound lesson attached to this, as it points to the fact that we tend to covet selectively, rather than perceiving the entire picture when it comes to the object of our desire. Read the rest of this entry »

Becky is fated never to become Lady Crawley. But sometimes the loser lives to fight another day. More poignant still are those proposals which hover on the brink of fulfilment rather than living on into reality.

No one conveys the sensation of love holding its breath better than Dick Francis, a master of the experience of unfulfilled longing. His heroes, bruised and bemused by life’s rough passage, can see new love glimmering and growing but hardly dare to hope that it can be for them. The defeats of the past have taught them that loving means losing, and the loser left with nothing but a legacy of painful memories and stifled sighs. Read the rest of this entry »

Of all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are, ‘It might have been’.

Among the annals of marriage proposal, a special chapel of remembrance hung with rosemary and rue must be set aside for those which however deeply desired, are not fated to succeed. Many couples do not manage to make the step from private love to public commitment. They do not get the marriage act together, for any number of reasons. Read the rest of this entry »

Self-stimulation can help survivors through impasses with insertion. Stimulate the clitoris before and during the dilator exercises. Sexual arousal increases natural lubrication and causes vaginal expansion, often making insertion easier. This variation is also useful in helping a survivor associate pleasurable sensations with vaginal fullness. Feeling comfortable with these sensations can eventually facilitate the ability to have orgasms during intercourse. Read the rest of this entry »

Women survivors may have difficulty with vaginal penetration because of two sexual problems.

Vaginismus is a reflexive tightening of the muscles in the outer third of the vagina when penetration is attempted. Women with this condition may have difficulty with intercourse as well as with insertion of a finger, dildo, or medical instrument.

Dyspareunia, or painful intercourse, is another dysfunction that can make intercourse difficult. In this condition, a woman experiences pain as burning, cramping, or sharpness that begins sometime during intercourse itself. Both vaginismus and dyspareunia can result from associating fear and pain of past sexual abuse with present intercourse. In some cases painful intercourse may be directly related to actual physical damage to vaginal tissues, nerves, and internal organs done during brutal sexual assault. Read the rest of this entry »

One man who most uncharacteristically takes it at a jump is Mr Knightley, in Jane Austen’s Emma. Knightley is nothing but grave and circumspect when it comes to other people’s affairs, but when it comes to his own moment, it sort of steals up behind him and pushes him over the edge.

This proposal comes as a great surprise to both participants, since the lucky recipient herself does not see it coming. Emma is convinced that Mr Knightley is going to tell her off, as he has been a stern recording angel of her minor follies and vanities. So when she senses that Mr Knightley is on the brink of something, ‘her immediate feeling was to avert the subject if possible.’

But like murder, love will out:

Emma could not bear to give him pain . . . cost her what it would, she would listen . . . Read the rest of this entry »

Strange fits of passion I have known,

And I will dare to tell

But in the lover’s ear alone

What once to me befell.

But the process by which he winkles it out and drops it into the ear of his chosen one is shrouded in mystery. Proposing is one of the world’s greatest secrets, like sex. Everyone knows that everyone else does it, but they never know exactly how and when. This is why, since you can’t be doing it yourself all the time, there’s a constant fascination with reading and talking about it. Read the rest of this entry »

Amazingly, Lord Randolph stood firm under this battery, and went on to repeat his proposal to Jennie Jerome in form. She married him, and subsequently became the mother of Winston Churchill. What more could any woman have done for England?

But Jennie’s life was to be dogged by domineering males poking their noses into her love affairs. Later, after she was widowed, she was courted by a much younger man. No less a person than Edward, Prince of Wales, intervened this time, to tell her that if she married her lover she would never be able to mix in court circles again. This was a royal act of humbug from the princely hypocrite, to condone an affair but not a marriage — and the Prince’s own dedication to the art of the horizontal hardly qualified him to give a moral lead! In the end Jennie cocked the aristocratic equivalent of two fingers at the whole pack of them, married her lover anyway, and did not lose either her friends or her position. Read the rest of this entry »

`You got to get married,’ said Uncle Penstemon. ‘That’s the way of it. I done it long before I was your age. Its nat’ral — like poaching, or drinking, or wind on the stummik. You can’t ‘elp it, and there you are!’

THE IDEAL PROPOSAL is a magical moment, a peak of ecstasy amid a whirl of impression of beauty — ballgowns and roses, passion and palm trees, with the strains of heavenly music wafting in the distance. But many people’s experience falls far short of this ideal — they get the strains without the music. Read the rest of this entry »