YOU’VE LOST THAT LOVIN’ FEELING?

If you have been together for some time with your partner, and feel that passion had gone onto the back burner, or worse still, in the freezer with the ready meals, why not consider a romance agreement?

It might help you spark things anew, or at least put your needs as man and woman back out on the table, and possibly even defrost them too. We will give an exampe of one later in this series.

PASSION IS FOR PARENTS TOO!
Yes, you might be parents, but what were all the things you loved most about each other that brought you together in the first place.

And as someone once said to me, “You most important job as a parent is loving your partner, because no matter what, you will always be connected through that child.”

What kind of connection, or dis-connection, are you creating in your house?

As your children are growing up, you will constantly be giving them messages about how to express love, and what makes a good marriage.

Obviously, the sexual side of your relationship should always remain private around small children and other members of you family and friends, but an atmosphere of appreciation, romance and connection, love and affection, is something you can cultivate with your partner all the time.

THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE ARE FREE

Best of all, the best things in life really are free, or inexpensive. It doesn’t take much to leave a love note, send a ‘Thinking of You’ text message or email, or bring up a cup of coffee to your partner before you head off it work. There are so many different ways to show you are thinking of your partner, it is just a case of knowing his or her likes and needs.

LOVE THEM THEY WAY THEY WISH TO BE LOVED, NOT THE WAY YOU WISH TO LOVE THEM—OR BE LOVED YOURSELF

We might think that we ARE trying to cultivate romance, and our partner is the ‘unromantic one’. This perspective can cause hositlity and resentment.

But remember, everyone has their own point of view. Most of the time, we are in our own head; often, we can even get stuck there and become convinced that ours is not only the RIGHT point of view, but IS actually the ONLY point of view.

We tend to love the way WE wish to be loved. We probably don’t give our guy a box of chocolates for Valentine’s Day, just like they don’t give us a socket wrench set for our birthday.

But are there expectations in your relationship on his part, or yours, which are equally out of synch with their likes and dislikes?

THE BEST OF TIMES, THE WORST OF TIMES
Can you name three of the best times you ever had with your partner—do they have a common theme? Can they do the same? Can you come up with the three WORST times you spent together as well?

BEST and WORST are also very subjective notions, but chances are if you and your partner cultivate more times like the ones on your top 3 lists, your connections will continue and grow even closer.

Again, LISTEN to your partner, taking the trouble to learn THEIR likes and dislikes. Try not to hear what they are saying with a ‘filter’ of your own tastes, or some preconceived notion of what romance ‘is supposed to be like’. Really listening with your heart and mind will help you discover the way THEY actually wish to be loved.

Read more in:
Keeping the Romance in Your Relationship Part 3

Keeping the romance in your relationship is really all about staying connected with one another.

How do you stay connected? By spending time with each other, sharing with each other, and yes, through the connection of sex.

COUPLES COUPLE!
Sex is the ultimate connection and reason why a couple is together as a couple—to couple! Otherwise, you could just go to dinner or the movies with anyone, and get a baby via the sperm bank!

Clearly, humans feel a natural sexual desire and passion, and seek a healthy outlet for it.

If intercourse gives you thrombosis
And continence causes neurosis,
I’d rather expire
Fulfilling desire
Than live in a state of psychosis.

So why does sex in the 21st century seem so problematic that advice about it is screamed at us from every magazine headline? If we are living in much more liberated times than ever before, just what IS the trouble with sex?

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
–Philip Larkin (June 16, 1967)

THE KEY TO IT ALL: A FOUR-LETTER WORK ENDING IN -K
Oddly enough, in an age where we are on email and cell phones 24/7, our communication skills seem to have broken down completely. There may be a lot of TALK, but not a lot of listening. The best mobile network or WiFi connection, but no communion.

What passes for busi-ness is really just BUSY-ness, and writing the To Do List, is a substitute for actually doing the things on the list. Which means the list will NEVER get done. There will always be a new list. So why not add intercourse to you list?

Have you ever thought about the word intercourse? It means TALK as well!

To be strictly accurate, the word intercourse is defined as:

The exchange of ideas by writing, speech, or signals: communication, communion, intercommunication (Roget s II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition. 1995)

Isn’t THAT the kind of romantic relationship you would like? Real intercommuncation and communion?

IS THERE REALLY ANY SUCH THING AS ‘HAVING IT ALL’?

Often the couples who want to ‘have it all’ end up having the least amount of sex and romance. It’s like everything else on the to do list is more important.

Or, as some psychologists have suggested, that people get married/settle down so they can stop having sex/looking for sex. They want to focus on other things, career, house, nesting, children.

Sex is sacrificed in favor of ‘getting ahead’-but many partners wake up one day and wonder how on earth they got HERE? How the romance may hve started out so blissfully, and ended up relegated to a furtive fumble every few weeks if you’re lucky.

Intercourse with a woman is sometimes a satisfactory substitute for masturbation. But it takes a lot of imagination to make it work.
Karl Kraus

Focusing on long term goals is fine, so long as BOTH couples are on board with that agenda. And not BORED with it.

If you ARE wondering how you got HERE, and ARE Bored with the lack of romantic spark in your relationship, read on…

See more at Keeping the Romance in Your Relationship Part 2

If you love novels with interesting settings, why not subscribe to the free serialized historical romance novel

Journey of the Heart

by Jacinta Carey

from HerStory Books Romance Publishers.

Don’t forget to pop over for the latest titles and sales.

http://guru-goddess.com/2009/03/02/more-new-novels-available-at-herstory-books/

5.0 out of 5 stars Vulnerable and Betrayed

I really loved the dark, scarred, brooding hero in this gripping book. The hero’s major issues with the heroine make him oscillate between him being made to believe, by the agents pulling his strings, that his former fiancee had betrayed him and tried to murder him, versus trusting to love amid the most dire situation they have suddenly found themselves in.
Surrounded by double agents, and convinced she isn’t telling him the whole story, he is constantly being forced to choose between love of country and duty, and the woman he has never forgotten, or never stopped loving, even after all those years, and all the things she’s been accused of.

In the end, the bad guys are exposed for who they really are, but it is certainly a game of cat and mouse.

As for the writing, the characters are strong enough to keep the pages turning, and the plot, based on chemical weapons, is a topical one, though it was written long before 9/11.

This is far better than the absurd puerile Plum novels, which are wooden and one note, or some of the top names on the bestseller’s lists-that one about the killer dolphins a couple of years ago was so bad, Fatal Tide, it was laughable were it not for the hefty price tag attached to any of these books.

The setting, the Pacific Northwest, Portland, Oregon, in fact, is depicted so clearly I feel like I am right in the middle of the action.

For an author who specializes in British historical fiction, (which I have read, and LOVED!!!) this is an excellent effort at the popular US romantic suspense genre. Enjoy!

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This book is available in PDF from HerStoryBooks: http://www.herstorybooks.com

A Dark Champion (Brotherhood of the Sword, Book 1)
by Kinley Macgregor

1.0 out of 5 stars Hopelessly confused muddle

This is supposed to be the first of the Brotherhood of the Sword books, but first of all, she mentions characters from her other books, from some novella or other that she wrote as part of a book with other authors, and secondly, she says she covered the first part of the story in a book that does not exist so far as I can find it. So the whole thing is confusing from the outset.

The trouble is that there is then so much of this back story- of the ‘he is friends with Simon, also known as Sin,’ and ‘hates Damien because…’ variety that it is confusing, tedious, and waters down the little romance there is in the book.

The hero, as a result, never really gets moving in the book, and becomes so much more dull as a hero compared to the villains of the piece. The whole Brotherhood of the Sword, presumably to help each other, seems to be pointless in a lot of respects when we find out that the villains are amongst them and the so-called Brotherhood are actually all killing each other off.

All of the hero’s duties mentioned so that he has no time for a wife, are what, exactly? He never leaves the castle!

The whole issue of his brother and his sexual preferences is done to death, and never once is the fact that he is a murderer addressed! He just says, that’s okay, you are my brother and I love you. Sodomy was totally sinful in those days, though since there is never once any mention of these people having any religion, it too is lost as a conflict point upon which the action could hinge, or be escalated, meaningful. This was supposed to be the Middle Ages. All the opportunities for really deep conflict and characterization are completely lost.

The whole issue of the heroine falling in love with a warrior is over almost before it’s begun, again because there is no believable context. These people break all ten commandments with gleeful abandon, which is kind of odd for Crusaders, supposed Christians, to want to do.

The book is weighed down with secondary characters or mentions of them for so short a novel, but when we really need them they are not there!! The Heir to Jerusalem vanishes from the book completely with little logic, and then we are supposed to find out what happens to him in the next book in the series, (first chapter included at the back of the book) when he has made hardly any impression. This is just plain bad writing and planning. The couple’s love-making in the jail whilst being spied on by the voyueristic Damien is just gross.

This book has no medieval content-they are all ‘electrified,’ ‘mesmerized,’ and they talk like teens down at the mall. There are no sumptuous or relevant details of medieval life, and there is a decidely disgusting hidden patriotic message that seemingly tries to justify the current war in America which most readers would find repellent.

If you are going to write medievals with a message, keep to facts and truth, not melodrama, and certainly not this propaganda with offensively modern outlooks which devalue both time periods.

I certainly am not going to waste my time on this sensationalist bodice ripper of a series. The blurb on the back of the book was completely misleading. This may well be trying to set up a series, but as a romance it fails completely. Very disappointing.

Book Review: Dear Lover: A Woman’s Guide To Men, Sex, And Love’s Deepest Bliss
by David Deida

5.0 out of 5 stars
A superb book for any couple who wants to live in true harmony and love

The author’s previous book ‘Superior Man’ is for men, and an excellent guide, but this is the companion volume for women, and gives deep insights into how a true man of integrity is able to and really wants to love the woman in his life. One woman, for this lifetime and even into the next. He writes beautifully and candidly, and each time I read it, I see more and more what I am able to share Tantrically with my partner.

We have created bliss on a daily basis through skill, determination, discipline, and above all, love, and this from a man who is by no means easy to live with or love! And one who never even thought he knew how to love, because all his other relationships had failed so miserably.

Deida’s advice about loving each other open to the divine even when ‘stuff’ gets in the way is one we would all do to remember. After all, what is more sublime than living and being in love-having that 24/7, 365 days a year, always, at every moment, is well worth it. So take the advice offered to heart in this moving book. And read his other books, like Wild nights and Blue Truth, and definitely get Superior Man for your guy. If you train and practice love, and Tantra, and be happy, you really will experience deepst bliss. It really does work! And as good as it sounds in the book, it is even better in real life.
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