- YOU BE -

Anytime you have a new boyfriend, you’ll obviously have less time for your old activities But sometimes the changes you make aren’t so benign, and a core part of your personality atrophies.

Many women unconsciously lose their best selves in the throes of falling in love, and that can doom the bond. You feel unfulfilled because you’re not being yourself, and it’s a burden for a guy to feel like he’s the center of your life.

Could you be lost?

There are trademark signs of a girl who’s gone missing within: She only makes plans with a plus-one, she minimises the traits she doesn’t think her man digs,she always answers questions with “Well, we think',” and she watches/reads/listens to stuff her guy is into, but he doesn’t reciprocate.
These habits are harder to spot in yourself, so solicit help from a loving, honest friend. “Ask what she thinks of your relationship and if there are facets of you she’s not seeing anymore. Also, if you avoid telling a guy about certain hobbies or friends, you’re likely suppressing something. Another sign you are: You think the relationship has saved you from a blahsville life. “You should be excited about new love, but thinking he’s perfect and throwing yourself into it with no real foundation is very unrealistic.

Why it happens

Getting too wrapped up in a dude is common. “Women get satisfaction from nurturing the relationship itself. So you engage in activities (military-history lectures!) and behaviours (skipping your weekly dinner with the girls) that aren’t typically you because you’re genuinely buzzed about spending time with him. The challenge is learning to pick plans where you both like the activity, not just the company.

Bring yourself back

You’ve heard it before, but cultivating your own interests makes you incredibly alluring. “Women overestimate the importance of saying yes. Guys value independence, so say no thanks to an invite from him that you’d never accept from a pal, and while he may be surprised at first, he’ll also be psyched that you don’t need to be attached at the hip 24/7.

Think back through your pre-boyfriend days, and reprioritise the most satisfying parts. Over time, abandoning experiences that seem frivolous (say, going dancing if you love being the center of attention) chips away at your quality of life. “When you dive into your interests, you’ll be happier, which makes you a better girlfriend overall.

Every relationship abides by an unsaid rule about keeping your love and emotions together, of sharing everything, right from your daily concerns and problems to your emotional dilemmas with the person that you’re in love. But what if your soul finds comfort in the sanctuary of someone you can neither call your lover and neither just your friend? When you find someone special with whom you share a deep emotional connect, are you betraying your loved one and indulging in emotional infidelity? I explore…
An emotional connect

Emotional adultery is when you embark on an emotional relationship with someone other than your partner. “Emotional infidelity is when a partner shares intimate feelings with another person, other than his/her partner, and is perhaps preoccupied with thoughts of that person and even craves for spending more quality time with him/her. It is any situation that creates or causes some degree of emotional unavailability, along with affecting the quality of one’s existing relationship as a whole,”

“It all started with the ‘we’re just friends’ thing. But the connection became very obvious by the long hours we spent talking intimately on phone and the vibes that were being set off by both of us. We gelled so beautifully with each other that sharing personal matters took us just one week,” shares my one of the friend, about her friend of two years. “I didn’t know what to call our relationship initially… but now I know my friend means nothing less to me than my man!” she adds further. Though my friend asserts that it is only her husband that she loves, she dreads the day he could find out about her emotional straying.

“I was going through a low phase in my relationship just months before I broke off with my live in girlfriend. It was precisely at this time that I met this incredible woman in office with whom I started sharing a great emotional bond. Being on par professionally helped us bond regarding our career, and
having similar traits drew me towards her on a more human level. It was an unspoken bond and though we never confessed our feelings we were deeply bonded.

Even if I didn’t see her for a single day I felt restless- missing her more than words could ever express,” confesses my one the friend working in MNC Delhi who eventually broke off his affair, moved by the strength of his new found emotional anchor. 

Emotional deceit: A bigger sin?
Is emotional attachment to someone else other than your partner a more blatant betrayal than a physical adulterous affair? “If my husband has a one night stand, it would hurt. But if I catch him having an emotional affair, it willcertainly knock the wind out of me. An emotional involvement is definitely harder to accept because it means mentally he belongs to someone else,” says my asst working in my company. While my asst finds emotional infidelity to be a bigger offence, another person I had talk, disagrees. “One can’t tag sharing your feelings with someone as a betrayal! As long as one’s spouse/partner is coming back to the same bed to sleep at night, they can’t be
blamed for cheating,” he retaliates.

Is it the end of relationship?

Interestingly,
a study on age gap relationships indicated that cases in which the wife
was older than the husband showed a higher than usual proportion of
good adjustments, as did those in which the husband was eight or more
years older. Yet these same marriages showed also the highest
proportion of poor adjustments.

It was found that the
happiest group of husbands had wives twelve or more years younger, but
that the happiest wives were from four to ten years older than their
husbands. Yet the happiest couples were those in which the husband was
from three to five years older. So you figure it out. Here are some
helpful principles:

1. If the man is about the same age as, or somewhat older than the girl, there will be no special problem of age suitability.

2. If the girl is
slightly older there will be no special problem unless one or the other
feels sensitive about it. The only question then will be, “How do they
feel about it?”

3. As people grow
older, age differences become less important. Other things being equal,
there will be less difference between a woman of fifty and a man of
seventy, than between a girl of twenty and a man of forty.

4. When one is
relatively young and the other as much as twelve years older, the
couple should carefully review the following problems:

In these age gap
relationships, there may be real differences in their interest in
physical activities. If the man is the elder, this may not be too
important. A man of thirty-five may play as good a game of golf or even
tennis, and swim as well as a girl of twenty.

In fact their age gap
may actually make them more evenly matched. A greater age gap
relationship problem will be the stage in which their interests happen
to be.

Younger people often
want to gad about at dances, parties, night clubs, and similar
activities. When people become older such activities are far less
attractive and may, if indulged in too much, become boring.

If the male is
considerably older and he and his wife do what he wants, she may miss
out on a phase of her experience which, rightly or wrongly, she may
always regret. If they do what she enjoys most, he is being dragged
through the same experiences twice, perhaps after he is eager to go on
to something else.

A compromise may work
out. On the other hand, it may result in a type of social life which is
satisfactory to neither of them. A deeper phase of the same problem
concerns one’s attitude toward life. To those of less experience the
problems of age gap relationships seem much simpler than they actually
are.

Young people are quite
likely to feel that the older generation must be knaves or fools, or
they would long since have abolished war, poverty, industrial strife
and mosquitoes.

Older people,on the
other hand, often find the enthusiasms of youth amusing. They may
tolerate them in their children, but do not want them in a spouse. If
the age gap is so great that the wife regards her husband as an old
fogy, and the husband thinks of his wife as a simple child who spends
too much effort and time in things that do not matter, the situation is
not favorable to a successful marriage.

Yet the fact that age
gap relationships are risky does not necessarily mean that it should
not be attempted. One young lady of twenty-five who was marrying a man
twice her age strongly stated that she would rather marry a first-class
man of fifty than a third-rate man of thirty.

There could be other
advantages to such a union. The girl who marries an older man has a
better chance of knowing what she is getting. In any case, the most
important consideration is not age, but maturity.

Younger people who are
more mature than most of their contemporaries may actually find an
older mate to be more congenial. Yet as in any age gap relationships,
the preference for a much older mate should be scrutinized with great
care.

The danger is that the older person is psychologically a substitute parent, rather than a mate.