Dating And Morality Part 1 – The Mix-Up

There is a recurring decimal in all the relationship problems involving women. Relationship pages in newspapers and magazines are replete with woeful bemoaning by women who have lost out in the relationship game. The problem is that dating relationship is being mixed up with marriage relationship. This mix-up is the underlying factor of most relationship problems.

Dating relationship is not a marriage relationship. Sexual intimacy is appropriate only in a marriage relationship between a man and woman. Outside marriage, sexual intimacy is not acceptable. This is said regardless of the possibility of being termed archaic, given the permissiveness and perversion of our time.

If you analyze the cases of ladies who write to relationship columns in newspapers and magazines and those who use free and paid services to seek for counsel on their relationship problems as statistics, we can safely say that close to 95% of them are in relationship where they started having sexual intimacy with those they are dating. In each of the cases, you see the cart being placed before the horse instead of the horse before the cart. No reasonable man worthy of a reasonable woman’s hand in marriage would marry a woman because of her sexual prowess. In all marriages resulting from sexual intimacy as its foundation, a woman has ended up with a man who is not worthy of her if she was forced into the sexual act. If she was not forced, then, you have birds of the same feather flocking together.

It is important to state at the onset that when a relationship has shifted from dating to courtship, it is still not appropriate to indulge in sexual intimacies. In fact, engagement is not a license for sexual intimacy with a man or a woman. The only license for sexual intimacy with the opposite sex is MARRIAGE. In this day and age, it is wise counsel that marriage should be according to marriage ordinance law – legal marriage. If during the course of building a relationship with the opposite sex one starts sexual intimacy and the relationship is called off, the only person whose loss may be manageable is the man. The woman loses completely and lives her life with a scar that hurts and hounds, even when she pretends it does not. The men do not go unscathed either. They live with the thoughts of it and spend their lives comparing their earlier sexual encounters with the sexual performance of their wives. Experiences in dealing with relationship problems show that the men suffer also but without knowing its source. The rich also cry, remember.

Fun and Games Job?

Library Director? People often say to me when learning that I am a librarian that it must be fun working in a library and just reading books all the time. How little they know.

As a library director some of my duties include: buying books and supplies, keeping records of all library transactions, checking books in and out, shelving books, attending meetings and conferences and week-long seminars, calling on overdue books and sending reminders, doing bookwork totals daily, monthly and yearly for statistics and reports, publicity, organizing and overseeing various library programs, which include Summer Reading, preschool story time, book discussion groups, family night, teen night, coordinating volunteers, weeding out and discarding old and out of date books, shoveling snow, and spreading snow-melt in winter, sweeping sidewalks and watering shrubs in summer, borrowing books from other libraries for interlibrary loans, picking up mail daily at the post office, trying to keep people quiet so others can enjoy the library and helping patrons find books. We also help people on the computers, clean the bathrooms, wash windows, set up tables and chairs, vacuum the carpets, empty the wastebaskets, put trash out for garbage day, dust, clean and sweep entry.

As we say at our meetings: “We wear many hats and small town librarians’ jobs are a labor of love.” You can prove that just by looking at our salaries.

Scary Dates And Ways To Escape

There is nothing more heart sinking than eagerly turning up for date to find the object of your desires has metamorphisised into a freak since your last meeting. Image is the usual bugbear – outlandish clothes are always an embarrassing turn off, especially if you have planned to go somewhere you are well known and where your choice of partner will be relentlessly remembered for all time.

Appearances are undeniably unimportant when choosing a life partner, within reason of course. Nobody wants to be saddled with Austin Powers when there are plenty of frogs left to kiss and one of them could turn out to be Tom Cruise or somebody equally good looking but taller.

Dating is a fickle and sometimes cruel game, guaranteed to draw out buried insecurities in everyone involved. It is only human to cringe when your chosen date shows up wearing an obvious toupee, or heel lifts, or a new, weird-beard. From a man’s point of view things can be equally fraught when the girlfriend is well past fifty and arrives at a favourite restaurant in a micro mini and a low cut blouse, looking like the pre-surgery version of Phyllis Diller.

The dating days are always going to be the best and worst moments of anyone´s life; the human condition is such that we all have pre-formed ideas of how our companions should look, talk and behave. When faced with people who do not conform to our own special codes of conduct, we panic and sometimes run away. The question is – where to?

If you are unsure about your date from the outset, it is much easier to plan an escape route in advance. There is no need to be offensive or rude in any way. Ask a friend to call your cell phone with an invented emergency about half an hour into the date. Lie convincingly to save the other person´s feelings and beat a hasty retreat gratefully.

Feigning illness is always possible, although this particular lie can lead to inventing symptoms and complicating matters. Worse, your partrner might be a particularly caring character and insist on nursing you all evening, so be careful with this one.

Remembering you have an engagement elsewhere is unacceptable. It is always painfully obvious that it is a lie invented to escape your evening obligations and deeply offensive to the other party, so don’t do it.

When all possible avenues of departure have been considered and rejected, you might consider sitting through the evening and determinedly enjoying the person´s company, happy in the knowledge that it is only for a few hours. After all, you did agree to the date in the first place and you are an adult, comfortable in your own skin and capable of approaching a delicate social situation with delicacy, tact and diplomacy. Yeah right.