Dating after the breakup of a relationship or semi-relationship? by Odilia Rivera-Santos

First, admit you know nothing about dating, and take a deep breath. Love is magic and happens in mysterious ways too advanced for our feeble mundane brains to control or understand.

You might meet the love of your life on a bus or at the laundromat, or on a dating site. The serial killer you've been warned about, when you go on a dating site, also takes the bus and does shim's own laundry.

Dating sites are interesting for a five to ten-minute read. 

They are well-orchestrated representations of the life a person hopes to lead: joyful, surrounded by great friends and family and financially prosperous as well. There is often an expensive red sports car in a man's profile, which is meant to connote danger, wealth, adventure and excitement. 

Then, there is the list of healthy personal attributes to which many of us aspire.
In creative visualization exercises, we are asked to write about what we would like to have,as if these things, people, personality traits, had already arrived to stay. 
I will have to check with Shakti Gawain's book about this, but I'm pretty sure that's how it works.
The healthy personal attributes list is great if they are not too far removed from where you are presently. And is the person or are you willing to work on yourself to get there?

Before you venture out onto the dating scene, consider sprucing yourself up a bit. 

Here are some pre-dating exercises before you dive back into the dating game. 

1. Write a list of your healthy personal attributes
2. Write a list of areas requiring work on your part. If you think you're perfect, use my rule: if three people, who don't know each other, have said it, explore it because 'it' might be true.
3. Write a plan of action regarding how you will address your special issues. Are you willing to go to therapy or a support group? Friends can listen but they can't play the role of therapist in your life.
4. What do you have to offer?
5. What are you looking for in the dating experience? 
6. Write a description of your perfect partner -- the one you could imagine living and traveling with. 
7. Make sure you clean up emotional baggage from your last relationship or semi-relationship.


If you enjoy your own company, and understand the difference between being alone and being lonely, you may be ready to date again.

Love Post For Men Who Hate Women by Odilia Rivera-Santos

You are a love chaser and when you catch up to love, you become an asshole.

Are you addicted to drama? 

1. Is the woman who broke up with you, the one you cheated on and lied to constantly, now the woman of your dreams?

2. Are you only 'happy' when your relationship is full of junior-high-school drama? 

3. Do you stir up trouble because you consider stability in a romantic relationship boring?

4. Do you continue to chase the old girlfriend as you begin a new relationship?

These are all issues better handled in therapy than in the world. In the world, you are showing up as an emotionally- abusive insecure man who doesn't believe anyone could really love you.

love pOst / the breakup by Odilia Rivera-Santos

I think it's important to have a sense of humor about love and the ways in which we all fail even when we try very hard to make a romantic relationship work. However, I know breakups can be devastating and shake up a person's self-esteem and self-confidence.

Here are some tips for getting over the end of a relationship

1. Change your perspective about the relationship; instead of saying the relationship failed, you can just say the relationship lasted for the amount of time it was meant to last.

2. Accept that the end of your romantic relationship might also mean the end of a friendship. Your former lover/partner/boyfriend/girlfriend has a right to choose whether to stay in contact with you.

Respect the other person's wishes. If the person says he/she wants no contact, let go.

3. If you cannot let go of the relationship and keep rehashing details and arguments, consider going to a therapist or spiritual counselor. You might need help moving on.

4. Instead of analyzing the other person's behavior, motives, and personality, consider your own behavior, motives and personality. What do you want to do differently in your next relationship?

5. Get rid of all the souvenirs from your relationship and really clean house, literally and psychologically.

Dating One Oh One, in search of a spiritual connection by OdiliaRivera-Santos

Being in tune with another human being requires that we, as individuals, undergo individual tuneups.

Strengthen the ability to focus on one thing at a time.

We have many mini-lives inside the major life. What keeps us moving forward is the need to feel we have accomplished something.

Set Personal Goals, which help with motivation and humility because they serve as a tranquil reminder of the finite amount of time we have on the earth.

Work as an Extension of You

Being engaged in work in an authentic way. Doing work that matters, not just a gig. Work can amplify the positive or negative tendencies of a person's character.

Sit down. Shut up. And do nothing

Just Being without the need to prove anything to anyone or keep busy for busy-ness's sake. 

Nature

Go somewhere sedate: a museum during off hours, a park or a meditation class.

Enjoy nature in whatever way possible -- buy a plant, go to the farmer's market, stare at a tree.

Sensory relaxation to balance out the overload, especially for those of us who live in the city.

It is about opening up the spiritual channels for something different.

A partnership can only be romantic if there is a certain sense of self-satisfaction on both sides.

You have to love you first.

Did you hear that?

It was a butterfly with the hiccups

Transnationalism for Dummies by Odilia Rivera-Santos

http://latinaauthor.blogspot.com/2014/04/transnationalism-for-dummies-by-odilia.html

Reading and telling and showing at The New Museum on April 19, 2014. 4:00-5:00

Writings on colonialism, being hemmed in and let out, sensualist excursions from Puerto Rico, the island of my birth, to the concrete silent, gray, black and white world of the mainland.

Brincando el charco.

Leaving Puerto Rican

Playing social worker

Being and being nothing and becoming someone unrecognizable.

Poetry

Stories

Art scrawled on walls.

Dating Juan Oh Juan / the First Date and Polite Conversation

By Odilia Rivera-Santos

5. The first date and keeping it light. You're at a lovely, dimly-lit cafe, here are some items to leave off the conversation menu

- a vivisection of your worst personality traits or those of your former lover/partner/spouse

- a list of all the regrets you have about your prior relationship

- how you've established a great rapport with your new parole officer (wait until the second date)

Love When You Say Love
 www.editorialtrance.com

Love When You Say Love by Odilia Rivera-Santos

Dating Juan Oh Juan / the Drama Queen and Recycling Relationships

By Odilia Rivera-Santos

4. You ended the relationship during the last attempt to resuscitate the exhausting monster in person, via email, text message, via Facebook message, tweet, and carrier pigeon. After three weeks, your ex calls to ask THE question in the way only a true drama queen could ask.

"Do you love me? Tell me you don't love me ... And ... I'll NEVER call you again." Shim says in a slow deliberate voice

"I don't love you" you answer quickly cause you have shit to do.

"Ok. If you tell me in person that you don't love me, I will believe you!"

PAUSE: do you answer the drama with a firm 'no' or sarcasm?

The drama queen loves the breakup-makeup model of a relationship and thinks it's exciting to chase but has trouble sitting still and BEING in a relationship. This character has no ideas about how to have fun without the adrenaline rush of stupid pointless arguments and breakups.

There is someone for everyone, so if this isn't your type, let go. Throw this little fish back in the ocean to hook up with a drama queen who will up the ante on wasting time.



Buy my book here: Love When You Say Love

Dating Juan oh Juan / are you dating a heckler? Odilia Rivera-Santos

3. I'm sure you've been at a performance and/or a lecture and listened to a heckler rebuke every aspect of the presentation or provide a negative running commentary.

Are you dating that heckler, naysayer, fearful person? The heckler/lover hopes to make you fearful enough about interchanges with the world and people to share his/her tiny existence. 

Keep these things in mind

- you existed and completed goals prior to meeting shim.

- a person who criticizes all of your goals and ways in which you plan to execute them is fearful about tackling his or her own goals. You provide a distraction from shim's sense of failure, inertia or inability to follow through.

- this person is also very insecure about being in a relationship with a person who appears to be on the road to self-actualization as opposed to just getting through the day.

- the need to control everyone and everything is not an expression of bravado or a sense of superiority; it's fear. Fearful people are very often afraid of people and their actions, so they choose to be in environments over which they can exert control. They don't socialize very much.

Anxiety, a need to control others and a fearful nature often lead to agoraphobic behavior -- refusing to leave the safety of home.

- this personality adds a lover to shim's life as a healthier person might add an end table. Shim wants you to share in the fearful lifestyle. 

If you are seeking a partner with whom you can socialize and travel the world -- outside of a planned tour bus scenario with a guide, this is not the character for you.

This personality is attracted to gutsy people because shim hopes to be more daring, but, most of the time, the heckler is too afraid to change and attempts to whittle the brave down a couple of sizes.

Writing exercise: 

What did I learn from a relationship with a heckler?

What did I have to defend in arguments with the heckler?

Buy my book here: Love When You Say Love

Love When You Say Love by Odilia Rivera-Santos

Coming soon!

Love When You Say Love

Odilia Rivera-Santos

http://www.editorialtrance.com

Photo Credit: Gene Bradford

Buy my book here: Love When You Say Love

Dating Juan oh Juan, the insecure partner

Odilia Rivera-Santos

2. The insecure partner delves deep into your life and psyche to bring you down. This rabid little individual will focus on everything he/she believes you 'should' be doing and act as director in your life. Sometimes, this type plays God as well because as shim explains it, if you follow shim's directives, you will be rich, famous, happy and own a home with gold pipes.

The insecure partner focuses on your potential, your flaws, and your mistakes in order to avoid looking at shim's own potential, flaws, and mistakes.

This person doesn't have much going on and is very fearful. You, the stronger more motivated half of the relationship are the power source. But you have a finite amount of energy and can't afford to have it siphoned off by the insecure partner. Inequity in perceived power to act in the world will not allow anything good to come of the union.

You can renovate and flip houses, but not  people.

The insecure person attempts to raise his/her self-esteem by projecting their fear and lack motivation onto you. 

Let go, grasshoppa... Let go!


Buy my book here: Love When You Say Love

Dating Juan oh Juan by Odilia Rivera-Santos

1. Intellectual match

Do you explain a lot of things to your potential lover/partner/significant other?

Watch: Educating Rita

Key Idea: if the colonizer does a good job educating the colonized, the first thing the colonized will want to do is get the hell away from the colonizer. Ya dig?





Buy my book here: Love When You Say Love

Writing and Meaning, a Writing Workshop taught by me... In Harlem

WRITING WORKSHOP in Harlem, NYC

Starts in April 2014. 

What have I learned from teaching writing for 17 years?

It is better to start with a seed of an idea and slowly add nuances, shade, color and light.

A writer has to take an authoritative stance in order to be a writer.

Humility is not downgrading one's talents or being bashful when asked to share work; humility is a recognition that God has given you the gift and you are a caretaker.

Discipline - putting yourself in contexts in which you will NOT be able to coast on your natural ability. Creating opportunities for your intellect, talent and imagination to be challenged, tested, and pushed beyond your self-imposed limits.

Many writers are averse to reading something different. The classicists, for example, won't read a graphic novel and the Urban Fiction peeps avoid 19th Century European novels. Reading a variety of texts makes for fluidity in creative expression

I will be teaching a Writing Workshop in April in Harlem.
For details, email o.riverasantos at yahoo.com
Run and tell that!
Subject: Writers Write
#OdiliaRiveraSantos


Buy my book here: Love When You Say Love

Love Post #99 Did you fall in love or fall in a vat of him?

Odilia Rivera-Santos

The only way to know who you are in a romantic relationship is to be in a romantic relationship. You won't glean knowledge about how to become a great partner from observing another person's relationship.

Lover as Colonizer

When you use your lover as a reference point in order to compete, compare or attempt to overturn his government of your emotions, you have officially become colonized.

You thought you fell in love, but, in actuality, you fell in a vat of him.

The schedule, friendships and rituals that made you a healthy, sexy, vibrant person falls away as you seek to be one with your lover.

Being one doesn't mean you adopt him as life guru and chuck every aspect of your old life to please/impress/keep him.

Becoming a conjoined twin with your lover brings up all sorts of crazy. And none of the crazy is particularly appealing. Are you teacher/student, parent/child, prospective adopter/dog pound puppy or are you two individuals sharing your lives with one another?

Decolonization within a romantic relationship is not easy and the United Nations has not established a program to set up new boundaries/governments for you -- they only do that for territories.

However, you can slowly peel yourself off of your lover and his ways.

What was your daily wellness (mental/emotional/physical) ritual prior to your romantically codependent life?

Can you admire him without seeking to become him?

Buy my book here: Love When You Say Love

Sex is Dental floss for your Spirit by Odilia Rivera-Santos

There are many kinds of sex to be had with a partner. Some prefer the noncommittal detached sexual tryst in which no one will make chicken soup and deliver it to the one suffering from the flu on a stormy winter day.

Some opt for a more spiritual connection in which you would not only make the chicken soup from scratch, but you would be willing to work on yourself in order to remain attractive through the many winters and storms of life.

What makes a person attractive to another person so that sex is not merely acrobatics, but a profound connection and conversation?

Attractiveness and desirability ...

Taking care of one's self is not just a matter of doing sit-ups and cardio. 

There is a lot of internal work to be done.

Are you kind?

Are you emotionally sober in a relationship?

Are you able to bring value to your time together?

Are you able to love yourself and represent your healthy sense of self in your choice of words and friendships?

Are you proud of your partner as a person apart from his/her material possessions and status?

I have always been a proponent of monogamy and believe those unable to sit still with one person are deeply insecure and dissatisfied with themselves.

Sex is dental floss for your spirit only when the connection between two people is rooted in a desire to share the wonderous fast journey that is life.

Being handsome or pretty, smart, and/or successful are great attributes, but are you romantically presentable?

Buy my book here: Love When You Say Love

LovePost #9 losing integrity with every apology #OdiliaRiveraSantos

Every one of us has triggers, which make us do stupid things. Stupid is a valid word for this, most of the time -- unless you commit a crime in which case, you'd say a trigger made you antisocial. For the purposes of this blurb, I'll focus on the stupid, not the criminal.

Everyone had a childhood with its mixed bag of delightful and not so delightful events, and although we may delete the file, the patterns may persist.

Certain events, words or even a tone of voice can get you off track and back into the familiar pattern you've sworn to never live by again. 

Apologies abound.

It's easy to apologize and it can feel so grandiose. .. Like handing someone a bouquet of heirloom roses. Apologies, however, will not necessarily expunge your record in another's eyes -- especially if you've apologized for the same thing many times. 

How can you keep doing stupid stuff so you don't have to keep apologizing?

Silence is a good thing

Watch the trigger and let it roam around your mind.

Shut up and listen and remind yourself what year it is.

You may want to list situations, personality types, actions and words that trigger a stupid action on your part, ruminate, and destroy the evidence and impulse.

Integrity in a relationship increases as your apologies decrease. In love, be as kind in words as you are in actions and be generous with your admiration.

Buy my book here: Love When You Say Love

Brooklyn Baby Fashionistas

Purple is popular among brand new Brooklynites

AfroLatino Comedian Jonathan Fernandez

Stylish 

Gorgeous 

Daring

Smart

Skateboarder

New Yorker

Met on line at a clothing store.

Communication skills for muthafuckas who don't know how to talk to nobody Odilia Rivera Santos

Listening or waiting to talk? Telling lies to shorten a dispute/conversation

How a person defines 'communication skills' really says a lot about his/her character. 

If you wait for your turn to speak, you're not listening-- this method reminds me of girls, waiting, with bodies swinging to and fro, on a line to jump into the double dutch ropes. 

Is it my turn? Is it my turn?

If you use language to convince someone to do what you want and what benefits you, you are self-serving and manipulative.

If you lie in order to end a conversation quickly, get caught in a lie and tell another lie to cover up the original lie and the lies pile up like a catastrophic car wreck, and you are over the age of fifteen, you will be viewed as emotionally disturbed or emotionally stunted -- either one is not nice. The tremendous  amount of time and energy needed to keep all the lies afloat could be used to do something meaningful like finding out why you can't connect with another human being or volunteer work at a soup kitchen. You might want to explore what triggers immature behavior.

If you say what the other person wants to hear, you will come across like a very insecure person who doesn't deem himself/herself lovable. (Insert therapy here; don't bring this hot mess into your relationship)

Best Practices for Destroying a Relationship

Labels are a great way to insure someone tells you to go fuck yourself and never speaks to you again.

Big ticket items in the area of labels: Ignorant, Lazy, Unmotivated, Racist, Bigot, Mamón, etc.

There's something particularly annoying about having someone slap a label on you, and I've never seen an antidote -- this is the snake bite that kills.

There are a lot of ways to argue, disagree or have a heated debate without name-calling,the definitive stamp of disapproval.

Communication Skills 101

1. Date someone you admire and respect

2. Say what you want in a concise manner -- you're not getting paid by the word. A long rambling explanation of a simple fact prolongs discomfort in an uncomfortable conversation.

Saying 'to make a long story short' makes the story long -- that's seven extra syllables no one needed to hear. Some conversations should be closer to a haiku then The Iliad.

3. Be honest about what you want. You have to be a grownup to say what you really want. 

Sit by yourself and write it out on a big piece of paper with a crayon: 

WHAT DO I WANT FROM A RELATIONSHIP?

You might discover you don't want a relationship and you just agreed to be in one to be polite. Maybe, you just want a short-term contractual worker who'll put up with your idiosyncratic nonsense for 1 to 3 months with the possibility of a semi-permanent part-time position.

4. Listen. If you don't know how to listen, watch the death bed scenes of twenty movies per week -- listen like that.

5. Don't bring anyone, who's not in the room, into the conversation

6. Always remember, unless you have a spiritual connection with your significant other, he or she isn't really significant and is replaceable. This is one I'll leave for you to mull over.

#LOVE! You, Me, and Everyone we Said No to by Odilia Rivera-Santos

Can you be single and take a break from dating and relationships?

In New York City, there are many opportunities for dating, hookups and the game-over situation called marriage. We are constantly talking to new characters at networking events, social gatherings and in the day-to-day commute through our magnificent journey as New Yorkers.
But, this is also one of the best places in the world to be alone, not tethered to another being and uninterested in the opposite sex, or same sex if you're gay. As a single, you make plans and invite people to join you or go alone.

 You, me and everyone we said no to

When you're committed to being alone, you will say no to people without hesitation and a Mona Lisa smile. Not swayed by the perfunctory ego-glory of being like-liked, you stick to your plans for the night, weekend, etc. The long explanation isn't necessary -- you don't need to explain your social experiment of enjoying your solitude and aloneness in order to spare someone's feelings. People asking you out is like a salesperson making cold calls: he dusts off his lines and repeats them again and again, registering only the response of yes or no, not the tenor or facial expression. You don't really matter to the guy who's asking twenty women out on the same day. And it's ok.

What can you do as a single woman?
You can finally get around to tie-dying those white t-shirts.
Go dancing five nights per week.
Do a salt scrub and leave the tub full of salt.
Work on your spiritual journey without spot-checking where your partner is on his or whether your partner is on a spiritual journey at all.
Walks in the park.
Meditation.
Brunch with friends
and the fireworks of loving yourself, where you are and what you're doing.