What's Wrong With Being Single?

What’s Wrong With Being Single? Maryam Jorjani

AN [e-reads]BOOK N e w Yo r k , N Y

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, scanning or any information storage retrieval system, without explicit permission in writing from the Author. Photography by Frederique Jorjani Copyright © 1999 by Maryam Jorjani First e-reads publication 2002 www.e-reads.com ISBN 0-7592-4477-4

Table of Contents Acknowledgements iv Preface vi One: The Nightmare 1 Two: The Road Most Traveled! 19 Three: It’s Not All About Adam 37 Four: Now, It’s About Eve! 54 Five: I Do! But Not “Until Death Do Us Part” 71 Six: Woman to Woman 88 Seven: Freedom 103 Eight: What Is Wrong with Being Single? 117 Nine: Feminine Awareness in the New Millennium 136

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Acknowledgements I am greatly indebted to all those who shared their stories with me during my research for this book. Without them this book could never have been written. My thanks go out to: Dr. Glenn Marron, with whose suggestions and direction, I was able to overcome the obstacles that I was facing before starting to write. Mairead McAllester who, with her generosity, inner wisdom and healing power, enabled me to achieve my life goals. Stephanie Show, for her encouragement and belief in me throughout the years of our friendship. Linda Potter, for her profound care and great wisdom and also for introducing me to Mairead McAllester in the first place. Peggy Martinez, for her kind heart and positive thoughts. Sharon Zaret, my lovely friend, for her unwavering enthusiasm and moral support — I needed it. My fabulous book design, editorial and production team at The Floating Gallery (TFG), New York City: Joel Hochman, Hoang Nguyen, Wendy Bonadio and Laurence Leichman for their creativity, enthusiasm, knowledge, perfectionism, honesty and, most of all, their unflagging support. Charles Aug, my boss and friend of seven years, for letting me conduct my business from home so that I could devote the time to write my book — all my loving thoughts. Tracy Saint Benoit, my dearest friend and “sister,” who believed in me even when I didn’t. Frederique Jorjani, my talented brother, for the great cover photo. My warmest thanks. I dedicate this book with great love and admiration to the spirit of my father, Dr. R. Jorjani, which has been with me and has supported me from beyond until today. iv

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My mother, who dedicated her life and love, and for her great strength and self-confidence as a single parent — it was not always easy in her generation of yesteryear. And finally to my daughter, who has always been my greatest inspiration in life and my number one fan. All my love and best wishes.

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Preface Forget THE RULES. . . Forget VENUS AND MARS. . . STOP trying to find a man . . . WHAT’S WRONG WITH BEING SINGLE? addresses the abuse aimed at society’s largest and most misunderstood minority: SINGLES. For too long, single women have had to put up with the questions and innuendos: “How can you stand being alone?” “How come you’re not married?” “What are you waiting for?” “What’s the matter with you?” “Are you a lesbian?” “Is something wrong, dear?” “Why can’t you get a man?” “A nice girl like you . . .” Meanwhile, the statistics speak for themselves: divorce rates are surging through the roof, spousal abuse is skyrocketing, couples’ counseling is becoming the fastest-growing form of therapy, and the courts are clogged with vicious child custody battles. How much of this obsession, this “push” on the part of so many people and institutions to force people to couple is social conditioning, religious edict, or cultural imperative? And what are the results? Loneliness, age discrimination, and “physical looks” bigotry. Where does that leave so many of us? I believe it results in an urgency to conform and a belief that we can only be okay if we get “fixed” by someone other than ourselves. I believe our society has become bigger than that and is ready to encompass new ideas — those old notions have become passé. vi

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Few “single women,” fortunately, know the kind of emptiness and loneliness that can come from a loveless or dysfunctional marriage. Our biggest mistake is buying into this crazy notion that it is somehow an awful thing to be alone — or, to be more specific — to be without a man. Even singles clubs and dating services are ultimately dedicated to the proposition that all people must be coupled off. Making marriage the only goal in life is truly a risky business for any woman to undertake. It can be a trap. I have met too many women who have more faith in their husbands than in themselves. They expect happiness to come from their spouses and lovers rather than from themselves. And when things get bad, these women’s lives unravel. I think that we, as men and women, are here not to compete, but to complete. And looking at the levels of unhappiness and abuse that exist in the world, it almost seems that marriage is something we’ve created to punish ourselves. This is not to say that single women don’t fall victim to some of the same pitfalls. But there is an alternative for all of us — to recognize that there is a choice we all can make. I’ve come to believe that if you are one of those women who has everything except a husband, then you truly have everything! I know this will sound a little odd, but perhaps the only “need” we should have is not to need at all. Life truly belongs to those who belong to themselves. The goal of this book is no less than to finally put an end to the raw deal that many single women — and men — have gotten over the centuries. It seems that singles, when not simply being bombarded with the most humiliating questions, are forever being herded into the “mating game.” In the extreme, single women have found themselves running the gamut from being ostracized and ridiculed to having their sexuality questioned. With that in mind, I’d like this book to serve as an inspiration to those who are living a life filled with uncertainty, doubt and fear — all because of our culture’s emphasis on marriage at the expense of any other lifestyle alternative. That kind of narrow-minded view only leaves a whole lot of us on the outside looking in. I hope you find this book alternately funny and daring — a pragmatic look at coping with relationships that offers simple and valuable advice. At the same time, it is a book of spiritual growth describing the sensations of self-love,

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healing, freedom and inner peace that come from opening ourselves to the profound awareness surrounding women’s existence. I find it strange that while everyone desires freedom, most are content merely to yearn for it. What’s Wrong With Being Single? is for those women who are tired of being dependent on someone else for their happiness. I’d like to help heal those of us who are suffering from the unthinking, but nevertheless, sharp and painful remarks inflicted upon us by our society. Many women are enjoying life as singles and feel they don’t have to prove anything to anyone. They are independent, freedom-loving souls. After all, freedom and self-love are the keys to true happiness. Creating a foundation for ourselves, learning to achieve on our own, discovering how to live as independent human beings and, finally, teaching our children — these lessons are perhaps the best life has to offer. — Maryam Jorjani New York City, 1999

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One The Nightmare My heart beat with excitement as I slowly walked along the shore of a beautiful tropical island. A profound calmness traveled lightly throughout my entire body and mind. My hair danced freely on my bare back and the wind caressed my breasts with its soft touch. Everything was perfect. I knew he would be there. Before long, I saw him strolling towards me, the sun behind him. As he approached, I watched the silhouette of his tall, perfect body come into focus; he could have been the “God of Handsomeness.” Without a word, we joined hands and walked along the edge of the water, where the ocean makes eternal love with the shore. The entire world was bathed in a colorful blend of gold and purple. I felt I was one with the Earth and the universe. I broke free from his grasp and danced while he, his golden-blue eyes filled with love and desire, adorned me with his loving gaze as I revolved round and round. I felt the sun’s energy passing through him and into me, giving me the life that I was living at that moment. We were like the sun and the Earth; he, radiant and strong, and I, filled with life to give. At that moment I knew I wanted him. I danced into his arms, where the sensation of his touch gently burned me with the flames of desire. We kissed passionately, his lips wet and warm. He was whispering something in my ear but I couldn’t hear him over the sound of the ocean. We fell upon the sand, and I felt its grainy warmth against my back and in my hair as his strong body pressed against mine. I had never experienced such intense feelings or such passion. We were part of each other, and seemingly part of the universe itself. I yielded to my desire, allowing myself to be

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enveloped in euphoria, when suddenly the jolt from a deafening sound threw me out of his arms and into total darkness. For a moment, I didn’t know where I was. Then that explosive sound repeated, this time louder. My body was covered with cold sweat and I was trembling as I opened my eyes and looked around. With total disappointment I realized that I was in my Manhattan apartment, in my bed, and the phone was ringing off the hook. I looked over at the clock next to the phone. It was 3:30 a.m. I thought for a moment, “Somebody had better be dead!” as I pulled myself together and picked up the receiver. “Hello,” I croaked. There was no answer, but I could hear heavy breathing. Great, I thought, I almost made love to the most gorgeous man in the world, in the most beautiful place at sunset, and some crackpot wakes me up in the middle of the night so I can listen to him breathe! Just before I could say something nasty and hang up the phone, I heard a voice, a familiar voice. It was my friend Alexandra, and she was crying hard. Now I was wide awake. It took a few moments, but as I gently asked, “What is wrong?” she finally managed to speak. Alexandra was one of my best and dearest friends, and I felt guilty for my earlier thoughts. Alexandra had a beautiful five-year-old daughter and a great husband, Lloyd, who, only two weeks ago, had taken Alexandra to the exclusive Tiffany’s store on Fifth Avenue for her birthday, carried her inside like a newlywed bride and bought her beautiful diamond earrings. Oh my God, I thought, please don’t let it be him or her baby. My hands were trembling and I tried to talk but nothing was coming out. My throat was dry and I couldn’t even think straight when finally she started to talk. To my astonishment her voice was full of anger and pain rather than sorrow. I was afraid to ask her any questions, and when she felt my silence she asked if I was still on the other end of the receiver. Then she started to tell me what had happened. “Two weeks ago, one of Lloyd’s hometown friends came to visit and they were spending a lot of time together. Lloyd showed his friend around and tonight, like the last two weeks, they went out together. It was after 1:00 a.m. when I started to worry that something was wrong, but I waited another hour, until the feeling got so strong that I didn’t know what to do. I called every hospital and police sta2

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tion that I could think of, but came up empty. I panicked, thinking that he could be dead somewhere and no one knew about it. I started running around the house looking for something — I didn’t know what — anything to give me some clue to his whereabouts. Then, in one of his coat pockets I found a matchbook from a local hotel, and I remembered that his friend was staying at this very hotel not far from our house. “I dialed the number that was on the hotel matchbook cover and was soon connected to Lloyd’s friend’s room. I tried to sound calm, but I knew I didn’t. I asked if Lloyd was still with him and to my surprise he said, ‘Yes, he is sleeping because he got drunk and couldn’t drive back.’ I asked if I could talk to Lloyd and his response was, ‘No, because he really is passed out,’ and his friend claimed that he couldn’t wake him. “I thought that maybe Lloyd was dead or badly hurt, and his friend didn’t want to tell me yet so he could prepare me for the worst. You know, when you are delirious you don’t think straight, and I was far from thinking straight. All I wanted to know was if Lloyd was okay. I asked him why no one had called me to let me know what was going on, but there was no answer. Call it ‘woman’s intuition’ or whatever, but my heart was pounding with rage and I knew something was not right, because Lloyd’s hypoglycemia prevents him from drinking too much. “I didn’t want to continue talking to this man anymore; I wanted to see my husband. I didn’t really know Lloyd’s friend — I’d only met him once and even then, I’d gotten a bad feeling about him. Besides, he was making me more nervous. I hung up the phone without saying goodbye, and with no further thought I grabbed my keys, jumped into my car and drove to the hotel. “When I knocked on the hotel room door, his friend opened it with total surprise. Behind him on the sofa was a woman with sheets wrapped around her body. I ran to the other room to find my husband, and there, instead of a drunken husband, I found Lloyd very active in bed with another woman.” Alexandra started to sob very hard as she continued her story. I was dumbstruck and didn’t know what to say. What can anyone say to a friend who just found her husband in bed with another woman? I could only cry with her and feel her pain and suffering. My heart 3

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ached for her, but I couldn’t do anything else but just listen and pray for her to get through this with as little pain as possible. Although I was still very upset and hurt for my friend, I was relieved that nothing was wrong with her child. It was after 5:00 a.m. when I finally hung up the phone. What a nightmare! It must be horrible, I thought, to go through such a painful experience. I leaned back against the headboard of my bed. I had a pounding headache, and I knew going back to sleep would be impossible. For a brief moment, my beautiful dream came back to mind — a perfect man in a perfect surrounding. No wonder he only came in my dreams, though — having a perfect man is a dream! Men are great until you marry them, but a perfect husband, now that’s another story. A morning beam of sunlight filled my room with an orange glow, something like the color in my dream. I had two more hours before I had to get ready for work. My face was still wet with tears and as I looked out the window at a beautiful sunrise, I felt sad and angry. I couldn’t believe this had happened to Alexandra. She was all lady, with a master’s degree from an Ivy League school. She was a great wife and mother, and she was very pretty. I knew, even if I tried, that I couldn’t comfort her at this moment. Eventually, Lloyd told Alexandra that those two women were from a topless bar he had taken his friend to for a fun night out, and the encounter didn’t mean anything at all to him. At least I could believe him that much, but not Alexandra; she was one of those women who believed that Lloyd would never cheat on her, and in all honesty he had never given anyone reason to believe he would. For the most part, he was a wonderful husband, crazy about his daughter and about Alexandra. He almost had me convinced that if there are some men who don’t cheat, he might be one of them. As their friend, I was very disappointed and sad because I knew Alexandra much better than I knew Lloyd. She was both stubborn in her beliefs and a bit insecure. “This is not going to be good,” I thought. I sat in the same position in my bed for a while, not wanting to move, not really having the energy to move. I closed my eyes and my own wedding came to mind. It had been a beautiful April day. The air was filled with the aroma of jasmine and roses, and I was so happy I thought I was going to burst from the thought that my Prince Charming was here on his white horse to take me away. This man who 4

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I loved was going to be with me “until death do us part.” On our wedding night, the rooms were filled with all kinds of flowers, and the band played one love song after another. I married my husband against all odds, quitting school and leaving behind my big family. I wanted to be with him “until death do us part.” He was the center of my life and I thought I had enough love to make him happy forever. We were in love for life — or at least I thought it would be like that when I said, “I do.” But things didn’t turn out that way. From the second month of our marriage, he started acting differently. At a party (thrown by mutual friend to celebrate our marriage, incidentally), he played a four-hour backgammon game with one of his old flames, and he flirted non-stop with her. He certainly wasn’t the same Romeo who had begged me to marry him (otherwise he would kill himself, he said). He started to lie and keep secrets. From the day of that party I fell into a deep shock and a deeper sadness. Was this the marriage that I had been hoping for and dreaming about? When I asked the advice of the older married women in our close circle they would say, “Welcome to the club — this is marriage, what did you expect?” Well, I expected more — much more. My thoughts went back to Alexandra, my poor friend. I felt sick to my stomach. It must be hard, it must be awful, to find your husband in bed with another woman. I closed my eyes and thanked God for at least sparing me from witnessing the actual horror that Alexandra had faced. I had been unhappy and lonely during most of my marriage, and I yearned for freedom. Lloyd almost had me convinced that there could be a marriage free of all the horrible things I had gone through, and I had been so happy for Alexandra to have found such a great man. Ironically, even after hearing these latest developments, I still believed that he really was a good man, but men sometimes do things that are not easy for any woman to digest. I wondered how Alexandra would cope. My mind was occupied with all these thoughts when the phone rang again. This time it was Dee, another friend. The three of us had been very close before Alexandra got married, but Dee and I still lived like before — divorced and happily single. I guess Alexandra had called Dee right after she spoke with me. When I picked up the phone, Dee didn’t even say hello. 5

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“Can you believe what that bastard did to her?” she said. “Yup, I believe that.” I responded, “and I am also very worried for her. We will see her tomorrow night.” Dee got quiet for a moment, and then said, “You know something? We all had our share of that big kick from our marriages, didn’t we?” “Yes we have, and we have had it.” Dee was still talking, but I wasn’t listening — my mind was wandering. This was a nightmare that only a woman who has lived through could understand. As angry as I was, I really couldn’t feel Alexandra’s pain and suffering. It must be excruciating to experience such an agony in your life. Poor Alexandra. Poor adorable, beautiful Alexandra. How was this going to affect her? How was this going to affect her marriage? I was very worried about my friend, and at the same time I felt sorrow for the many other women in the world who have had the same, bitter experience with the man they so loved that they put all of their trust and hope in his hands. I finally got out of bed; it was about time to get ready for work anyway. What a night, I thought. One moment I had been in a most exotic dream, and in the next I found myself in the nightmare of the realities of many marriages in the world. But this time it was happening to my best friend. From Bad to Worse Later that morning in my office, I couldn’t keep my mind on anything for too long; my thoughts were consumed with Alexandra and Lloyd. The sad part was that Alexandra wasn’t the only woman who had experienced such a horrifying dilemma; psychologists’ offices are jammed with women like Alexandra. Oddly enough, I wasn’t that angry with Lloyd either. Twenty-two years ago, or even fifteen years ago, I would have contemplated Alexandra’s dilemma differently, saying, “he really didn’t love her,” or “how could any man do such a disgusting thing to his beautiful wife,” but I know better now. Twenty-two years ago I was very naive about men. Again my thoughts returned to Alexandra and how much she really believed in love. She wasn’t one of those women who married just to have a husband. In spite of her mother’s matchmaking 66

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and her family’s remarks, she had turned down many men (which made her mother very angry), and continued to look for “The One,” determined to find him even if it took her all her life. I remember on Alexandra’s graduation day, her mother told me how happy she was now that this “education stuff” had ended, and Alexandra had to face the fact that there was nothing else to do but get married. “She has to start a family,” she said, “her biological clock is ticking.” She rolled her eyes with sadness as she continued, “It is not good for any woman to be single,” and of course she added, “that goes for you, too. You should start to think about getting married again!” At the time I had only been divorced for a short while and certainly had no immediate plans to get back into what I’d gratefully gotten out of. Being young and also a bit intimidated by Alexandra’s mother, thought, I bit my lip and said nothing. Another time, when Alexandra became a bridesmaid for the third time, her mother said to her, “When are you getting married? You don’t want to be a bridesmaid and not the bride forever, do you?” Alexandra had tears in her eyes and when we were alone she said, “I wish my mother would leave me alone and let me live my own life. I am not ready yet. Why can’t she understand this? Besides. I am only twenty-six years old, for God sakes.” And when she got her first job and her own apartment, that certainly wasn’t very impressive to her mother at all, so the battle between them didn’t stop; it actually got worse each day until, at the age of thirty-two, the man she would end up marrying came along. Lloyd was one of the most eligible bachelors around, and a great catch. They met at a family gathering on their own — without anybody’s matchmaking. That night, we stayed on the phone for hours; she was too excited to sleep. All she wanted to do was to talk about Lloyd — how wonderful and handsome he was, how smart he was. “Do you know he made all his money on his own? He is totally brilliant,” she said. I had known Alexandra for a long time. Through the years, she had told me many stories about the men she dated, how her mother used to force her on blind dates, and the various feelings she had had for those men, but I had never before heard her talk about any man like she did about Lloyd. 7

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Lloyd was her savior. She had finally found the man she was waiting for, and when they got married it really was a true, deep celebration of life for her. Alexandra was so in love that she was actually radiant (and, come to think of it, so was Lloyd). I was deep in contemplation when the sound of the phone brought me back to my office reality once again. To my astonishment, it was Lloyd himself. Puzzled and angry, I really didn’t know what I could say. I heard him take a deep breath as he said, “Please don’t hang up. I am very sorry that I had to call you at this point, but I need you.” Through his shaky voice, he was obviously trying hard not to cry, but I still thought he had a lot of nerve to call me. I almost opened my mouth to say so when he abruptly said, “Alexandra tried to commit suicide. She is in the hospital right now. I don’t want to tell our family at this point. Please help me.” I put my hand over my mouth to hold back a scream. My heart was racing. I knew she was angry and hurt, but trying to kill herself was beyond my expectation from such an intelligent woman. I could tell that Lloyd was in genuine agony and felt painfully guilty, but this was not the time for me to discuss anything with him. I got the name of the hospital and ran out of the office. Lloyd was in the hallway of the emergency room when I arrived. I didn’t know if I wanted to hug him or kick him “where it hurts,” but when he looked at me, I saw that the pain in his eyes was so severe, I had no choice but to open my arms and hold the scared little boy he had become. He really loved Alexandra; I never doubted that. “This must be killing him,” I thought, and in spite of all that had happened the previous night, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. His hand was trembling and he couldn’t look me directly in the eyes or he would have cried, but I think he had no life left in him to do so. “The doctors are still working on her,” he told me in a weak voice. “They asked me a lot of questions, but I told them that she took those pills by mistake, that she meant to take some headache pills, but it was dark and she was so sleepy she couldn’t tell the difference between the two bottles. I didn’t want her to have more problems than she already has right now. Oh God, I am so worried for her, I love her so much.” I wanted to grab him and shake him and ask him, “Then why did you do that?” but I knew he really meant what he was saying, and what 8

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had happened last night had nothing to do with his love for her and he honestly had no intention of hurting her. That didn’t make me feel any better about the whole situation, though, and I wasn’t in the mood to analyze either of them at this point. I asked, “When are you going to tell her parents?” He dropped his head down and with the saddest expression continued, “As I said on the phone, you are the first person I told.” My mind was thinking the worst — what if she died? Under the circumstances I think he did the right thing. Having a suicide attempt in her record could damage her for life. If they got divorced, she could lose her daughter to Lloyd — even though he was the guilty party. In the recovery room, I was alone with Alexandra. Her beautiful face pale and lifeless, she could hardly speak. She didn’t want to see Lloyd anymore, but the sad part was that she was blaming herself for his actions. “He doesn’t love me anymore,” she said, “I am getting old and I don’t excite him any longer” I held her hand, looked her in the eyes, and with a voice that only she could hear, I said, “Next time you find him in bed with another woman, instead of trying to kill yourself and make so many people miserable — especially your precious daughter — get a bucket of ice and dump it on his ass. And quit being down on yourself. This had nothing to do with you.” Her lips opened into a bitter smile and she whispered back, “You know very well that he was everything to me and it’s obvious he doesn’t want me anymore, otherwise he wouldn’t do such a thing.” To my own surprise, I was angrier with Alexandra than with Lloyd in that moment. I could hear her mother’s words — “She was only good if a man loved her.” Her act had been destructive to her self, her child, her family and her friends. Honestly, I don’t think any man is worth taking your life for, especially when you found him in the arms of another woman! But I was saving my fury for another time. Now she had to get better. That was the most important issue. Her eyes were closed, but she was still holding my hands between her cold fingers. My feelings were very mixed. I personally wouldn’t do what she did when she found her husband in bed with another woman. I was very disappointed with my friend and at the same time very angry with Lloyd. I was in a very bad spot and I alone had 9

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to bear this secret burden. Well, I thought, “I guess that’s what friends are for!” My thoughts went back to those days when she used to date Lloyd. How fulfilling her life had been, how differently she used to think about him. When they got married, I was in the research stage for this book and the feedback I had received didn’t look very promising for the longevity of any marriage. The number of divorces was climbing by the minute, mostly because of men’s abusive behavior — infidelities or other horrible actions against women. But we always have hopes; we think, “This is it, he is that one in a million, and nothing bad is going to happen to me.” Alexandra wasn’t any different. She was such a firm believer in love that she endured all the problems with her family and waited a long time to marry. “He will never cheat on me, I just know that,” she used to say, “Not all men cheat you know. It won’t happen to me.” God knows how many times I heard a woman say that she was so sure that her husband was that one in a million, that he was not just the type! It’s Always Something In the course of my research for this book, I asked every woman I had ever known, married or single, if she had ever had an affair with a married man. Guess what? Every one had — at least once! It reminds me of a joke that I once heard: A mother asks her daughter, “Why do you have to meet him in the restaurant? What happened to those men who used to pick you up?” “Nothing,” her daughter answered, “They’re still around. Now they just call them ‘married men!’” I am not saying that every man cheats or every woman eventually will find her husband in bed with another woman, but the truth of the matter is, marriage will complicate your life one way or another; even if infidelity doesn’t enter into your marriage, some other problem will. When I was promised my husband, in front of God, that I would be his lawfully wedded wife and that I would be there for him in sickness and in health until death did us part, I really believed it. Like all newlywed brides, I never dreamed I had less than a 35 percent chance of staying married. Unfortunately I was wrong. Marriage didn’t turn out to be anything near what I had expected, and soon after the wedding, 10

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“happily ever after” began to fade and I found myself an unhappy woman, spending most of my time with family or friends, hiding my sad smile, and pretending that everything was just fine. I started thinking about divorce soon after my child was born, but I was afraid to mention it — much less do anything about it — for fear of what people might say; after all, I had married my husband despite all the obstacles my family had created. I thought I had no choice but to stay married and suffer in silence. Soon, though, I realized that living and staying with a man I used to worship, in a boring, romanceless marriage for the rest of my life, was a more frightening prospect than facing people’s ignorant gossip. When I lived in the cage of marriage, freedom was an ecstasy that I could only dream about. After a year of soul-searching, I decided to make my dream come true and walk out of the so-called closet of “being married to make others happy” towards the freedom I longed for. I was still in my twenties when I got divorced. The liberty was authentic and the ecstasy genuine. I no longer daydreamed, but savored every day with passion. How little I knew then that there are people who form our societal values by making everything we do their business! A Humble Homecoming Alexandra asked me for some water. Seeing her so helpless and weak in the hospital bed scrambled my emotions so much it was hard to keep my focus clear. On one hand, I was very disappointed in my intelligent friend’s unexpected actions, and on the other hand, I was furious with Lloyd for driving her to it. Three hours later they released Alexandra from the hospital. Thank God she was all right. Lloyd didn’t accompany us on the drive home — he was too embarrassed — and of course Alexandra was badly wounded and too hurt to see him face to face after what she had seen the night before. She hardly spoke on the way to her house, and although I had something to tell her, I respected her privacy until I could find the right time. When she stepped into her house, she looked around at her belongings, her daughter’s toys, Lloyd’s clothing on the sofa and many other reminders of what had been many years of happiness. She suddenly 11

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burst in to tears and cried for a long time, hurt and sorry and terrified — not only from Lloyd had done to her, but what she had almost done to herself. Thank God she had taken only a few of the sleeping pills, I thought. If she had actually killed herself, what would have happened to Nicole, her beautiful little girl who needed and loved her mother so much? Who would have broken the news to her that her mommy had killed herself after finding her father in bed with a DD-cup topless dancer? Yes, Alexandra’s pain was real and legitimate, but not worth ending her own life. In spite of Lloyd’s indiscretion he really loved Alexandra and what he did had nothing to do with his feelings for her. He had been taught since childhood that men are a certain way, and because he saw most men around him behaving in a particular manner he was programmed the same. Now he would do anything to make it up to her. He would get down on his knees and beg for her forgiveness. With her family’s old-fashioned values, Alexandra didn’t have much choice but to stay and try to put her life back together. What could she say to her family? “I found Lloyd in bed with another woman so I decided to kill myself.” That wouldn’t work because, in her family, what Lloyd did was considered only a minor, mischievous act that most of her female family members had already experienced. This was the haunting tune of marriage, that deadly tune that gets the best of us. You can read all of those “how to” books and get therapy for years, and when you think you have finally fixed it all — BOOM! — he will do something else that will be beyond your comprehension. I had to leave on a business trip from New York, but before I left, I made sure Alexandra was all right. Lloyd was in the house, but he was sleeping alone. Dee and I were the only ones who knew what had happened, and I made Alexandra promise not to do anything foolish ever again. With my mind on my trip, I left Alexandra with my blessings, promising to call her soon. Fog and a New Friend The fog was thickening rapidly as my taxi approached Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris. It didn’t look good at all — even the driver seemed to be concerned. “This is going to be a hard day to get any12

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where on time,” I thought as I paid him. As an international real estate broker, I had to travel several times a year to Paris, so I had some experience with the fog around the airports; for some geographic reason, the fog has a hard time departing when it settles down. Although I loved its mystique, its heavenly look and the feeling of its silkiness on my skin, today I wished that the sun was shining and I was on my way back to New York as scheduled. When I entered the airport lobby, I could not believe the crowd that had gathered there — an empty seat was nowhere to be found. I looked at the people sitting on the floor and on the steps, and I listened while the announcer gave the latest development. It was bad news — no planes had left or landed in the past several hours and no one knew how long this delay would continue. “Well, we can’t fight Mother Nature,” I thought, and I knew it would be a long wait. For a while I didn’t know what to do, but soon enough I realized that the best thing was to find a place to take a load off my feet. Getting anywhere near the cafeteria was an absolute impossibility, and there was a rumor that no food was available regardless. I could sense some sort of panic in the air; this was one of the infrequent occasions on which people couldn’t wait to leave Paris! “I’ll probably have to stay overnight and wait for the fog to lift,” I thought with disappointment. I thanked God for the great book that I had with me. “Excuse me, can I squeeze right here, my feet are killing me.” I looked up at a woman who resembled Cheryl Ladd standing beside me. Like the rest of the crowd, she couldn’t find anywhere to rest. I moved my carry-on bag closer to me to give her room to sit down, and she thanked me with a very warm smile. I couldn’t help noticing that she was reading the same book as I, The Road Less Traveled, by Dr. Scott Peck. I looked at her and noticed she was looking at my book, too. Then we looked at each other and laughed. “Great book, isn’t it?” I asked. “Oh yes, but I am about to finish it and I don’t know what I’m going to do. I have nothing else to read which can possibly be this mindgrabbing.” “Well, you can always read it again. Actually this is my second time around in less than a year,” I replied. “That is an excellent idea. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed this book. No other book has ever had such a positive effect on me.” 13

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I totally agreed with her. I hoped that Dr. Peck knew how many lives he had touched with such a masterpiece of writing. She introduced herself to me as Betty. She was a tall and very beautiful woman with a calm demeanor. She seemed untouched by the tension around us. “You were on vacation?” she asked with the same happy and bubbly tone in her voice. “No, I was on a business trip.” “Tough job,” she said, and we laughed again. “How about you?” I asked. “No let me tell you, the way you look it was definitely a vacation, and probably somewhere sunny.” “Oh yes, and a very special vacation, I was celebrating my freedom, freedom, from the web of spider man in the south of France.” She giggled and continued, “This was the first time in a long time that I felt alive, like a human being.” Now I was beginning to understand where that positive energy was coming from, and I appreciated the fact that under our extreme circumstances I found a companion that was so happy and totally removed from what was happening around us. She told me all about her unbelievable rejuvenation as a single woman in the south of France, and I told her about the book that I was preparing to write on that subject. As predicted, the dense fog never lifted that night and we had no choice but to spend the night in the nearby hotel, courtesy of our airline. The evening passed with lots of fun. The dinner served, accompanied by a generous amount of very fine French wine, was very pleasant. By the time dinner was over, Betty and I were more like old friends than two strangers who had just met. I liked her positive attitude. She reminded me of the lightness and the happiness that I felt after my divorce. Unlike some women who, after a divorce, go through great difficulties or depression, Betty was the opposite; she was one of those who found the golden door to her serenity. Betty’s Story Betty came from a very large family of seven children. Having two younger sisters who were married with children didn’t make it easy for her to stay a single woman. 14

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“I was a legal secretary in a large law firm,” Betty told me, “and I lived in a great apartment loft in downtown Manhattan. I was never eager to marry, perhaps because I could see how unpredictable marriage could be. I witnessed how easily people say goodbye, but most of all I saw how children could blamelessly and innocently be detrimental to a marriage and the already complicated relationship between a man and a woman. As a forty-year-old “over the hill” single woman, I felt cursed! Others can make you feel so insecure that you can easily lose your self-confidence and self-esteem. When you start to doubt yourself, you will fall into their trap and become one of them. “Several times I got a pinch from one or other of the married women in my social circle as if to say, ‘What are you waiting for? When are you getting married? It is getting late!’ I wish I could have said, ‘Getting late for what, being as miserable as you are?’ but instead. I started getting serious about finding a husband. I was almost ashamed to go to a party or any family gathering, trying to avoid those remarks.” I knew very well what Betty was talking about. I had been married once and had a child but still I was not protected from all of those unkind and unjust remarks. (Actually, it was after one very ugly episode at someone’s wedding that the idea of writing this book was conceived; my thanks to those who pushed me that far!) There was silence for several long minutes. We were both preoccupied with our own thoughts. I was the one who broke our silence when I asked Betty how she had met her husband. “I met Frank at the birthday party of a friend,” Betty said. “Frank was the typical dream man, tall, dark and handsome. He had never been married and, to add to my relief, he was six years older than I was, with a very successful business, a beautiful home and a BMW! I didn’t fall in love with him immediately, but it was lots of fun along the way. He was full of excitement, and while he was stealing my heart he was also busy impressing my family and friends with his entrepreneurial wealth, not to mention his impeccable manners. Everyone thought that I had hit the jackpot, and of course I was off the hook in the eyes of the society. After five months of dating, we got married at a romantic spot on the shore of the Hudson River under the summer moonlight, while our families and friends shared that memorable night with us. 15

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“Our honeymoon was even more romantic than our wedding night. Hawaii was more beautiful than I had ever remembered — of course, when you are in love, the whole world is more beautiful to your eyes. I honestly couldn’t believe that this was really happening to me; it seemed too good to be true. “Quitting my job was actually his idea, not mine. When it came to marriage, he was an old-fashioned man. My mother happily remarked, ‘Now you can do whatever you want to do instead of getting up every morning and working your life away.’ Actually, she wasn’t wrong, I thought. There were several things I wanted to do but I had been too tired to do them while I was working full time, like taking ballet lessons (which I had to stop when I entered college) or taking painting lessons (which was one of my secret desires in life). To top it all off, I had nothing to worry about where money was concerned. Such a wonderful life was waiting for me. “The first day in my permanent home, I felt like I had entered into an unknown world. It seemed as though one day I had been a single working woman over forty in New York City, and the next day I had suddenly found myself married to my dream man and living in a big beautiful home in Connecticut.” There was silence again. “Oh well,” she finally continued, “they say time flies when you are having fun, and six months disappeared like lightning into the darkness of clouds, and one day I awakened from my dream. Things were changing right under my nose, but I was so busy living my dream that it took me too long to notice. He had changed. Everything had changed. First the maid disappeared and I was forced to take housekeeping lessons from his mother — a woman whom, I had noticed only recently, still had quite a bit power over my husband. She was one of those mothers-in-law who believed no matter how wonderful, beautiful, or talented you were, you still weren’t good enough for her son. “In the following six months, I learned how to cook Frank’s favorite foods, how to take care of his wardrobe, and how to fold his sweaters. I had to learn what Frank liked for breakfast when he was home, what he liked when he was on the run, and many more things I don’t even want to tell you. Finally, after one year of training, when he and his mother were both satisfied with my work, I was left alone to take care of things. Although the whole thing was 16

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a big humiliation and extreme disappointment to me, in the eyes of others, I was a happily married woman. As ridiculous as it sounds, I was much more respected as an unhappy maid in my husband’s home than when I was a happy single woman under my own roof! “Sometimes I would laugh with anger about how much ballet I had learned and how wonderful my new painting looked in the living room! The happiness that I was expecting from this marriage didn’t exist. What made me more frustrated was that Frank seemed very happy with his life. Things really changed for the better for him and he looked better every day. I was starting to look older than he was and that gave him even more reason to taunt me. There were no more words of compliment, hardly any romantic sex (if there was any at all) and, on top of that, I found out that in spite of his lies, he had been married several times before to women half his age. None of those marriages lasted even a year, so I guess this time he thought he would pick an old maid who was desperate to be married and take all of his crap without opening her mouth. Of course that stupid woman was no one other than me. “If I complained, he would say that I was a most unappreciative bitch who had every luxury of life and didn’t see it. I remember one day seeing the movie The Stepford Wives while he was away on a business trip. It hit me hard, and I cried for days realizing what had happened; the free-spirited Betty I used to be had been killed by one of those robot-maker husbands. I felt like I didn’t have a life and I didn’t exist. If he had gotten a knife and took out my guts with it, I wondered if I would even have bled. My five years of marriage was a dark shade of disappointment and nothing else. During that five years, I read everything there was about marriage and love and how to be a perfect wife, and nothing worked. I spent so much time and effort learning to please him that I forgot myself. “Yes, I would get all dressed up to go to a wedding or a party, and yes, I would entertain people and smile to the guests (who were mostly his friends and family) in my house (or, should I say, his house). I tried to dress sexy and make him wonderful dinners with candlelight while wearing my latest Victoria’s Secret negligee, but nothing worked as those books had promised. The flame was gone and now I 17

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don’t believe there ever was a flame to begin with. He had been only waiting for a maid, not a real wife. “Finally, one day when I was really fed up with his abusive words, I told him that maybe he should seek professional help. Well, he slapped me so hard that my nose started to bleed and then he left the house. I sat on the floor and cried hysterically for a long time. When I had no more tears, I looked up and noticed my reflection in a mirror, and the woman I saw petrified me. The beat up, old, overweight woman who was looking at me in the mirror wasn’t really me at all and I finally admitted to myself that there had to be something wrong with me to take this much abuse from a man who hated me, and perhaps hated all women.” Betty did get help, and when I met her she didn’t look anything like what she had described. With tears in her cheerful eyes she only had one regret: “I wish I had been strong enough to stand up for myself from the very beginning and not care what people said about me, but the past is past and now I am the master of my own destiny. I have every intention of enjoying the rest of my life in tranquility and with positive energy that will be generated by me, only for me!” When I came back to New York, Betty’s story, like many others that I had gathered through the years, went into a file to be used one day in the book that I was preparing to write. The more stories I hear about women trapped in the cage of marriage, the more I believe that staying single is like being in a state of everlasting dreams, where you never have to wake up to the nightmare of most marriages of today.

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Two The Road Most Traveled! I was inspired by the writings of my favorite author, Dr. M. Scott Peck who, through his acclaimed work The Road Less Traveled, displays wisdom and undivided care, showing us how smoothly we can travel along our darkest unknown road until we find the way to our soul. I, on the other hand, would like to show you how we, as women, can avoid traveling down this bumpy, dusty, dangerous, and often deadly “most traveled road” that we call “marriage.” Through sharing this book with you, I can help you avoid the pitfalls of uncertainty in your own life by showing you how to detour around this dangerous road or at least demand its repair before you proceed with caution. Presently, women are getting nowhere in marriage, and those of us who have ventured down its road are reporting that the trip is simply not worth taking if the risk leaves us lost, miles off course and empty-handed in a worthless mirage. After years of research my greatest wonder is why, with all the dangers along the way, no one seems to warn us. Instead, others encourage us to go forward, telling us false stories about the wonderful life that is waiting for us along this uncertain and bumpy road. And through our innocence, most of us blindly wait to eagerly start our journey. Alexandra and Betty’s stories are not so unique or farfetched. Many married women have told me that if they could do it all over again, they wouldn’t marry at all. But the heavy weight of society on our backs, like a forceful wind, pushes us forward until we become frustrated, tired, and angry with the reality of marriage. Perhaps that is why many of us are refusing to complete the journey to the road’s end, and a growing number of us are now refusing to even begin the journey. 19

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You Are What You Learn Almost sixteen years ago, I read Dr. Joyce Brothers’ renowned book, What Every Woman Should Know About Men, and it helped me a great deal. It discusses the physiological differences between men and women in a much clearer way than any medical book. Reading this book, I learned about men’s and women’s differences from the embryonic stage until death — from differences in our hormones to the consistency and thickness of our blood. After I finished this book, I was no longer aggravated when my boyfriend and I came back from a hard day of skiing, and he would soon be snoring his head off, still dressed in his ski outfit, while I prepared dinner. But for the life of me, I still don’t see the connection between the fact that men have 20 percent more red corpuscles in their blood and their behavior towards us. Does the heaviness of their blood give them the right to batter, rape or harass us? Or is good old testosterone the reason for their violent behavior toward women? (If, indeed, testosterone is the reason for so much of their bizarre behavior, then why don’t women run amuck and raise the crime rate after menopause, when their body produces more of that male hormone?) Over twenty-two years of research has shown me that, despite our biological differences, men’s behavior toward women has little to do with biology but rather seems to mimic behavioral patterns stemming from misinformation about women that has been passed down from generation to generation around the globe. We, male and female, yin and yang, the only ingredients to the ultimate creation called “life,” have never been truly and honestly introduced to each other. Men in particular still live in the shadow cast by their immense egos, and it will be a long time before they look at the true identity of women. Each of us is moving toward our true freedom as human beings, and although the women’s movement has aided our otherwise slow progress down that bumpy road, most of us are not yet there. We have been talking about equality for some time now, but unfortunately the subject is extremely misunderstood by both of us — yes, even by women! We put too much emphasis on learning about men, and we always give much more to them than we ever get back. We, as

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men and women, have relied on the teachings from our unenlightened childhood ignorance. Women have been introduced to men this way: “Woman, this is Man. This is his world. You were born to please him and obey him. You are not as smart as he is, and therefore he is better than you are. That is why the world belongs to him. Learn to take care of him, learn to sacrifice for him. “You, woman, are really nothing unless you have a man as your master to give you his name, reputation and security, because you can’t succeed without him. And when it comes to making a marriage work, the responsibility is yours. It is not an easy job, but you have to do it, and if your husband is unhappy with his life or becomes unfaithful, it is because you failed to do a good job. So learn and learn, practice and practice, and don’t stop trying to please him. Otherwise, you will be doomed to stay single, branded by the rumors that follow every single woman. You will be cursed, and the world will look upon you with pity. It will be very difficult out there if you even think of staying single.” Does that sound familiar to you? Why have women allowed themselves to be kept in a position like this? Because having a husband is the greatest achievement of every woman’s life! Women are taught: “Don’t be a loser, be an achiever and get yourself a husband — there is nothing else for you. Men will be men, but you are the one who must understand and sacrifice in order to keep them in your life, regardless of the price you have to pay on this dangerous road you must travel.” And this is what men are taught: “Man, this is Woman. She was born to please you and fulfill your needs. She is weak and incapable of doing anything meaningful without you, for she is not as smart as you are. And remember, you may have as many women as you want, even when you are married. She will have to understand this because she learned from the beginning of her life that she is nothing unless you are in her life. You are the ruler of the world; you are the master of the game. “Live your life the way it pleases you, and your woman will follow. You are one of the boys, and boys will be boys. She will have to learn that. Don’t worry about her needs — after all, boys are busy

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doing what boys do, and she has nowhere else to go. You are in charge, and consequently you have every right to abuse her, rape her, and disrespect her. You may discover during your superior life that she is in many aspects much stronger than you are, but don’t allow her to even think that way about herself — after all, you have the physical strength. If she gets out of line, you have the power to force her back in her place. Just beat her and she will learn, for she has no choice.” While I certainly don’t believe that every man in the world grew up with this kind of stereotype about women, I honestly believe that most women were brought up with the idea that she is the one who will be the “marriage keeper” and take the abuse. It has been this way throughout the centuries and millennia. The massive brainwash about women’s roles has given men, in their total ignorance, the permission to do what pleases them. All over the world, women confront this in their marriages because men, in their misinformed minds, believe women have nowhere else to go. Men are far removed when it comes to understanding women’s needs and our importance in a world that belongs to us both. Men learn to behave with disrespect towards women from an early age. By the time boys and girls get together in school, most boys’ minds are so corrupted with wrong stereotyped opinions that they really have no idea of the importance of women’s roles in this world, so they think it is just fine to treat girls with impudence. Men’s expectation of today’s woman is too forceful, too old fashioned and extremely one-sided. We are learning, but not fast enough. I am optimistic that this new millennium will bring spiritual awareness and immense power to help women. Most importantly, I feel our society needs an awareness — of women, by women — to realize that we have been pushed back for too long by our husbands, brothers, fathers, and bosses. The change is slow in coming, but there is an awareness of its existence among women in particular. In every evolution, change begins with an explosion. Our awareness of women’s true rights and the desire to stop men’s brutal behavior and misperceptions of women will create a defiant explosion that will affect everyone for the rest of our lives. This explosion will be as great as a big bang, and will mark a new and powerful beginning for women. As with any explosion, it takes time for the iridium to settle down, and so begins our new way 22

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of thinking, behaving, adjusting, and recreating a new understanding in men’s misinformed minds. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Man’s World Women have long wondered why traditional marriage doesn’t work. We are always one step ahead of men in intuition and awareness. But when women make demands that men find unacceptable, they long for the return of the old slave who mopes about the house but takes care of things, who shows supports him outside the home and doesn’t demand his respect in return. Few men in the world respect women enough to take the time to examine femininity with interest and care, but plenty has been written about men: how to know a man, secrets about men, how to make them wild in bed — the list goes on for miles! Living in men’s shadows, we get it in our heads that women are the ones who should learn about men. In other words, we made ourselves look unworthy, not important enough to make an effort to read even one chapter about women (unless, of course, it’s sexual). Freud asked, “What is it that women want?” Well, if he were alive today, I would tell him the answer on behalf of thousands and thousands of women from all over the world. But Freud is not here (and even if he was, I wonder if he would listen). Many people — men and women — have debated over which sex is truly the “most fragile.” Modern views say that we are really equal, that we both have different strengths in different areas of our human bodies and brains. We are not here to compete with each other, but to complete each other. Each sex brings strength to the other, making us a complete couple able to deal with life’s unavoidable difficulties. The two of us together can balance life. This is society’s idea behind marriage. In this unsafe world, with danger hovering above women’s heads, we seek shelter and protection under a man’s strength. Sorrowfully, the reality is we often get more hurt by our protectors than if we walked in Times Square in the middle of the night! According to police reports, 40 percent of emergency phone calls come from women who are being battered by their husband or partner. As long as our equality is wrongly measured by our physical strength, women will always lose, and there is always war and 23

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competition between men and women. Because men are physically stronger, they have developed a superior attitude, reinforced by society and women’s inferior behavior around them. Consequently, they believe they have the right to rule the world. Together yet unknowingly, we exist under the same sky, our opposite sex not having the slightest idea of what women are all about. We are forcefully encouraged to take men for what they are until we kill that little girl inside us. We forget about that little girl’s desires and we put her in a dark closet in order to have a better understanding and more time for our “Men,” taking the time instead to learn about that little boy who lives inside every man! We are trying to fit in a so-called man’s world while carrying more weight and responsibility on our shoulders than any male’s ego would dare to admit. No one warns us, and although most of us will face the danger right at the start of our journey, there is no turning back. Little by little we realize that we are only going to be a prisoner of some twisted aspect of marriage. Under the tight and highly troublesome supervision of men and their world, we let ourselves become nothing but a possession of the male ego. A majority of women never have a true identity of their own, believing they must have a husband to complete them. This need and weakness is women’s number one enemy and the determinate destroyer. Women throughout time have believed that they are in desperate need of men for comfort, security, and above all, the respect that we will only achieve if we are a “Mrs.” Then and only then will a woman be recognized by society. We linger throughout life to achieve that missing identity by being someone’s wife. Women everywhere are starting to realize that marriage is much better for men than women, but we still keep that wool pulled over our eyes and go along with the humiliation of marriage that is degrading and destructive to our being. We actually pledge our hearts and souls to men who, not so long ago in many parts of the world, buried their firstborn alive if she was a girl. Such men battered their wives if she carried a girl, despite the biological fact that it was their sperm that actually determined the sex of the child! In many cultures, women still endure embarrassment and poor treatment from the husband and his family when their firstborn is not a boy. 24

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And what about medieval times? Are we forgetting that men used to burn women who wished to use their womanly knowledge to assist others through childbirth? Men wanted us to believe that the childbirth process — a normal and natural act of nature, and a woman’s most miraculous act of creation — was forbidden unless they were in charge. Now, you might think that things have changed since then. But if you open your eyes, you will see that such injustice still exists. Although 40 percent of battered women do call the police, there are up to 30 percent who never call. That leaves 70 percent of today’s women whom, with all our “rights” and “equalities,” will be battered or abused in so many ways by their men. Traveling around the world, I interviewed women from young to old, Wall Street executives to Asian housewives, and I found that even with all the talk about “women’s lib” (which has more a tone of mockery and a painful pinch to it than an honest and true acceptance of women’s values and freedom), women are still treated with different standards than men throughout the world. For example, consider if a man named “Marc Clark” rather than a woman named “Marsha Clark” had handled one of the most difficult and challenging trials of the decade. Do you think anyone would have cared what his hair looked like or what he was wearing on the fortieth day of the trial? Sadly, this woman was treated with prejudice by a society that was looking at her as a sex object rather than as a skillful attorney. Jill’s Story When Jill met Bruce, she had a great job and a bright future in a very well established law firm. Bruce was ten years her senior, and naturally she looked up to him as both a man and a knowledgeable lawyer. After one year of dating, with several successful business cases under her belt, they got engaged. “Being engaged to Bruce made me feel that my future would be even brighter. Where could I go wrong with a reputable lawyer/husband?” Jill said. “I saw us together as a couple with a big successful law firm, like the one he constantly promised me. ‘Oh honey, I am going to make you a very rich and successful woman. In no time you will be so rich that I 25

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don’t even think you are going to stay with me!’ he would say, and we would laugh. In my eyes there was no one better or more honest than Bruce. “Soon after the engagement he started his own law firm while I stayed working at my same office. I was making a very good living, but when Bruce asked me to quit my job and work with him, I was very excited. This was the first step in our new venture together. I knew that at first our firm wouldn’t bring much profit for me, but this would be very temporary. The most important part was that soon we would have our own firm together. The thought of it would make my stomach jump with nervous joy. “Time passes very quickly when you are working fourteen hours a day, bringing work home, and entertaining clients, but I realized day after day, as time passed, that I wasn’t earning much money. I was living off my savings. When I confronted Bruce, his answer was shocking: ‘So don’t spend that much money on useless things like clothing, and you can easily live on this money. Lots of people with families live on the money you alone spend on your clothes and your dinners out with friends.’ “If Bruce had looked at my life closely, he would have seen that all my time was spent either working for him or cooking, cleaning, entertaining his friends and family, and packing and unpacking from our long and tiresome trips. His life was so demanding on me that I had no time to keep up with my own work. The problem was, he really did not care about my life. Every time I mentioned something about my career, his answer was the same: ‘Where am I taking this office? This belongs to you and me, it is ours.’ And of course, I would blame myself for having been upset in the first place; ‘Maybe I have P.M.S.,’ I would think. “Meanwhile, I was nothing but a maid and an escort to fill in whenever he was alone or needed me to play the part of his fiancée. I had to be there for him. I had no life of my own. I was under his command, and as a softhearted and naive woman, I always believed his empty promises. After years of his lies and underhanded conspiracies, I bitterly realized that I was nothing but a gopher for his fast-growing company. During the five years we were together, I earned next to nothing, spending the last pen-

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nies of my own savings while he was purchasing valuable real estate for himself without a penny toward my interest. When all was said and done, I was five years older and ten years poorer than when I had met him. Foolishly, there was no legal paperwork between us, and trusting him turned out to be a lethal weapon used against me. “After six years of working hard and depleting my bank account, I realized that this man had no intention of marrying me, nor did he have any true interest in my welfare or well-being; he had simply been using me. When I would ask him, ‘When are we getting married? He would answer, ‘When you make half a million dollars, then I will marry you! How would you like me to make money when you are stealing my clients away from me? You have no interest in looking out for my financial security.’ “His attitude of indifference finally woke me up to the understanding that I was being robbed blindly by a man who was supposed to be giving me peace of mind and security. When I left Bruce I was penniless, with no promise of an easy future. I trusted my own abilities and, although I gave six years of my life to a shrewd, underhanded, jealous man, I stopped the damage before it got any worse. Leaving him was the best thing I ever did. In time, with lots of hard work, I managed to repair the damage he caused in my life, and I even made it much better. Thanks to this experience, I will never give this much to any man ever again. I learned my lesson well. Bear in mind, whenever you stop the loss, it’s a gain!” Fortunately for Jill, she stopped her loss, but there are many women who are drowning in their losses and, not believing in themselves, sink deeper and deeper in the man-made quicksand until they can’t breathe any longer. It is very easy to stop your loss — as easy as putting your foot on the brake of a car and turning the wheel toward your own ambitions. Even with all the stories about unhappy marriages and high divorce rates, there are still women who have no goal in life except to be a wife. Their reasons vary but, overwhelmingly, they feel they must get married in order to prove their worth to the world. They are the women to whom, when they get stuck in the middle of that road most traveled, I have no problem saying, “I told you so!”

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Teach Your Daughters Well At the age of twenty-five, my daughter came to me and said, with obvious concern, “Mom, I think you know this by now, there is nothing more important to me than my career. God knows my share of unsatisfying experiences with the men in my life, and I know very well that if I had married any of them I would have been divorced several times by now. Nonetheless, I love my own life and I am not crazy about having children in this overpopulated and vastly polluted world. I don’t want to sacrifice my future for any man, but just by looking at my friends, I can see what happens to those who venture into marriage. Most of my high school friends who have been married are now divorced with one or two children, or having a hard time coping in life. Tell me, how many weddings did you go to during this past five years? And tell me how many are still married to the same person?” “Oh, God knows,” I answered, “but I was in five weddings in one year where, before the year ended, two of the couples were already divorced and the others were working hard on their relationship to make it work.” “I know the truth, my eyes are open,” she said, “and now that Robert [her boyfriend] is asking me to marry him, I am having a real difficult time saying yes. On one hand, I think he is a great guy, and he’s constantly reassuring me that he wouldn’t stop me from pursuing my career, but men change, we all change, and their promises are as reliable as the wind. My concern is, if I stick to my own goal and go on with my business and never marry, what will people say about me? What label they are going to pin on me? Are they going to say that I am gay? Or what?” “Speaking of being gay,” I said, “do you know how many women find their husbands in bed with other men? Let me make us some tea because I have a story to tell you.” While I was making the tea, my thoughts went to all those women I had interviewed throughout the years who have found out, after marriage, about their husband’s homosexuality. My daughter anxiously waited to hear my opinion, and after some advice about her boyfriend’s proposal, I looked at her beautiful, young face. Then, in the same way I used to tell her bedtime stories 28

What’s Wrong With Being Single?

when she was a little girl, I started to tell her a tale about a father, his son, and their mule. “Once upon a time, there was a poor old man who lived in poverty with his son in a small village. They had a small piece of land that was in desperate need of hard work before it would produce anything substantial. The work was hard and both of them were too tired to plow the land for better crops. One day, the father went into town to buy a pack of tobacco. He complained to his old friend, the store owner, about how hard he and his son had to work. “A shepherd, who was also buying something from that little store, told him that he knew of a young, strong mule for sale in another village that could help them to do the hard work with much better results. Soon after the old man returned home, he told his son. ‘Son, I think if you and I go to the next village and purchase this mule we can plow the land with much ease and we can grow our own vegetables and sell them and make a good living.’ The son, with a big smile on his face, agreed immediately and they took their life savings and proceeded on their journey in hope of a better future. The hope that was growing in their hearts made their faces radiant with happiness. “The road was treacherous and the old man had difficulty walking. After four days and nights of walking and climbing, they arrived in the village and found the woman who was selling her young mule. They were even more hopeful about their future when they saw how strong and healthy the mule looked. Now they had all they needed to make a better life for themselves. “‘Who knows,’ the son told his old father, ‘maybe with the extra money that we make from the sale of our vegetables, we will be able to buy more mules and someday be really rich farmers.’ When they bought the mule, even the old man had new life in him, and without further delay, they purchased some food for the road and started to head back to their promising land. “‘The long way back is going to be fun and adventurous,’ the old man thought. Because they had already experienced that difficult road, they decided to take turns so each one would ride the mule until the other got tired of walking. This way, they could make the journey with much more comfort than before. Because the father was an old man and was still very tired from the first trip, the son insist29

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ed that his father be the one to ride the mule for the first part of the journey. “As they traveled down the mountain road, planning their future, they passed through an old town. Soon they noticed that people were looking at them with criticism and yelling loudly. The father and his son couldn’t help hearing the people mockingly saying, ‘Look at that mean old man, how could he let his young boy walk with those skinny legs that can hardly carry the weight of his body while he takes the comfortable ride on the mule.’ At first, the old man and his son didn’t pay much attention to the comments, but by the time they reached the end of the village, the gossip had become so nasty that the father climbed down from the back of the mule and let his son take the seat. “‘Maybe they are right, my son,’ the father said. ‘I have rested enough. It is your turn anyway.’ As they journeyed along, their thoughts returned to their plans for the future. Soon, they arrived in the next town. This time, the townspeople’s remarks were about the young son — how insensitive and cruel he was to let his poor old father walk on the dangerous road instead of letting him ride the mule. By this time, both father and son were indeed getting tired of people’s remarks, so they decided that neither of them should ride the mule until they got to their own village. “The road was long and the weather hot, but still the father and his son were busy planning for their future and minding their own business when they arrived in the third old town. This time the mockery was greater, the laughter was louder, and the comments were crueler than in the other two towns. The old man and his son couldn’t help but hear what the people were saying behind their backs. ‘Look at these two foolish men. They have this young, strong mule and they are both walking. They are dumber than that mule. Someone should tell them that they could take turns and ride the mule along these difficult roads!’ “By this time, the father and his son were extremely frustrated. They didn’t know what was really right. So far anything they had tried was not good enough for the people, and no one was satisfied with their choices. The father finally told his son, ‘Son, we lived without a mule for as long as I can remember. This mule is bringing us nothing but problems. We should just get rid of it and make our way back home!” The son thought for a long moment and realized his wise 30

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father was right. So, they pushed the poor animal off a cliff, not knowing that by doing so they also pushed their comfortable life and their better future along with the mule.” My daughter looked at me with her beautiful girlish smile. I could tell that she liked this little tale. “So, what you are saying is, I shouldn’t push my mule off the cliff!” she said. “That is exactly what am I saying. Keep the mule and look forward to your bright future. Don’t listen to what people say about the way you like to ride your mule! You know who you are and that is good enough because no matter what we do, there is always someone out there who will have an opinion about it. When you pass by them and disappear from their view, they will find someone else to criticize. Those people won’t change. Don’t change your life for them. Just close your ears to their remarks, which are the result of pure jealousy. Listen to your own heart and live up to your own beliefs.” My daughter got up and, with a satisfied smile, kissed the top of my head and left the room. I sat there and remembered how the same jealousy and ignorance had driven me almost into a second marriage. The thought of some of those experiences and those men that I almost married gave me the chills. I promised myself that I wouldn’t let society drive me — or any other happily single women — to “throw our mules off the cliff!” When I started my research for this book, the divorce rate was somewhere between 48 percent to 50 percent. Now it is near 68 percent. This means men and women are growing farther apart than ever before and there is nothing to stop this fast-growing syndrome. None of the methods or “how to” books that we have are working. We women, in particular, are sick and tired of reading what we have to do for men. We read and read, and the only result is that men are becoming more separated from the reality that women have more value than men like to admit. The male ego is blocking men’s vision about women, preventing them from seeing how important we are for the longevity and balance of this mysterious and beautiful life in which we both participate. Most likely that is why many women of today are discouraged about saying “I do,” for they strongly believe it will take an undeterminable amount of time to change men’s misinformed 31

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perceptions of themselves and women. It’s as hard as trying to straighten an old strongly rooted crooked tree — it won’t work, and the tree will break during the process. To have a straight tree in your garden, you have to grow it straight and tend it from the very beginning. Most men tend to deny women’s abilities no matter how we advance in life. If women make it in a man’s harsh world, they say, “She slept her way up.” If a woman prefers education to marriage, it’s because “She is ugly and has no hope for a husband.” If a woman doesn’t play the “wifey” game of chasing men and hunting for a husband, it’s assumed there must be something wrong with her. Men must be taught from a very early age, at home and in school, that women are indeed perfect and whole. Men and women together are as equal as the two sides of a coin and we both participate in the perpetually perfect creation of life. Men are too busy playing ego games, and women are getting fed up with it. It’s time for men to put in some effort and energy to learn about women. It’s their turn to take the initiative and look for ways to make women happy and more satisfied in marriage. Men have done as they pleased for ages and no one has objected. We have put up with their childish behavior and actually studied them carefully to learn more in order to make things right. Women are realizing that men are mostly to blame for the unreliable duration of today’s marriages. The reality is, men’s behavior is the reason for rapidly growing divorce rates all over the world. Carol’s Story After sixteen years of marriage, thirty-eight-year-old Carol voices her frustration. “I don’t know if it was him or the marriage, but when we lived together before marriage, he was a much better man. Right after he said, ‘I do,’ though, he changed and forgot how to do the things he used to do. It was as if he was possessed and he couldn’t stop himself. But now I don’t want to put up with this kind of nonsense from him anymore. He loves to intimidate me because he thinks all I ever wanted was just to be his wife. He thinks that he is a prize, he puts me

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down constantly, especially in front of other people, and sometimes I feel like the lowest piece of crap in the world. “I feel like nothing, I am sick of it, I am sick of trying, I am sick of reading those ‘how to’ books that have been written only for women to learn how to make men happy, and without any results! I don’t know what right any man thinks he has to treat his wife this way. I don’t want him anymore. I would like to be with a man, but not as my husband. They are not properly playing their role because no one taught men how to be husbands. I don’t know what it is about that saying ‘I do’ that does it. I’d like to be with a man who appreciates me and really and truly treats me as an equal. Where are they? Do they even exist, or is their existence just a figment of our romantic and naive imaginations?” Carol was angry. I told her she needed a caveman — a real caveman from the Stone Age. Studies show that cavemen had much more respect for their women than men seem to today. I guess those were the good old days for women! The world was rough and tough and the male ego was satisfied. Consequently, there was no need for a man to hurt or abuse women to achieve his role. I think the seed of conspiracy against women was planted right after men came out of the cave. Even in the most primitive tribes in the Amazon, women of today have more power and respect in their own community than we have in our so-called equal world. We modern women are still lost and disillusioned about our rights. We have no belief in our own power and strength to show what we really are capable of doing and being. Dr. Deepak Chopra, a most renowned spiritual leader and author, theorizes in his book, Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, that we are all capable of controlling what happens to our bodies, good or bad, by using the power of our minds. Unfortunately, the theory of “mind over matter” has worked against us; women have been manipulated and brainwashed for so long that we postulate all the negative and underhanded beliefs about ourselves, which gives men even more power to try to destroy what little self-esteem is left in most of us. Our self-respect weakens until we become firm believers in the myth that we are worthless unless we have a man. With our generous help, we empower men through our insecurities and neediness to treat us this way, truly believing that this is the only way, therefore

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allowing men to pass it on to the next generation and so on. This behavior has been going on and on perpetually, as long as life after the caveman has existed. When a man and a woman were together in the Stone Age, there were not such distinct differences between them. Everyone participated in one thing — survival. No one told their children corrupted thoughts about the opposite sex. Life was fair and productive. A woman did her share of the hard work and a man did his share. There was no need for a piece of paper to keep them together. Men respected a woman for whatever strength she possessed and life had harmony. There was peace between men and women. Young boys didn’t grow up thinking that it was horrible to be a girl. They didn’t learn that there was a stronger or weaker sex, they just believed that everyone was part of the universe. There were no books to read, no religions to follow, and no spiritual understanding to guide them. They simply took women as the other side of the coin. Equality between men and women was extremely natural to Stone Age men, who were more protective than injurious to women than men of today. Stone Age men didn’t have marriage vows to break. There was coordination and harmony and consequently, a healthy balance between men and women, which hasn’t existed since men invented marriage. I don’t believe that marriage was demanded by God; marriage is man-made, the result of a male chauvinistic outlook. Men created marriage to conquer and capture women and use the last drop of their blood in the name of our protectors. Women haven’t changed that much from the Stone Age — we just lost our real freedom of being a human being. Ironically, in the Stone Age, when there was danger from the wild animals or other predators, men protected women. Today, when wild animals no longer threaten us, men themselves become that dangerous force which makes our lives more difficult and more dangerous than it was when we lived in the caves! This erosion started with the birth of the male ego. The world is being ruled not by men, but by their troublesome egos, with women being dragged along behind them over a dangerous road. At this point, marriage is becoming a nuisance to most women. If one of the reasons for marriage was so our children would have a good and proper life 34

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with both parents to see to their upbringing and well-being, then why are the offices of psychotherapists filled with children and adults who live in a troubled family? Suffer the Little Children Jordan is a good example of a child who really suffered as a result of a bad marriage and the ugly divorce of his parents. As early as age three, he saw his father beat up his mom. At fourteen, Jordan already had attempted suicide three times in an attempt to get even with his parents and, after his parents divorced when he was sixteen, he wound up in a mental institution. We don’t necessarily bring security to our children by marrying. Instead, we bring heartache and uncertainty to their lives. Do you believe that a child doesn’t feel the coldness that exists between parents who stay together for the sake of their children? Yes, they do, and they all blame themselves for it. Andy told me, “It was all my fault, all the crying, all the fights. I heard them saying it all through my life. I caused all the unhappiness in our home. If I hadn’t been born, they wouldn’t have had to stay together. I wished to die so they would stop fighting over how each one of them sacrificed their happiness because of their child, ME.” Staying in disastrous marriages is unfair and dangerous to our children, our only future source of survival. Karen, a thirty-five-year-old woman said, “I can still hear my father screaming at my mother from the top of his lungs. I still remember shaking under the staircase, out of my father’s sight, so as not to be an innocent bystander. Sometimes the memory is so vivid that it sends a chill up my spine. My parents are still married, but I have a hard time staying in one relationship for too long. What good did “until death do us part” do for me? I wish that my parents had divorced long before they created such mental and emotional damage to their children. I wish they hadn’t believed in a culture that misleads them in the name of matrimony. In Jordan’s case, like most cases, both parents are responsible for his unbearable pain. This is exactly why most women are losing interest in putting any more innocent children in Jordan’s situation by getting married and becoming a mother. The risk is getting too high, and women’s reluctance to being wives and mothers is pretty obvious. 35

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More and more women are joining those who protest traveling down that unknown road with the dark ending that is actually threatening instead of reassuring them. If we want happiness for ourselves and our children, we have no other choice but to stand our own ground and build our own road, instead of traveling on that road which is “most traveled!”

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Three It’s not all about Adam! From the time human life began, women have been stereotyped by the elementary religious belief that God created Adam in his own image. For Adam’s amusement, God then took a piece of Adam’s rib and, from that little piece, he created a less perfect playmate — a “weaker sex,” a “punching bag” to tend to the needs of His masterpiece, Adam — and He called her Eve. And because Eve was created only for Adam’s pleasure, God gave her a superficial beauty to nourish Adam’s eyes. She had many flaws. She was an underhanded, seductive, weak and imperfect creature who had no desire of her own, and the only reason for her existence was to fulfill Adam’s every need and desire. She looked up to Adam to make her complete and cover up her imperfections. Eve served one other purpose: God needed to prove that Adam, the innocent symbol of perfection he created in his own image, could never — without the seduction of envious, self-centered, smallminded Eve — get cast out of the Garden of Eden. There are many other symbols of women’s weakness throughout the world’s history. Somehow, this little, weak, imperfect gender has created so much fear in strong and perfect man that, when she showed her knowledge and worth, she was either burned as a witch or beheaded as a warning to the rest of the female population to back off and stay in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. The manipulation was vast and strong and the fear of male power was so great that women were convinced of their own imperfections and second-rate status. That is how the paradigm and stereotype about women started. With the spiritual insight that has been murmuring around the world, the molding of our paradigm is changing. We are on the 37

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verge of realizing that the world doesn’t belong to just men. The root of the matter is that those who believe this man-made myth about women’s imperfections are the ones who also created an imperfect God, the God who is himself a man and who consequently favors men. True perfection is not capable of making a mistake this big, so it is obvious that this myth was motivated by the weakness of the male ego. Bear in mind that in the journey of the soul, there is no room for ego. Ego is the blockage — the blind spot, the core of negative force. There is a saying that “money is the root of all evil,” but it is the ego that motivates the yearning for power through money, and therefore it is the ego that is undoubtedly the true root of evil. Controlling the male ego and working to understand his behavior are the areas of weakness men need to work on and put into perspective. This is the only way to arrive at the threshold of a profound understanding of any human’s real worth and the value of femininity, the essential completion of life. Women have denied themselves by playing an underhanded role in order to make the world go around more smoothly, never receiving encouragement nor appreciation for doing more then her fair share. Women have been conditioned to believe put-downs that produce negative energy drain. Hand-in-hand with fear and ignorance, we pass it to the next generation. Undeniably women have come a long way, overcoming obstacles that men created to block their way to their rightful place in the world, but the final and probably the most difficult part of their trip is yet to unfold. Women feel that their present status has not progressed far enough. We recognize and thank those fearless women who have stood up for females’ rights while suffering hatred and torture. We are breaking the old fossil mold and showing our importance more than ever before. Women are acknowledging the truth about men’s claim for the world: that it has nothing to do with a man’s physical strength, but rather his inner weakness and void of spiritual being which has allowed jealousy to unjustifiably force and twist everything to his benefit. As we approach the end of the old millennium, our strengthened feminine belief in our own power and valid existence is giving our 38

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lives a renewed vitality. In this time of reaching out and so closely touching our prophecy, we are forming new beliefs and developing a different paradigm than our feminine ancestors followed. We are realizing that this whole intact universe of consciousness is a creation of extraordinary perfection and love. Undeniably perfect creations can’t or won’t produce anything but perfection. In the world of consciousness, we are as perfect as can be. The merging of our polarities is leading us to this profound perfection, the mystery of life uniting with our Earthly personality. During the last 50 years of the Declaration of Human Rights, how many women have been battered, killed, bullied, humiliated, or the victim of other harsh actions by men? I would like to know how we, as women, can say we have rights as human beings when we live in a man’s world? Finding our way through the mass of fear, ego, anger, jealousy, despair and other negative emotions is the challenge our souls face. Going through life in our physical bodies, we will find the spiritual growth to continue the journey to the Kingdom of Light. Because we have free will, we are in the driver’s seat. We have always been in that position, but we just didn’t believe that we could drive! Men often close their minds to this phenomenon and therein lies the origination of the biggest conflict within their inner selves. The question is, how can anyone — man or woman — live with inner peace if these two forces are in constant conflict with each other? Tremoring polarities within the self cause confusion and self-hatred, which manifest themselves in many men through rape, murder, destruction and chaos in the world. When these two elements merge and reach maturity, a profound level of perfection in our spiritual evolution is created, much like the conception of a perfect child. We need that intact balance to live a harmonious life; a lack of balance in this area creates only chaos and suffering. Only when one is in a state of realization, can he or she see the perfection in others. Honoring and understanding our opposite sex, grasping similarities and differences, is the key to unlocking the door and facing our long-existing predicament. Merging your inner dualities is not an easy task, but is the only road to inner peace. Inner peace and compassion are essential tools for human spiritual evolution. Most men see this spiritual evolution as shallow and ignorant — a product of woman’s weak 39

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emotions, but actually it is men who have been hiding in a world of ignorance. “But I’m Only Human!” When a man is totally unfamiliar with and unaware of the substance of his being, he can become easily confused, and that perplexity will not allow him to live with tranquility, the essential tool to grow the essence of his soul. The more fragile his ego, the further away is his connection with his complete being and the rest of humanity. Becoming entangled in his own unfamiliar feelings, a battle rages within him until his emotions burst forth through cruel and unjust actions. The unknown shows her face as his enemy. His feminine feelings remind him of his mother, his sister or the girl next door — any woman who showed no respect for him. How can a man who has such a mentality towards women and who is in denial of his own femininity love, honor, and respect the opposite sex? How can a man who lives in constant turmoil and who lacks harmony within himself create harmony with his “weaker” opposite sex? It is impossible to expect a man this far removed from respecting and loving his whole self to see any woman as a whole; he simply wouldn’t know where to begin. He would have had to grow up with this knowledge, live with it and sleep with it before it could become a part of him; there is no other way in which his two opposing sides could merge into a whole. Without such an experience, he will instead see himself only as one content “male chauvinist” who ignorantly honors only one of the two sides of himself. Many of today’s spiritual psychotherapists agree that mental health problems are created because the man who is doing the killing or raping is the one who couldn’t acknowledge, recognize, or love his own dualities as a whole being. If that conflict doesn’t manifest into violence, it surfaces most commonly in anger, extramarital affairs, depression, despair or feelings of nothingness. It has been shown that men who have become spiritually aware no longer perform negative gestures, most definitely have more balance and harmony in their marriages, and are generally much happier. Today’s women are getting much farther in breaking the old beliefs than ever before. We have known from the early days that men’s claim 40

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on the world had more to do with their inner weaknesses than their physical strength. The great void between a man’s present world and his spirituality breeds an uncertain fear of women’s impending power. He tries to calm his fear by comparing his muscular, strong physique — created in God’s image — to her perfectly designed but smaller body. Men forcibly twist everything to their own benefit and keep women in a state of weakness just because they have physical control. Women’s beliefs in their own undeniable feminine vitality are taking a different turn; in a time when we can reach out and so closely touch prophecy, we are forming a different existence for ourselves than that of our great-grandmothers. We are becoming aware that this flawless universe was a creation of a magnificent and undoubtedly perfect Creator. In the spiritual world, no sex duality exists; there are no “masculine” or “feminine” entities. On our current physical plane of existence, we must take male or female form in order to manifest the true essence of life; however, each of us — male or female — is actually a combination of these two elements. Men and women are proof of the existence of life, having obvious (but superficial) dissimilarities, yet having such undeniable equality. The differentiation between men and women in our tangible realm is a test to see how we, as men and women, will get along. We, in our unique and different forms, are as combined as our individual souls that have no sexual distinction. God said, “I am that I am, therefore we are that we are.” Each sex is a perfection of the creation, but in the same way that we create different visions of God, so too do we, as men and women, look upon one another. This enigmatic differentiation in us does not exist in our soul’s realm, but it provides a mystery that makes life worth living. Finding our way through this maze of life is the challenge that our soul needs to grow. When a perfect human being is created, two extremely essential forces merge into one inseparable unit. Therefore, one cannot live and let live in peace if their whole being — made up of these two perfect elements within them — is in conflict. These two parts must merge to create oneness. If a human being feels peace and unity within, love will automatically radiate outwards, and perfection in others can be perceived. Honoring the oneness in others and ourselves is the key to solving our long-lasting problems. 41

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Accepting our true value as human beings is a great responsibility that cannot be comprehended by men who are spoiled and fooled by the power of their own physical bodies. We can no longer be ignorant of the fact that those who love and honor themselves are the ones who love and honor others. This is the inner wisdom that we all possess, and this wisdom is nothing but the feeling of unity, compassion, and above all, unconditional love. In this area, women are much richer than men are. Lack of the male ego and our predestined biological function is the connection between women, divinity and the spiritual world. When a man is so removed from his own essence, how can anyone or any book teach him otherwise? Men create negativity in the world. If you doubt this theory, then think about this; wherever there is maledominated power, there is more chaos and trouble than in places where women hold more power. Take a good look at the Middle East. In a dictionary of one of the Middle Eastern languages, I once came across the definition of “weakness” listed as “female, the weaker sex, woman!” If we don’t harmonize our unification, sooner or later our unbalanced polarities will destroy themselves. How can we live in a world that constantly struggles with itself? This constant disharmony affects women more deeply than men. Women actually live in a lopsided world — on one hand, our soul needs to experience togetherness for total purity. On the other hand, men create imbalances that disrupt our vital concentration and push us farther away from achieving total evolution. Men excuse their behavior by blaming their actions on their humanity. The excuse, “I am only human,” ironically works better for men than for women. When a man — from prince to president to sportscaster to movie star — cheats on his wife, she is expected to understand that he is only human. Conversely, should she succumb to the same “humanity,” she wouldn’t be at all understood! Either men think that women are immortal, or they theorize that in this case, what is good for the goose is certainly not good for the gander! Men are not the only ones who misuse this phrase; one way or another, we all try to blame our humanity and its imperfections for our faults. We hurt people, betray our friends, cheat on our spouse or act rude and despicable, then blame our behavior on the fact that “we are only human.” 42

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I remember an old associate of mine, a so-called friend, who was extremely insensitive toward others’ value of time. She was constantly late and often broke appointments at the last minute that had been made weeks in advance. She was famous for inconveniencing those around her, offering no better excuse than, “I’m only human.” After years of patience and understanding (which she took for granted), I finally got fed up and didn’t accept her excuses anymore. My philosophy about this over-used phrase was obviously not the same as hers. I believe in the existence of perfection in human beings. I have met many people whom I would consider “perfect,” not judged by their looks or how much money they have, but by the compassion, respect, and dignity they possess. Manipulation is not, and should not be, a part of “being human.” Being human means striving for perfection. We are all perfect, and despite our flaws we are learning that a lack of compassion has no place in humanity. Finding compassion and love in our hearts is the essential key to unlocking the true value of humanity. When a man is caught cheating on his wife and says, “Well, I am only human,” who is he comparing himself to? God, plants, vegetables, animals? If he believes that being unfaithful is part of being human, then he should be as understanding if his wife were to do the same thing. Society shouldn’t react to women’s behavior any differently than it reacts to men’s, but our society differentiates between us, creating an even greater imbalance between men and women than already exists. If a woman was caught cheating and she said, “I’m sorry, I made a mistake, I’m only human,” would her man buy it? I doubt it. Perhaps one man in a million might have this kind of understanding, but we are not talking about that one rare man in this book. Many women get killed for that kind of confession! We can no longer deny the fact that there is no balance in our relationships. Until we create that essential equilibrium, there won’t be true equality and peace within us. If nothing else, this should strengthen our belief in reincarnation. What other proof do we need to show that we must to come back again and again until we are capable of manifesting total perfection? A few years ago, Dr. Joyce Brothers gave us the facts about the differences between men and women, and since then, others have brought forth information. By now, most of us should be aware of the 43

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undeniable differences between the sexes. Yes, men and women are very different from each other — our hormones, our blood, our sex organs are all different; we are different. By George, I think we’ve finally got it! By the same token, we also know that our cats and dogs are very different from us, but should we abuse them just because we are more “powerful?” Our differences create a true zest for life, and we should appreciate it and be amused by it, but not fight it. Those people who only relate to others as they do to themselves are the ones who don’t believe in one pure and whole force. Why must those differences that bring such meaning to our creation also bring disadvantages to women? Why should men give themselves the right to impart an imbalance on the perfect creation of this perfect togetherness? If Adam really existed and Eve was his seductress, then why are most destructive acts performed by men? Most likely, the reason we were kicked out of Heaven wasn’t because Eve touched and offered the forbidden fruit to Adam, but because of some mischievous action on Adam’s part! When Adam was asked to leave the Garden of Eden, he seduced Eve into going with him and manipulated her into believing that his strength would protect her from all evil. Foolishly, she believed him and followed him. He cheated on her and, instead of protecting her, he abused her. She forgave him again and again, until her self-dignity was destroyed by his childish schemes. Women should stop buying those “how to” books about men and start putting their lost energy back where it belongs — in our own field. When a woman gives over her power by making a man the center of her attention, living within his rules and giving him everything she has, how can she expect more? By the same token, how can a man who has been so pampered and spoiled comprehend the importance of his share of responsibility in marriage or any other relationship with women? Women who have lost everything in marriage after spending years nurturing, supporting and giving — and receiving little in return — can identify with what I am saying. Women like Lili, who told me, “When my husband took off with a woman who was actually older then I, he didn’t just take the car or the money from our joint accounts, he took my heart as well. I gave him my all for sixteen years and now 44

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I am totally drained and empty. When you give your all to a man and he leaves you, what are you left with? Nothing, that’s what.” Most so-called marriage experts who believe they can fix everything by writing “how to” books and giving seminars are not paying attention to the real issues. The problem with men is not the fact that they like to read different books, or they prefer to go fishing instead of seeing romantic movies, or they can only focus with half their brain; these are differentiations but not the true problem. The real problem is that men never learned anything about women and the importance of their support role in marriage. He has never been taught that he is as instrumental as his partner is in making the marriage partnership work. Man’s focus revolves around his own needs and he expects the woman to put the broken pieces together and guard the whole from breaking apart. The same man who sent a human to the moon never learned that if he focused on his marriage union, he could prevent much heartache. It seems that marriage is only sacred if women do all the work and they “hear nothing, see nothing, and say nothing.” I have discovered with great certainty over many years of research that the reason men act this way is simply because they have been spoiled rotten! Recently, the medical world made a new discovery, reporting, “the reason men can’t listen to their wives is because they can only focus with half their brain!” Seeing what men are capable of doing and achieving when using only half their brain, I am neither impressed by nor satisfied with their lack of attention to their duty as husbands and fathers. Apparently, women’s importance is not part of their half-minded focus unless they are thinking about sex, which, along with their self-centeredness, makes the world a very unpleasant place for women to live. And we wonder why the divorce rate is rising by the minute! Do Opposites Attack or Attract? Women are tired of trying to find solutions to the marriage problems they have always faced. In the end, the only solution that makes sense is that we are much better off unmarried than bothering to spend the rest of our precious lives with a nonfunctional pair of ears and half a brain! (I have often wondered if men lose their hearing more often and 45

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much sooner than women due to disuse!) Because “Adam” has learned that the world revolves around him, if a topic of discussion is not about him, he feels it isn’t worth listening to. We, as men and women, are the two elements of fortification that should be holding divinity equally in every way. Instead of using our differences to support the opposite and bring the other to the middle line, the “shade of gray” will always be “black or white” instead. Through our never-ending search, we have finally come within reach of the key that turns the light in our hearts to the truth — unconditional love. From the heart, woman is trying to convey her deep feelings to man, the only true opposition that has been created for her. But, while she is busy reading books to learn how to nourish man’s self-esteem, nurture his ego and care for his inner child, she is demolishing her own self-esteem, suppressing and killing the child within her. In doing so, all her needs as a child, mother and wife erupt like a great volcano, blanketing the world with divorce. Women have been trying for thousands of years to create a better life and a better world for everyone’s comfort and happiness, but when a fundamentally egotistical, sexist man is totally surrounded by all this attention, what do you expect? Naturally, all that fuss has allowed men to give themselves the right to expect more and give less. The feminine weakness that motivates her to do all the work without attention is her true measure of strength. My grandmother used to say, “The branches of the trees bearing fruit are closer to the ground.” In other words, being humble is a sign of abundance and power. Men, however, often misinterpret women’s humble attitude for weakness. From the first day of the existence of the ego, man abused woman because of her strength, to mask his own weakness. Those “how to be,” “what to learn,” “when to say” books no longer appeal to many women because they don’t offer any real results. Now we are facing the fact that in actuality, all this “huff and puff” is a cover-up for the fear that exists within that scared little child inside every man! Women who have been abused in some way have a message for that phony little boy: “Grow up, and fast. We are running out of patience!” With a firmer understanding of women’s strength, we are reaching the last part of our destination — the realization that we, in 46

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our own right, are as strong or stronger than men, are certainly more levelheaded, and by far more peaceful. Embracing a more solid understanding of our existence, women around the world wonder if Eve in fact may have been the first creation of God, not Adam. We carry life inside us; how much closer can you get to the miracle of life? Women’s essence undeniably bears the most resemblance to the Divine Being. However, we are taught that the Almighty is strong, forceful and vengeful, so men, therefore, must reflect his true image. We must say goodbye to the old belief and the old image and welcome the truth that has been hidden from us for all this time! Did you ever notice that when a woman treats a man like a child, he dislikes it passionately, and when she gives him the responsibilities of a man, he refuses to accept them? Keep in mind that when we marry a man we are really adopting a schizophrenic child with a built-in icon attitude! If we look beyond the icon, we see that we have been learning about men and we are winning in this game of life by reclaiming what is rightfully ours. It is not an easy process, because society and books have been advising women that, in order to “win,” we must lose to men, no matter what the game. Does that make sense to you? It doesn’t to me! Adam & His Ego Once, I apologized for knowing about a certain brain disorder because my boyfriend at the time felt inferior for not having a clue on that subject. Another time, on a Thanksgiving night, he started a very ugly fight over a totally innocent joke and left me alone in the hotel room just because I skied better than he under very stormy and poor conditions! I realized then that I could never allow myself to be with a man who put me down for my intelligence and abilities. This type of man is quite common and is most dangerous to women’s self-esteem. When I told an older, married friend of mine about my boyfriend’s reaction to my superior skiing abilities, she said I should have pretended I skied as badly as he, or worse! Why, I wonder, should anyone belittle their own knowledge or abilities just to be with a man? I wouldn’t! Most men still live with the notion that they are better than women and that they alone are the masters of the world. 47

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Prince Charles — a man whom I had previously admired — caused one of the saddest tragedies in recent history. I have no doubt there was a time when many women in the world would have given anything to be the wife of the one and only Prince Charming, the Prince of Wales. The A&E Television Network program Biography described very well how things changed between Prince Charles and Princess Diana when she became the main attraction in their marriage. Like most men who are challenged by the overwhelming power of a woman, especially a wife who is supposed to be under his command, he started to feel threatened. And like any red-blooded man, he began manipulating her with the usual forceful male technique. He pushed every button to make her look bad in the eyes of those who admired her for her wit, intelligence, and inner and outer beauty. Instead of giving her credit for doing such a good job in a very difficult position at such a young age, he used his power to bring her down and remove her from public attention. The rivalry surfaced when the Prince of Wales couldn’t believe or tolerate the fact that his wife could take away the spotlight from him. He reacted no differently than any other self-centered, egotistical man; suddenly, all matters weren’t about “Adam” anymore, and his male ego got in the way. When bruised, the male ego is capable of performing many underhanded, vicious, destructive acts, and in this particular situation, the result was like a kick in the royal butt! The way things turned out and the way he treated Princes Diana will haunt people who loved and admired her for a long time to come. Although Prince Charles is starting to get back on track and continue what Diana did so beautifully, it doesn’t have the same effect. The sad part is, if he could have reasoned with his own ego he would have seen that the love that people were pouring out to the Princess was actually love and admiration toward him and his impeccable taste in the choice of a mate. Prince or not, his ego reacted no differently than any other, and in his case all that negative energy piled up at his front door and blocked his way to the love of the people which he so desperately sought. What Diana accomplished during her short but profoundly memorable and productive life was an opening to a deeper understanding of what women are really all about. Women of all kinds — homemakers, wives of blue collar workers or politicians, women who live in 48

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male-dominated cultures — are getting tired of the burden from the heavy chain that has been dragging at their feet for so long. Isn’t it peculiar that in almost all religions, women lose their rights “in the name of God” when men actually achieve more freedom? The problems women face will not soon cease because, in all fairness, men are not completely at fault. There are plenty of women who still believe they are living in a world that belongs to men, like that woman who told me to act little in front of my boyfriend, or those women who write books about “husband hunting.” As long as women — especially those who have achieved a high level of education — still believe that a woman’s job is to lie, pretend, or even change our personality in order to keep peace in our relationships with men, how can we expect more from men? So far, men devour our hard work while smiling with mockery as they watch us perform as mothers, businesswomen, and wives who walk on eggshells, bending backward to please them, a big smile on our faces saying “Cheeeeeeeeese!” If you were in a man’s shoes, would you want things to change? What a ridiculous question! If women keep on doing and making everything in life “all about Adam,” then we will never reach our rightful place in this world. The Gray Planet When the book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus was published, I, like many women, went out and bought a copy. With great hope I thought that finally a man actually had taken the time to write a book that would benefit women and explain to men that the world doesn’t necessarily revolve around them, their moods, and their desires. With that in mind, I couldn’t wait to read it and pass it along to my boyfriend. Sadly, though, from the very beginning of the book I was greatly disappointed. I absolutely disagree with many things that the author, Dr. Gray, wrote about with such authority, as if he was the creator of women! The book was no different than any other “how to” book, but with a twist. This time the author was teaching women the same things that we have been learning all along about understanding men by “including women” to make it look as though he is concerned about our welfare. 49

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In fact, learning about men was the major part of the book, and once again, everything was “all about Adam.” The twist shrewdly differentiated women and men in such a way that at first most women felt a kind of relief; relief that this book was offering a new hope for women by finally letting them in on the big secret. By golly, we had no idea that men were from Mars! So that explains it all, and all along that has been the reason for their strange and vicious behavior! The symbolic differentiation was so palatable that it gave those who read the book renewed hope for improving their marriages. And bear in mind, again, women had to go to work and learn about men, who came from another planet this time! Now that we discovered that we are from two different planets, by learning all about this creature from Mars, we could finally put the missing pieces together and at last we could live together happily ever after. My disappointment, as with that of many other women who read the book was that, even with his clever idea, he created immense distance between us; the Martian still had very little material to learn about the Venusian, compared to what the Venusian had to learn about Martians. After all that hard and difficult work spending so much time learning and trying to bring men closer to us, now we have this book that creates more distance between men and women. We suddenly discover that men and women are millions of miles further away than ever! Dr. Gray was so happy with himself while he was advertising his seminars and his book that it looked like he had found the cure for the common cold! The way he cleverly used his hands to describe how men should bring women to talk actually fooled many thirsty women who were searching for the fountain of recognition. Women are very well aware that our physical superficial beauty has been the inspiration of the arts, in paintings and beautiful sculptures from ancient to modern times, but the woman on the canvas or inside that statue has never been discovered by many men. For a short while, the book, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus brought hope, but soon it appeared to describe women as empty-headed chatterboxes. Women demand more than a technical book from a writer with one failed marriage and a sister he claims got satisfactory results from his “uh-huh,” “oh” or “really!” One of the book’s remarks about women’s need for “tete-a-tete” was Dr. Gray’s belief that women need to talk about problems to get 50

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close, not necessarily to get solutions. Wrong! Many women with whom I spoke state that when they talk about something, they are looking for the solution, period. Getting results is the point of the communication, and that is what we are hoping by having any communication with men. On another page of his book, he says, “Men are like a rubber band; they expand to get away, and return whenever they are ready.” Well, sorry doctor, that male “rubber band” behavioral pattern is the reason why women are fed up! The whole point is that we are truly tired of living with a “rubber band” who likes to retreat from time to time into his cave! And if the “oh” and the “uhhuh” was enough for a happy marriage, the divorce rate would decline, not rise! Of course I am not blaming Dr. Gray for that, but I remember very well that a woman told me, “Even if I had in mind that some day I will get married, after reading this book and seeing how difficult Martians are, I honestly don’t think so!” Men are not at all interested in reading anything that has to do with relationships, but nonetheless, those men who read this book found more arguments to use against women. In actuality, Dr. Gray created more monsters, not understanding husbands! Susan was having a hard time with her typical non-communicative husband when the book came out. “I was probably the first woman who bought the book, hoping that maybe my husband — who refuses to seek counseling — would at least read a book about how important it is to communicate with me rather than to just order me around when he has some need to be fulfilled. Two years after I placed that book on our living room coffee table, he picked it up and read it — and only because I persisted. But now I wish he had never read it! After reading the book (which took him several months), he showed no improvement in his non-communicative pattern and, for the first time, started vanishing into his ‘cave.’ “God forbid, if I ever wanted or needed something that required his attention, he would shout and complain that I didn’t understand the book at all! Now he thought he was an expert on marriage, of course, and said I should study more about male behavior. Furthermore, he said he didn’t want to have anything to do with me when he was in his cave! Ironically, I couldn’t punish him when he decided to come out. I was expected to reward him and practically roll out a red carpet when he decided to reappear into our married life.” 51

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Shirley also had valid complaints about this so-called “how to” book: “Like many women, I read the book, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, but I felt very offended when I learned that men were still getting more attention than women. All my husband was expected to do was pretend he was listening to me, and that, supposedly, was going to solve my marriage problems and make me happy! The book suggested things for me to do and ways for me to talk that were outrageous! “I wanted my husband to learn the importance of communication — which was missing from our marriage — but for the life of me, I couldn’t make him even look at the book. It, without a doubt, was written only for women, and the sad part is, I realized that no book in the world can make a man change unless he absolutely wants to change himself!” Contrary to Dr. Gray, communication is not the only way you can honor the female’s point of view. Experts have proven that women who enjoy a healthy sex life and happy relationship suffer less dramatically — or not at all — from P.M.S., unlike their counterparts in bad marriages, who lack sexual and emotional fulfillment. Therefore, not all women have a need to hide in our “wells,” as Dr. Gray would have us believe. Most men still believe that keeping women happy in marriage is not important at all — just having a husband should be enough! Even if we respect men’s disappearance into their caves, ironically, many men don’t go in there alone. Often his mental disappearance into the cave is the result of his preoccupation with his secretary, his new associate, or the young girl he just met while attending a recent seminar! With the information that I now have, if a man were to retreat into his cave, instead of going in after him, I would lock up the cave and throw away the key and let him stay there until he rots or begs me to let him out! Next time, he will think twice before even going near that cave of his! I was especially amazed at how Dr. Gray compared married life to a score-keeping game, as if when we say, “I do,” we are saying, “Let’s go play and see who makes the bigger square.” Women don’t have that kind of mentality about marriage; we get married for the exchange of love and compassion. “Keeping score” is not the intention of any woman that I have spoken to in the course of my research. No woman 52

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ever counted how many points her husband lost when she found him in bed with another women, or how many points a woman gains or loses when she puts her husband through medical school and he leaves her after he becomes a successful doctor! When we are married, we are in an important union — we are not playing miniature golf! Women I interviewed were very grateful that not many men had any desire to read the Mars/Venus book in the first place! To prove my point, I conducted my own survey in which I asked 150 men if they had heard of, read, or knew anything about the book in question, and the result was even more amazing to me than I anticipated. Out of 150 men, only five had read the book, three wanted to read it, twenty had never heard of it, and the rest had heard about it but had no interest in reading it! Those who did read it and who tried to change went back to their old behavior patterns before long. This alone proves that anything that has been written about relationships is really not of any interest to men. Without a doubt, communication is one of the most necessary ingredients in a successful marriage. However, we cannot wait until we find it lacking in our marriage and then hope that we can change our 30, 40, or 60-year-old man by giving him a book to read or by taking him to a seminar or two. The real solution is to communicate with them as mothers the day that they are old enough to start their potty training! Men and women are not as different from one another as Martians and Venusians! We were born on Earth for each other and for a specific and a profound reason. Just for the record, if we were from another planet, I’ll bet women wouldn’t choose to live on Venus because the planet Venus is one of the few planets in our solar system that lacks the essential ingredient for romance — a moon! And if men were from Mars, they would look at women or “Venusians” with much more interest and curiosity than as just their servants and sex objects! Earthly men are very capable of giving an abundance of love and compassion to women if they would only learn how. Both men and women are mysteries in a universe designed to manifest perfection by merging us with our opposite to the point of true harmony and oneness; that is the definition of our soul. Love is the essence, and life is about living joyfully together with an abundance of love, honor, and compassion. And by all means, it’s not “all about Adam!” 53

Four Now, It’s About Eve! About 150 years ago, a woman named Susan B. Anthony put her foot down, and, along with several other women, calmly demonstrated her beliefs: “Enough is enough with this man’s world — what about me? What about us? What about women?” You can imagine the chaos their actions created in the closed tribal society of their time. Some women followed in her footsteps and built their own foundations with what little they had, but many others, manipulated and fearful of men’s cruelties, remained in a world where they believed in their own weakness and male superiority. The sad fact is, we still live with the same stereotype that women are not as good as men and that our only role is to be a good wife, bear children and take care of everything. At the same time, women who have been left behind are screaming with despair and shouting, “Stop, where has everybody gone? I think you forgot someone! What about me?” But there are many who can say with fortitude, “It’s about time that it is about me!” Life Makeovers (Linda’s Story) Linda and I met at the birthday party of a mutual friend, and immediately we knew it was not a coincidence we met; we were heading toward a very close and spiritual friendship. Linda is a young fortyfive-year-old woman (who, even now, is often asked for identification to prove her age). She is highly educated, but until three years ago, she didn’t realize that she actually had very little value as a human being. “I grew up with four demanding brothers and a father whose domineering behavior toward my mother and his children was normal in the eyes of society. My mother was ‘lady of the house,’ but in actuali54

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ty, she was nothing but a head servant who catered to my father and my four brothers. There was a huge difference between the way my brothers and I lived our lives. From early morning until bedtime, I was nothing but a shadow; I had to be seen but not heard. I was expected to learn the arts of cooking and skillful housekeeping in order to serve my future husband. But my heart was elsewhere. “I always envied my brothers’ freedom of choosing where they wanted to go and what they wanted to be. I wished I could go along on their camping, fishing and mountain climbing trips, but they wouldn’t take me along. I used to ask my younger brother to tell me all about their adventures when they came back from a trip, but even he would answer me with an attitude: ‘You should not be interested in these sort of things. These activities are for men. You should learn your stuff, like, I don’t know, cooking, and stuff like that.’ I would hate him for a moment or two but then I would forget and love him and things would go back to normal again. I could not help my envy, though, and the little voice inside me would shout, ‘What about me? When will it be my time?’ “I used to get angry and suffer in silence and hate myself for being a girl. I had my father’s sense of adventure but, being a girl, I had to give it up and learn how to cook and take care of the house. Those were my activities and that was my purpose. Sometimes I hated God for making me a girl. I thought it was a curse. As our cook used to tell me, ‘Being born a woman is punishment for a sin we committed a long time ago, and we all have to pay.’ As far as I could see, all the women and girls around me pretty much had the same life I did. Girls were girls, boys were boys, and as different as our biological makeup, so too were our activities; therefore, I believed in that ‘curse!’ “Many nights, I would fantasize that my fairy godmother was giving me a wish. I wished to be a boy, and I would imagine myself on a horse with the rest of my brothers and my father, living among the trees and the running water of the streams without being so cruelly restricted. But after each fantasy, I couldn’t help but appreciate that I was a girl, because I didn’t really want to be a boy. I spent hours wondering why being a girl also meant being forbidden from doing the things I longed to do. 55

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“Growing up went quickly, and soon boys were activating my hormones. Before I knew it, I was married to Matthew. My wedding day was the happiest day of my life, as it is for most brides. I believed I was being freed from all the restrictions my family had created for me, and life with Matthew wouldn’t be the same. “Matthew and I had been distant friends since I was about eight years old. He was a close friend of my older brother and he used to come to our house early in the morning when a bunch of them were getting ready to go on one of their outdoor trips. I remember crying when I heard the sound of their horses fade away in the distance, while I stayed cooped up in our county house watching our cook prepare food for their return. When the men came back, hungry and weary from their adventures, I had to scrape the mud from their boots and shine them in preparation for their next trip. Growing up was nothing but frustration, suffering and disappointment for this outdoor lover, destined to be cooped up in a kitchen for life! “When I became Matthew’s fiancée, after weeks of pleading and begging, my father finally allowed me to go along on one of their trips. The night before, I was too excited to sleep, but soon after the trip began, my fantasy ended. I could clearly see that although I was physically there with them, I wasn’t part of their activities at all. Matthew was acting even more like my father than my brothers were, but I was so blinded by love that I believed he was doing it just to please my father, and that made me love him even more. Shortly after that trip I became his wife, and our life together began. Living out my deepest fear and despair, I became a housewife. Every dream I had was killed or remained only a dream in my heart. “My husband was a lot like my father, and in some ways he was even worse. He was very rude to his mother, which wasn’t proper behavior in my family. Matthew used to call her names like ‘dumbo’ or ‘stupid character’ or ‘walnut brain’ to which she would laugh and still love him to death. Little by little, he started using similar nicknames with me, and the one he used the most was ‘moronic little character.’ “I knew I wasn’t happy; there was a gap inside my chest that was not filled by marriage, as I believed it would be. Matthew thought if I read a book it would corrupt my brain. He believed my high school education was more than I needed for my life. When I suggested I get 56

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a job, he laughed and said, ‘Who would give a job to a moronic little character like you? What do you want to be, a maid? You are doing just fine here.’ In his distorted mind, he really meant that as a compliment, but it wasn’t a compliment to hear that I was a maid in my own home. “He was not a vicious or violent man, and I really think, even up to this day, that he loved me as much as he was capable. I was his devoted wife who cooked well and took care of the house and the baby, but I felt a big difference between us as human beings. While he was living his full life, I was only taking care of him, as I had learned to do growing up. Even when I took care of myself, it was only in order to please him. I was doing a fine job, but I knew there had to be a bigger and more exciting world out there. The question was, ‘What happened to my share? Where was I heading in this man’s world?’ Well, when my daughter was twelve, she changed my life forever. “Matthew’s mother was a lovely woman and I had no problem with her moving in permanently with us. Neither my daughter nor I liked to see Matthew teasing and putting down his mother and I or calling us names in front of everyone. At first I was offended and tried to stand up to it, but little by little, I became like his mother and tried to take the insults with a smile, as she did, but I still deeply resented the way he treated me. Furthermore, I was very concerned that my daughter would be brainwashed growing up with his behavior. However, one night she showed me I had nothing to be concerned about! “We were having dinner, just the four of us, when my husband said something offensive about female stupidity and uselessness. All of a sudden, to our complete amusement, my twelve-year-old daughter stood up, banged her fist angrily on the table, and said to her father, ‘I am not a stupid character, and I am sick and tired of your male chauvinistic ignorance about women’s intelligence. You could be very sorry someday for putting me down. You might be looking at the future President of the United States! Now it is about me and before I get any more disgusted by the way you are treating all of us, I would like you to move out. I want a divorce.’ And with that, she walked to her room without crying. “For a long while, the three of us looked at each other with disbelief. Then as a revelation entered my heart, I got up and silently left the 57

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room. Somehow I knew for the first time in my life that I would finally be free. My child had the courage to vocalize what I had felt for years, and she made me realize it was time I built up my own courage. “Well, I took charge of my own life from that point, and without shedding a single teardrop I began making my life ‘all about me’ instead of asking ‘What about me!’ It has not been easy, but now I am a new woman — a woman who knows her worth and will live up to it. I have a job and I am training to become a veterinarian. I know that someday soon I will be living my life, healing animals in a beautiful place near a stream on a mountainside, and not wasting time in my husband’s kitchen.” Five years after I met Linda, she became a veterinarian. She now lives and practices in New Hampshire (near a beautiful stream!) and she is enjoying her life. Older Women, Younger Men Women like my friend Linda should not be overlooked. Many new voices are arising to question women’s suppressed, forgotten or unacknowledged desires. Why shouldn’t women run for presidential office? Why are women sneered at when they marry or date a younger man? When Cher, a beautiful singer and actress, had a relationship with a younger man, the world could not stop talking about it, and some women condemned her. But why is it more acceptable in our society for a man to marry or have an affair with a woman half his age? A man reaches his sexual peak roughly between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, and a woman reaches her sexual peak between thirty and forty-five. Considering this fact, isn’t it a little peculiar that most women feel they have to marry older men? If we believe men are overgrown children (and they often act like it!), why do we twist this matter so much? A 30-year-old woman who marries a man already past his sexual peak will soon have to put up with his insecurity about his lack of performance, and eventually this insecurity will lead to a midlife crisis. Marriage between younger men and older women makes much more sense. These days, many women have good incomes and they are not looking for old-fashioned financial security. Our sexual peaks 58

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are more harmonious with those of younger men. Considering the fact that women in their fifties are now having babies, why are we still under the assumption that it is more proper for us to choose older men? Statistically, men die at a younger age than women, so by marrying younger men, we can synchronize the times of our deaths much closer together. It is time to lift this taboo that has haunted women for ages. By the time your younger man has his midlife crisis, you can still divorce him. But even if you don’t, you will still be mature enough not to take his midlife crisis personally! Helen’s Story Helen comes from a fairly comfortable family but as she said, “My brother was always first when it came to education and college funds. If there was any left over I would have some, but the main concern for the future was for my brother, not me. I felt discriminated against even as a young girl, and when I asked my mother ‘what about me?’ she used to say, ‘Don’t worry, my angel, when your man comes along you won’t need all that hard work of learning things in books in order to earn a living. It’s his job to take care of you.’ “How little she knew that when I did get married, I had to learn a lot in order to keep my disastrous life together. When my husband left me for a younger woman, I had to go through years of unprepared hardship and put the pieces of my broken life together. I resented that my parents favored my brother’s education and I was motivated to show them how wrong they had been. Parents should put as much effort and energy into the lives of their daughters as they do their sons. “Even without a college degree, I am now more successful than my brother, who is still struggling. When my father passed away, I am the one who took care of my mother’s financial needs. But getting where I am without the proper education wasn’t a piece of cake.” Women everywhere continually demonstrate their abilities in this man’s world, but still the basic concern of most families lies with forming the futures of the male children. Throughout history, women — wealthy or poor, young or old — asked, “What about me?” and with great difficulty, we have achieved the right to vote, earned degrees from prestigious colleges, bought our own homes, and are close to getting paid equally for doing the same 59

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jobs as men. Many women, though, still live under the great burden put on them by society, and their voices are fading away in the wind of ignorance and unknowing. Men have always twisted things to their own advantage, and women have gone along with it. Many women have stood by and watched as they became hollow shells that broke too easily — women like my old high school friend, Zoe. Is it Possible to Break Free? (Zoe’s Story) I saw Zoe in Los Angeles, for the first time since high school, at the wedding of a mutual friend’s daughter. Zoe had been one of the most beautiful girls in our school, and she knew it. Before the end of ninth grade, she decided to quit school and marry a man sixteen years her senior. Choosing a handsome, well-to-do politician husband with a very bright future made sense to all of us, and many girls envied her; she had no more homework and no more waiting for “Prince Charming” to come along. She was going to skip the pressure years and live happily ever after. Now, twenty-two years had passed, and all I knew was that she was still married to the same man. When I saw her again, I was shocked. She was at least fifty to sixty pounds overweight. Her eyes couldn’t stay focused on one thing for longer than a second or two. She held a cigarette in one hand and stuffed food into her mouth with the other. Although she wore a very expensive gown, she had stained the front of it with so much food that she literally looked like a bum. It was heartbreaking. I tried to look cool and unaware, but I was very unsettling to see my old friend like that. When she talked, she didn’t make any sense. Although she seemed quite drunk, I noticed she only drank club soda. Her husband, on the other hand, looked just great. He seemed very happy, in shape and very vital. While she stuffed her face, he danced with great energy and even flirted with younger women the entire evening. After the wedding was over, she insisted we see each other again to catch up on lost time. I agreed immediately. I was very curious to find out what had happened to her. The next day, Zoe showed up at my hotel to take me to her house. She was out of breath and looked very sloppy. There was a hole in her 60

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inappropriately tight leggings and her sweater had a big stain on it. I felt a sudden rush of sadness for her that brought tears to my eyes. I got up to greet her but before I could say a word she grabbed my arm and showed me the way to her car saying, “I invited some other friends that you knew from high school to have lunch with us. They will leave soon after and then we will have plenty of time to talk. Since this was my last night in Los Angeles, time was no problem, and I looked forward to seeing other old friends as well. As she drove to her house, I noticed that although she didn’t seem to have much control over herself, she seemed to be in complete control of her automobile. When I looked over at her, her sloppy appearance and big body made me sad. While she rambled on, I looked at the palm trees and enjoyed the sunshine. We were driving along the heavenly, beautiful, and lush spiral roads of Beverly Hills. “What a great view,” I said to her. She seemed preoccupied and didn’t answer. She was silent as she slowed the car and turned into her driveway. The place had one of the most magnificent views that I have ever seen; two rows of trees were hugging each other along the thousand foot long road to her house. There was a grand fountain in a circular driveway that led us to her massive colonial style home. There were already several cars parked in the driveway when we arrived. Inside, the house was even more beautiful. The aroma of gourmet food combined with Casablanca lilies and fresh gardenias was adding to the pleasantness of the house. The style and the beauty of what I was seeing mesmerized me. “Who took care of this place?” I wondered. The antiques and beautiful decorations definitely had the flair of a very experienced decorator. Soon I learned that everything — from the cooking to the decorating and the gardening — was all Zoe’s work. The lunch was eaten in a very pleasant atmosphere. It was really great to see all of these friends whom I hadn’t seen very often because of our distance. We were so involved in conversation, but I could not help noticing that Zoe didn’t sit down with us very much. She was busy cooking, serving and cleaning, and eating nonstop. From time to time, I noticed that she was popping some pills. There was a household staff, but Zoe was doing most of the work herself, especially when it came to her food. The food was great, her house looked magnificent and the only thing that seemed out of place 61

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was Zoe herself. It was as if she had no interest in herself at all. ‘What could make someone change so much?’ I wondered. This is the same Zoe who didn’t have one hair out of place when we were in school. I was dying to speak with her alone and ask how a woman with so much going for her could do that much damage to herself. Finally, all of our friends disappeared to their own afternoon activities and left us alone. We settled down in the prettiest room in her house, which she called “the garden room.” The room was like a greenhouse, with large open windows that let in the mystical fragrance of the ocean breeze. She sipped on her tea while her other hand was occupied with a chain of cigarettes. I had very little to say, though, and through my tremendous curiosity I only managed to ask if she was all right. I guess my question was what she had been waiting for because she gave me a sad smile and said, “I look unhealthy to you, don’t I?” Without waiting for an answer, she said, “Can you believe what has happened to me?” I didn’t know what to say. I just looked at her with interest and listened. “You knew me when I was a thin, spoiled rich girl who had everything anybody could ask for except one thing — parental love,” she said. “I cleverly hid it from all of you because I was truly embarrassed about what was going on in my house and between my parents, so I put on an act that I was the love of my parents’ life. “No one, not even you, knew that my parents were married in name only and they never really loved each other. They had separate bedrooms so as not to interfere with my father’s love life. Once I walked in and saw my father in the arms of another woman and I had to apologize! I wanted to be loved by them the way I used to pretend, but my real life was nothing like that. My father was a self-centered and aloof man who had a hard time even kissing me on my birthdays; that is how I remember him from my childhood. “My parents’ nonstop fights and then the coldness that followed was the saddest part of my life, and then Ben came along. When I got married, I was very young, and Ben being older, was the father that I always needed to have. I loved my father, but his temper and remote personality scared me so much that I guess I was really looking for a father in my husband. So I became the wife of a man without a bad temper who was many years older than I to fill up the emptiness I had carried in my heart for so long. 62

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“While I was growing up, all I heard from him were nasty things about my mother. It seemed that everything was her fault; if she just wouldn’t drink that much or she wasn’t a woman of the house, she had no desire to cook or to satisfy him. She was one of those women who were trapped in the cage of marriage while she wanted to be somebody herself but never had the chance. It took me years to see how much I really resembled her at heart and instead of doing something with her life, she drowned herself in liquor, and that put her in an early grave. When I got older, I realized that, being dead in spirit, she really had a death wish. She actually hated her life so much that she wanted to die.” Zoe was gazing out at the horizon at one of the most beautiful sunsets ever. We were both quiet and I realized that of all the harmful things she was inflicting on herself, alcohol wasn’t one of them. She said that even on her wedding night she only pretended that she was sipping the champagne. “I was so afraid to be like her that I never touched the stuff,” she said. But smoking so much and taking all those prescription drugs was no better than drinking. She looked at me as if she had read my mind and with a sad smile she said, “You know what? I did a good job being a wife. I take care of my husband’s every need, and I am the best housekeeper in the world. He invites people over just to show off to them how well he lives and he loves to brag about my cooking. My children have never heard us fighting.” She dropped her head a little bit lower and with an indifferent sort of numbness she murmured, “I know that he is having affairs, but how can I blame him? Who wants to sleep with someone who looks like me?” I almost opened my mouth to say something to her at that point but then I decided just to listen. “Ben treats me with respect in front of people. At least he does that much right. When he married me I was as beautiful as a rose, but now I am a fat pig. I would rather be a fat pig than the “lush” that people called my poor mother. She was a sad woman and I think I am exactly like her — in my heart, I’m a bird in a cage. My mother wanted to be in the man’s world with a career, and she drank because my father made it clear that he wanted a wife, not a colleague. She didn’t leave but instead took it out on herself. I suffered a great deal and I promised myself that I would never be like her. So, instead of getting 63

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drunk, I became the wife that my father had wanted my mother to be, and my husband took me just for that wife who does all the work for his comfort. “I forgive my mother because now I understand what was lacking in her life, but I guess it’s just too late for me to be who I wanted to be. I am an unfulfilled woman who hangs onto the wrong things. I did everything for everyone. I had five children of my own, but no one could see that I had my hands full. Every day of the week, there were at least three or four of my husband’s relative’s children playing, eating and making a mess in my house, but no one ever heard a complaint from me. I have a bunch of happy children and a happier husband running in and out of the house and a beautiful home, but in my mind, there are nagging questions: ‘What about me? What happened to my life? Where has Zoe been for the past twenty some years? And did my mother scream the same questions while quietly drowning herself in alcohol?’” “What about Ben? I asked. “Didn’t he ever see how unhealthy you look and try to help you?” There was no answer. I guess I knew the answer all along — like most men, all he cared about was his own happiness. “Why don’t you do something about it?” I asked. “You are suggesting nothing that I haven’t thought of before. I simply can’t. I am the head of my society group, my children are getting close to marriage, and you want me to change all this and just move on? To where? I feel it’s too late for me, but the question is, what happened to my life? I was pushed by a male-dominated world into a situation from which there is no escape.” And then she sadly said, “Did I satisfy your curiosity about what had happened to me? Or are you still in the dark?” I felt that lump again in my throat. “Why should it be this way?” I asked. “There is always a way out, there is always help.” Zoe looked at me with the same sad smile and said, “If I could turn back the clock and know then what I know now, maybe then I could change things, but now there is no other way, at least not for me. Besides, believe it or not, I do love Ben like a father. What would I do if I lost two fathers in one lifetime?” As I rode in the taxi along that breathtaking road back to my hotel from Beverly Hills, I gazed out at the luxurious houses and I realized 64

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that those big houses didn’t seem as grand anymore, and I could see the grass for the true color it was. I wondered how many women living in these houses had their high hopes dashed as they watched their prince change into a bullfrog during the course of marriage! Not everyone who has a great house is a victim, or is unhappily married to a frog, but there are plenty of “Zoes” around. She will probably die before she finds herself and makes peace within her. Her husband should have helped her long ago. Our new awareness is for women like Zoe to live and love with total happiness. There are women living fulfilled lives who have no emptiness in their hearts. Their lives are about themselves, without being selfish, but they have reached the point where they know how to truly honor themselves for what they are, and they continue to fight opposition from society along the way. For women like Zoe who are reclaiming those lost years and starting new, finding oneself unprepared for a major “life makeover” is not that easy and at times may seem impossible. A “life makeover” might not necessarily produce a very satisfactory result and often the outcome will be a sad and lonely time for a woman left suddenly lost and powerless to stand for herself. A twenty-two-year-old college student told me, “I really don’t think that I want to be married unless I live with 100 percent equal rights in every shape and form. I am very reluctant to give the best years of my life to build a foundation for a man who only God knows what he is capable of doing. If I do get married someday, unless we can really see eye to eye, I’d rather to be single and live free.” Divorce by Death (Naomi’s Story) In our short history of women’s awareness, more and more women are getting married later in life and going against the old-fashioned system of our culture than ever before. Women are no longer willing to put their youth and their precious energy into a relationship that has more than a 65 percent chance of becoming part of the statistical divorce rate. This time the glass really is half empty and we are not being pessimistic, but instead we are facing up to the true crisis in our most important union of all, marriage. Even those in the 65

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minority of “happily married” have no guarantees. When the husband dies, many times the wife is left with more debt and problems than she can handle. “It is a risk,” Naomi began her story about how she almost became homeless because she trusted her husband’s judgement on everything. “I was twenty-three when I married my husband. I had never been trained for anything. My only connection to the outside world was when I became a receptionist in hope of finding a husband, which I did. He was a very nice man and he loved me a lot, but when he suddenly died of a massive heart attack I was as lost as a puppy dog in a desert. I wanted to die as well. Of course I didn’t, but as time started healing me, I realized that we had so many debts that even if I sold everything I owned, I still couldn’t manage to pay them all. “With the help of my uncle, I borrowed some money from the bank and moved back with my mother. After being married for eleven years, the only blessing was that we didn’t have any children to go through such an awful and heartbreaking time. I believe that even if he had lived to be hundred years old, he would never have thought about another woman. What he put me through after his death was worse than living with money and comfort and finding out that your husband is having an affair. Giving your all to even a good man might not be rewarding in the long run. Women always should be prepared for letdowns in marriage because the bottom line is, if you don’t have your destiny in your hand you never know where the other person will lead you. No matter how you look at it, marriage is a risk, a risk that not all women at this point are eager to take.” In all the years of my research, I have never found one man who said that being married was his goal, but do you know how many women have no goal other than marriage? I would like to ask a girl who is on the verge of marriage with no other goal but to be a wife, “What kind of a goal is this when 50 percent of its achievement lies in the hands of another person?” To me, and to many other well-adjusted single or married women that I have met though all the years, a goal is something you can achieve on your own and no one can take it away from you, like running a marathon, going into space, being successful in business or making lots of money — anything that is totally yours. 66

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Making marriage your only goal is truly a risky business for any woman to undertake. One woman told me she just didn’t see a reason to dedicate herself to a man for a lifetime, only to wind up like most women who say, “If I knew better, I would never have done it.” So why do it in the first place? She reminded me of a very funny remark that my grandmother used to make, “Marriage is the only deed in which the one who did it and the one who didn’t are both sorry!” Isn’t that the truth? A divorced woman told me that as much as society tries to label the lives of singles as lonely, no “single” can feel the true meaning of emptiness and loneliness unless she is married to a man who doesn’t acknowledge her existence. Some of these lonely women even made it to their fiftieth wedding anniversary, but many of them had the same question — “What was life all about? It certainly wasn’t about me!” Men Will be Boys (Lilian’s Story) Lilian, a seventy-two-year-old woman in sad spirits said, “My husband was the little boy and I was the mother to him and to our children and our grandchildren. As long as he is alive, I will always be his mom, even though I am ten years younger than he is. I wanted him to be a passionate and loving man, and at the same time I wanted him to be a father figure to me because I lost my father at the age of ten and I always needed to fill that gap. My life is almost over and I don’t know what happened to it. One thing I am sure of is that my life certainly wasn’t about me!” Joyce, a thirty-three-year-old lawyer told me, “I am familiar with this theory of ‘boys will be boys,’ and about this nonsense that ‘men will be children.’ If in fact we know that men are children, then how can we expect to have a serious relationship with a child? Why do we leave the most vulnerable part of ourselves — our heart — in men’s care? And besides, who needs to be a babysitter their entire life? Not me. I’d rather stay single and play with these spoiled children than put them in charge of the most valuable assets of my life.” As far back as ancient Greek mythology to modern age fairy tales, males’ outer physical strength was to be used to protect women, and women’s inner strength was to protect men from their lack of 67

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self-control. Together we were supposed to create perfection and balance, but men have been using their strength mostly to drain and destroy feminine power. Now we are saving the power for ourselves. The world is not a playground, and the men are not little boys. This is what we have to teach our boys and our girls. The schools should teach them, the television should teach them, and society should teach them. Of Love and Lies A young man admitted on The Oprah Winfrey Show that he tells lies to women because he believes women like to hear them. I wonder who taught him that? If anything, women thrive on hearing the truth. The reason we believe men’s lies is because most of us say what we really mean, and we expect the same truthfulness from men. Sadly enough, many women are not happy unless they have a man who tells her he loves her, even knowing that such a phrase is one of the biggest lies men have told to appease women. According to Dory Hollander, Ph.D. in her book, 101 Lies Men Tell Women and Why Women Believe Them, “I love you” is one of the most common lies men tell women. In another study reported by David Buss, Hollander says that over 70 percent of college-aged men said they exaggerated the depth of their feelings to have sex with a woman, and a stunning 97 percent of college-aged women said they had personally experienced this in their relations with men. When men’s lies finally show their face, our world shatters. We hate the world and we get miserable. Some women get depressed and fat, others take it differently and become skinny and sick. These women’s happiness depends on a man’s words. Their lives are like unbalanced yo-yos, with the string in the hand of a child. When a women gives her heart to a man and he recklessly drops it near a clogged sewage drain and a delivery man on his bicycle accidentally smashes it and pushes it further down the gutter before she can pick up the pieces, a man casually says, “It wasn’t my fault — you shouldn’t give it to me in the first place.” He leaves her heartless and she blames herself and the world for what has happened to her. But she was the one who took her heart and handed it to him. Women’s complete trust in men is extremely dangerous. Keep your 68

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heart, but share as much as you can without leaving yourself exposed to ending up with an empty space in your chest. Love yourself before you love someone else, impress yourself before you impress a man. If you matter to yourself you would never be forced to ask, “What about me?” You can easily make the world about you if you love and respect yourself enough. Tips for Men There is no denying that women are turned off by many things about marriage. Learning how to handle men is becoming a boring, unsatisfactory effort that is taking the romance out of marriage. Here are some tips for those men who are interested in making their marriages work and creating a better environment for themselves, their wives and their children. Women have much to give, but unfortunately, the vast majority of men don’t have the capacity to receive. A spiritually awakened woman knows to give only to the capacity of the man’s gracious acceptance. So if you men like to receive, try to be gracious receivers. And if you are wondering about the secret to a woman’s sexual stimulation, bear in mind that most of us get stimulated through our hearts; that is why those men who are more in tune with their egos and in harmony with the spiritual world are the ones who understand the strength and value of women and live happier lives and more successful marriages. Women are the true source of energy, and a man’s happiness depends on his ability to tap into her energy and benefit from it without draining it. Drawing from the feminine source requires respect and understanding of a woman’s true desires, which can be a very difficult concept for many men to grasp. For example, a man who looks at another woman while he is with his mate causes an energy drain that women are trying to avoid. We don’t like to be insulted just to make our husband or boyfriend look or feel good about his inflated ego. We are all so very different and unique individuals. If each and every woman in this world teaches one secret about herself to a man and asks him to respect and cherish it and pass it along, maybe we can begin to live together in much more harmony. Finally, to 69

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discover the secret of womanhood is to take a good look at your inner feminine side. That alone will tell you all about “Eve” and convince you that it is really great to have those qualities. That is why more and more women are starting to deeply believe that “Now it’s about Eve.”

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Five I Do! But Not “Until Death Do Us Part”

You can find a man . . . If you have nothing better to do. You can fall in love . . . If you really love yourself. Live together if you must . . . But don’t share the same bedroom. Share the same bank if you must . . . But never the same account. Say “I do” if you must . . . But keep your own name. Say “I do” if you must . . . But don’t clip your wings. Say “I do” if you must . . . But not “until death do us part!” Inspired by Khalil Gibran, I couldn’t resist writing this lighthearted poem about how marriage can be salvaged if we “let the wind of Heaven dance between us.” It is better to remain as separate individuals without signing that meaningless piece of paper which seems to poison the true essence between men and women with the very utterance of those mortifying words, “I do until death do us part.”

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Want to Kill Romance? Get Married! Some believe that time is the killer of romance because familiarity destroys the freshness, passion and desire but time is not to blame. Marriage is the real killer of romance because it breeds complacency. Many people living together without the burden of the law and nonsense that follows the vow, “I do” have more romance in their lives than those who have been cast under the spell of marriage. In his book, In the Search of Stone, Dr. Peck says, “After a while, no matter how imaginatively inventive and experimental you might be, marital sex pretty much ceases to be adventurous. The territory becomes old hat.” About his own infidelity Dr. Peck says, “I knew perfectly well that I would never find a better woman — or even one as good. I was not looking for another wife. I was looking only for the newness, the freshness of romance. In this respect, my sexual infidelity was definitely addictive behavior.” Not every man admits with such honesty to his infidelity or analyzes his actions. Years of research have shown that being interested in more than one person in a lifetime is a natural human urge to experience. It’s our nature and it is the essence of our mysterious being. In that respect, we are all addicted. Marriage, on the other hand, pushes you into an unnatural union that brings out the desire in you to go out and look for that romance lost in the depth of the familiarity of marriage. Merging with another person for life makes us push the most destructive buttons within us — shame, guilt, anger, hurt, vengeance, jealousy, and hate. This union creates stillness in our sense of curiosity, and we deprive ourselves of the freedom and the newness that are tools to our growth by staying in a marriage that detaches us from our soul and brings us nothing but distortion and misery. Is it fair to force a free-spirited, freewilled human, with an addiction to romance, to say “I do” and think that he will live happily ever after? While discussing Dr. Peck’s theory about addiction to romance a man told me, “When two people fall in love, it’s like picking up a glass of vodka or snorting cocaine or any other substance that makes you feel good — it’s totally out of your control. We are built to have these feelings.” Oddly enough, I agreed

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with him, but why do we bottle up our desire for romance and fulfillment when we say, “I do?” As the fixation of newness is an addiction for men, marriage by itself is an addiction of our society. It is not easy to break such an old habit even if it is harmful to your well being. Getting drug-free takes lots of hard work, determination and preparation to prevent or stop the addiction. When society opens its eyes and sees how marriage is malfunctioning, we will think of better ways to make life easier for each and every person who is starving for love and a long-lasting relationship without the danger of addiction. Diana’s Story “I just celebrated my fortieth wedding anniversary,” Diana told me, “and sadly and finally, I admitted to myself that I am burnt out. I really didn’t achieve anything for myself. I put my desires for romance on the side while I watched how my husband glowed after every new woman walked into his life. He simply was what we all really are — curious and forever searching. I, as a woman, had stopped myself from pursuing these same desires because my husband would probably have either killed me or hated and shunned me forever if he found out about my affairs. “Besides, I had no place to go; I had nothing but him. He was my goal. Meanwhile, he achieved almost all his goals while I only watched and praised the man who didn’t give me the tiniest opportunity to grow. And now that I am standing closer to my grave, I am regretting the time that I lost — time I spent on someone else because of my cultural beliefs. The only real achievement in my life is my children. But my husband had the same children and also had other active goals. “So I’ve made it through my fortieth year of self-sacrificing, and now I am asking, ‘Where is my Medal of Honor? What was the result of all that effort?’ If I could, I would tell all those young girls who think there is something wonderful waiting for them in this ridiculously unfair, one-sided union called marriage, ‘Don’t do it. Keep on building your own foundations and keep on achieving your own goals. Life is what you make of it; live it for yourself and don’t hand it to someone else on a silver platter. There is no reward waiting for you 73

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at the end; you can live very happily without a husband!’” Most women are in this enigmatic, obscure relationship and they think nothing of it until, like Diana, they wake up forty years too late, grieving for the lost years. Olga, a foreign woman with an American husband, told me the following story: “I knew he was cheating when I was three months pregnant with our first child. When our daughter was two years old, I found out that he had several steady girlfriends, one of whom he bought an apartment. It hurts like hell, but if I open up the can of worms, it will only eat me alive. This is my life, and being a wife with all its requirements is the only thing I am good at. The day I say one word about his way of life it will be the day that he will say, ‘Alright, let’s get a divorce.’ Sometimes it really gets to me and I think he goes too far. I realize how free his life is and I want to ask for a divorce, but the truth of the matter is, I really have nowhere to go.” Olga’s husband humiliates her and treats her with disrespect, but she says it is still better to be married. Why? “Because I need to be,” she says. Too bad she hasn’t learned that the only need is not to need at all. “Need” is a very big word to use with a sex-addicted, insensitive man who is ruining your life. In her case, the old paradigm of female worth — that women are nothing unless they are married — applies. In most cultures, divorce affects a woman’s reputation a great deal, but again, as long as she takes the crap from her man she is seen as a wonderful and great woman. Why do we feel that we must live our lives for other people’s approval? Olga’s husband is one of many men who belong in the wild. Caging them will have no other result but watching them try to break free, and break the heart of the one who is holding him inside. If Olga had more respect for herself, she would not put up with the roaring sound of a wild animal trying to break down the gate of the cage of marriage. Fortunately, the numbers of enlightened women with increased selfesteem and awareness of a greater purpose are growing, including women from male-dominated cultures and religions. Attitudes are shifting from “This is marriage, welcome to the club!” to “I might say ‘I do,’ but not until death do us part!” Jessica, a 31-year-old bank executive, says, “Whatever job you have, no matter how big or small, don’t give it up for your husband 74

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or children. The majority of times when there is a job-related relocation, the one who gives up the job or leaves a career is the woman. When this happens, she loses herself as well as her professional life. When you get married, you don’t know what is there waiting for you.” Short-Term Marriage for Long-Term Gain Someone said to me, “Marriage is like snow. It comes down one by one as beautiful flakes, but before long, it piles up behind your door, and sooner or later you will suffocate!” The more feedback I receive from people, the more I realize how badly we need to change this destructive, temporary, and twisted union of marriage into something that helps us live a better and happier life with the partner in our lives. Let’s say for a moment that instead of having such a definite everlasting expectation from marriage, we had a short-term contract to honor. How do you think that would change our view of staying together? The entire outlook about marriage would change, even in the eyes of children. If we teach our children from day one that it is part of human nature for two people to have a tendency to grow out of love and go their own separate ways, then perhaps not as many children of divorced parents would blame themselves and grow up to be unhappy, fearful, and angry. If our children value and appreciate our honesty from the beginning and their heads don’t get filled up with “happily-ever-afters,” a truly liberated happiness can emerge in our society and grow in our new generations. Let’s look logically at the more positive and optimistic results of short-term marriage contracts. Weddings are beautiful and, in most cases, the wedding night is one of the best times in a woman’s life. So, why not repeat the whole occasion every five or ten years, just as some couples renew their wedding vows to reaffirm their commitment to each other? If married couples are totally happy and satisfied staying together, with true wanting, freedom of choice, and no strings attached, they would decide to renew their contract and stay together for whatever or however long they agree. In real estate, you renew a lease because you have been steadily paying your rent, the landlord is happy, and you as a tenant are happy because you are where you want to be. The concept of renewing the 75

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short-term marriage contract is very similar. If everything is going well for the couple, then their love and respect is still strong and no one is taking the other for granted. Life is as sweet as a ripe watermelon! Why should they leave and take a chance with someone else when what they have is working great? The reason that togetherness among couples who decide to have a short and renewable contract might work is because neither of them is locked in a cage with the door shut forever. We all know how time flies when you are having fun, and the limited time they have together might produce the respect that most women desperately seek. Disrespect thrives when couples take for granted that they will be together for as long as they live. The thought of being together for life creates suffocation from the very beginning of a marriage. A female married friend of mine said, “There are three rings in marriage for women; First, the Engagement Ring, then the Wedding Ring, and finally, the Suffer-Ring!” A short-term marriage agreement will let the winds of heaven dance between us without getting stale. Those who change their marriage roles and honor a shorter, renewable contract will have a better and longer lasting love than those who say, “I do, until death do us part.” Many women suffer from “post-wedding depression syndrome,” typically starting the last day of their honeymoon. In a short-term marriage, a woman who is suffering and sinking into a depression can look forward to many more and better weddings to come, either with the same man or others. What really matters is that it is not yet over. No matter how you look at it, divorce creates pain, confusion, and chaos for so many people that it should be against the law to enter into a marriage that brings us and our children such anguish and despair through eventual separation. People change and grow in different directions. If the right answer to a complicated question is usually the simplest answer, then why is it so hard to understand such a simple answer to end the misery brought on by high expectations of lengthy marriages? We are very versatile creatures capable of doing many things in our split second of life, but then we put a heavy gate in front of us that swings against the very nature of our being, as if to say, “I don’t respect my humanity and my feelings, so let me lock myself in a cage and see how I behave.” 76

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Maybe an open door is the answer to solving the mystery of this fast-growing divorce rate. The true and long-lasting union should be the one between parents and children — that is the only “marriage” that will, and should, last until death do us part. The law doesn’t protect children in marriage. Most often they get burnt and pushed and abused because once upon a time there were two people who were fooled by the ancient paradigms of society who impulsively acted on their mischievous hormones and said “I do, until death do us part.” Those two people really believed in saying “I do” when they didn’t know what they were doing or where they were going. Now they have reached the point where their curious hormones naturally diminish, exposing the false belief of everlasting love. Ironically, by then it is their child who pays dearly for the ignorant beliefs of the parents. Goldie Hawn commented about her successful and long relationship with Kurt Russell. “I don’t believe we own anybody.” The biggest reason for couples like Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell’s long-lasting togetherness is probably because “the wind of Heaven” is always dancing between them and preventing the romance from becoming stale. No door has been shut, no cage has been built, the bird is free to leave, yet he remains. What she says makes a great deal of sense because when belonging comes into the picture we lose ourselves, and when we lose ourselves, that is the time the frightening clatter of divorce can be heard loudly and clearly. If you really want the fascination of the wedding and the honeymoon, make sure that first you belong to yourself and then enter into a short-term marriage contract instead of fooling yourself into thinking that yours is the only one that is going to make it! When our marriage fails we always ask ourselves, “Where did I go wrong?” I think we have to rephrase this question and ask, “Where did I allow society to push me?” Society closes its eyes to the chaos created by marriage and divorce, yet we continue selling the idea of everlasting marriage to our children and youth of today. And when they are completely lost in the complex space of marriage, we send them to a therapist’s office or to the bookstore for a book about how to keep a marriage together, which hasn’t helped us so far. It is very simple for the average person to relate to the basic phenomenon of human nature, that what once appealed to us might not have the same effect at a later time. We’ve often heard that when the 77

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chase is over, so is the romance and mystery that creates the initial drive. A woman who wishes to marry should first build her own solid foundation and then become a bride, but not a wife. If she approaches marriage on a short-term basis, she has absolutely nothing to lose. In this way women, can marry a wealthy man without the humiliation of prenuptial agreements or rejection because he thinks she only wants him for his money and that she will someday leave him and take everything he worked a lifetime to have. When I got divorced, I didn’t ask for any alimony because, even as a very young woman, I knew that asking for that alimony would needlessly prolong my divorce. And besides, I didn’t want to be dependent on someone else’s money; I wanted to make it on my own. Half of my daughter’s expenses were all I asked for, and my daughter received it, as the courts decided — but only until she reached the age of eighteen. Well, who says that at 18 years old, a person is ready to stop living his/her future dreams and accept the pressure that life has put on their injured mind? The real support and heavy expenses only start at that age. Children should always have the utmost support from both their parents, no matter what age they are. If parents were legally married to their children, neither of them could cast off the responsibility from their shoulders until they see to it that their children — especially their female children — have a solid foundation. Ironically, many parents selfishly think more about their own welfare than about sending a healthy-minded child out into the world. Moria’s Story Moria was happily married for ten years, and although her husband is a very handsome man, she was never jealous or afraid that he might someday leave her for another woman. When she became pregnant, she decided to leave her secure job in a government agency to stay home and be a full-time mother and wife. She had plenty of free time on her hands, so her husband decided to give her more responsibility, like booking their trips, buying and selling their cars, or overseeing the construction that was going on when he was too busy. While Moria was happily tending to her added responsibilities, her husband wasn’t really busy with his business demands, but with all 78

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the women he had become involved with. Unfortunately for him, Moria’s husband had one very peculiar habit; he liked to take a picture of himself — in a very personal and sexy pose — with every woman he slept with. He had to constantly change his hiding place for the photos, for fear that Moria would find them. One day, Moria decided to give their car a thorough cleaning; she was going to sell it and wanted the buyer to get a good impression. As she was cleaning, she came across her husband’s collection — which by then had grown to over thirty pictures! Can you imagine what happened to that woman who gave up everything to be this man’s wife? In Moria’s case, she confronted him, got her revenge and used their child to torture him! What about those women who found similar things but only after their husband died? That must be a real killer! Everlasting love, which almost all of us are looking for in marriage, is a false promise that many men like to make freely to their wives, knowing that they aren’t capable of keeping such a grand promise. What is love? This has been the question for as long as we can remember. My theory is that love is a manipulation of chemicals in our brain set off by being close to certain people. Therefore, what we feel has less to do with the other person but mostly what we feel about our own feelings. The promise of that “forever feeling” we give each other is like a big empty gift box; at first, you open the lid and peer inside with great anticipation, but soon you find that the wrapping was nicer than the gift inside and you are left emotionally drained and disappointed. So many people die trapped in this empty and heartless promise without tasting the real happiness that life has to offer. Growing Up, Growing Apart In many families, a girl spends more time with her mother and a boy with his father for healthy guidance and supervision. Unfortunately, this itself leaves a great gap between the father and his daughter and the mother and her son, leading to an even bigger gap between the sexes. Most experts say that men who lost their wives to death and have a close relationship with their daughters are more sensitive to women around them. In the opposite case, when a woman loses her husband through death, the sons become more sensitive toward the women in their lives because of their closeness to feminine influence. 79

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Communication is essential to any healthy relationship, from married couples to parents and their children. A blood test is not the only factor that determines the makeup of a happy family and it doesn’t indicate that we will be good parents or how our children’s lives will turn out. More and more attention is being paid to children because we finally understand that if we don’t create a healthier environment for our children, helping them develop their brain with better information sooner, the world will suffer greatly. Our children should hold the greatest value in our life, but how can you expect someone from an abused or neglected childhood to provide a healthy environment for his own children? Future parents should go through healthy learning and testing before making the decision to bring children into this world. We are so wrapped up in physical fitness that we forget that having a physically healthy child is not enough for a healthy-minded society. In his book, The Celestine Prophecy, author James Redfield wrote, “Humans will slowly understand that they should not bring children into the world unless there is at least one adult committed to focus full attention all of the time on each child.” I loved this part of the book about children. How important it is to have an adult pay attention to a child and teach the true and profound lessons of life! Redfield says there are many families who leave their younger children under the supervision of another child. What wisdom, love and knowledge can a child learn from another child who doesn’t yet know anything about life? In this desperate time of conspicuous awareness, our hope for solving the problem of our “until death do us part” marriages is to give our children more constructive supervision. So far, girls learn that they must have a man, and even if their husband is no good he is better then nothing, and boys learn that even if they do not behave properly they are still a prize. This is how our society has molded the shape of marriage, and yet we expect it to last forever! Nowadays, many women realize that “nothing” is far better than most husbands they see around! You will be amazed at how you can make that “nothing” into something worthwhile and productive when you are not so entangled in the stereotypical belief that having a male (even a chauvinist, cheapskate, or cheater) is better then nothing! Personally, I don’t envy any woman who is trapped with a good-for-nothing man in her life, but when I was 80

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still married, I used to envy the lives of those women who had freedom and self-respect. Lynn’s Story Lynn, a forty-five-year-old woman who was trapped in this frame of mind told me, “I don’t know what to do. I am really not happy with my husband. I think my youth and energy went down the drain, but I promised in front of God to be with him until death do us part, and besides, he is better then nothing.” It was very difficult for me to make her realize that God didn’t create her life to have it pushed down some drain just because innocently she said, “I do until death do us part.” Getting married with the idea of “until death do us part” subconsciously makes you feel one step closer to death. Suddenly, one chapter of your life is totally closed, and in life, when the chapter of youth and freedom is closed, we feel restless. Men who fear death will panic and blame the marriage for their getting older. At the same time that women are looking forward to a lifetime of romance, love, and security, men are busy getting further away from their fear of the “near-death experience” in marriage! If a man knows that the union is not permanent, he doesn’t see himself as close to the end. Women don’t panic in this way, but we are definitely getting tired of men’s panic attacks. WHY WE CHEAT (IT’S NOT FOR SEX!) I knew of a family on Long Island in which a man, who lived with his wife and three lovely children, believed that having an extramarital affair was very normal for men but forbidden for women. After years of neglecting his wife and having affairs with several women, he found out that she was also having an affair. He took a gun and killed her, their three children, and then himself, leaving a note saying that he couldn’t live with the embarrassment that his wife had brought upon him and he had to reclaim his honor! There is a big difference in the reasons for a woman’s extramarital affairs and a man’s unfaithfulness. Most women who cheat do so because they feel they are being taken for granted, their husband is busy elsewhere, or they feel less attractive and need reassurance that 81

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they can still appeal to men. While a woman needs to repair her badly damaged self-esteem, a man cheats simply because he feels trapped in the “forever togetherness,” so almost immediately, he looks for the newness that makes him feel young and further away from closing the youth chapter in his life. During my research, I asked thousands of men that, if the length of marriage was only five or ten years at a time, would they feel the same restlessness and claustrophobia? The general consensus was, if they had the option to leave marriage without guilt or the fear of losing their life achievements, they would appreciate the relationship more and feel less anxious, and wouldn’t feel so eager to leave. When we have a choice, we are in control, and we all like to feel in control of our own lives — especially when it comes to such extensive commitments as marriage. The benefit of a short-term marriage contract would most likely be that both men and women would want to stay together until death. There is always that feeling of choice, which by itself reduces the claustrophobic feelings in our current permanent arrangement of marriage. Think about this: if you had no choice where you could move — even if you love your beautiful present home — without a doubt, you would start to feel that you are trapped and are one huge step closer to death. Sometimes marriage without the choice of leaving can be like a slow death. Short-term marriage contracts play on reverse psychology and just might surprisingly work miracles for our relationships. Men who have lived happily with a woman for a long time without that piece of paper tend to cheat soon after they “tie the knot” because they feel their freedom has slipped away. No matter what we do, the moment we say, “I do,” the love will change. How many times have we heard that the ex-husband became attracted to his ex-wife after their divorce and wanted to see her and date her again? Why? Because her independent life and freedom away from that cage brought back the newness of the attraction and love they felt for each other in the first place. A fifty-five-year-old man told me, “When my wife found out about my frequent affairs, she left me. And that was the time that, with total terror, I found out how much I was still in love with her. To make the story short, we married and divorced three times, and 82

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then because we really loved each other, we decided to live together and forget about marriage and see what happened. Well, it has been ten happy years since we started living together, and not even once have I had a desire to see other women. I guess because I didn’t commit myself, I feel free. I can leave whenever I want, so I really don’t want to do it. “When I think back, I never really loved any one of those women the way I loved my wife, but I did it just to feel that I still owned part of myself and to prove that I can still be a free human.” This is the story of many couples who show that in reality, there is love and life under the dust of marriage. As someone said, “If you want monogamy in marriage, marry a swan!” Marriage is a negative legal contract between a man and woman that brings out the most primal part of us: that part that we aren’t even aware of before we find ourselves in marriage. Freedom is the essence of human nature. Wouldn’t it be great if we could love and honor the one who loves us without the fear of losing our home, or fighting over our children, or thinking how it will benefit only us? Using marriage — a supposedly permanent contract — as our basis for love and honor is the biggest self-delusion we can create for ourselves. True love does not need any kind of contract; it should just exist. We, as free-willed, totally perfect humans, weren’t designed to bind ourselves to marriage by page of a legal contract that typically causes both sexes years of anguish and despair. Those of you who have been in nasty and long divorce battles understand how unreliable and unfair many marriages and divorces can be; one moment you were a bride in your white gown, and the next moment your future, your freedom, your life achievements, your hopes, and the course of your destiny become meaningless when left in someone else’s hands. If we can eliminate painful divorce from our lives by making a temporary agreement for those who really and desperately want to be married, then we have taken a giant step forward in solving our never-ending war with the opposite sex. People change and are guided in different directions. We might want to live out our lives without permanently joining with someone else. Don’t let anyone tell you that you have to couple up — that is, not until you have first learned to value your own worth as an individual. We are perfect human beings, and if we need to reproduce, true love is the only guarantee that we can offer to each other and to our 83

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children. When I talk about true love, I don’t mean the physical rapture between men and women, but rather that most profound feeling that you feel deep inside for yourself. If you truly love yourself, the compassion that is the extension of love won’t allow you to use your children against their mother or father for your own benefit or for your victory. True and profound love means that you take care of that child, the one who was once created out of love, no matter what happens between you and your spouse. When two people really enjoy each other and share a great love and understanding, then total equality in marriage comes naturally and easily. Love should not be such hard work. The Thrill is Gone For as long as I can remember I had this desire to own a car. One day, I finally managed to buy my dream car — a red sports car that I had always wanted. At first, I used to wake up in the middle of the night and look at it through the darkness with the help of a flashlight. I enjoyed thinking about how I finally managed to have my dream come true. Several months passed, and one day I realized that I couldn’t remember where I parked my car. I am pretty sure that if my car came with the condition that I could only keep it if I took very good care of it and promised to look at it every night with a flashlight, then I would certainly remember where I parked it. However, even with my dream car, the newness had worn off. How many of you remember the CD you bought several months ago and played to death as you fell in love with the songs, until suddenly one day you felt that if you heard it one more time you would get sick? Whether or not you want to admit it this is typical human nature, when we own something, anything — even the implied ownership of another person — in the same way that I lost my passion for my dream car, we soon start looking for a newer or better model. Is Your Partner the Problem — Or is it Marriage? Bob told me, “I have been married for twenty-five years and I love my wife, but I love her more like a sister than a wife at this point in our lives. How can I deprive myself of having the most natural feelings of 84

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passion and sex that a man has running in his veins and stay faithful to her. Should I bury myself? The thrill is over. If she wants a divorce I happily will give it to her, but I can’t deprive myself of not having feelings whenever I meet a new woman.” My grandmother used to tell me, “Treat men like your own shadow. Let them follow you, and don’t be a shadow chaser; let the shadow chase you!” Men lose their interest most likely when we have spoiled them. We give in to them too easily. We make a goal out of marriage and they think they do women a favor by giving us their name. We are there for them all the time. What is so exciting after the dust has settled down? By not making the marriage contract permanent, we have the chance that men will follow us as long as we keep from saying, “I do until death do us part.” A thirty-one-year-old woman, very beautiful, educated and talented, complained to me, “No man that I cared for ever asked me to marry him. Does this mean that I am not as beautiful or as talented as people are telling me? Is this just in my head because I have a loving mother and I believed her lies about my worth?” It was so sad to hear such a beautiful woman so harshly judge her own worth, her talent and her inner and outer beauty just because she was not married. Unfortunately, many women seek male approval to give themselves self-assurance. If this young woman had been married for several years and divorced with two children, she would have no time to think about her very profitable career and she would not think this way about herself; instead, she would cry for having said “I do” to begin with. Seeking approval from others, especially if used to value one’s own self-esteem, is a sad concept that society has created for most of our young female adults. With the new millennium in front of us, the last goal a woman should be thinking about is one which revolves around marriage and what other people say or think. When you marry, you will walk through a dark passageway into the confusion of ego, jealousy, fear and anger. And when you are there, trapped in that man’s world, no one can help you out because they are all lost in the same maze. The most frightening part is, you start to believe that this is what life is all about. At a wedding I attended, the priest, after performing the marriage ceremony, congratulated the groom and wished the bride lots of luck. 85

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I couldn’t help but think, “Isn’t it better to be safe than sorry? Just stay single!” Ironically, studies show that before the wedding ceremony, men have much more anxiety than women do, and do you know why? Because men don’t really trust themselves. They don’t know when they are going to break the vows and disappoint their mate. It may take two to tango, but we, as women, start dancing alone from the very beginning. In fact, it is getting to the point that whenever I am invited to a wedding, I have this nagging thought, “Is this going to last, or is it going to be added to our statistics, like the other 65 percent — and climbing — divorce rates?” A woman named Lesley wrote to me, “I loved my husband like any newlywed, but it took me five years before I realized that my unhappiness has less to do with him than it has with the whole idea of marriage. I don’t even like his family and they are getting on my nerves. I feel I am sinking in something that, if I don’t free myself from it, I know I will never be able to get myself out. When you say ‘I do until death do us part,’ always be aware that you are saying ‘I do’ to his mother, to his sister, to his nieces and nephews and all of his friends that you might never like or want to be around.” So many divorced women complain that if it weren’t for the husband’s family, maybe the marriage would have made it. My desk is filled with letters like Lesley’s. Before you look for happiness in a marriage, look inside your own heart and see what is there. If you can’t find a sign of happiness in your own heart, don’t ever believe that someone else will provide it for you in marriage. Most of us search endlessly in the wrong places for happiness. We have been brought up to believe that a total stranger with many dark secrets, who probably doesn’t even know any more about love and compassion than we do, will give us the gift of love and happiness. Free yourself from the archetype that happiness comes with a man labeled “husband.” A woman who lived many years of her youth in Alaska told me about the abundance of men in certain parts of the state. There are, she said, twenty men for one woman in most industrial locations. After living in Alaska for five years, her mother asked her why, with such good odds, she was still single. She responded, “You are right, Ma, the odds are good, but the goods are odd!”

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When we hold a coin in our hand to make a phone call we feel and look at something that has two sides, but when we put that quarter in the telephone, we are only focusing on the oneness of that coin. We don’t even think twice what would happen if we had only one side of this quarter. It would not be possible to make a phone call with only half the coin. The limitation that a “forever” contract puts on us is the only toll that can separate the two sides of the coin, and this is why, quite often in life, we are stuck with a useless coin that can’t even be used to make a lousy phone call! Without women there is no “tomorrow,” and without men there is no “tonight.” Our unity should be as functional as the coin to make a phone call! The differences which create war between us should instead only make us closer. Marriage as we face it never has been the gatekeeper for long-lasting love. If anything, marriage distracts our love, our sex, our passion, until we can no longer live together happily ever after. If there was no cage, if there was no permanent door to keep us inside the prison of marriage, maybe many of us would say “I do” with much more ease and without fear, but not “until death do us part!”

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Six Woman to Woman! COMES THE DAWN After a while you learn the subtle difference Between holding a hand and chaining a soul, And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning And company doesn’t mean security, And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts And presents aren’t promises, And you begin to accept your defeats With your head up and your eyes open, With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child, And learn to build all your roads On today because tomorrow’s ground Is too uncertain for plans, and futures have A way of falling down in mid-flight. After a while you learn that even sunshine Burns if you get too much. So you plant your own garden and decorate Your own soul, instead of waiting For someone to bring you flowers. And you learn that you really can endure . . . That you really are strong And you really do have worth. 88

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And you learn and learn . . . With every goodbye you learn. Someone sent me the above poem anonymously during my research. The poem’s beautiful and meaningful words, no doubt, most likely came from the heart of a woman who has been there herself. Female readers of this book probably fit into one of several categories identified by our society. You could be single and very young, still thinking that some day your Prince Charming will come along and sweep you off your feet to live happily ever after, and that all this advice and fuss has nothing to do with you. I too was there once, believing a husband, whomever it might be, would never do anything to hurt his wife. That belief and understanding about men and marriage makes you the most vulnerable of all types of women. Nearly 70 percent of you will be disappointed, and will pay dearly for the teachings of the old belief of marriage that will not give you what should be rightfully yours: a delightful life, an understanding husband and good father for your children. Or maybe you are among those women reaching their thirties or forties who find themselves in the middle of a panic attack because being single in our society is pushing you into depression, self-pity and self-doubt. You think you are losing it because you have no husband, and everybody gossips about you saying, “What is wrong with her? Why she isn’t married?” It bothers you to death because you know as well as I that if you wanted to be married, you would be, right? You are confused and angry and trying to do the right things for yourself, but you are pulled back by negative beliefs and you don’t know what will be next. “The universe gives us what we really and deeply desire to have. We are where we are supposed to be. There is a reason you are here; you have a role to play that no one else on the planet could fill.” So says Sanaya Roman in her book, Creating Money. If you are single and cannot seem to find the right man in your life, could it be that you really came onto this planet to do something different for the world than playing the role that others expect? Author Sanaya Roman says, “Don’t wait for someone else to give you permission to quit your job and do what you love with your life. 89

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If you give up your goals, dreams and aliveness to be with people, you aren’t truly doing them a favor. You will in some way demand that they give up the same things. The only way you can truly love and support others is to support their aliveness and growth, and one of the best ways to do that is to support you own aliveness and growth.” Her explanation, which comes from her inner wisdom, relates the importance of how grand it is to truly love yourself. In other words, if you are a mislead, fearful person, then you will delude yourself into a false sense of happiness that you cannot possibly create for yourself, let alone give to another person. If you fall into that category, you may feel unnecessary anxiety and suffer from low self-esteem. You think very little of yourself because the world is telling you that you are nothing unless you have a husband or a “man” in your life. You could be among those women who have been married and divorced and because of that experience won’t even go near a man if it somehow involves a permanent commitment. Or, you may be among those single women who clearly knows what is out there and are not willing to sacrifice your precious freedom and a lifetime of achievement to be controlled by someone, or a situation, in marriage which is highly unreliable. Perhaps you are among those married and totally miserable women who thinks that there is no hope — only unhappiness — in marriage, you have lost the chance for happiness in life. You could even be among that very small percentage of women who are happily married and simply amused and perplexed by seeing how the majority of women complicate their lives. OKAY, SO WE CAN’T BLAME MEN FOR EVERYTHING All in all, we are women who at one time were children who believed what our parents, society, religions, and cultures taught us about ourselves and the other sex: men, who “own the world.” We have all had our share of problems with men. Some of us paid closer attention to what men have done and continue to do. Talking about how women have been abused by men for centuries, even millenniums, is already cliche.

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As convenient as it would be to solely blame men for all this longlasting predicament, history clearly shows that women’s acts of jealousy and envy toward each other have created a weakness that manipulated us as a group, preventing anyone from having the strength and power to achieve any substantial space and dignity in society. From the very early stages of life, women are equally at fault for men’s actions toward us because we allow people to treat us the way we feel about ourselves. In this way, our own beliefs became the accepted behavioral patterns for male actions toward women in general. Notwithstanding the superficial or biological differences, men are human beings just like us and they have a great ability to learn and to advance; look at our world technologies. The problem lies in the fact that there has never been a good resource from which to learn about women. We, as women, can be a positive influence in teaching men about womanhood, but we just don’t do it. And yes, I do think women of today share in the blame for continuing to suffer because many years ago someone else started a fire and it continues to burn because we haven’t made enough effort in putting out that nasty fire once and for all. When midwives were burned at the stake as witches, not all women opposed, and actually many women were so envious of the midwives that they threw stones and screamed, “Burn the witches.” In many cultures, a woman is not fully respected unless she has both a husband and a first-born male child. To please their husbands and his family and feel good about themselves, very few mothers put the same value on their daughters as on their sons. They place so much value on being male that there is very little room for a woman to open up her wings and fly. As Dr. Joyce Brothers staled in her book. What Every Woman Should Know About Men, “Parents center their hopes on the male first-born who will carry on the family name.” Truer still is that parents center their hopes on males — first-born or second or third-born — more than on their daughters. In China, in order to control the population growth, laws now prohibit couples from having more than one child. Needless to say, most couples make sure they have boys (many female children are either

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abandoned or aborted before birth). Imagine what is going to happen in that part of the world in twenty years! After all, it’s the boys who carry on the family name, unless women keep their maiden name or select an altogether new name for themselves. In spite of the differences growing up, when I got married while still a teenager, the first request I had was to keep my own name. I don’t know where that came from, but I didn’t want to change my name to his, and my husband agreed. I guess being a possession even in the name of love and marriage didn’t agree with my free-spirited personality from a young age. Most women I spoke with over the years who grew up with a brother told me that although their mothers loved them, bought them dolls, or made them clothes, they always felt that they weren’t as important as their brothers. Women couldn’t attend many universities until recent times; guess who decided to keep women in the dark by making it hard for them to get an education? Men’s expectations are outrageous. Even those who are proud that their wives’ work and recognize their abilities still tend to believe that his position is much more important than hers. That is why, in the majority of job relocations, a wife has to leave her own job behind and follow her husband. When a woman becomes frustrated and realizes that she is missing the boat, she becomes jealous of those who are already on their way to their desirable destinations, until the resentment grows so strong that she justifies her own failure by labeling a free or successful woman a bitch. Jealousy, Woman-to-Woman Once, I saw a woman motorist who had broken down in the middle of a busy street. I witnessed several passersby — men and women — call her a “woman driver.” What a shame! The truth is, if the driver had been male instead of female, no one would have demeaned him; he would simply have been a man with car trouble, and that would be all. The sad truth is, most women have a hard time supporting or encouraging other women on the way to their success, yet they are extremely generous with words of discouragement. I noticed that the more successful the woman, the more she has compassion and admiration for the success of other women. This is a 92

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new bond that is being created between women of today. In recent years success in the business world has brought women much closer to each other. Women with strong foundations, either married or single, feel strong and worthy. When a woman can pay her own way without looking to men for financial support, that by itself is a big step toward our heart’s desired liberty. Many famous and successful women have inspired others through stories of their own personal challenges and triumphs. Even if there is still jealousy and backstabbing among women of today, it is because being in a man’s world is a very new issue for women. We are still learning how to compete and we are scared and angry. However, with a new awareness among us, there is hope for female togetherness to conquer underhanded jealousy as more women become successful and fewer are left to gossip. There are those women who remain jealous of others and that is one reason why we are still being pushed around by male egos. Happiness comes from within, and the happier the woman, the less criticism she displays about other women’s successful lives. A woman’s jealousy is a manipulative tool that keeps us at a lower level than men. Women who make it in this world have to fight two opponents — men and jealous women. If every woman who puts down a successful female redirects her negative energy into building a valuable positive foundation for herself, she too will taste the sweetness of success. Very rarely a mother tells her son that he has to respect a woman for who and what she is. We can’t really expect an ignorant man to teach his son the value of women if he never learned it to begin with, but as a woman, a mother, a sister, we should teach boys to respect and cherish the women in his life. Unfortunately, most of the time our motherly jealousy prevents us from teaching male children that mothers are not the only woman they should love and respect. A mother should know that in order to see her son as a healthy-minded adult and a good husband, he should be given more lessons about women, their importance, and their value and worth than he is learning. Reach Out and Teach Someone We spoil our sons rotten, society doesn’t teach them enough, and we send them out unprepared to ruin many innocent lives and disre93

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spect the ones who make it in the man’s world. And also, if we expect to stop men from calling a successful woman a “bitch,” we have to first stop calling each other names in front of our children, especially our sons. When your energy becomes scattered over another woman’s worth and you feel unproductive and lost, that is the time you should refocus and practice being the center of your own life. If you are focused, there won’t be a minute in your life to waste on what others do. Women who have truly made it in this world have no problem learning from other women in power. Instead of feeling jealous, stop wasting your time and gather your own positive energy. Jealousy feeds on others’ energy but only weakens your own. Every woman possesses talent that she can put to better use herself instead of wasting it on someone else. Most of us put so much effort on improving our lives through men that there is nothing left for us. You could fill a book with the names of women who have given their all for their husbands, putting them through school and supporting them in businesses, only to have lost it all when he left her for someone else. Women who have been through such a trauma will tell you how wrongly they invested their effort and how ignorantly they built the foundation for their husband instead of for themselves. We carry males in our womb, nourish them with our blood, and bring them into this world, but we don’t teach them the truth about women because we, as women, don’t think much of ourselves to begin with. A young, educated woman from Caracas, Venezuela told me that men rule their lives in that country and women believe that men are kings and men expect to be treated as such. It seems that no matter where you travel, most of us still believe that the world is a male-dominated kingdom. Women have this early contact and the opportunity to teach them better, but unfortunately we forget about us, and under the guise of teaching them about humanity, pass along outmoded information. This misinformation, coupled with our special treatment, helps their egos grow and blocks their view about themselves and women throughout their entire lifetime. We go on forever about how we have to learn to deal with men and all we had to overcome when it would be simpler to teach them 94

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right in the first place. We create the monster and then we cry out with fear when the monster hurts us. We are the ones who make men the unqualified kings of the world and then if they treat us like slaves we feel we have no choice but to take it. Because we don’t know ourselves, our strengths and our worth, we have never given the proper respect to women. We give men the power to treat us poorly by portraying exactly the picture they have in mind. Recently, the flavor of television programming has begun showing a woman’s worth and strength, but it tends to have a mocking tone, as if to say to us, “Does this make your boo-boo feel better?” It is a start but it is not enough. As they say, “two wrongs don’t make a right,” and unfortunately one of these two wrongs comes from women who have willingly surrendered our part of the world to men. Women are fearful of being without a man because society says she has little value on her own and, believing she cannot make it alone, she buys into the false teachings until it becomes her reality. That is how the human brain works. Our mind has been too occupied with negative matter far too long. We have been absolutely brainwashed! Melissa told me that at age fifteen she was still escorted by her father to school, while her brother, who was only one year older, was already dating, driving, and smoking. Most mothers are the ones who tell their sons, “Don’t cry, crying is for the girls and you have to be tough and strong.” They are the ones who teach their sons to suppress their natural human emotions while releasing them is forbidden and weak. Some mothers don’t let their sons feel compassionate and completely human. Men are not as emotionally strong as women are. They cannot hold their emotions inside with their fragile egos, but parents and society overlook men’s inner weakness and only see the facade, the fact that they have bigger bones and muscles; therefore they must have stronger emotions as well. As children, men are discouraged from expressing themselves, so they grow up to become angry and resentful toward women’s peaceful dealing with crises. It is not that men have less emotion; they just never learned to develop them as women have. They had no practice, the same way that women didn’t practice to be as strong outside as she is inside. It would be wonderful to see a man who is so comfortable with his own 95

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masculinity that he reaches the point where he recognizes his feminine part that allows him to be soft, to cry without that shame of feeling less than a man. Men bring out the darkness in themselves because they have been told that the lightness that women possess is their weakness. When you deny the pain for so long, the suppressed emotions will manifest through hatred and violence. Men are Feminine, Too Men are not more dangerous than women by nature; if that were true, we wouldn’t have many absolutely great men in our world. But men are generally angrier than women are because society expects more from them than they can give. By playing the “weaker sex,” mothers acknowledge society’s ideas and beliefs that slightly feminine actions are not suitable for boys. They tell their sons not to cry when he should be emptying out his chest from the pain that he is suffering. We are killing the feminine side of him that our world so desperately needs to see. French men are famous for treating women better than any other men in the world, and they have always been the symbol of passion and romance. I am not saying they don’t believe the world belongs to them, but in their world, because of the closeness that a boy has with his mother, he is allowed to see and experience femininity more so than others and this makes him more sensitive to a women’s needs; he simply learns from his own mother how to treat a woman. There is certainly no guarantee that he will be forever yours, but at least a woman has a chance at a fulfilling relationship with him while it lasts. If we start today teaching our young boys, the future will bring more togetherness between men and women, and maybe marriages will last longer because people truly want to stay together. If your knowledge about men stems from your childhood fantasies, try to have an open mind and take time to learn the truth before you get married. Don’t be a slave to your emotions. Men are much more complicated and emotionally weaker than we have been led to believe. Yes, we are physically different from each other, but if we teach our sons, our brothers, our boys in school, that they can show pain and fear and we encourage them to release their frustra96

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tion through simply crying, maybe we can prevent them from growing up angry and frustrated. We should let them see how wonderful it is to be a woman and teach them to respect the emotions of the opposite sex. Remember, if not for women, there wouldn’t be men. Teach men to love themselves. Learn as much as you can about men before you give in to the hormones that will come crashing down on you like a big tidal wave, leaving behind a mass of residues. Manage your life from an early age. Stop learning how to serve men and start teaching them how they can have a good and healthy relationship with their mate by sharing their emotions and dealing with them. Teach them about the beautiful and the healthy part of our life that for nine months creates a little nest for them as an embryo, and tell them how we rejuvenate every month after our menstrual period; don’t tell them they are lucky that they don’t have to deal with periods, because it is actually one of the biggest reasons women live longer lives. Don’t knock yourself to make them feel bigger than they are. As a mother, teach your daughters about their worth and teach them that having men should be a desire, not a need. Don’t let them think marriage should be their life’s goal. Teach your daughter that she doesn’t need a man to bring her happiness. Teach her to love and respect herself, and when she happens to fall in love and is ready to give away her heart, she should instead plant her own garden and decorate her soul with its flowers, because believing someone else’s promise is like leaning against the wind for support. Let her see the light in her own backyard before she shines it on someone else’s face. Make sure that your daughters build a strong foundation for themselves before saying “I do,” and while you are teaching your children the value of themselves, don’t sit still; build you own foundation as well. Be independent, no matter what lifestyle you have. God created our physical differences for a purpose, but we are the ones who created the unjust differences in our lives. Teach them as a mother, sister, friend, coworker, or wife, and let them see that the old days are ending. We have been either too lazy or too afraid to put in the effort because we never truly believed in ourselves. A woman has more faith in her husband then she has in herself. 97

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Belief in her own weakness, which leads to desperation, has been a man’s motivation for mistreating a woman and, like a domino effect, it has been ruling our world for a long time. At this point in time, many of those domino blocks are standing still, unaffected by the weight of the others. The momentum is slowing, and we are starting to realize that we have been badly mistreated. Unfortunately we are partially responsible for that. We would like to see a better life for our future generations and for ourselves, and that is why many of us prefer to stay single rather than marry spoiled and immature boys who think they are the kings of the world! Don’t treat them like kings, because even if you become a queen, you are nothing but their toy and slave. Teach your children the value of being human and being their friend. Do not physically punish your children; talk is much more effective than the pain you inflict when you show hatred through punishment. As a child, we store our painful experiences in a compartment called the “subconscious.” Instead of pain, fill up your children’s subconscious minds with loving, healthy and valuable lessons that will be useful to them as adults. And, most importantly, learn to love yourself deeply, completely and unconditionally before you even think about having a child! We tend to believe that our children are our possessions, and if they are good or bad, it is nobody else’s business. Wrong. Our children belong to the world. A child who grows up dangerously angry and filled with hatred can, in one desperate moment, pick up a gun and kill innocent people. Hitler once was a child. The book, The Psychopathic God, By Robert Waite discusses what may have made Hitler so evil; if Hitler had grown up with loving parents, perhaps twelve million innocent people wouldn’t have been so brutally murdered. We should pay more attention to the actions of those men who are loving fathers and great husbands; nine out of ten had a loving mother more than a loving father. A loving mother can make a big difference in her son’s life to such a degree that it really can change the world for the better. Teach your sons to love, honor, and cherish women before they come face to face with her in adulthood without a clue of how they should treat her. Honor yourself as a woman and honor your children as human beings.

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The stability of future happy marriages and healthy unions is at hand, and it will only come to pass if our children learn their value from a very early age. This knowledge should be taught in our schools, but unfortunately, our present education system does not provide enough information for men to learn the true value of women. In Living with Joy (HJ Kramer, Inc., 1985, Publisher), author Sanaya Roman writes, “If you know people who seem to be very wise and yet put others down, reject friends, make people feel bad about themselves — no matter how high their works or what they teach — you can be rest assured they do not love themselves.” Let’s put aside our jealousy and send each other light with plenty of love to promote our awakening. When you feel jealous of another’s achievements, try sending love and light to them instead of negative thoughts. Everything we send into the universe comes back to the sender in many folds. Send love and light and see how your own life becomes enriched with love and happiness. Lucy, an unhappily married woman, strongly believed that the only thing keeping her from leaving her husband was money. She confronted her desperation by saying, “If I had two hundred thousand dollars in my hand, I would divorce my husband and start all over again in a second, but my hand is empty and I have no choice but to stay and suffer.” “What if you had one hundred thousand dollars? Would you still be able to leave him?” I asked her. “Yes,” she said. “How about fifty thousand dollars?” “Yes.” When I finally came down to almost nothing, she realized the only obstacle holding her back was her own fear and lack of belief in herself. My point is to feel important by being useful to yourself. Your only teaching doesn’t have to be to your children; that is for tomorrow. Meanwhile, try to make yourself strong enough to be able to have a greater impact for everyone around you. Impress yourself before you think of impressing others and bank your energy under your own name. Let’s change the world’s outdated expectations for us to one of happiness by letting ourselves get unhooked from outmoded beliefs and ideas about what we used to be. Be your own best believer, make

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your life worthwhile and, by all means, don’t wait for someone else to bring you flowers. As much as we have been lead to believe, I don’t believe marriage should be something we should have to work on at all, not even a bit. Marriage should be a loving bond between a man and a woman who respect each other for whatever length of time they choose to spend together. If you are working too hard to keep your marriage functional, then you are not a happily married woman. You must stop your energy from being drained before this hungry dragon swallows your very being. Stop believing in a bad marriage as a way of life. Women in truly happy marriages have husbands who also give their energy towards keeping the marriage together. When the man is the supporter of this union, marriage is not work — it is only togetherness and respect. Look at what is happening to our youth of today. Many of them are so angry and disturbed than it sends a chill down my spine to think that these are the ones who will one day run our lives. Be your own support and don’t even go near or walk on the edge of this quicksand. Be honest with yourself and more supportive and positive toward living a happy, single life — believe me, it is great fun! We must start to protect our future by not becoming voluntary victims in the name of marriage. If you are suffering, which is very sad and unfortunate, either take yourself out of it or don’t try to take others down with you. Put out your hand and get help. There is plenty of help out there, and the helping hands are getting stronger and more plentiful than ever before. A woman said, “If I put towards myself that forty years of hard work I spent on the man who trashed me like a used car and left me for another woman, I wouldn’t be in this mess. With all the bad things he did to me, I blame myself for taking it, for putting all my life’s support into bettering him in the belief of marriage. After forty years of marriage, I have so little that I am embarrassed to invite any old friend to my house. “I live on welfare, and if not for the help of my two children, I don’t know what would have happened to me. When you see a homeless woman, don’t just pass by indifferently — you never know, maybe she is a victim of her own ignorance. Maybe she was a wife and she believed in that union that brought her where she is now. Don’t get 100

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yourself locked into a situation that eventually stops your growth, for many marriages block self-growth. We start to lose self-respect and self-esteem, until finally the dragon eats you up from within.” When I was studying in Paris, I met a beautiful young woman who was a talented pianist with one wish — to play in public. She was a very friendly and happy person, kind and self-assured, and then she met her husband Mark, also a pianist. No one ever expected him to do anything else in his life but to follow what he could do the best — playing piano. I heard them both and I could not make an easy judgement as to who played better, but he was bound to put his talent into a career, and he made it into successful one, while in her spare time, she taught piano to little children. After a year of marriage, she was not happy at all. Her husband was traveling and holding concerts all over the country while she tended to his every need. I was present at many of her husband’s concerts, and she always stood up for her husband, fighting over the setting or arrangement of the concert. Finally, I asked her why she was so angry when she used to be so happy-go-lucky. She burst into tears and told me what she had been hiding for so long: “The life that he lives is the life I was hoping for myself. It’s eating me inside knowing I play better than he does, yet he is the one on the stage, getting bigger and bigger in name, while I prepare his meals and carry his suitcases so he doesn’t hurt his fingers. “When I married him, I was a single woman who was 35 years of age and going downhill. I could feel the coldness of my own family members who had husbands and didn’t want to invite a talented single woman into their homes. I opened a big door to a social life and closed a dream behind me when I said ‘I do.’ I am the shadow of my husband’s fame and achievements. It is hard to live someone else’s dreams. You must have at least one dream and wish of your own to see it flourish and give you the fruit of your own essence.” Be the star of your own life and direct your own destiny. We were born to feel enjoyment, but instead we welcome fear, anger, difficulties, anxiety and humiliation because of what people think about our way of life. I would not associate with people who judge me without any respectful knowledge of what I am all about. We read enough and we have been given enough lectures. A bad marriage is a bad marriage, and between us women, a bad marriage is the most dangerous 101

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emotional and physical health hazard for women and, unfortunately, we bring it upon ourselves. A woman told me, “After receiving my medical test results from our doctor, my husband asked me why I had such high blood pressure for such a young and skinny woman? ‘Oh my God, look at your cholesterol level, you shouldn’t have such high anxiety — you are sure it is not hereditary?’ I took him by the arm and walked him in front of the mirror and pointed at him, and I said, “This is the reason for my high anxiety!” With all honesty, we are a great help to our own high anxiety. We are the ones who let society manipulate us into what they want us to be, and as we all know, more women are the members of our society! We are the ones who take away our own credits and we are the ones who give men too much credit for doing things that we can do ourselves with less headaches and more ease. Stop being your number one enemy and start being your admirer. Be kind to yourself; you are a free-spirited being who was born to do something greater than most people can ever know. If your eyes are closed, please open them to the true happiness that exists inside you, and not in the presence of an abusive man who was pushed into your life by society.

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Seven Freedom FREE True freedom is a freedom of spirit which comes from God, a freedom of mind and heart which can never be taken away by people or events. No matter where I am at this moment or what the conditions may be, I can be free. So I claim my freedom now! I know with every fiber of my being that I am free — free from lack, free from doubt, free from anything that would hold me back or keep me from experiencing the wonder and beauty of life. I am a free and thankful person, declaring: “Thank you, thank you. God, for the freedom to pursue the hopes and dreams that you inspire within me, in your presence, I discover one of the most precious of all gifts — freedom, I am free to live, to love, and to be at peace. — Daily Word, Tuesday, May 27, 1997 How could it be possible to feel that kind of emancipation when we are held captive within the elevated, impenetrable walls of our outmoded society, in marriage? I was among those girls who learned from an early age that there is no real freedom, no real happiness, unless I am sharing my precious life with someone who is going to love me and complete me until one of us dies. But living in a cage of marriage for eleven years taught me better. Now I believe that marriage is not even one of the elements of happiness in life. I was in turmoil, uncertain and annoyed with society’s unkind remarks and heavy pressures to the point that, from time to time, I missed my childhood fantasy.

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As a child, I desired to share my life with my dream man, but in reality, the one I was planning lifetime happiness with had been cheating and lying to me even before we tied the knot. After my divorce, each time I got close to someone and the relationship got serious, I developed this feeling which I call “marriage phobia syndrome”! I know now that subconsciously, I created the situation for those serious relationships to break up and I managed to stop the damage before it could ruin my life and take away that precious freedom that I had in my serene lifestyle. I believe in life after death and reincarnation, but at the same time I believe that each and every lifetime is extremely important, and each one of those lifetimes must be lived in completion. We are each here for a reason and every moment of this life should be lived with total happiness and to the fullest satisfaction of our many different goals and accomplishments. When I see a woman living behind the walls of this cage, disintegrating little by little, my heart aches for her. There is absolutely no reason for anyone in this day and age to stay and suffer in any situation, especially not in a marriage. “. . . Joy and sadness, however, are not contradictory: they are both parts of authentic feeling — unlike the false smile on the wife’s face,” (Marriage Shock, Dalma Heyn). How well this has been described, and how sad it is to watch that pitiful smile, as if there is nothing more for her in this world. By gathering the treasure of our self-esteem the falseness of the wife’s smile can be changed into a happy and rejuvenating one. True happiness is not what we’ve learned since childhood, but what society condemns us for having — freedom! To feel free is the most precious and valuable gift that the vastly generous universe ever gave us, but women lacking self-worth either don’t accept the gift, or we hide it somewhere no one can see it. Our negative beliefs and thoughts create many rules and regulations for us and set boundaries that close the gateway to the real road to happiness in our hearts. Marriage is one of the boundaries we created to punish ourselves and keep us from the true joy in life that we deem to be unworthy to possess. When a woman gets married, she leaves herself in some dark

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corner and gives her entire energy to her husband. Look around you and then take a good look at your own life. Most women do indeed give 100 percent of themselves to their marriage and their husband, and suddenly everything changes, from the way they talk, eat, dress, sleep, think, it all changes, and before long they start living in a totally different dimension. While some might like that radical change, most women become loyal, well-behaved prisoners of marriage. Because they think and believe that this is the real thing that they must do, their thoughts become their reality. The innocent smile of that little girl with infinite happy dreams and fantasies becomes sad and pasted on the face of a “wife,” until it turns to jealousy and envies the true happiness lacking in her life — her freedom. I interviewed countless so-called “happily married” women who admitted very strongly that if they had money or security of their own, even with the remarks of other women in society, they wouldn’t stay married. Security was the number one reason women wanted to be married. There is a saying that you can only call a woman rich when she has a rich husband. When you think about it, a lifetime is an extremely high price to pay for security which any of us, if we put our minds to it, can easily provide for ourselves. Women don’t get enough credit for the energy they put into the unworthy, uncertain, useless, unjust union of marriage. We become prisoners of our own self-established boundaries. We have a great tendency to twist a joyful phenomenon into a punishment. We learned that having too much fun is called “sinful.” When we feel pleasure in our lives, fall in love and truly enjoy a relationship, we succumb to the unofficial rule and ruin it for ourselves. This is the boundary that humans create for themselves. Why is it that everyone desires freedom, but most are content merely to yearn for it? We are the free-spirited creation of God and we have been given free will. What good can that do for us if we don’t use it? No wonder we talk about freedom as if it is only a myth. We, as Americans, are very proud to live in a free country. That freedom gives us a sense of superiority, power and pride, but most women who live in this free country have a very hard time claiming their freedom, so they live with unhappiness. They would like to laugh, but they can’t,

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and when they smile, it is a false smile. They show their envy with mockery and jealous remarks, becoming bitter women. The unhappy woman yearns to break the cage of marriage and fly free like the single women, but she can’t. Her fear is blocking the way, so she searches to make herself happy by putting down those who are enjoying freedom, those who make her feel left out and frustrated. She criticizes how other women conduct their lives and she talks about how frustrated and miserable singles are. But when she goes to bed at night, she knows in her lonely heart that life really belongs to those who belong to themselves. Those are the ones who know the real meaning of happiness, but she will never let them know. She will start her tomorrow as she did yesterday, instead of listening to her own heart for the happy sound of freedom for which she yearns. When you are single, freedom hovers above your head. Don’t look at it as a curse. Reach up and grab it, turn it upside down and make it a quality in your life. Make it an asset for yourself instead of losing it in negative energy because others are envious of your strength. I can always tell when an unhappily married woman is jealous of my freedom; I can read it on her face. Take a good look at an unhappy woman who is stuck in marriage. See the difference for yourself; she is the one who comments, “When are you getting married?” and “How awful it is that you are still a single woman.” She either has a guilty look on her face because she knows what she is saying is false, or you can see peculiar lines around her lips and certain geometric lines around her eyes that I call “envy lines!” Try to press your lips tightly together, narrow your eyes, and tell a lie! That is how they look to me. Eyes are the mirrors of the soul, so look into the eyes of someone yearning for the freedom you have. Jealously is a big contributor to early signs of aging; it can eat you up inside and add years to your outward appearance. When you feel jealous, bear in mind that you are denying that our perpetually complete universe knows what it is doing. You are denying the Creator’s flawless work. Why do we stay and suffocate in a marriage instead of setting ourselves free? I strongly believe that our society is very much to blame. “Freedom” for most married women is when their husbands go on a

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business trip or if, for one weekend, his family decides to go away instead of coming over to their house for dinner. Vast and profound freedom only comes when you start to believe that you have power and are worthy of happily living your gifted life, free from obstacles. I greatly believe that if a married woman is trying to make herself feel good by making me feel bad instead of doing something about her own life, she is really announcing her own unhappiness because contentment is much quieter then despondence. Lidea’s Story “I was one of those unhappy women for a long time,” Lidea told me. “My life didn’t start that way, but somehow I wound up in those shoes. I met Jeff in Dallas, Texas at a convention; he was from New York and I was from Houston. We fell in love, and after a year-and-ahalf long-distance romance, he asked me to marry him. The preparation for our wedding was hard, but my family made it very easy for him. We had a small wedding in New York and then went about our life together. “The first year was just as I expected it to be, but things changed. As he was getting richer, I was getting more worried. Jeff happened to be a very good-looking man who always got a lot of attention from women. Being rich and good-looking is a very dangerous weapon for a man to possess, like giving a match to a child! I decided that since I didn’t work any longer, I should have children to keep him closer to home. Over the next three years, we had two children, and with each child, he got busier and busier with his work. If I complained, his excuse was very legitimate — he had to make more money to support his growing family. “I didn’t stop at that point either; two years later, when I was sure that he was having an affair with his secretary, I got pregnant again, and this time we had twins. Now I had four small children and a husband who, without a doubt, was having an extramarital affair, traveling much more than before and getting better-looking by the minute. “One day, when the twins had a high fever and the two oldest children were having a problem in nursery school, my maid came down with the flu. Exhausted and confused, I cried for the rest of the afternoon.

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I was frustrated; this is not what I wanted out of life. When I met Jeff I didn’t think marriage was going to be like this, and now I was a disappointed and angry woman. “After each child was born, and especially after the twins were born, we couldn’t have sex for a long time due to physical complications. I really wasn’t in shape for a long time, and as the days passed, I found myself growing nastier and angrier than before. I was not aware of what was happening to me. I wouldn’t associate with my single friends anymore. Their lifestyle was sickening, their freedom was nauseating to me, and my fear of losing Jeff to any one of them was a nightmare in itself. “I didn’t like summer vacations, because then Jeff saw other women in bikinis. My fear of losing my husband prevented me from confronting him, even though I was very well aware of his unfaithfulness. I was just too scared, and honestly, I thought it was my fault that he was seeing other women. I didn’t have any place to go, or at least I couldn’t see clearly that everyone has a choice; I thought I didn’t. “That is what marriage and society does to you — it blocks the way to your better judgement. My anger and jealousy were growing so badly that even my husband mentioned to me several times that I should stop attacking every single woman who crossed my path. “I wasn’t aware at the time that I was acting this way; I was simply acting out my envy and jealousy. I was constantly bragging about how happy I was and how wonderful it was to be married. I had several friends that were in the same boat, and we used to sit together and encourage each other to attack so and so, on what occasions, or we would try to find a man for the woman our husbands were paying attention to. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that I was getting wellknown for my remarks and sharp tongue, which of course stemmed from the unhappiness in my own life. “Finally, with Jeff’s persistence, I sought therapy and I found out that I was more jealous and angry at my husband’s freedom than at the other women. I was playing a role that I never wanted to take on in the first place. I wanted to be free but he was the one who had freedom. While I was at the grocery store buying diapers, taking the kids to the doctor, or sitting and reading baby books, he was flying over108

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seas for business trips and living a hell of a good life. I wanted to be him. I don’t know how I wound up being the mother of four children and acting pitifully jealous. “Fortunately, with the help of my therapist, I started to make some changes inside and out. I started to make myself the center of my own life. When I look back now and remember how nasty and unbearable I was to most women around me, I want to die of embarrassment and regret. I know in my heart that I hurt lots of women who had it better than I did, and I really made them feel lousy for not sharing the pain I was living with.” When I met Lidea she was very sociable and friendly. It was great to see that she had found herself, unlike many other women who cannot stop the downward spiral that has become a part of them and their belief system. Women who speak from jealousy may think that they are hurting others, but in reality their voices are a reflection of their deep envies and pain. Remember that people who like to put you down and are always ready with a sarcastic remark are the ones with a skeleton or two in their closets! What they really are saying is, “I make you feel bad to make myself feel good.” We all live inside our own heart. If you seek freedom, look first within your own heart. I searched for the definition of “being centered” for a long time. I knew the meaning of the words, but I didn’t know how to bring myself to a point of being truly centered, so as not to be shaken by women like the “old Lidea.” For years, I would come home from a party or a wedding and feel lousy or furious at what some angry woman had said to me. I knew that I, as a single woman, had a much better life than they did, but yet I was enraged when I was by myself, wondering how I could tell them off. Many times I was about to say, “You are fifty pounds heavier than before, your husband is cheating on you, you look ten years older than your real age — so when are you getting a divorce? Tell me, when is the big day?” but I never did. I guess the reason was because down deep I knew where her anger and sarcasm were coming from. Those who are enjoying their lives in spite of the opposition and momentary anger really don’t care what others say. My life was so fulfilled that I had no room to give more than a passing thought to the kind of life an unhappily married woman should have. It was then 109

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that I realized what “being centered” meant. I pictured myself as a surfer, so focused on staying on the board and having fun with the waves that I didn’t notice what was happening on shore. My advice to those singles who are having a good life is this: don’t throw away your freedom because of what others say. Try to ride the waves and stay centered, because freedom is the most precious gift of all. When you are free from the chaos of the ups and downs of marriage, you can put more effort into making your own life better. If Lidea had accepted that she was an ambitious woman who didn’t want to be a mother and a typical wife, watching her husband get a world of opportunity, she would not have been so miserable and unfair to others. Helen was different from Lidea, but being from a very traditional and very religious family, she had to be married, especially after she turned thirty. At the age of thirty-two, when finally she found her husband, she was sad and confused; sad because she liked her single life, and confused because she knew there was little choice in escaping the misery she would cause her parents if she didn’t marry. “When my husband asked me to marry him, I cried, but my tears weren’t tears of joy,” she said. “I knew from that moment on I was going to lose the feeling of belonging to myself forever, but my family and my parents didn’t leave me much choice. Just to prove to them that I could, I got married. Now I have been married for twelve years, and I have two daughters whom I love more than life itself. “Among all the men that I know and see around me, my husband is one of the most decent, but I do envy those who have themselves. I live for my husband; I wake up when he wakes up, I go to bed when he goes to bed, I shop when he likes to shop, and the list goes on to no end. I just don’t know what happened, but somewhere along the way I lost Helen. “I know I always will feel this emptiness in my heart. I don’t think that I will ever get a divorce, but I feel like I am carrying a weight that prevents me from feeling that freedom that I used to feel when I was a single girl living in my one-bedroom apartment in New York City. Ironically, it feels as if I had much more room in that little apartment than I have in my five-bedroom house on Long Island. I see with sadness that life is passing me by, and as much as I can, I advise young girls in my family to do themselves a favor and 110

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not get married. And bravo to those who already did close their ears to all the remarks and pressure, even if it did come from their own loving parents.” Maggie’s Story “Living under the supervision of a man like my father wasn’t easy, and after I turned thirty he was pushing me to get married. Even though I was living by myself, his constant reminder of my age was very unpleasant. Arnold and I met through a family fix-up. He was from a very reputable family and we had known of each other since childhood but didn’t meet until much later. My father was very happy, and was busy telling the world that his daughter was getting married. “Arnold was a quiet man, very serious about his work and his family. He had enough money to live a good life. I got pregnant on our honeymoon and didn’t stop until I had my third child. So far, you think that I had a good life, right? Wrong! He changed in the first month after our first child was born. Once, he slapped me so hard he gave me a concussion, but I lied and said that I fell in our wet hallway. I knew that I couldn’t complain to my father, who probably would take Arnold’s side. I had no place to go, since my child was only an infant. So that was my life. When I got better, he didn’t talk to me for a month, and then suddenly he became nice for awhile. “I got pregnant again, thinking that another child was what we needed. Wrong again! I was the envy of friends and family — I had a sincere man who wasn’t cheating or running around, but no one knew that I was a battered wife. Arnold was an angry man who would never show his anger in front of people. He was one of those types who no one would ever believe was an abusive person. Anything and everything made him angry, and I was his punching bag. I used to daydream about being free to backpack the world, but that was only a fantasy. “By the time my third child was born, I was getting famous for my clumsiness; all the black-and-blues on my face and body never made anybody suspicious of the fact that he was abusing me. But little by little, he was taking every bit of my essence and destroying it without reason. I knew that he was sick, but having been brought up in a traditional religious family that didn’t give women the right to act 111

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against a husband, I felt totally alone, and I had to make my sick marriage work. “Once, when I suggested Arnold see a therapist, he smacked me with his large hand and jolted my neck. Then he called me the sick one and threw me out of the house and locked the door on a cold winter night until I admitted that I was the one who needed to see a shrink. My neck was hurt so badly from that night, I couldn’t move it for months. As morbid as it sounds, though, it turned out to be the best thing he ever did to me, because when I did start seeing a therapist, I regained control of my life. I am now forty-five years old and I look like a beat up old woman. I have bursitis in my jaw, a permanent neck injury, and I spend more money on acupuncture and physiotherapy to alleviate pain than most women probably spend on plastic surgery. When I first went to the therapist, I had no hope in the world; I was a frightened, lost woman who had lived for many years with demolished dreams about freedom.” After the death of her father and many long hours of therapy, Maggie left her marriage. She feels rotten about how, in the name of marriage, she had allowed Arnold to treat her so badly for so long. Her liberation from that painful marriage didn’t come easy to her, though; she related her freedom to that famous story about a man who left jail after thirty years — and a week later committed suicide because he didn’t fit in. “But I tried,” she said, “I tried nonstop until I realized there is life without marriage. Maybe someday I will even go backpacking — if my condition allows it.” Women have a lot more going for them at this time, and many young girls are refusing to be puppets of their societies, cultures, and religions like Maggie. The universe gave us unconditional love and freedom of choice. We are free to create or recreate our own destiny. In the law of the universe, choosing any kind of lifestyle is perfectly all right, but isn’t it funny that we humans don’t give each other the courtesy to live our own lives the way we choose? No wonder many people believe that God didn’t create us — we created God. In over twenty years of my happily single life, whenever I told the man I was dating that I don’t want to get married again, he would ask me to be his wife! I didn’t have to trick him, I didn’t have to chase him, 112

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I didn’t have to read books and follow their step-by-step ways to catch a man, and I didn’t have to get pregnant to chain him down. As unfair as it sounds, men like to chase — but not be chased — when it comes to marriage. Chasing is one of man’s very strong desires, and the victory is when they have captured you and the thrill is over. Marriage ends the victory for men. In your dating life, did you ever notice that when you don’t really love a man he is the one who asks you out the most, or he is the one who calls you the most? That is extremely essential to men; they like to be ignored — it’s a challenge on which they thrive. With this in mind, picture these poor creatures in a lifelong relationship! David’s Story David’s big problem with his marriage was that he lacked even the smallest hope for freedom. “In my family, they prefer you have cancer than get a divorce. That is why I spend most of my time at work. I go to work at seven in the morning and I leave near ten at night. My wife checks on me every couple of hours each day. She calls when I am in a meeting and she calls when I am with a client. “When we were engaged, it was I who used to call her all the time, but as soon as she became pregnant, things changed. She is just a very insecure woman. She thinks she is left out, but the truth is that I am totally turned off. I loved her very much when I married her, but her behavior is pushing me away further and further every day. Every time I have a new female employee, she will show up in the office to check her out and surprise me. At the same time she embarrasses me as well, and most of the time she brings our little boy with her to tell the newcomer that she ‘has me for good and there is no chance for her.’ “It happened, though, that I fell in love with this new woman who was just hired. I feel free for the first time since I got married. The love and attention I get from her is very different than what I get from my wife. She is not needy or insecure, she doesn’t interrogate, she is a free-spirited woman who has been married before and now is totally against marriage. I know that even if I wanted to marry her she wouldn’t marry me, and that makes me even wilder about her. 113

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“Whenever I am on my way to see her, I feel that I grow two big wings and I am flying. If my wife would let me be, and let herself be that independent woman that I married in the first place, I probably wouldn’t need to fill up that gap of emptiness I felt when she started to be my jailkeeper. I need that feeling of freedom that my lover is giving to me. If there is love, there should be freedom to go with it.” Though this man was cheating on his wife, I couldn’t help but agree with him. When we scatter our energy, we get caught up in every bump and wave and we make it part of our everyday life. But when you are centered, you can feel the wind and ride the waves and yet you are there, right in the center, where you can be the happiest where you belong. Loving and Living Together A fifty-two-year-old woman told me, “I lived with Charles for twentytwo years. I don’t know why all of a sudden I started to listen to people who were saying, ‘You should get married. If two people can be happy together, it’s you. After all, you are getting old; don’t you want to have someone permanently yours? What about security?’ and so on.” So we got married. I just don’t know what happened. Five years later, I didn’t know the man I was divorcing. I really don’t know what happened to the loving, considerate man that I used to live with. With all honesty, maybe it was me — I don’t know. “The point is, why did our relationship work for twenty-two years based on a great love, and didn’t last with “security” and that reassuring piece of paper? Now I’d like to strangle those people who I listened to! If we hadn’t gotten married, I’ll bet anything that we would still be together. He told me that I was suffocating him — something that I never heard him say in the twenty-two years that we lived together before marriage; maybe I became a wife and I was suffocating him. Who knows!” What this woman didn’t understand was that she wasn’t the one who was suffocating Charles; it was his captivity behind the iron gates of marriage that did it. I’ve heard of many couples who got married after many years of enjoying a happy relationship, and shortly thereafter got divorced. It is marriage that suffocates you, not the person to whom you are married. Sometimes, when you start to see your part114

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ner suffocate, you start to feel it, too — it is contagious! Jean-Paul Sartre, the renowned French writer and “Father of Existentialism” had the same “sad comedy” dilemma in his life; he married a woman after being with her for twenty-five years, and a year later, they were divorced. What is it in marriage that can do that to our emotions? I believe that losing the sense of freedom that we are born with to a piece of paper legalizing our belonging makes us become old hat. We must find a new way to be together under less frustrating, less suffocating and less demanding relationships. Marriage should be based on freedom rather than captivity. Staying single in a relationship is to say, “Be in the world but not of it.” We, men and women, can be in the same union, in our own world of togetherness and yet not be “of it;” being “of it” means to make it legal and then finish it off — the whole thing; the love and the respect. Staying single is much safer for all concerned, yet after witnessing all this misery, society has the audacity to condemn singles, especially when the party in question is a woman. When one day you find yourself on a sandy beach, put both your hands into the sand and pick up as much sand as you can and place it on your open palms. Close one of your hands tightly, then open the hand that you were holding closed and empty the sand you have in each hand in a separate space next to each other. Now see which hand held the most sand. You’d be surprised that the amount of sand in your open palm is many times greater than that held in the hand that you were squeezing so hard. When you love someone unconditionally, your hand is open, like when you have the sand freely on your open palm, and when you close it with the demands of marriage, you lose almost every essence of your being. In marriages today, as it has always been, the door is open enough for men to go out and come in as they please, but getting close to the doorway is forbidden to women. How many men do you know who forgave their wife after finding her in bed with another man? If she stayed alive she is lucky, but we all know of many women who had to forgive their husband’s infidelities and live with them for the rest of their lives! Women, more than ever, are being squeezed in the hands of marriage. The scale is not balanced in our lives and that makes the freedom of staying single sound and feel really great to the women of today. 115

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They are saying with one voice, “We are not gaining anything by giving our precious gift of life and freedom to any man. The price we pay is way too high and in the end the result we get is far too diminutive.” I don’t need to convince anyone that men know the value of freedom and have tried for centuries to keep this precious gift only to themselves to enjoy. We also know very well that marriage, with few exceptions, is much more beneficial to men than women. The overwhelming divorce rate reflects women’s desire to attain the same status men have enjoyed. The Prince of Wales, our beloved Anthony Quinn, President Clinton, and even rabbis and priests are all proving that men are not reliable foundations for our lasting love and devotion — at least not yet. It is getting embarrassing to publicly say that you are part of a happily married couple when so many who have said it have already been slapped in the face by scandal. This is the time to set ourselves free from the humiliation that marriage brings upon us. For a woman to achieve freedom and satisfaction in life with man as her equal partner, she must first build her own solid foundation and become the master of her own destiny. If a man can’t “own” you, he can’t rule you. Like the song says, “You don’t own me . . . don’t tell me what to do anymore.” Freedom means having control over your own life and your own destiny. Every creation in our world of technology was based on wanting more freedom. Cars, telephones and airplanes are all conveniences, but with a profound hidden purpose. When you own a car, you have wheels. When you are in a plane, you have wings. These creations came about as a result of our eagerness for freedom — freedom from being captured by time and limitations. If you are grasping freedom in life, no one can hold you down but yourself. Don’t act like a little child trapped in a car seat asking, “Are we there yet?” Unbuckle the seat belt of marriage and fly the rest of the way if you need to get to your aimed destination. Don’t count on someone else to set you free.

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Eight What is Wrong With Being Single? The great poet Rumi once said, “You are the unconditional spirit that is trapped in conditions. Like the sun in eclipse. We are a pure spirit because part of us is participating in space and time and yet another part is free as the wind and beyond. Free as the dust in the dust, free as the wind in the wind. And all these wizards have said the same things, they all said that deep inside you there is an inner intelligence and this intelligence is the ultimate and supreme genius which mirrors the wisdom of the universe. And when you find this intelligence, then life will become magical and miraculous. — Dr. Deepak Chopra, The Way of the Wizard.”

The Wizard which Dr. Chopra is pointing at is that awareness within us which is rapidly awakening to help us find the magical and miraculous energy being mirrored from the universe — an intelligence that awakens our consciousness. Women’s awakening has been much quicker than men can comprehend and it is creating a form of chaos in itself. Sadly for some women, being aware of their worth and profound power is unfamiliar, and vastly strange to a majority of men. “If anything, the return of the magical has really been greeted more quickly by women in our society than anyone else and for that I am grateful to womanhood. Today, lots of wizards are awakening in society and they are very ordinary people. They are not famous; they 117

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might be standing in the grocery store in front of you. It is happening in an astonishingly rapid way. Collective consciousness is merging into working to what is called a critical mass, when everybody is going to become a wizard” (Dr. Deepak Chopra, The Way of the Wizard seminar). Victory Over “The Virus” The story you are about to read tells of an experience from the darkness of my ignorance — a combination of youth and unfair expectations from our society. Before I could set myself free as the wind in the wind, when I was not enlightened enough to ask with total reassurance, “What is wrong with being single?” I had to go to great lengths to prove that I could do it as well. I was holding the bouquet of red roses that Steve gave me in the airport so closely to my chest that I could feel the thorns piercing my flesh. I was feeling dizzy and warm and I didn’t know what was wrong with me; the past three days had been an experience that I would never, ever forget. I was thinking about the time that I had spent over the past weekend and I looked up to see him smiling at me with a glow of victory on his face, as if he had just won the lottery. He wouldn’t let go of my arm for a moment. I had very little time to catch the plane, but he was using every second to be with me, even though we were to become husband and wife in less than a month. Finally the last boarding call was announced and I had to leave for my destination — New York City. I walked onto the plane with shaky legs. My mouth was dry to the point that I could barely speak. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I had never before felt like this. I thought maybe I had caught something in Dallas, but the feeling wasn’t like an illness; I felt more frightened than sick. I actually felt like I was going to have a heart attack, even though I was young, a nonsmoker, and very healthy, but there was nothing else to identify my condition at that moment. I managed to fasten my seat belt, and a flight attendant kindly asked me if I wanted her to put my flowers in water until we arrived in New York. Surprising myself, I told her she could keep the flowers. My hands were shaking so that I could not keep control, and I felt so weak I thought I was going to faint. My heart beat as if it was in my 118

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throat, and as the plane took off, I started to hyperventilate. My entire body was soaked in a cold perspiration, I felt numb and I thought for sure that I was going to die in midair from a heart attack. My whole life flashed before my eyes. I thought about my child, who would be waiting to see me in a couple of hours, and about my mother, who was so happy when she heard that I had set my wedding date. I felt disoriented and unable to make any decisions. I felt disconnected and fearful of everything, as if I was hallucinating. At that point, I knew something was very wrong and, with disbelief, I asked the flight attendant for help. I knew for sure that I was going to die; I was pretty well convinced that the symptoms I was experiencing were those of someone on the verge of a massive heart attack. There was no other explanation, I thought, and soon I would be dead. I had just left the arms of the very reputable doctor whom I was soon to marry. Why hadn’t I told him I was feeling this way? Why was it easier asking the stewardess for help? I had no idea at that time. “May I have a glass of water, please?” I said, and immediately I added, “Is there a doctor on the plane? I think I am having a heart attack.” She gave me a double take, and I saw the fear on her face, which made me feel ten times worse than I had felt only moments ago. I felt faint, closed my eyes and began to pray. When I opened my eyes, I saw three flight attendants rushing toward me. One opened an oxygen mask, another was checking my heartbeat, and the third, the eldest of the three, gave me a yellow pill and a glass of water. “Don’t worry,” she said, “you are experiencing a panic attack. I am a registered nurse and I see many people go through this when the plane takes off.” Without hesitation, she helped the other flight attendants push the oxygen mask over my face. In less than half an hour, I was weakly back to normal. My heart rate had declined, my body felt warm, and I was no longer shivering. My vision had cleared and finally I could speak. Through the entire ordeal, the flight attendant who had given me the pill had been sitting next to me, holding my hand. I started to cry with relief. I had heard about anxiety attacks but had never before experienced one. I leaned my head back against the seat and, tears rolling down my face, I smiled at the stewardess and told her that I was just fine. I went along with her belief that I simply had a fear of flying, which I didn’t. 119

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Several years ago when I left my husband, I was almost certain I’d never get married again but, being only in my early twenties, I was not immune to the “virus of the mind” (as Oprah Winfrey calls it) that says, “You simply must be married!” So when I met Steve, I already had “the virus” that our tribal-minded society has been spreading around for centuries. I was not prepared for the severity of the virus back then and, after several years of living a healthy and happily single life, I gave in to the virus of marriage and “settling down.” My reaction in the plane was just a loud and clear subconscious rejection to that decision which was against my total belief. Steve was a very well known doctor with a reputable private medical center in Dallas, Texas. I was tired of being pushed by family, friends and society so I gave in to his aura of the perfect husband and accepted his marriage proposal, knowing that deep down inside, I really didn’t want to lose my freedom. A force stronger than my own will pushed me to say, “Yes, Yes,” simply to avoid people’s comments. I said, “Yes” because I knew that would make my mother very happy, but sadly, I wasn’t thinking about my own feelings — like how much I adored living in New York City. To me, New York is the most unique city in the world and the thought of leaving it was very painful, but in spite of that, I was willing to make a new home with Steve in Dallas just to stop the murmuring about why I was not married. The anxiety really began when Steve took me to his parents’ house and told them the news about our wedding. They were very happy, but I developed a migraine headache so severe that Steve had to take me to his clinic and give me medication to stop the pain. The day of my departure, the weather was beautiful but I felt gloomy, as if the sky were gray and the warmth of the sun was missing. At the airport, when Steve gave me the flowers and called me his “future wife,” the anxiety crept up on me without my knowing. Marie Antoinette probably felt something like this when she was told that she was going to be beheaded! The stewardess softly asked me how I felt. I opened my eyes and said to her, “I don’t think I am scared of flying anymore.” She seemed happy to have helped a passenger, but what I really meant was that I felt free again, and there was no way I would go through with this marriage. I would have to tell Steve my decision as soon as I got to 120

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my apartment in New York. I arrived at my apartment around midnight and before even turning on a light, I picked up the phone and called him. Without any guilt or hesitation, I told him what had happened to me on the plane and that there was no way I would go through with this marriage. Though he was angry, I smiled because I knew that this would never again happen to me; No matter how much society pushed me, I would see to it that I would never give up the most valuable asset of my life — my freedom. That night I slept better than I had in a very long time. Many years after that horrifying three-day weekend in Dallas, I watched Oprah talk about the “virus of the mind.” I wanted so badly to tell her that this virus has been spread around by our unfair and nosy society and it is time to find an antidote to stop it from infecting the minds of our young girls. The reason for my “cold feet” wasn’t just because Steve lived in Dallas and I lived in New York City; when he asked me to marry him, I could see him for what he was — a demanding, self-centered, non-compassionate and needy man who wanted to turn me into a robot. I believe my love for freedom protected me from giving up what I valued just to please others around me. I had beaten the virus and I was happy about that for a long time, but the gossip didn’t stop and there were those people who wanted to re-infect me. Unfortunately, after a couple of years, I succumbed to “the virus” again, but only momentarily. Just Say No I met Joel in a restaurant. He was an executive and part owner of a very large and well-known clothing company. He said he fell in love with me from the moment I walked into the restaurant. One week later, we were dating and soon after, he popped the question. He lived only ten blocks away from me in a very luxurious duplex apartment with a beautiful view of New York City. He was neat and didn’t seem selfish or self-centered, but after a very short time I realized that he could drink — boy, could he drink! But I was not going to make a fuss over that, especially because I knew my family and friends hadn’t recuperated from the “Steve episode.” They still considered me at fault and too fussy, whispering 121

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to themselves that perhaps something was wrong with me, so I dated Joel for a while. Our relationship was fun and happy until he took me to his vacation home for a serious talk about our future together and to set a wedding date. The big stone house was built in the middle of twenty acres of lush land, and it was breathtakingly beautiful. That night was the first night that I spent with him; our New York apartments were in such close proximity to each other that I had always insisted on sleeping in my own bed instead of staying over. This was going to be quite an experience for me. We ate a pleasant dinner in front of the fireplace. I drank one glass of wine, and Joel consumed the rest of that bottle — and then another! We talked and decided to be married among only our children and very close friends at his summer club, and then I would move into his apartment, because it was much more spacious than my own. Honestly, I was waiting for the anxiety to creep up on me, but to my surprise, nothing happened, so I believed that this time I was lucky and he was “the one.” After our long dinner and lengthy conversation about our future we got ready for bed. While he was singing and putting on his robe, I couldn’t stop wondering how this skinny man could drink so much. I felt a twinge in my stomach but I dismissed it and convinced myself that I had to marry him — if I didn’t, what would people say about me this time? God knows I was not ready for that; you see, I caught the “virus” again without knowing it! We had both had a long day and it was way after midnight when we finally got to bed. I don’t know exactly how long I had been sleeping when I jumped up to what sounded like an avalanche! I abruptly sat up and deliriously reached over to awaken him, realizing only then that the sound I heard was not an avalanche, but snores coming through his nose and his half-open mouth! I sat there with my eyes wide open, scared as an owl, and didn’t know what to do next. I shook him gently at first, and then harder, but he didn’t wake up and didn’t stop snoring. Finally, I decided to sleep in one of the (several) guest rooms. While I was carried my shaky body to the other room I couldn’t help thinking, “God, how can I marry a man who snores like that?” The way it looked, he would never wake up until the effect of the alcohol left his blood in the morning. 122

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Except for the noise, it was as if he was dead all night. His snoring was so loud that even moving to the third floor of the house didn’t help me get a good night’s sleep. In the morning, he found me curled up in front of one of the fireplaces with tissues stuffed in my ears. He thought that was funny and said it reminded him of his ex-wife! Stunned, all I could do was sit there and stare at the wall. All the good feelings I had about being his wife and closing the mouths of my family and friends didn’t matter anymore. I was being cured from the virus once and for all and all I had needed was the sound of an avalanche to do so! I told him the truth — that I was not going to spend the rest of my life with a man who drinks that much and snores that loudly! Well, then he showed his true colors. Being an alcoholic made him more defensive than I expected, and he threatened that he was not going to take me back home until I came to my senses. “Listen buster,” I said, “Throughout my life, I traveled around pretty well. I have been on planes, in hovercrafts, buses, taxies, trains and even on the Concorde by myself. I think I can manage to get back to New York from where we are. Either you take me back or I will make my own arrangements.” At least he was sober enough (after his fifth cup of coffee) to realize that I was very serious, so we left. That night I finally told my mother that the wedding would not take place, and before she could even start to tell me what people were going to say about me, with a newfound calmness I told her, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” And from the bottom of my heart I felt free again, this time for keeps. I finally realized there was no way I would ever fall back into the dynamics of that trap set by society to make singles’ lives miserable by forcing them into marriage. Up to this day, I have kept that promise and I am very proud of myself for that. When you want to learn something you go to an expert. Having lived single and happy for many years, I am most qualified to tell you that despite the unfair and fundamentally pure jealousy directed toward you, there is nothing wrong with being a well-adjusted single living free from the “virus of the mind!” After I left my husband, I met a man whom I fell deeply in love with. I spent eight lousy years with his lies and cheating, in hope of changing him to a better person (which, of course, didn’t work). Now, he is miserably married and 123

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dying of regrets. Steve is in his fifth marriage and Joel is still looking for a woman who can take his drinking and snoring. I beat the old beliefs with my strong will for freedom and happiness — without a legal partner — and you can do it too, even if now you are walking in my old shoes. Don’t Put Your Happiness on Hold There was a time when mothers would send their daughters to a good school or encourage them to take a good job just to find a man. Now, a vast majority of women are learning from the mistakes of others. Going to school and getting a good job or starting a great career is only going to be an asset to themselves. They have no intention of leaving it behind for the iffy 35 percent chance of staying married. Our growing awareness has helped us realize that no one has the power to make us happier than we do. Happily living single is the true meaning of freedom. Looking for happiness in marriage is a big gamble that not many people, women or men, like to take anymore. We are reaching the end of our journey. The wizard is awakening in us to the realization that being alone doesn’t mean being lonely. We will no longer let ignorance push us back to a place where we don’t belong. Being single shouldn’t be a waiting game. I know so many women who don’t live fully because they are waiting to be married to use the china that their grandmother left to them. I knew a woman with a very good income who lived like a gypsy. Her apartment, which was in a very good location in uptown Manhattan, was extremely depressing. There were no pictures on the walls, no decorations, and no flowers. Everything was piled up on the floor. There wasn’t a piece of decent and comfortable furniture in the entire place. She slept on a lumpy sofa that she opened with difficulty every night because she was waiting to be married to start her life and buy a “real” bed. I asked her, “How do you entertain your male companions in this condition?” “Well, they have to understand that I am in a waiting period,” she responded. I honestly don’t believe that was a very appealing atmosphere in which any man could get to know this woman. You are how you live, and that wasn’t living — that was a desperate act of waiting 124

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and feeling unfulfilled with her own life. Worse, it let everyone know she had little self-respect. She didn’t matter to herself as a person, as a whole being, as the ultimate perfect creation. She saw herself only as “half” of a potential “whole,” and radiated this unhealthy attitude to all those around her. When you are good to yourself it creates a certain aura which automatically gives a positive impression to others. If you are a single woman hoping for a husband, first treat yourself with respect and live a good life. Do not wait for marriage to give you the life you desire. Respect starts from within you and then radiates from you. Someone who lives life in limbo waiting for Prince Charming (or a frog) cannot attract them by looking hurried and wanting to get out of her own life to join theirs; that is a turnoff to most people. If you don’t honor yourself, no one else will — especially a man who is just beginning to know you. Your hunger to catch him shows from miles away. Remember, you are perfect and complete the way you are. Don’t feel less because you don’t have a man, and don’t wait until someone else comes along to give you what you mistakenly believe is missing in your perfect life. If you feel nothing unless he gives you your ideal life, when he leaves, he will leave you with less than you had before. If your completion is dependent on someone else, you are in deep trouble. Living in limbo until “the big day” will leave you empty and lonely. If you live your life for yourself, you’ll be amazed at how miraculously you can attract positive people into your life. It has been said that we come here fully equipped. We don’t need spare parts — we are not manmade, and we have been made by the perfection of the great divinity. There is nothing we need to give us more than we already have; we only have to believe and recognize it. The moment you feel complete is the time you will find the one who can be adding to this perfection; this is a rule of the universe. I can’t say it enough — don’t make marriage your goal. Your goal should be to better yourself. Marriage, if it was meant to be, will happen. If it does not happen, and you are in that stage of perfection, it really doesn’t matter. Many women and men believe marriage takes away from — rather than adds to — their lives. Thousands of women find their husbands in bed with other women (or men!), and thousands of others find out about their husband’s 125

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affairs only after he passes away. On a recent episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, everyone on a panel of married women claimed that they had had a more exciting sex life before marriage. I wonder why! When I hear that 40 million women live with pain and emptiness — all in the name of being called “wife” — with no desire to have sex with their husbands, it makes you wonder what started this thing called “marriage” in the first place! A woman told me, “The best part of my life started when I finally achieved my independence and realized my self-worth. I was no longer living in someone else’s world; it was my world to have fun in. I started to have more friends, I attended more parties, and most importantly, I started to laugh — something that I never did in fifteen years with an abusive man in an abusive marriage. I say “abusive marriage” because he wasn’t the only disparaging person in my life; almost all his close relatives were insulting as well. “When I left them, I felt this lightness in my heart, as if a huge chunk of metal was lifted from my chest, and now I am putting all my positive energy into bettering my own life. I don’t feel as if I am disintegrating while still alive. As a single woman, I have much more fun than I could ever imagine possible, and I will never let it go. This happiness is the only thing that I will keep ‘until death do us part!’” I learned through my own happily single experiences that when you are the center of your own life, there is no need for legal attachment, and when there is no legal attachment, there will be an abundance of adoration to last a lifetime. Detachment from needs creates healthy attachments to others. Who needs the grief from marriage when we can achieve long-lasting happiness living in the enrichment of liberty and unconditional love? Society judges and attacks singles because singles exercise their free will and do not participate in this “marriage madness.” There are many other more important matters to put our effort and attention into instead of concerning ourselves with who is going to be the next in line. Any woman putting her energy into desperately seeking a husband who will drain her, who instead channels that energy into getting a better education or building a career for herself will have much more stability in her life. Your goals should be within your own reach, not in someone else’s hand. 126

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Don’t let others’ jealousy or our old-fashioned society change the truth about you. Being single at any age makes you a winner. Don’t let anyone take that happiness away from you. Protect your mind from the disease that our grandmothers suffered from. If most of your friends are getting married but not you, don’t worry; sooner or later, at least 65 percent of them will come back and they will need your help to put the scattered pieces of their broken lives together. I have done this many times, for many people, so I know what I am talking about! You are validated even when you are “single” — again, because you matter. Always keep in mind that we are born total and complete. No piece of paper and lifetime of misery can tell you otherwise. If you feel manipulated by others remember that you too are complete. Don’t be an incomplete person to satisfy others. A man can choose to share a full-time marriage with an incomplete partner or a part-time relationship with a complete partner — it is his choice. We talk about great love stories, like Romeo and Juliet. If those lovers, in the greatest imagination of Shakespeare, hadn’t used poison on themselves but instead got married, most probably Romeo would have taken many lovers and Juliet would have had her own affairs. The scandal would have made it ugly and unbearable to the point that, after a short time, I’ll bet they would have used the poison to kill each other! Their love is such an inspiration to the world because they didn’t marry — they didn’t have time to kill the magic! Let’s imagine that you have found your Prince Charming and he is the best there is. He will never cheat, never lie, never come home late, never ignore you or take you for granted. He is considerate, very compassionate and he cares for your children from a previous marriage as if he was their biological father. He loves your mother, respects your father and is truly a prince. Then, one day, when your hope is completely in him, your heart is full of his love, and you can’t even breathe without him, he drops dead — then what? Frankly, I don’t believe there are many such men on this planet, and if they do exist, a marriage with such total surrender to your partner leaves you at great risk. Singles dismiss the stigma of loneliness and replace it with selfworth. No single person can be lonelier than an unhappily married person. Loneliness is in the heart of a woman who feels like a ghost 127

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in her own home with her husband who, most of the time, doesn’t even know that she exits. There is always hope for singles to meet someone exciting, even if only for a short time. When we get married, we bury that hope inside our hearts and, if we look for excitement beyond what our partner gives us, the outcome will be the sinful act of cheating. Never before have women understood with such clarity the risk in giving up what they have just to satisfy those around them. If you are one of those women who has everything but a husband, then you already have everything! Well-adjusted single women are totally indifferent to others’ unfair remarks and really could care less what society expects. They truly have a great time. You can see their aura, their sense of self-worth, and a youthful look and behavior that is missing in many married women. A powerful mystery surrounds them, like a halo of light, and you wonder what is their secret, how can these women always do something positive for their own lives? A married friend who knew that her husband was cheating on her asked me one day, “Do you ever have a bad day?” I think that was the best compliment that anyone could give me. I do have bad days, but my bad days are my bad days and I can do something about them because they aren’t caused by outside forces. If my date was rotten or a relationship turns sour, I don’t have to pack my things and go to my mother or a friend for help. I still go to my own place, I sleep in my own bed, and my clothes still hang in my own closet. If I get hurt by some man and feel like crying, I will cry in the privacy of my own home, and eventually I will get over it. I don’t have to worry about losing my dog, my stereo, my home, or worse, my children. Because I don’t know who I am going to meet, I always look my best. I don’t work hard; it just became a habit to me, the same way the opposite becomes a habit for many married women. Even though it seems that this book has a feminist flavor, I know many men who have lost a great deal, emotionally or financially, through marriage and never recovered from their loss. I have written this book from a woman’s viewpoint because generally marriage is more to men’s advantage than to women’s. I have lived in one place for twenty-five years, versus many friends and relatives of mine who have been married and moved several times during these same twen128

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ty-five years, each time losing a great deal of themselves in the process. So I don’t listen to people who ask me when I am going to “settle down!” Who is more settled, anyway — a woman who has been married and moved several times living through Hell, or someone who has been settled down in her own way of life for that long? While you are deciding on marriage or staying single, the main thing is to be true to yourself and your feelings because playing the part is not the answer. Mime’s Story Mime was a longtime friend who never married, and many people — including her unhappily married sisters — were envious of her freedom and her youthful look, which may have been from lack of worry and the heavy responsibility of being a wife. She always told me that she would never marry and wanted to live just like me. When she reached the age of forty, something suddenly happened to her and she became one of those desperate husband-hunters who turn off men on the first or the second date. She would send signals from the very first date that she wanted to be married, and the man would run for his life. Ironically, she had had many proposals when she had been happily single, but everything changed when she started seeking out a mate. Her neediness made men who had once been attracted to her turn away. She suddenly wasn’t true to herself; she was acting and living someone else’s life instead of being happy to be who she was. When I visited her in Los Angeles, she was angry and sad at the same time, and it was heartbreaking. One day she screamed with despair, “What is wrong with men? I have everything — a beautiful apartment, great and expensive furniture, I am attractive enough, I cook for them on the second date, and I have my own money. Why do none of those men who chased me at the beginning want to have anything to do with me?” “Dear friend,” I said, “You are not being true to yourself. You show them someone who is not you and then when they get interested, they realize that you are really someone else. Your desperation for marriage shows and it is not very attractive to those who were drawn to your 129

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abundance of self-love to find that you are a needy girl. You don’t attract them anymore — at least not those whom you lured into believing in your phony representation. You are not that exciting girl that I used to know, or believed that I knew, anymore. You are entangled in the tribal mind of society, caring too much about what others say or think, and honestly I think you always have been. “You are affecting my judgement about you because of the way that you chase those men away from you. Until you free yourself from this tribal web, you will get deeper and deeper in a rut.” Unfortunately, I think that was the last time we ever spoke. I left her apartment much sooner than intended and left her to deal with her anger and her selfdestructive way of life. When we write our own scenario and play in our own show, we are the star and we can remain a star if we so choose. But when we play a part and our performance depends on another actor, we, most likely, will lose our impact. If he is a lousy player, the show will be ruined for us and no one will be the star. Mime lost it when she started to look for her leading man. She lost it because she became needy for a partner who didn’t know how to play opposite her. It was very sad for me to see an independent, successful friend turn into a needy woman because society was giving her grief. If she had been strong enough, she would only have laughed at those who were draining her youthful energy from her. A married man told me that he had been having affairs since the first year of marriage, twelve years ago. When he started his affairs he was very attracted to single women, but then he realized that the lifestyle of a single woman gave him a complex. He went through many affairs until he realized that he was simply jealous of the freedom he had lost when he married through family pressure. “I used to tell all those single women that they have to get married,” he said. I just wanted them to be like me. I used to tell them stories about disease and danger out there, but the truth of the matter was that I couldn’t stand it when my lover would pack and go on an exciting vacation without me, not knowing who she was going to meet, or how much fun she was going to have. When I went on vacation, it was more like a duty or obligation than fun. I was envious of their freedom and fun, and most left me because they couldn’t tolerate my demanding attitude. The one I was most crazy about once said to me, ‘If mar130

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riage is so great, what in the hell you are doing with me? If I wanted to be a wife, I would not see a married man — I would go husband hunting,’” and she left me for good.” Another woman told me, “I was a happily single woman until I was pushed by society into a relationship that was heading for marriage. I was wearing big diamond rings and driving expensive cars, but he was a verbally abusive man, a self-esteem killer. One day I was complaining to a married friend of mine (who happened to have a very irresponsible and lazy husband herself) that I didn’t think I could go through with this marriage. ‘He is a very nasty man, he curses at me all the time, he is rude and disrespectful. I am sick of the way he is and I don’t know what am I going to do.’ ‘Is he a cheater?’ She asked. ‘No, I don’t think he is the type.’ ‘So at least he doesn’t cheat. What would you do if he were cheating on you? Would you prefer a man who treats you well and cheats or the man who treats you badly and is faithful?’ I screamed as loudly as I could, ‘None of them! Who said I have to settle for any man who either cheats or abuses me verbally or physically? I am just fine without any of them!’ Thanks to my friend, that conversation opened my eyes to what I really wanted and I left my fiancée the same week.” Mary told me, “When I got engaged, I invited three of my married friends, my only true friends, to dinner to celebrate and break the news to them, but instead of a celebration, I was shocked when I got hit three times on the head! They told me that my life was an inspiration and how much they admired and even envied my freedom. By getting engaged and joining the “marriage club” it was a letdown to all of them, and finally they said, ‘We thought you were smart.’” In our culture, we always believed that a smart woman is the one who closes her eyes to her husband’s infidelities, who plays the whore in the bedroom and the cook in the kitchen, the one who, in spite of hating her husband’s family, entertains them and gives her all for his happiness. Nowadays “smart” is changing its definition; the smart woman is the one who saves her energy for bettering herself and enriching her own life, and she doesn’t waste even one day waiting for “Mr. Right” to come along and give her that false security. The smart 131

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woman is the one who doesn’t lose everything when the man drops her flat on her face, demolished and helpless. We have come a long way, haven’t we? Singleness is Healthy We can add to our life span if we eat well, exercise, sleep well and, most importantly, stay away from stressful situations. If we have a stressful job, we can change it. If we live in a stressful city, we can move. If we have friends that create stress in our lives, we can sever our friendship, but what about marriage? If we want to leave a bad marriage, divorce can be the most stressful time in anybody’s life. Many women fear divorce more than death. If marriage were shorter, by design, our lives would be longer. We are keeping each other bottled up in the name of security and that is a major factor for stress in our lives. A single woman who has established her own security can share more fully with her partner, adding joy and laughter to the relationship. It has been proven that fun and laughter and peace of mind can add greatly to our lives. Over the past twenty-two years of my happily single life, I have seen it all. I have sympathized with and showed compassion for those who admitted to me their misery in marriage. I had pity for and prayed for those who were in a rut but chose to do nothing about it, those who took their anger out on singles’ lives in any shape or form simply because singles were living, vivid examples of what they couldn’t be. Most of those who have criticized my life ceased their attacks because they finally understood that I have walked a long way in both pairs of shoes and, believe me, singles walk in greater comfort! A recent study showed that in France, only 5 percent of marriages survive and, in Italy, women’s reluctance to be wives and mothers is leading to the massive decline in their population. In like fashion, we are not far behind them in this country. When someone asks you, “When is the big day?” answer with a smile, “Today, today is my big day. I’m where I wish to be. Yesterday is behind me and tomorrow is unknown and you are with me on this big day. The question is, are you enjoying yours? Because I am.”

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Living happily ever after in marriage is an illusion put in our minds by our society. We are finally seeing most marriages for what they really are — big, disappointing mirages. The closer we get, the bigger the disappointment. Most of us — women, men, and children — have been cheated by this constitution that has brought more chaos into our lives than happiness. If everyone built their own lives and took care of their own garbage, then being together actually can be long lasting. To be very honest with you, even with all the negative actions men have taken against women, if I wake up tomorrow and a TV anchorwoman announces that all the “Martians” have left planet Earth and they will never come back, I think I would die of sadness because, even with all their idiosyncrasies and their childish behavior, I love men profoundly and can’t live without them. But still, I wouldn’t like to be married to them! The best advice I can give to those women who have never married is this; if you want to stay happy and have solid intimacy and romance in your precious life, don’t tamper with your partner’s garbage bag. After years of experience, I realized that as long as we don’t let ourselves get close to that garbage, the safer we are because when we get too close to the danger zone we have the tendency to dump all that rubbish on each other’s heads and expect the other person to sort it out for us. When the smelly garbage piles up on top of us we start to suffocate and, believe it or not, most of the time women are the ones who have to clean up the mess. Personally, I stay far enough away so that they have plenty of space to sort out their own garbage, but if they cannot get rid of it and are waiting to dump it on me I run as far and as fast as I possibly can. Unless we enter into this union with an empty garbage bag and a heart full of love for ourselves and others, marriage will have more difficulties than we can tolerate. As I sit behind my desk looking at the cover of Time magazine, I see a picture of a good-looking but very disturbed man. His hand covers his mouth with great tension, his teeth are pressed together so tightly that I can see the muscles of his jaw, and I wonder what is going on in his mind to make him so incredibly tense and unhappy. The picture is of Bill Clinton. I have mixed feelings about him. Toward the husband who broke his marriage vows I feel anger, but as a powerful and capable president in his tough job I respect him and I am most certain that

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those who are pointing the finger at him are hiding a skeleton or two in their own closets. Some people have forgotten his hard work, but I didn’t, I also didn’t forget that he is a man, not a saint. What happened in the private life of our president strongly symbolizes that being single is more beneficial than being locked within the walls of marriage. He is opening our eyes to see that marriage simply doesn’t work, no matter who is in it. In spite of being a president, I wonder — did he do this to his marriage or did marriage do this to him? Let’s pretend for a moment that we have a president named Bill Clinton who is a single man. No doubt, he would get credit for a job well done as our president. Certainly, he would not have been criticized for his actions with any women and, most definitely, he would have more fun then he is having now. With all that we hear and with all that concerns us about the morality of this situation and those of the actions of other men in politics, I don’t understand why we are so hung up on the fact that we prefer our politicians to be married men? What is wrong with being single? It is a shame how many capable men we lost just because of their so-called scandalous private lives or how many others never run for office because they are single. It is time that we no longer judge a man’s capabilities based on his marital status. Being married doesn’t mean you can accomplish any job better than a single person can. By all means, this is a great form of discrimination. Marriage doesn’t respect or honor human feelings; we trap ourselves in this cage to be humiliated. In Time magazine, Robert Wright called it the “It Could Be Me” factor. No one really can be in another’s shoes, but at the same time, where is our compassion? With all the fuss the public and media made, they truly hurt only two innocent women: our First Lady, and most of all, the President’s daughter. Using the knowledge I gathered in the “school of life” and watching the sad performance of most people in marriage, I realize that as a single woman I live a life of a thousand excitements. I feel great about what I do for me and I will never let myself down. If you allow others to hurt you or get to you because you are a single person, bear in mind that “People of low achievement often envy and resent people of high achievement” (Nathaniel Branden, Ph.D., The Power of Self-Esteem). I would not change one day of my single life just to reach my fiftieth wedding anniversary in a miserable marriage. It wasn’t easy to 134

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stand behind my beliefs all these years, but I am proud to say that against all odds, I did it my way! I lived with the true meaning of being in the world, but not of it. My prayers go out to those who are struggling in marriage, and to those 65 or 70 percent of couples who will soon enter the roller coaster of divorce. Until the day that each of us truly loves ourselves and radiates that love to our mate, and when our children’s happiness is the center of our lives, I will continue living in my own home, sleeping in my own bed, and buying my own flowers. Even with all the false accusations from society, it is greatly evident that being single has many benefits that can no longer be denied, and without a doubt, it is clearly obvious that there is utterly nothing wrong with being single.

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Nine Feminine Awareness in the New Millennium WOMEN IN BLACK DEFY CHINA’S POLICE “An Englishwoman with gray hair and granny glasses, a black cotton shawl draped over head and shoulders, looked downward as if in solemn prayer. In one hand, she held a white candle, tipping it forward slightly so that dripping wax would not burn her fingers, in the other, she helped hold a sign that said: “Violence Against Women Must Be Stopped.” — Seth Faison, The New York Times International, Tuesday, September 5, 1995

In the United States, this article moved many feminine activists and others with compassion for women in such conditions, through the realization that there are still so many women in the world with very little right to live as human beings. The saddest part is that this wasn’t happening just in China; even in our advanced country there are women who still live under the same conditions as women in many parts of Asia. Regardless of where women are from or how advanced a culture may be, we are still the victims of violence in a world created by men with our help. The complete manifestation of women’s rights is long overdue and it is essential that violence against women be stopped. For the past several decades, a subtle awareness has reached the very core of our being and can no longer be denied. There is an intense anger over war and violence, which shows even among men from 136

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around the world. Many more charitable organizations are reaching out to help the hungry and the needy, despite religion or color. There are more helping hands than ever before from caring people with compassion for worldwide human strife and suffering, especially for women’s need to achieve equality and recognition. We have begun to understand the significance of pets as a source of love and good health. People who didn’t let a dog near their home now adopt them for help in controlling high blood pressure, lowering cholesterol and heart disease, or to heal and comfort illness in children needing love. Unlike years ago, when we were scared to talk about our experiences with the spiritual world, these days almost everyone has a story to tell that gives hope and lights up our hearts. There is a whole world out there that we can’t see, but whose love and compassion can be felt. We are beginning to believe and understand the true meaning of not being alone. Many of those who were in touch with other dimensions are coming forward and openly sharing their experiences for the benefit of others. Many books have been written about the existence of angels in our everyday lives. People, without fear of being called crazy, are talking about their near-death experiences. We are starting to believe that just because a phenomenon is beyond our physical touch in this threedimensional world doesn’t mean it cannot exist. Overwhelming evidence is at hand that can no longer be ignored, but must be used to enrich our lives. Being touched by the unseen world may seem unbelievable at the time, but for me, having faith made it more adventurous and more heart-warming than any other discovery in my life. When the book Dancing in the Light by Shirley MacLaine came out, there was plenty of controversy and even mockery among those who hadn’t experienced the unseen world, but it answered many of my questions with great insight. Awareness doesn’t start or stop with believing in reincarnation, life after death, or near-death experiences. In the last decade or two, it is as if we started to boil a pot of water and the water simmered slowly until now, when we are very near the end of one millennium and entering into a new one, the water is reaching the boiling point. People who have been touched by this awareness find it nearly impossible to avoid the shining light of inner power that is beaming 137

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toward us and opening our consciousness. One beam of light that shines among the brightest is the light of awakening to who we really are, bringing us the knowledge of feminine awareness. All the beauty in the world is solid evidence that we have been created to live a joyful and loving life yet, in most marriages, love quickly loses its meaning and is replaced by hatred and animosity. Lacking knowledge of true and selfless love blocks the passage to our hearts and we ignorantly close ourselves from receiving the most important fact of our existence — true joy and happiness. Women in all religions have been several steps ahead of men on the spiritual road. Undoubtedly, we are the leaders whose purpose it is to open the window of light and let it shine throughout the world. In 1931, Margaret Sanger started the revolution for unwanted pregnancies by fighting for birth control and, according to Gloria Steinem’s article in Time magazine, it took her 34 years to establish her idea, reaching conclusion just one year before her death. Sanger was past 80 when she saw the first marketing of a contraceptive pill she had helped develop. But legal change was slow, like almost everything that concerned women’s freedom and comfort. Yes, times have changed since Margaret Sanger’s day. This extraordinary woman’s efforts, with the help of a small group of friends, changed the course of our lives and gave us the liberty of choice and control over our own bodies. The undeniable fact that women’s well being has been brutally ignored and taken for granted is nothing that we can soon forget. Happiness in a woman’s life is no longer just the little light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. Harmony and everlasting happiness, that have eluded many of us in this male-dominated world, are being brought to the surface by women who are breaking down the old structure of imbalance. With great hope, our feminine power embraces every living creature in this so-called man’s world, benefiting all, especially our children — the leaders of tomorrow. Each of us is like a drop of water that together makes an ocean of life. From our little goldfish to our purring cat or the sound of a tree rustling in the wind, we are all part of the formation of this greatly magnificent universe that radiates from every single cell within us. We are becoming more aware that we are the masters of our own health and well-being and we have the power to act upon that fact and

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use it to better our lives. As small as we are, by comparison, we are the spacious part of creation called life. I remember when Shirley MacLaine held a three-day seminar at the New York City Hilton. I was the first one waiting outside the closed door at five o’clock in the morning to get a good seat in a big hall that held three thousand people. I don’t know why, but I needed to be close to the woman whose knowledge and insight, presented as a gift to us in her book Dancing in the Light, made me dance in the light of understanding and awareness that we are part of God and, therefore, we are gods in some form. While Shirley was taking questions from the audience, a woman rose and said, “With all due respect, I don’t believe you are God.” And Shirley answered, “But I think you are.” The woman, who evidently needed some reassurance of her own capacity of light, had a hard time recognizing that by Shirley saying to each of us, “You are God,” she was telling us that we all possess that light, love, compassion and power. We need only look within to find it as close to us as ourselves. We can even heal ourselves if we give the right orders to our over seventy-five trillion cells; without a doubt, we are in charge. A New Age and A New World Women have survived through the roughest and toughest conditions men have created. As we have heard and experienced, if something doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger. Although many women died in the process, on whole the struggle has made us stronger. For the souls of those women who put their lives on the line we are awakening with much more awareness than ever before known to mankind. A revolution is taking form in the world unlike any revolution created by man through bloodshed and violence. This revolution comes through peace and love, bringing comfort to the rest of the world with women in charge. I am not saying that when the year 2000 arrives at exactly midnight, suddenly all women will stand in their living rooms wearing shining head-to-toe silver futuristic costumes with weapons in their hands and ordering men to “behave or die!” This revolution

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will bring an evolution of more understanding and peace into the next thousand years. Women are quietly and peacefully turning the table to bring a much more beneficial life to all people. Amazingly, the shade of gray is becoming extremely popular in the fashion world, and women are responding to this color so positively that it is not just a fashion trend, but a symbol of the merging of the yin and yang. Even if the creators of this new trend don’t consciously know that their subconscious mind and spiritual awakening is giving them news of the arrival of harmony and equilibrium between men and women. Even many men recognize the change; the majority of fathers don’t want their children to learn to use guns, in order to prevent possible mass murders in the future. The big question is, “When will this violence stop?” If we leave it to men — especially macho and angry men — never! The awakening of feminine power needs support from all sources to be effective. The anger and violence that exists in most male-dominated cultures is created by loneliness in the heart. There is a darkness, an empty void that easily can be filled up with the light of awakening. When the heart is empty of love, understanding and divine order, and is filled with nothing but ignorance and doubt, whatever comes from that empty heart can be sadly dangerous. We would like to avoid headlines such as Time magazine’s April 6th, 1998 cover story, “Armed & Dangerous, an American Tragedy,” by Nadya Labi, about little boys who heartlessly killed their classmates and friends. Loneliness is a segregation between humanity and the spirit. Kids like these are suffering from the disconnection of their soul and spirit and from separation from the divinity. When you feel lonely, you have no connection to your soul and no connection with your heart. You are lost in the vast ocean of negativity and fear. The more fearful you become, the more dangerous some can get because fear will transform itself into anger, rage, and finally into destructive actions against humankind. Questions are raised such as, “What should society do? What should parents teach their children to prevent destructive action like using guns or drugs to fill their empty lives?” The answer is very obvious and extremely simple: “Love.” Because men spend most of their time in their “caves” or they are busy chasing the things that don’t belong to them to prove their mas140

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culinity, they forget that they have a great responsibility in developing their children’s minds and awareness to more important phenomena in life. By satisfying their own thirst for power, they are leading their kids to violence and drugs. Our precious youth should be the pillar of support for our future well being, but in these sad and frightening cases, mothers are not a great help either. They do and act as their husband desires, not necessarily in the way that is right for the child. “We were created out of love and ecstasy, we were created out of adoration of light and awareness. It is our birthright to be happy and connected. We are made in the image of the infinite Creator, and that means, quite simply, that we are infinite creators” (Darryl Anka, Bashar). In this new millennium, we can either rebuild our thoughts and our beliefs for a better world, or we can destroy ourselves and everything that is connected to us. It is up to us to take charge and teach our children, and in the process of teaching, learn how worthy we are and how well we can cope with negativity and change in a most positive way by allowing love to change places with hate. We have no other choice but to make man and spirituality live side by side. The man who admits to his weakness is truly a strong man and that is what we have to teach our children about life and equality between the sexes. Some women find it hard to believe that they are the master of their own destiny in the same way that most people cannot believe that they are the healer of their own sicknesses. As part of this mysterious universe, we are capable of being whatever we choose to be. By the arrival of the new millennium, we will see more of the power that has been repressed in us burst into the positive and light the way as our world has never before seen. We are in the last days of our nine-month pregnancy. The time is very near when we will be giving birth to newness in our world through love and compassion so powerful that nothing will ever be the same. We will no longer hear about abused, battered, deserted, disillusioned, weak, deprived women. In the decades to come, women will show their true power and knowledge, and men, with all their resistance, will give in to the peace and serenity that will surround us all. This is not a fantasy or some future prediction. Listen to the voices of women around the world growing louder and louder, and even if you are a non-believer, you will start to feel the enlightenment within you. From the girl in ele141

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mentary school to the woman whose husband, father, brother is abusing her, we have had it with the misconception of what used to be. There will be a time when the world around us has no choice but to change in order for us to stop the way women have been treated by society, by men, by cultures and religions. Those days are in the verge of vanishing into their last breath of existence. If you are an awakened woman or a man living in a woman’s world, you are probably already feeling the velocity of our movement toward total awareness of our self-worth, that gentle power that springs from the depth of our soul, that love which can be constructive not destructive. In the end, the light is the force that conquers the darkness. Women have been on the move even while locked up in the kitchen, “barefoot and pregnant.” More and more, our younger female generations are dismissing the goal of “husband hunting” and are putting more energy into making their own foundation stronger. I am optimistic that feminine awareness is flowing in one large and powerful stream, an indisputable force for women in the new millennium. In the bright new light of awareness, from all over the world, women are supporting each other with these new feelings of bonding and togetherness like a river of shimmering light that originated from the ocean of knowledge and love. More and more women are teaching their male children that it is okay to cry, it is okay to have soft hands and it is essential to respect the female and her world. We have lived in a man’s world, with difficulty, for too long. It is time for men to experience the true joy of living in the bosom of love and power of a woman’s world and feel the true happiness in their hearts. We have honored men for a long time and now we are expecting them to do the same for us; we won’t settle for anything less any longer. When love totally replaces punishment and understanding replaces distance between a mother and child, the jealousy and the envies will change places with a greater understanding of our purpose in life. The ego moves to its rightful position, the anger vanishes from the face of the Earth, our opposite sex will be our protector as designed from the beginning of life, and then and only then will we find the heaven on Earth that we so desperately seek. As Dalma Heyn pointed out in her book Marriage Shock, “If we really care to understand why up to 65 percent of all new marriages end — and 142

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most of them after only a few years — wouldn’t we spotlight the most surprising statistic of all: that whereas in 1970, most divorces were the man’s idea, today, 60 to 75 percent of divorces are initiated by women?” Everything has changed over the past one hundred years, everything but marriage. Women, without saying too much, are changing the way marriage is being interpreted in our ignorant and forceful society. I love the television show “I Love Lucy,” as do many people around the world. Her show is my escape from the bad news and cruelties we face during an average day. I am sort of addicted to her funny ways and her voice, and I have been watching her show for over twenty-eight years; I know most of the episodes by heart and never tire of watching them. Watching this one-of-a-kind, superb comedy, though, I realized how men, even loving men like Ricky, used to treat their wives. In one particular episode, as usual, Ricky was objecting to Lucy’s desire to be in show business. He was complaining that he doesn’t like his wife to be in a show because that was not a place for her, he wants a “wife” who cooks his meals, takes care of his house, brings his slippers when he comes home, and takes care of their children. Of course the show was always funny, but at the heart of it, even the beautiful wife of a star was nothing but a housekeeper who had to serve on her hands and knees to please her husband and couldn’t even buy a hat without his permission. That was how men and society believed women were supposed to act. Times have changed since Lucy was Ricky Ricardo’s sitcom wife, but many men in the world still think the same way about a wife as Ricky Ricardo described the role of women in marriage. No wonder statistics show that up to 75 percent of divorces are initiated by women. We need a change like we need air to breathe. Sooner than later, this ridiculous union of marriage has to form a new meaning that can suit both men and women, or else, just be ended. Experts seem to agree that true and pure love is what is missing in our partnerships. When we marry, most of us think we have found our true love, but several years later, we hate each other. As a child, I heard my teachers and grandmother say, “To love God is to love yourself, and to know yourself is to know God.” As a child the meaning of it was very vague and unclear but as I grew older, I 143

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understood how simple it is to know and love yourself. We hear all the time, “Unless you love yourself, you can’t love anybody else,” but the simple meaning is not sinking into most peoples’ minds. They believe they are in love and then one day they kill the one they loved or abuse the woman they couldn’t live without. What kind of love are we talking about here? What kind of love does a man have for himself when he can commit such crimes in the name of it? What kind of understanding has he about his own consciousness when he kills a woman who he promised to love and to honor forever? If a man’s love and respect is in the realm of spirituality with an understanding of his perfect creation, and if he believes in eternal love, can he kill, can he abuse, can he dishonor his partner or anybody else? I don’t believe so. At the age of 24, Franklin married 18-year-old Penny, the love of his life, and very soon after the wedding, the fighting started. Every time I saw Penny, she had a nasty bruise somewhere on her face or on her body. Being one of her closest friends, I used to tell her to make him see a professional, or for her sake, get out of the marriage. “He is going to change,” she would tell me, “When he learns how much I love him, he is going to change.” But the beating never stopped and he never showed any sign of change until their first child, a little boy, was born. Franklin was breathlessly running in and out of the delivery room like any caring husband and excited father. No one would ever had believed that over the past five years, this man had beaten up his wife dozens of times — even during her pregnancy — so badly that she could not move from her bed for several days at a time. Time passed by quickly, and their little boy started to grow up. At the age of ten, he announced to his parents that very soon the world would explode and everybody would die and it would be the end. It was very sad to hear such negative words from the beautiful and fruitful life of such a young boy, but he hated his life so much that by predicting that the end was near he gave himself salvation for a life not worth living, and soon his misery as part of a very unhealthy family would end. At the age of sixteen, he joined an atheist group and left home. He left a note saying that he hated both of them for bringing him into this loveless phony life and he didn’t want to see any one of them ever again.

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Franklin and his wife were devastated. I don’t know who was to blame — his father, a man who showed nothing but anger in front of his child, or the woman who took all that abuse and helped to bring up a child in an unhealthy atmosphere in the name of being a good wife and making her marriage work. As a woman and a friend, I was furious with Penny for putting up with all she did from her husband, bringing this upon all of them, especially upon her only son. I know it is unfair to blame her for her husband’s actions, but she had a lot to do with the way her life turned out. Her young son is now a soul deeply lost in alcohol and drugs to forget his pain. The father is a lonely, divorced and bitter man, and the mother is no better off. This is a true and very sad story, but one thing could possibly have saved them all, and that is self-love. If Penny and other women like her truly loved themselves and believed in their worth enough to leave their husbands before bringing innocent human beings into this world, many lives would have been completely different. Believers in karma know that because we are masters of our own destiny, we can change the work of our karma by replacing negative energy with positive. If we can find that divine connection, we can easily find our way to the source of love, the only passage to the light, and easily change our lives. This is a simple law of the universe. When you are in love, there is a glow on your face that most everyone can see. That glow is the light that your heart generates. It is the light that we are trying to make last an eternity, not just for a short time. Women are the pioneers for unfolding the knowledge and importance of spiritual awareness. Our school systems are missing one important subject and that is to teach our young children about selflove and connection to the divinity. I am not talking about religion, which sometimes is a reason for people to take sides and hate each other; I am talking about the oneness in humanity. It is so essential that we have to start teaching this as early as yesterday! Every child must learn the importance of what it means to really love themself so, at the age of sixteen, they don’t go into a severe depression, believing that life isn’t worth living. The span of human life is increasing every day. There are so many new discoveries in the medical world it is astounding. Nowadays, 145

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people fifty to sixty years of age are considered to be only “middleaged.” Even seventy-year-olds are not as “old” as we used to think. Longevity is not something that humankind is only wishing for; it is here, but longevity has its minuses as well. If human life span is getting longer and people continue to reproduce the way they are, what kind of a world are we building for our future generations? At this point, our technology is not well prepared to keep up with the population growth. In Tibet, it is told that there was sacred water in a Himalayan city that could cure any kind of disease with just a drop. People from the modern world who were disappointed when medication couldn’t cure their diseases traveled to that fountain of health and swore that it made them feel better. Now, sadly, that sacred water supply is filled with so much lead and pollution that drinking it can’t cure you and it might actually kill you! For the Children In a world that is so overpopulated, thousands of children die from hunger everyday, and others get into all sorts of trouble because they lack proper supervision. It is pretty closed-minded to question a woman for not having a baby or to remind her of the ticking of her biological clock. If you are among those women who, for whatever reason, don’t have children and people are hinting to you about your biological clock, remind them that the population growth should take a little break to save our future generations from a certain and painful extinction. Tracy, a 40-year-old woman with no desire to have children of her own, is very active in the world hunger movement and has adopted 12 children. She says, “I was getting sick of those people who supposedly heard my biological clock ticking; they would give me grief about not bearing children and not being married, so I decided to keep pictures of some of my adopted children in my wallet. Before I adopted them, not all of them looked like they were going to make it; their ribs stuck out, their stomachs were so large, and their legs looked like two little drumsticks. “I say to people, ‘As long as I hear the sound of a healthy heartbeat from these children who, if I hadn’t helped, would have been quieted by 146

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death, I don’t hear the ticking of any biological clocks like you do. Hearing the sound of my biological clock is a sign of boredom in your life, not mine.’ And you should see their faces when I am through with them!” The satisfaction she gets from seeing these children getting proper care and education, even if she didn’t give birth to them, is very inspiring. Every day 35,000 children die from hunger. Our water and air are polluted, our schools are overcrowded, and we don’t have enough help raising our children while we are off helping our non-appreciative husbands and dealing with society’s unfair remarks. When a woman tells you that your biological clock is ticking, what she is really hearing is her own scream for help. The sound of that clock is a reminder in her own life that she is falling deeper and deeper into that black hole instead of saying, “Oh God, I want to be like her. I want to be free, I want to travel. I want to go back to school.” On behalf of thousands of women who face this situation, I would like to say to those who are so concerned with the ticking of other women’s biological clocks, “Put cotton in your ears and mind your own business, and take a good look at our crowded world before you speak such foolish words.” We must harmonize our power with the flow of energy that is coming to achieve another step in feminine awareness. The unity among women who are beginning to understand themselves is the hope and strength of our new bond. Bear in mind, not every woman was born to have a child and or be married. Those who are setting themselves free from troubled marriages and unwanted motherhood forced on us by an immobile society, realize that each of us is a complete creation of perfection and there is no need to feel incomplete by refusing to join in the rituals of our old tribal world. Many people make great parents for children that already have been born and who need care and attention. We are all one, and we don’t have to give birth to be a mother. There are so many women who love their adopted children or other women’s children much more than those who abuse their own flesh and blood. If we believe that we are born to be exactly who and where we are, we will eliminate many heartaches caused by changing our path from one we should follow to one others expect us to travel. A woman who doesn’t want to be married and have children or a homosexual who has to hide his/her true feelings from parents, society, and family are 147

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swimming against the current of their lives. Sooner or later, they will become exhausted and rundown, feebly asking themselves what happened to them. Each and every one of us willingly comes into this world to experience this tangible realm of mystery, to find our way to the kingdom of light with simple tools of love and compassion, and to enjoy and let others love and enjoy their lives the way it was designed for them. Forcing or changing our way because of what others expect from us is a step backward that will turn this enjoyable trip into an agony that makes many of us look forward to the destination instead of enjoying every moment of this wondrous and mysterious journey. As long as you are a living, there is an opportunity for good things to happen. Those women who think their marriage buries them alive should be hopeful and know that if they take charge, they can expect great things to come their way. Our life is a most precious gift and it is worth living every moment. Don’t lose a minute because you think you have no choice; the choice is in your hands, just ask for guidance and you will see the light. When you stop and look, you will see that everything is in order. Even when you think you don’t have enough, you are not beautiful enough, or no other man but your abusive husband is going to come near you with all your faults, there is still hope; perfection and true beauty is in the soul of people, not in their faces. Many people hide the ugliest monster under their beautiful face, and many others have the heart and soul of an angel, no matter how their face or body appears. When you feel in harmony with your soul and in line with divinity, and you don’t let envy, jealousy, or other’s remarks throw you off balance, you are centered. Stay there in the only place you can find true peace and happiness, and no one will destroy it. When you are centered, you act lovingly toward yourself and others because you feel loving and perfect. You can’t act or behave any other way because in your beholding eyes you are inside and out as perfect as can be. This is the feeling and essence of our very near future that is spreading. Women don’t want to settle for anything less than being treated with respect and dignity from our lives and our marriages. Wives of today are saying, “Either see me eye-to-eye, or say goodbye.” When a man comes into your life and he tells you how beautiful and wonder148

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ful you are, or how great you cook, life is just perfect. You are on cloud nine and then, several years later, you have to put on heavy makeup to cover the bruises he created on your face. Besides the superficial wounds, you have to pretend that everything is fine so people cannot see how badly your self-esteem is shriveling. When you allow this to happen to you, you don’t truly love yourself, you don’t believe you deserve better, and you are not centered. If others judge you because you don’t want to continue living that hell, you should not be concerned. When your inner self is at peace, you will not care what others say or think about you. I personally experienced this when I was in a bad relationship that looked good to people on the outside. No one could really see what was going on in my life and no one could have helped me even if they had known the truth. When I came out of those bad times and I had peace and tranquility, that was the time I heard them feeling sorry for me because I had no man in my life! That really made me laugh and wonder if anyone can really feel another’s feelings while they are so busy judging them. The only time you can feel another’s happiness is without judgement or jealousy. Compassion without put-downs allows you to feel the emotion that passes through others’ hearts. You have to be an open channel to love; you must see with your inner eye, feel with your inner light, and not let the judgement of others affect your life. The moment you become aware of admiring your own worth is the day that the judgement of others won’t affect you, and your need for outside admiration from others will diminish. I am not saying that we must be totally without the pleasure of admiration from others, but judging ourselves through the eyes of others who don’t have a true and loving interest in their heart for us is a dangerous way of living. Be rich with self-love to the point that you have enough to freely offer to others, and you will see how that self-empowerment will recharge and awaken more love in your own heart. Choosing a lifestyle should be completely up to each individual. Put this book down for a minute and look around you right now. If you like what you see or dislike what you have, it is only up to you to enjoy it or change it for the better. No one can give you the gift of freedom unless you desire it for yourself. If you are waiting for that 149

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“someone” to come and give you all that is missing in your life you are setting yourself up for a big disappointment and extreme sadness. Ask those who have been married several times in search of the “perfect man,” trying to fill up the empty gap in their hearts. You will find that disappointment was all they found and the gap became emptier and wider than ever before. Until you master your own happiness, you can never truly be safe. There have been many predictions about the new millennium, from Nostradamus to New Age philosophers, astronomers and experts who wrote books and presented theories and manuscripts. We hear theories and negative words predicting that sometime in, near, or shortly after the year 2000, the world may come to an end and darkness may take over as catastrophic disaster destroys humankind. The only way I see the world being destroyed is by us, not by some unbelievable disaster we are all waiting for. Our world is undeniably heading for a change, but if anything, we are heading towards much greater tranquility and peace than ever before. Soon the little girls and young women of our society who are talking about power in feminine hands will run for presidency and many other high positions. They will take over and soothe the nerves of this injured and angry man’s world, and we will witness and live in the peace that we have been yearning for so long. The idea of women in power used to be nothing but a fantasy for those who had higher hopes, but the fantasy is well becoming a reality. With every costly error men make, women are getting one step closer to taking the leadership out of the hands of our “man-children” and teaching them how to treat life from a woman’s point of view. It is our duty at this point, more than ever before, to put our strength together and join forces for the salvation of this unhealthy world. We must have our fair share of the world to show how we, together, can run the world with total equality. We always heard that renowned phrase, “Behind every successful man, there is a woman.” How true this is, and now is the moment when women are stepping out from the shadows of men and taking the lead towards a better, more loving, and peaceful world. A Middle Eastern woman, on behalf of many others in that part of the world, complained about the way men treat their wives. “When we are in our home, I am on my hands and knees to fulfill his needs 150

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just to be treated like a piece of crap. When we are outside the house, I have to walk five steps behind him and I can’t say anything about it. If I open my mouth to voice an opinion I am risking my life, and he has the right to kill me without much difficulty because the law will protect him. “I have to hide any reading material from him; if he finds it he will beat me to death. Even in bed I don’t see much compassion from him, only force. I hate being in a world that favors men this much, and when I think that he was actually born from a woman it makes me angrier than I can bear.” Her every word was sank in my stomach like a block of cement because I knew it was painfully true. We have been, and some still are, being dragged through the mud because of male lust and ego. But with the arrival of the new millennium comes a simultaneous arrival of freedom for women which none of our grandmothers could even dream of tasting. It was the true forbidden fruit of their lifetime. Those who are holding tightly to the old tradition need to let go and live in the time that is right for them. The old days are on their way out and we are trying to push the rest of the residue out of our lives. Feminine awareness and this great change didn’t come our way overnight. We had to program our entire being slowly and look over our shoulders for centuries, fearing men’s reactions. When we take our rightful seat in the world, we women are not the only ones who will benefit from the change. Someday, men will deeply appreciate the tranquility that will dominate their lives through women’s peaceful nature. It is up to you to stop relating love to pain, and marriage to despair and boredom. Push away that negative thought and instead keep in mind that “one want is better than a hundred needs.” Choose to live the way you want and don’t be dragged down by your needs. Don’t let society brainwash you and live your life for you. A woman asked me, “I have an open mind to the unknown, but if life is perpetually perfect, and we are where we are supposed to be and everything happens for a reason, then why am I in this rotten situation? And why did I meet my husband, who created so much grief in my life in the first place?” My answer was what I learned myself through years of soul-searching and being stuck in a rut from which I thought I would never be able to recover: “Sometimes in life, we need 151

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that kick in the butt to realize that we don’t need this kind of life any longer. When you recognize that, then is the time you start to make positive changes that will get you out of that rut. The key to unlocking this gateway is to try to see what it is that you have to learn about your worth and abilities from being with someone who threw the kick at you to begin with. No one said you should stay and take the abuse, but until you understand, no one else can help you.” There has always been a mystery surrounding feminine longevity versus the shorter life span of males. There is a deep belief that women have less fear of death because of our spiritual connection. The existence of a void between men and spirituality helps feed their fear of the unknown, sending negative signals to their brain and bringing them closer to death than women with stronger beliefs and less fear. Feminine awareness in the new millennium is not passing unnoticed by men. Many young men are showing more sensitivity and attention to their feminine side, which up to now was a shameful aspect of themselves to admit. They are recognizing their feelings of pain and hurt, and without shame, they act more compassionately. Imagine a man with his physical strength who developed the power of his own femininity and combined them in his magnificent being. Wouldn’t it be a miracle to live with someone this perfect? If every man could nourish the feminine power within him, men would benefit from the same longevity that has been one of our secrets all along. Perhaps then we won’t lose our men to premature death just because they lived through and put pressure on only one part of their two essential polarities. Evidence shows that we are on the verge of a revolutionary awakening, and the recognition of feminine awareness is first on the list. We have come a long way in one hundred fifty years, from the first feminine activist to the first female commander of a space shuttle, Air Force Colonel Eileen Collins. These are very promising times for women. Soon our country will recognize the value of having a female president and we won’t be petrified that if indeed we do achieve great success, we will be burned at the stake! Feminine awareness in the new millennium is the catalyst for a spacious change.

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Biography Maryam Jorjani French-born Maryam Jorjani was educated at Sorbonne. After a notable career in the fashion industry, she is currently the director of international accounts for a major U.S. brokerage firm. For the past 24 years, Maryam has been leading a happy and productive life as a single woman.

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