Wombatgram #19 - Royal Life-Cycle

The Royal Life-Cycle, which is similar to the way the rest of us go about it.

Click on Wombatgram to see the gruesome details.





Bottoms Up, Monarchists.

Life Curves - Wombatgram #11

Some windows of opportunity are wide open, some are heart-breakingly short.



Click on the Wombatgram to view with more detail.

Bottoms Up, Lifers.

Why can't I save her?

I note a thread in my dating history that I guess some others know too. It's the state of mind that says:

There's a girl I think needs help. I can save her.

It's a foolish way of thinking, but for a long time I couldn't quantify why it doesn't work. Experience taught me that people change only when they want to; the impetus for doing so must come wholly from within. Knowing that someone would benefit from help is different from them deciding to change.

The decision process I figured out is to never commit to someone more than they commit to themselves.

This is one more of those life lessons that would have been handy to learn by instruction rather than repeated mistakes.




Bottoms Up, Lifesavers!





Photo courtesy of the Ocean City Sentinel. [link]

Edited for clarity.

The Secret

Guessing now, but I imagine that men spend a minimum of ten percent of their lives thinking about women. That's 65,700 hours in the average male lifetime completely dedicated to contemplating the be-skirted sex.

And the marital status of the dude doesn't matter. Single guys spend their allocation wondering how to snare one; guys in relationships wonder if she is the one; married fellas have the complicated circumstance of having one bird in the hand and a nest and previous birds in the bush. That's not something about which I can authoritatively speak.

I'm writing a review of a book about a famous American man. Revealing his name would spoil the fun, but the following excerpt, which is a quote from a friend of his, caught my eye. Some truths about women are universal, even if we - all we men - think we know stuff others don't.

Here's how to woo a woman.

"(He) treated romance as a job - not as a conquest, but as a process. The reason that every woman who ever met him fell in love with him - and I've never met one who didn't - is because he put so much effort into it. Any woman who came to (his place) would be wined and dined. (He) would prepare elaborate meals with oysters, chocolate, strawberries, champagne - drugs, if that's what they were into. He had a magical ability to make a woman feel as though she was the only one who ever existed - he actually used to laugh at other men because he knew how good he was."

Aye. Make a woman the centre of your universe...at least while you're together. That's The Secret.



Bottoms Up, Lotharios!


Pic of cheer-leader from a now-defunct blog, so it's pointless providing attribution. I bet she likes an oyster and some champagne.

Sticky

Wet-spot and post-bonk jokes aside, there's a kind of cosmic glue that holds people together.

You know the kind of glue you buy at the hardware store to repair stuff you've broken at home? The kind that costs a mint and requires two tubes of foul-smelling, vaguely dangerous-looking goo? Well, dating is the process of mixing the two parts of this Love Epoxy together. We squeeze, mix, apply, clamp, wait, and at some point you'll figure out if you're attached to the other person or not.

Unfortunately, even the best glue can come unstuck. Just as when you repair that lamp or piece of crockery, relationships can split along the same axis to which you applied the sticky stuff in the first place. This is not pessimism. It is simply an observation of change within relationships that we're powerless to stop.

The upside is that if one epoxy formula loses its 'stick' there are always other combinations that will work. In fact, I'd say that relationship maintenance - the same as preventive maintenance on your car - is all about exploring other kinds of glue. Experimenting with small amounts of other compounds can be fun, and might lead you to lots of different ways to stay together.

Fitting together's great, but sticking together's good too.



Pic from here.[link]