My Frugal Valentine

Valentine’s Day is taking a big hit as the third year of recession turns Americans into savers rather than spenders, the NY Times reports.

Business forecasters say as the financial crisis continues to bite, people are re-evaluating their personal values and making permanent changes to their spending habits.

The result is Valentine’s Day is returning to its roots, as an intimate card-giving occasion that grew into the second-most marketed holiday after Christmas.

Cheaper Faster Better!

For 2010, with apologies to Rodgers and Hart, frugal valentines are likely to supplant funny ones. The mood is epitomized by the cover of the Feb. 17 issue of Woman’s Day magazine. Next to a photograph of a heart-shaped chocolate dessert on a pink plate are these words: “Cheaper, Faster, Better!”

Long-stemmed roses are being replaced by homemade cards, and personal jewelry by personal poems. Budget restaurants, which have not traditionally been hot spots for lovers, are offering Valentine’s Day specials.

Creative and Personal

The Internet abounds with ideas for frugal options, like playlists burned onto CDs and coupons for household chores.

And even some preparing to propose on Valentine’s are seeking a bargain approach: on Yahoo, searches for “cheap engagement rings” are “off the charts” compared with a year ago.

Other searches that are up over last year include “cheap lingerie,” “free Valentine’s Day cards” and “homemade Valentine’s Day gifts.”

Romance and Humour

Some suggestions for low cost personal ways to celebrate:

• Do whatever it is that you did on your first date. The idea is to recreate that first meeting, recall falling in love and indulge in a little humorous nostalgia.
• Imitate the couple who were building a “blanket fort” in their living room and sharing a picnic dinner – or take a picnic in the park for real
• Cook a nice dinner together and listen to your favourite CD’s.
• Prepare a special Valentine’s dessert
• Give each other a massage

Angeline Close, a business professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, says Valentine’s Day may be coming full circle.

“It started as a very pure romantic holiday, until capitalism and marketing spiked it,” she said. “We are retreating back a little bit to the original meaning behind the day.”

Why Women Want Sex

Women have sex to “ensure a quiet life” or to “bargain for household chores” ahead of expecting the earth to move.

That’s what a survey of 1000 women interviewed by Texas University professors admitted as their reasons for having sex. Forget physical attraction!

From relieving boredom, to keeping the peace or curing a headache, women have sex for many reasons but romance and passion come rather low on the list, a book presenting the survey results reveals.

One woman even admitted to having sex just so her husband would put the rubbish out.

Mundane Motives

“Research has shown most men find most women at least somewhat sexually attractive, whereas most women do not find most men sexually attractive at all,” Why Women Have Sex authors Cindy Meston and David Buss said.

One woman she did it for a spiritual experience, proclaiming: “It’s the closest thing to God.”

But mostly the explanations were far more mundane, with 84 per cent admitting to having sex just to ensure a quiet life or to bargain for household chores. One woman said: “I have sex to relieve the boredom because it’s easier than fighting. Plus it gives me something to do.”

While it may not come as welcome news, some women have sex out of sympathy, with one admitting: “I slept with a couple of guys because I felt sorry for them.”

But many have more selfish motives, with financial or material rewards a major factor.

Sex For Fun

In one survey of students, nearly one in 10 women admitted to “having sex for presents”. Others said: “He bought me a nice dinner”, “he spent a lot of money on me early on”, “he showed me he had an extravagant lifestyle”.

And rather than love or romance, for many women sex is just about fun.

Six in 10 university students said they slept with a male friend who was not their boyfriend.

“Life is too damn short to be waiting four years to have sex again,” one said.

Redford and Fonda – Life An Adventure or Nothing

What is it about turning 70?  First Robert Redford gets married at 72, and then Jane Fonda announces she’s in love again at 71, having thought “all the good stuff” was now a thing of the past.

The two stars – each a Hollywood legend in their own lifetimes – are powerful exponents of the Helen Keller* approach: “Life at any age is either a daring adventure, or it is nothing.”

Redford, American cinema’s “eternal, and most principled, hunk” (Time, 2001) married his partner of 13 years, German abstract artist Sibylle Szaggars (51) in her hometown of Hamburg in July.

 

New House in Santa Fe

Engaged in May 2008, the couple recently announced they were building a house in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and starting an initiative there to support and encourage Hispanic and Native American film makers. It’s obviously a passion they share.

On her website http://www.sibylleszaggars.com/index.html Sibylle records how her interest in old cultures and traditions led her live with Hopi Indians in Arizona after she moved to the US from London in the late 80’s. She said was “deeply touched by the Native Americans spiritual connectedness with life, the land and the world,” and developed large paintings inspired by the connection.

In the 1990s after moving to Sundance, Utah, she met Redford and her artistic focus turned to “impending issues of extinction and environmental protection,” she says.

Fresh New and Exciting

In the new programme, veteran film directors, producers, actors and writers will work with Hispanic and Native American filmmakers in a series of labs which will be an independent offshoot of Redford’s famous Sundance Institute, he says. The goal is to help bring out under-represented voices of our society.

Redford says he has been drawn to Hispanic cultures for years. He traces that appreciation to growing up as Anglo in a primarily Hispanic neighbourhood in Los Angeles. It grew when he worked on the 1988 hit film Milagro Beanfield War, which was filmed in New Mexico.

Redford has decided to build his new home near the tiny village of Tesuque, just north of Santa Fe. The Sundance offshoot will be headquartered at Los Luceros, a historic hacienda and ranch between Santa Fe and Taos.

“The exciting thing about this is that it’s basically a startup program,” Redford stated. “It’s fresh. It’s new. That excites me.”

* (Keller, the deaf blind activist who inspired Oscar winning 1962 movie The Miracle Worker, was one of Gallup’s Most Admired People of the 20^th Century)

Is Love More Powerful than Sex?

Sex and romance may seem inextricably linked, but the human brain clearly distinguishes between the two, according to a new study. The upshot: Love is the more powerful emotion.

The results of brain scans speak to longstanding questions of whether the pursuit of love and sex are different emotional endeavours or whether romance is just warmed over sexual arousal.

“Our findings show that the brain areas activated when someone looks at a photo of their beloved only partially overlap with the brain regions associated with sexual arousal,” said Arthur Aron of the State University of New York-Stony Brook. “Sex and romantic love involve quite different brain systems.”

Left side, right side

The study was small, however, involving 17 young men and women, all of whom had recently fallen madly in love. They filled out questionnaires while their brains were hooked up to a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) system.

Romance seems to steep in parts of the brain that are rich in dopamine, a chemical known to affect emotions. These brain regions are also linked by other studies to the motivation for rewards.

“To our surprise, the activation regions associated with intense romantic love were mostly on the right side of the brain, while the activation regions associated with facial attractiveness were mostly on the left,” said Lucy Brown of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

The study also revealed that as a romance matures, so does the mind.

“We found several brain areas where the strength of neural activity changed with the length of the romance,” Brown said. “Everyone knows that relationships are dynamic over time, but we are beginning to track what happens in the brain as a love relationship matures.”

Love wins

The processing of romantic feelings involves a “constellation of neural systems.” The researchers — neuroscientists, anthropologists and social psychologists — declare love the clear winner versus sex in terms of its power over the human mind.

“Romantic love is one of the most powerful of all human experiences,” said study member Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University. “It is definitely more powerful than the sex drive.”

Animals, too

There are hints in the study that romance is not a uniquely human trait.

Some of the changes seen with mature romances were in regions of the brain also associated with pair-bonding in prairie voles. Other studies have found that expressions of attraction in a female prairie vole are linked to a 50 percent hike in dopamine activity in the brain region that corresponds to the location where human romance is processed.

The Secret of Kissing

Kisses That Turn Her OnThe chemistry of romance just gained a new dimension, with revelations that a previously unknown ingredient in salvia increases sex drive. The impact of a first kiss can be life or death to a love affair, but now scientists investigating the biochemistry of kisses say that hormones exchanged during passionate kisses can stimulate sexual attraction.

New findings show saliva in the kiss contains testosterone, so the open–mouthed wet kisses preferred by men may be an unconscious attempt to transfer testosterone and turn the woman on. Don’t make it too sloppy though, or you’ll turn her off.

The exchange of hormones in a kiss may also allow males to assess women’s fertility and estrogen cycle, scientists argue. More than 90 per cent of human societies exchange kisses, but the full story of the hormones exchanged in a simple kiss is still to be told.

Scientists say kissing is a way of assessing our potential mates. They are finding that all kinds of chemical systems are in play in courtship. One study found that 66 percent of women and 59 percent of men say that the quality of the first kiss can kill a relationship.

Recession Hits Romance

Recession puts a dampner on romance, according to a survey which shows couples are sharing a whole lot less loving because of financial worries. A quarter of women and a fifth of the men surveyed by sexual lubricant company K-Y Brand reported the economic downturn was having a detrimental effect on their relationship.

However, the good news for romantics was that most men wanted to make things right, with more than three-quarters of them saying, despite tougher times, they would not be cutting back on Valentine’s Day spending.

The sexes put a different priority on physical intimacy in a relationship. More than a quarter of men said more intimacy was the “thing they wanted most” for Valentine’s Day, while women wanted chocolate and flowers more.

More than a quarter of men (27 per cent) said the thing they want most for Valentine’s Day was more intimacy, followed by a card (25 per cent) and chocolates and flowers (20 per cent).

For women, “greater intimacy” came in second to chocolates and flowers (26 per cent) and equal to a card (13 per cent).

Relationship counselors report even before the world downturn, money worries were the biggest single factor in relationship problems.