With some people it is not necessary to read palms or tea leaves. With some people you simply read faces. The face contains the emotions they try to hide behind barriers. Each face contains, what raine would call four dragons, -- Desertion, Death, Betrayal, and the one that lies within them waiting silently to confront them when they least expect it. If they do not slay it when it rears its ugly head, it will kill them. How many people have you known that live in a shell, a vacuum, who are only a figment of what they once were or what they could be?

Life makes you incredibly strong. Strong enough that one day you will quit complaining that life's lessons are too hard, and instead you will ask, "What am I to learn from this?" And you will find that all along you learned. That you grew stronger. By stronger, I mean you learned to love, to be gentle, accepting, compassionate. When you are old, and you will grow very old, you will have that look in your eyes-that wondrous look of laughter and wisdom. The look that means you have seen the worst of life, and reckoned with it, allowed it to teach instead of destroy. You think all of your suffering in life has been for naught, without reason? No it hasn't. You are one of the few in life that have the power to heal others. To speak with others and heal them through the power of your thoughts and your words. You will have the overwhelming ability that not all are blessed with. You will love. You will lose that love. And you will over it and learn to love again and again as many times as necessary for you to be happy. You will learn that hearts break, but they also heal over and over again. You will be one of the very few that know heaven on earth. Raine has known it. She has lost it. But she trusts she will find it again.

When we lose someone we love we feel so empty and hollow inside. As if there is noone else that could ever replace that special someone in our lives. Guess what! Here is a news flash for you! There is noone to replace that "one". But there are others that do not wish to replace a lost love. They are the ones who are their own unique person and you should not try to "replace" one with another but instead open your heart and accept them for who they are and what they mean to you individually and respectively from the one that has left you or gone.

I had a man tell me once that he could never understand why all his relationships went sour after his wife left him for other men. He said that all his relationship felt hollow, boring after the first few months. He always thought it was because he missed his wife until he realized that it was because of the game that everyone plays. At first the women he met were sweet and helpless and accommodating. And at first he felt like a knight, those manlike qualities that all men need to feel - being protector, provider, hero-needing their ego stroked in order to feel their own self worth. "She needs me to look after her, she looks up to me. etc" But then those relationships begin to shift. Suddenly he would realize that he was the center of someone's universe. Always expected to make the decisions. Always expected to make life fun and exciting. And before too long the relationship begins to feel like a cage, it starts to feel clingy and cloying-dead and dull. He thought it was because nothing "real" was happening. That he and she were just playing roles in a game called life.

What makes this difficult, he said, was that someone genuine came along in his life-who doesn't play by the rules, who doesn't fit nicely into their allotted role of life. And strangely enough, that doesn't feel good either. It made him feel threatened. But life with this genuine person was never dull or boring-there were times when it seemed it was the most loving and exciting time of his life. The problem was that you don't just have an affair with a woman like that and simply get her out of your system. A woman like that takes energy-mental, physical, emotional. A woman like that would take everything. She would never be satisfied with leftovers-with less than a man's full presence. Challenging, yes, but not draining too, and that was if you were lucky enough to survive the sharp edges. He thought he liked women who were softer. Who has some problem for him to fix for them. They were less assertive. Who didn't keep him on his toes, like a boxer waiting for a punch. Who didn't make him think about every word before he said it. Suddenly, and unhappily, he wasn't certain if he liked what that said about him. He knew he needed an independent woman and not some fantasy or has been love affair. He thought maybe he was in love with the memory.

He told me that he finally found happiness again when he finally let it all go. He had to let go of his need to be always the one with the answers, to always be the strong one. He had to have an equal not a helpless woman. Now he says as he laughed (I remember the laugh as if it was yesterday-the my god I was so stupid for so long laugh) he can not think of relationships in any other manner but to be equal. Anything less than a person he can share with totally, respect totally, be challenged by totally, doesn't seem like it would be worth having.

I think he is right. I know in our lives we can not accept what we "used to know" for relationships, that as we grow older, we also grow wiser. I know that with the equality between two wholes, also comes a little deeper torment when couples do not agree on things because they are both so headstrong. But it is challenging and it is rewarding. It may not always feel better than the "helpless" one that one has to "take care of" in a relationship. It is more rewarding to be alive-like its going to change and grow endlessly, not wither and die, strangled by its own traps and pretenses.

Raine likes making other people happy--especially Sandtiger. Raine's happiness depended for a long time on him being happy. But she came to a point in the relationship that she finally understood that people really can't give you happiness. You are your own joy. It's inside you, or it's not real. Raine's happiness was not real because it relied mostly on Sandtiger being pleased. Does your happiness depend on yours or someone else's? As kajira it is very easy to become so bogged down in trying to please the one that owns us, we forget that we are people too with our own needs and emotions that must be fed. We are people playing roles in a chatroom not actual Gorean slaves. Gor is fictitious. You are not.

I guess what raine is trying to say is this-you are the only one responsible for your own happiness and you can not make someone else responsible for that happiness. Think of the man above. He could not find his own happiness because it revolved around his wife and once she left him, he could not find happiness within himself, but looked to other relationships (or the wife to come back) to make him happy. When you figure it out, that you must find your own happiness within you, then it makes you much healthier and whole enough to really learn how to be in a fulfilling relationship. A relationship based on freedom. Freedom never to have to try too hard. Freedom to be yourself, to enjoy one another, rather than crippling each other with some false expectations.

Love is the strongest emotion known to man. It is stronger than steel and more painful than a scalpel slicing skin. If you did not love a person, possess the most incredible of loves for one, you would not have the strength of that love that keeps you walking beside them in good times and bad and even when they don't want you around. If it were anything else you would walk away and never look back. Maybe you are in love with a memory. Maybe the love you have between you is not the kind that poets are fond of talking about. It may not be the firecracker variety or soulmates. But that firecracker variety love dissipates with the morning's sun and you have two strangers staring at each other after the smoke of passion clears away. The love that you share, that day-to-day love, is the strongest kind of love. It is that steady, day-to-day kind of love that just keeps going. Time is so short. Don't cheat yourself from love. Teach yourself/him/her that kind of love. Teach them how to give it back to you. Trust in it.

I believe there are different kinds of love and they reside side by side. There is the kind of love that sees you through tedium and fights and quarrels. The kind of love you feel in moments of passion and moments of quiet. No, maybe not so much different kinds of love I guess. One love. One magnificent force with a zillion different manifestations of its power.