Just like regular real-world relationships, online relationships need tending, to grow over time. Here are some quick growing tips.

1. Take time and make time. Does your online date get in touch with you regularly? Do you do the same? Neglecting virtual meetings can be considered abuse or neglect, so treat each other’s time with respect. If it’s lacking, might mean time to move on.

2. Communication needs to “feel” right for both of you. If one of you is too pushy about meeting, for instance, that can give off bad vibes. So don’t rush. Take time to learn more about each other and develop trust.

3. Respect each others privacy. Don’t share personal email addresses or digital photos online, for example, if your online date sent you the information in confidence.

4. Share special online and offline fun times. Online – send greeting cards, links to favorite places to upload digital photos of your favorite pet, download music and video clips, post on favorite forums of interest. Offline- if you’re exchanging addresses or post office boxes, send print greeting cards and postcards, small items from your area (like a key chain with your state bird).

Tend your online relationship. Water it with care and over time it can sprout and grow.

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Win Back Love
Don’t miss out on this. You no longer need to suffer with a broken heart!

It happens to most of us at least once during our lives: What was so wonderful at the start of the relationship, that amazing feeling of being in love, suddenly comes to an end. Our loved one leaves us, one way or another, and we are left with the pieces, feeling broken hearted. Humans bond deeply to one another and when these deep attachments are broken we suffer. We feel bereft, betrayed, depressed, hopeless, furious, deeply saddened, anxious for the future and in pain. Although the following steps are not a miracle cure, letting them guide you may help you to recover quicker from a broken heart. If you need more help then this article can offer seek us out at Sex and Relationships (see resource box) for more advice on sex, sexuality and relationships.

Step 1: Acknowledge that it’s over. However things ended between you and your lover, you need to acknowledge that for now at least, things are over between you. You may not want to give up hope yet and hold on to the thought that your lover will return one day, but you need to accept that for now, right now, you will need to be facing life without him or her, day by day. Acceptance of loss is one of the first steps to grieving, any grieving. Allow your feelings to be whatever they are – loss, rage, hurt, sadness, or nothingness – but keep your thinking clear. He or she has gone and you need to live your life, one day at a time, without them. If you still have hopes that you can win them back this still applies to you. Accept how things are for now and get back on your feet. Being a clingy emotional mess won’t bring your lover back.

Step 2: Acknowledge your emotions. A broken heart is painful. We often experience a whole range of unpleasant emotions from grief, betrayal, hurt, disappointment, anger, disbelief, guilt, yearning, anxiety, jealousy, rage, sadness, hopelessness and despair. Some people go numb and listless rather than very emotional and feel deadened and lifeless. Whatever you are feeling, let yourself feel it. See whether you can name what you are feeling at different points in time and explain to yourself why you are feeling that way. Psychologists call this skill ‘mentalising’ and it’s about creating meaning out of the storm inside. Ultimately that will help you process the feelings and move on. You could also write down your thoughts and feelings in a journal or find some other means of expressing what is going on for you. Talk to people how you are doing, such as your friends and amily, and if there isn’t anybody in your life with whom you can do this you could find a self-help group on the internet to engage with. Be patient with yourself and give yourself time. Look after yourself to the best of your ability by eating well, exercising and being around other people. If you feel loads of emotion, make sure you release the emotional energy by crying, sobbing, shouting and movement (even just going on a long walk can help here). If you tend to feel nothing, make some time and space to grieve and don’t feel scared about the feelings. In the end they are just feelings, just electrochemical energy in your brain.

Step 3: Reflect on who you are now. Losing a loved one doesn’t just mean the most important person in your life is gone, but also that you are not the same person yourself anymore. Losing a loved one affects our dreams, our identity and our hopes for the future. We become the person who has been left behind, or who had to leave, who was betrayed, abandoned or who felt he or she couldn’t stay. The impact of the ending deeply affects our self-image, our identity, how we see others and what we think is possible in life for us. Make sure you are honest and clear in your thinking. Yes, this relationship has ended, but that doesn’t mean all relationships will end or that you will never find someone else. That’s catastrophising. Listen to your friends, even if you don’t believe yet what they are saying, e.g. that you are an attractive person and that your lover has made a big mistake. In the end you need to make sure you can integrate what has happened into your self-image. Keep your options open for the future by keeping your own image of yourself as a good, attractive and worthwhile person, other people as mostly trustworthy and good to be with, and the world as an exciting and fairly predictable place in which stuff on occasion can go wrong. This puts you in a position where you see yourself, other people and the world as generally OK, rather than one or more of them as intrinsically bad. You might also find that as you adjust your self-image and your expectations for the future, losing the dream of what you thought you had with your lover is just as painful, if not moreso, than losing him or her.

And while you reflect, forgive yourself. Some time we don’t let go of relationships, because we keep thinking it was our fault that it ended. If we had only done more, or talked more, or not done this thing or that thing, then maybe we’d still be together with the loved one and all would be bliss. No. Guilt is a horrible emotion which keeps people locked into negative thinking. In the end what you did is what you did. Are there any lessons you need to learn from what has happened? Would you really choose to do things differently next time? Would that be possible or sensible? Most people take too much responsibility for what has happened even if it was pretty much out of their control, or really their lover’s responsibility. If you find you still have regrets then change so that next time round you will be better equipped to deal with your relationship. Guilt and regret with no action are useless and pretty self-indulgent. If you are struggling with being in a different place then get some help through friends, books or psychotherapy. In the end do let it go, forgive yourself. Whatever you did wrong you can do better next time round. We all make mistakes and slowly grow through learning from them.

Step 4: Live your life, day by day. If you are struggling to keep going then the old Alcoholics Anonymous tactic is best: deal with life a day at a time. Don’t get lost in the bigger picture or get scared by all the long and possibly lonely days ahead. Just deal with this one day, today, to your best abilities. In the end we can only live each day in the here and now. It often helps people to really focus their attention on what is around them right now and what their task is right now. If you are doing the washing, then just concentrate on doing the washing. Be conscious of who and what is there with you, the colours, the textures, the sounds. Staying with your sensations will slow down your internal process. It will ground you and anchor you in the now. It will help you survive bad times because there is proof every single minute that you are surviving: just stamp your feet and feel the ground beneath you if you don’t believe me. This is also a good technique to slow life down and be present with yourself and your feelings. There is a good chance that as you truly attend to what is around you right here, right now you reconnect again with the miracle that is being alive, no matter how painful it may feel at any given point.

Step 5: Remember back to your life before your lover. It might seem like a mystery to you how you managed without your lover before you met them, but it’s obvious that you did. You did live your own life without even knowing he or she existed at some point. You did what you did, had dreams and hopes, plans for the future, possibly friends, family, a job and many more things in your life that had nothing to do with your lover. It is important that you find who you are again on your own without your lover so you feel OK about being separate from him or her and being a person in your own right. Going back to your older self, your dreams, hopes and desires, can help you separate psychologically.

Step 6: Work at having a good life. Building up a good life takes effort. The end of a relationship might also mean the end of going to specific places you enjoyed visiting together and letting go of friends or activities you shared. Although this can be a very painful process in itself, you can still rebuild your life to a richer level than it was before. Of course a new life won’t just appear out of nowhere: you will have to put effort and time into creating it. You may also need to take risks and put yourself into new situations to make new friends. It’s important that you move out of your old habits and comfort zone. If you were to move to a new city or a new country you’d also have to put in effort to create a place for yourself. You’d have to become familiar with a new neighbourhood, you’d have to find new friends and invest in new activities. Losing your lover might also create a window of opportunity for you: you could finally start that course or activity you always wanted to do but never had time for, or take that holiday, or visit with friends that your lover wasn’t keen on. This is your time again, you are single and you don’t need to live with compromises any more.

Step 7: Have some hope. One of the persisting human myths is the idea that there is only one single person who is right for us and who we need to be with for the rest of our lives. This idea first originated in Greek philosophy and is about 3000 years old. Humanity has moved on a bit since then and we have much more opportunities to meet new partners and fall in love again than people had in ancient Greece. Imagine all the amazing lovers you might have missed out on if your relationship had continued until the end of your life! Most people meet many others at different times in their lives with whom they could potentially be very happy. Of course each relationship is unique, but while you could be happy with person A, living in city X, having one type of life, you could also be very happy with person B, living in city Y, having a very different life doing different things. Even though your life won’t be the same with a different person it’s very likely that you can be very happy in a different way with somebody else. Who knows, maybe another amazing and lovely person is just around the next corner!

How far can you afford to bend your values to preserve your relationship? How far can you go in giving yourself up to avoid losing your partner? How much of yourself can you afford to sacrifice to not lose someone you love? How do we find the balance between maintaining our integrity and bending our values?

Most relationships require us to bend to a certain extent, but how much can we bend without a sense of loss of self?

There is an inherent paradox in these questions: A truly loving relationship is a relationship where each person accepts and even values the differences between them. If you have to excessively bend your values to preserve the relationship, what are you preserving? You are not preserving a loving relationship since love does not demand that you excessively bend your values.

Rather than look at relationship in terms of bending values to accommodate another person, let’s look at it in terms of each person learning and growing as a result of their differences in values.

For example, Patricia is a highly responsible person with a strong work ethic, while Sam tends to let things go a lot, which results in an imbalance regarding financial responsibility in the relationship. Patricia is not happy about this. Does she just accept these differences to preserve the relationship? No! That is not what a good relationship is really about. Since a good relationship is about each person learning and growing from their differences, rather than one or both people giving themselves up, Sam and Patricia need to engage in open explorations about their differences. They each have beliefs that can be explored, and in this process, new learning occurs that leads to intrinsic change rather than superficial compromise.

The real problem occurs when one or both partners are not available for exploration and learning. If one partner says, “Just accept me the way I am,” or gets angry or withdrawn when the other partner attempts to discuss the situation, no learning can take place. Then the other partner either has to accommodate or leave – not a healthy situation.

Joe is extremely neat, while Julia has a hard time putting things away. Roberta is always on time while Cecelia is always late. Maggie is a spender while David is a saver. Carl has a high sex drive while Andrea has a low sex drive. Angie is an authoritarian parent while Curt is a permissive parent. Ronald is highly social while Greg is a homebody. Depending upon whether or not each person is open to learning, these differences can lead to:

* Constant conflict

* One partner giving in to avoid conflict

* Both partners opening to learning and growing as a result of their differences

The outcome of these conflicts depend entirely upon intent. There are only two possible intents in any given moment: The intent to protect against pain or the intent to learn about loive.

When one or both partners have the intent to protect against pain, then they will find many controlling ways of avoiding dealing with the differences. They may argue, defend, withdraw, blame, give in, resist, explain, and so on, Each is intent on having their way, not being controlled by the other, or avoiding the other’s rejection. This will always lead to distance and unhappiness in the relationship. The problem is not in the differences themselves, but rather in the unwillingness to learn and grow from the differences.

When both partners are open to learning about their differences, their differences become fertile ground for the exciting process of personal and spiritual growth and healing.

We cannot make another person be open to learning – we don’t have that control over others. If you are in a relationship where your partner refuses learn and grow from the differences, then you need to be honest with yourself regarding how much of yourself you can give up and still maintain a sense of integrity. You cannot afford to compromise your personal integrity. You can bend and accommodate as long as you do not feel as if you are losing yourself. Once you feel that you are losing yourself to preserve the relationship, you will likely find yourself so resentful of the other person that the relationship begin to fall apart anyway as a result of giving yourself up. You are not preserving it by accommodating – you are destroying it while losing yourself.

The key is to be willing to come up against conflict and rejection, and even lose the other person rather than continue to accommodate when going along with what your partner wants means a loss of your personal integrity. On the emotional and spiritual level, you can afford to lose your partner but you cannot afford to lose yourself.

There is nothing as stressful and intimidating as
having to meet the parents of your girlfriend for
the first time. But, if you know how to handle
this, you will see that can be a real interesting
experience.

It comes a day in your life when you figure out
that your relationship with your girlfriend is
getting serious and she has to take you to meet
her parents and family. This is a big step in
your relationship and it is very important to
make a good impression from the beginning, if you
want that they agree to meet their girl anymore.

There are several occasions in which you can meet
her parents, such as a holiday or birthday,
picking her up for a date, or just a dinner in
family prepared special for the meeting. No
matter in which circumstances you meet, for
impressing her parents you must be prepared.

First of all, dress to impress. You must be
presentable at your meeting, that’s why the best
to wear is probably a suit. Your performance will
be judged by the first impression you make in
their eyes.

Before the big meeting make sure to find out from
your girlfriend all the details about her family,
so you will know what to talk with them. Ask
where her parents work, about their personality
if they are very serious or they have sense of
humor, and if they like funny people or much
reserved, to know how to act with them. It is
important to know some details, to not refer to
her grandparents if you don’t know if they are
still alive.

Also asking questions about her family will show
her that you really care, that you are interested,
and ready to do all the sacrifices that are
necessary to make their parents like you.
Remember that in the first meeting you must make
sure that they observe your good manners, to
prove her parents that you deserve to be with
their daughter.

If the meeting takes place at their home, don’t
forget to bring a gift, such as flowers, a box of
chocolate or a bottle of wine to show that you
are polite. Be confident, give her father a firm
handshake, and as a sign of respect call him Sir.

You have to make a good conversation, but also be
prepared for many questions towards your family.
Don’t panic, relax and look in them eyes and
answer as nicely as you can. Be prepared to
answer at the question about what do you want to
do in the future. Speak about your job, family,
sports, but don’t bring any discussion about
money, politics or personal questions. Asking
questions about their family will show your
interest about them, as far as your aim is to get
along with both partners, to get on their good
sides.

Keep a smiled face to show you are friendly; be
personable, polite and respectful. Flatters her
mother’s look or clothing and compliment her
cooking by finishing your plate. You may offer
your help to clean up the dishes; this will
certainly impress her mother.

Be yourself, to see from the beginning how you
are, and don’t show too much affection towards
your girlfriend in their presence, one kiss is
enough, to not think her parents that you are
over reacting.

Before you leave tell her parents that it was a
pleasure meeting them and they have a very
special daughter.

You will see that it will be harder with her
father which wouldn’t accept easy that now it is
another man in his daughter life except him, but
if you conquered her mother you will see that she
will be the one which will invite you for dinner
and will defend you in front of her husband if
she really likes you.

So, meeting her parents can’t be so bad, and if
you really success with this meeting it will base
a great friendship between you, which will have a
big positive effect on your relationship.

Here’s a little secret that those of the female persuasion keep from us guys: Women, even very beautiful women, like to be approached by a confident and interesting man. Are you surprised? It’s true…and confident and interesting are much more important than looks to ladies of all ages, too. That’s true for internet dating, as well as, dating in your brick and mortar world but we’re talking about internet dating here…so back to the subject at hand.

Once you have joined an online dating service, you will find that there a lot more men than women and that the men are much more likely to browse profiles and make initial contacts than women. Yes, it’s a woman’s world…still. It’s “traditional” for men to make the first move. It always has been and it always will be. Some things never change. That’s why your profile and picture are so important.

Remember…confident and interesting….and that does not translate to cocky and self-centered. It’s important that your profile lets people know that you have friends you care about and that you are passionately interested in a variety of things…not JUST sports. Another thing about that all-important profile….please don’t start it with, “I’m the guy your mama warned you about”.

You will have just shot yourself in the foot with that line. Another one to never use is, “I could be the man of your dreams”. The lady HOPES you are but she will be the judge of that…so don’t insult her intelligence. Remember….exude confidence and interesting and you will find that lady you have been looking for…or she will find you.

Won’t it be nice to have the ladies contacting you instead of you having to do everything? If you write a great profile that stands out in the crowd, that will happen.

Set The Mood

Set the mood by treating her like a queen. Take care of her every need so she can just lay back and let the day’s stresses wash away. If it’s your first date, just relax, take your time and make the entire date all about her (which means you have to tell her stuff about you too!) Look, she wants to feel like a million dollars, so treat her as though she is.

Pick The Right Situation

Take her out to a restaurant, for a moonlight walk, or cook dinner at home. Whatever the situation, create an ambience that’s all about romance. Make sure the music is just right, give her your full attention, and if at all possible use candles! Candles are the secret-weapon of romantic guys everywhere. There isn’t anyone who doesn’t look mysterious, and glamorous by candlelight.

Sweet, Sweet, Breath And Soft, Soft, Lips

Guys, no one likes fish-breath! Or cigarette-breath come to that. Now wine-breath or chocolate-breath may just be OK, depending on the tastes of your partner, but you know what? To play safe, brush like a dentist! If you can’t do that, then always have breath fresheners with you–any brand as long as they are peppermint or spearmint–and don’t forget the lip balm.

Learn From The Masters

Too may guys dive straight in and have her pinned against the wall in three seconds flat. Look. She’s most likely very tentative so be tentative too! She’ll like that a lot. You must have watched the masters at work in those wonderful old classic movies starring Bogart and Cary Grant? It may take an entire 90 minutes to work up to THE kiss, but when it finally happens the sexual tension is just explosive! Well watch those movies again. Take note of the body language; the flashing eyes; the meaningful looks; the brushing of fingertips. What’s NOT being said is louder–and way sexier–than any porn movie!

Nuzzle Her Neck And Kiss Her Face

Why do so many guys miss this amazing ace card? Unlike guys (most) women are slow starters. They take a while to warm up, and this is sort of kissing foreplay. Spend some time “investing” in the kiss to come.

(1) Post good-quality, flattering photos of yourself on your dating profile. Find several photos of yourself where you look healthy, attractive and confident and add them to your profile. You want your female matches to be drawn into reading your profile from your tasteful photos of yourself.

(2) Post photos of yourself smiling in which you seem friendly. Avoid posting photos where you have a neutral or negative expression on your face. Avoid posting photos where you have closed body language, such as your arms crossed tightly in front of you. You want the women looking at your profile to consider you as a friendly, approachable, down-to-earth guy.

(3) Spend a good amount of time and care while writing your profile. A primary goal to keep in mind is that you want your profile to be original and creative. Since there are thousands of men on the dating site competing for women’s attention, make sure that ladies reading your profile will become intrigued by your imaginative, carefully crafted descriptions of your personality, personal interests, career, life experiences and relationship goals.

(4) Reflect on the top ten qualities that matter most to you in a partner. In a welcoming manner, write a description about the characteristics that you are searching for in your future girlfriend or wife. Be careful however not to appear to be too demanding, too critical, or superficial. Superficiality is a major turn off for any self-respecting woman.

(5) Avoid being boring and uninteresting while writing your profile. Avoid writing something cliche, such as “I am just a nice guy looking for a good woman.” Write your profile in a manner that reveals your special personality. Use tasteful humor in your dating essay. Share several heart-warming stories about yourself that will make you endearing to your female readers.

(6) Avoid posting shirtless photos of yourself. Chose instead photos of you in action, doing favorite activities such as sailing, cycling or playing tennis. Most women will be turned off by revealing photos.

(7) Consider the characteristics that women are searching for in a long-term relationship partner. Communicate the following attributes while writing your profile:
a) Confidence: Show your independence and self-confidence in your profile. Remember to show humility and avoid coming across as macho or arrogant.
b) Ambition: Reveal to your matches that you are educated and intelligent with a good, stable career. Women want a man who is purposeful and goal-oriented.
c) Humor: Communicate through your profile that you are a fun and playful man who will be a fun-loving and entertaining boyfriend.