But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls (Kahlil Gibran)

To love someone is an art. You take your paintbrush, and with great patience, dedication, and inner calm, you apply strokes to the blank canvas with the intention of creating a masterpiece. As the white fades away and a landscape begins to appear, you realize that you are responsible for every color and every shade that appears on your canvas. Each thought, each action affects your canvas.

To stay with someone is also an art. We speak of communication, we speak of respect, we speak of honesty and loyalty- all these things are crucial for a relationship to function and grow, yet there is one important aspect that people usually over-look: what I call “Sacred Space”. As Gibran wrote in his famous The Prophet, in order for love to grow, we need to nourish space between the one we love and us.

How do we practice this sacred space in a couple? First off, by making sure we have our own friends, our own activities, and our own hobbies. In order for us to feel free with someone, we need to have our own world orbiting our own sun. Some other ways to conserve our sacred space and hence keep our relationship healthy is to sleep apart some nights, so that we can stay in our bubble and re-make our energies. Always sleeping next to someone can affect our sleep and our energy levels, and if some nights we need to go inside and seek for answers, one of the best ways is to sleep alone.

Another way to conserve our sacred space is to have moments that I like to call “Bubble Moments”. This is when people stop talking and enter their bubbles in which they feel in peace and in love with themselves. A lot of time, when we are in a relationship, we enter the other’s bubble without knowing it. Having our bubble moment allows us to really unplug from the one we love in order to go and spend time with our own selves, in quiet and in peace.

May the spaces between you and your loved one help to create a stronger and more durable love.

I am a huge fan of Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights written in 1847. Bronte’s novel tells the tale of a woman, Catherine Earnshaw, who is in love with a man of lower social status named Heathcliff. As all women of her time, she must eventually choose a husband and instead of choosing the one she loves, she opts for the richer man named Edgar. “I shall like to be the greatest woman of the neighborhood, and I shall be proud of having such a husband,” says Catherine.

As the tale progresses, however, we soon see how Catherine suffers for not having chosen the man she loved. She falls ill of a strange disease, and when Heathcliff returns to her after a three year absence, he coldly tells her, “Why did you betray your heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort- you deserve this. You have killed yourself.” Shortly after, Catherine dies and leaves a tormented Heathcliff to face the world alone.

Bronte’s brilliant novel is a brutal reminder of how one must always follow one’s heart when choosing the right person to settle down with. Although it would be nice to have a rich soul mate, most of the time soul mates don’t come with the latest Porsche or the million-dollar house in Beverly Hills. Sometimes our soul mate doesn’t look like the one we had in our head, and sometimes they don’t even speak the same language as us.

Wuthering Heights is timeless in the sense that we are still being faced with the same decisions people were faced with centuries ago, whether to marry for status and money, or for true love. When the time comes to say yes, let us recall the Beatles’ famous song and sing along, “Can’t buy me love” extra loud.

Internet relationships are much easier than real-life relationships. The real world is a place where you expose yourself and can experience true rejection and pain. Behind a screen you are protected; your looks don’t matter, your clothes don’t matter, and your garlic breath certainly won’t scare off your partner on the other end. You feel like a master behind the screen and you certainly are because anything you write becomes truth.

Internet dating has become a very common thing in today’s world. People meet on-line day after day, week after week, and spend hours writing e-mails and hours chatting. A common thing that happens to people that are dating on-line is that when they finally meet in the real world, suddenly things are completely different. The spark that existed over the screen is nowhere to be found in reality. It’s happened to everyone, even to me I admit.

In my experience, to avoid such deceptions, go straight for the real deal when you get the chance. If you meet someone that seems nice on myspace or facebook or an internet dating site, don’t wait weeks or months before actually meeting. You think you feel a spark? then go for it, always making sure that you meet in a public place at first. Don’t let a nice photo, sweet words, or a sexy voice lead you down a path of illusions. Explore in the real world, and try not to have too many expectations.

It’s also a good idea to avoid speaking of love when you haven’t actually met the person in flesh and bones yet. Remember that love is a very physical process, and takes time and effort. A click on the screen won’t bring you true love, but it can sure allow you to find a wonderful person who has similar interests and goals. So if you think you’ve met your soul mate over myspace, don’t wait months before testing your theory out. And who knows? Maybe you might get lucky and the spark that was once in the digital world trickles down into the physical world.

When a relationship ends, most of us get fed the usual statements from our friends and family; “There are many fish in the sea”, “You’ll find a better one”, or “Time heals all wounds”. Familiar words, right? From personal experience, these words usually don’t do much to heal a broken heart, and usually sound empty to our ears. Here are some of my own recommendations for those with broken hearts:

1) Live in the present moment. Seems easy, but it isn’t. Most people keep rolling that romantic film in their heads, the one about the first kiss, or the great trip to Cuba that year with uncle John and aunt Jenny, or that supper that he cooked on Valentine’s Day, or… Those films in our heads are the weights that keep us from living the present. In the now time, the relationship has ended, for whatever reason, and it is time to start rolling a new film. A movie where you are the star, where you are meeting new people, doing new things, and becoming happier as each day passes.

2) See friends and family. This really helps to deal with the shock of losing that one special person whom you thought would be with you for all of eternity. Seeing friends and family will remind you that in fact, your world did not gravitate only around your ex, but gravitates around many other people that love and care for you very much. Perhaps here is a good time to remind the reader that you should never make one person the center of your world. Instead, make the people you love and the things you love to do the center.

3) Create new hang-outs. Instead of returning to that lake where you first kissed or that restaurant where you had delicious clams for your birthday, build a new repertoire of hang-outs. After a break-up, it’s your chance to re-invent your world, try new things, eat at new places, visit new countries. Don’t torture yourself by returning to those places that contain memories that bring you pain; go and draw yourself a new map.

4) Write a diary. It’s not just because I’m a writer that I say this; writing liberates the mind and allows us to see more clearly certain situations. When my ex left me, I wrote every day in my diary and eventually, months later, saw to what extent I had grown stronger, happier and even relieved that I was no longer with that man. A diary is like your personal psychologist, and it’s free!

5) Exercise. I advocate exercise to nearly everyone I know who has lived through a break-up because when you exercise, the blood circulates and toxins evacuate better. More than that though, when you exercise one hour a day, it is the equivalent of taking one anti-depressant pill a day. Exercise is free and it’s less damaging in the long run than pumping your system full of pills.

Heart-ache doesn’t dissappear over-night. It does take time to get over that person whom you loved so much just earlier, and it will take some effort on your part to move along to that new film, that film where you are the star and happier than before. You can do it!