The Household COO

I received this tale of a remarkable love story through email and decided that I just had to post about it.  We all know, since I came out of the closet, that I’m such a sucker for these stories.  However, this is a change from the usual Hollywood romance scene - it is the real McCoy.  I hope it serves as a source of inspiration in a society that is now too quick to file for a divorce and discredit the whole sanctity of marriage. 

An incredible love story has come out of China recently and managed to touch the world.

It is a story of a man and an older woman who ran off to live and love each other in peace for over half a century.

The 70-year-old Chinese man who hand-carved over 6,000 stairs up a mountain for his 80-year-old wife has passed away in the cave which has been the couple’s home for the last 50 years.

Over 50 years ago, Liu Guojiang a 19 year-old boy, fell in love with a 29 year-old widowed mother named Xu Chaoqin.

In a twist worthy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, friends and relatives criticized the relationship because of the age difference and the fact that Xu already had children.

At that time, it was unacceptable and immoral for a young man to love an older woman.. To avoid the market gossip and the scorn of their communities, the couple decided to elope and lived in a cave in Jiangjin County in Southern ChongQing Municipality.

In the beginning, life was harsh as hey had nothing, no electricity or even food. They had to eat grass and roots they found in the mountain, and Liu made a kerosene lamp that they used to light up their lives.

Xu felt that she had tied Liu down and repeatedly asked him, ‘Are you regretful? Liu always replied, ‘As long as we are industrious, life will improve.’

In the second year of living in the mountain, Liu began and continued for over 50 years, to hand-carve the steps so that his wife could get down the mountain easily.

Half a century later in 2001, a group of adventurers were exploring the forest and were surprised to find the elderly couple and the over 6,000 hand-carved steps. Liu MingSheng, one of their seven children said, ‘My parents loved each other so much, they have lived in seclusion for over 50 years and never been apart a single day. He hand carved more than 6,000 steps over the years for my mother’s convenience, although she doesn’t go down the mountain that much.’

The couple had lived in peace for over 50 years until last week. Liu, now 72 years, returned from his daily farm work and collapsed. Xu sat and prayed with her husband as he passed away in her arms. So in love with Xu, was Liu, that no one was able to release the grip he had on his wife’s hand even after he had passed away.

‘You promised me you’ll take care of me, you’ll always be with me until the day I died, now you left before me, how am I going to live without you?’

Xu spent days softly repeating this sentence and touching her husband’s black coffin with tears rolling down her cheeks.

In 2006, their story became one of the top 10 love stories from China, collected by the Chinese Women Weekly. The local government has decided to preserve the love ladder and the place they lived as a museum, so this love story can live forever.

Here’s the link to the news story.

One of hubby’s and my favourite passtimes before we had Gavin was to head out to the cinemas for a movie.  When I become pregnant, our friends who had a baby before us told us to watch as many movies as possible before I delivered because there would be no more movies for a good long while once the baby was born.

Indeed, I have yet to see a movie in the cinema since I had Gavin.  Restricted to home DVDs on muted volumes and reading subtitles so we wouldn’t disturb the baby, it hasn’t quite had the same effect as watching it in the cinema.  While movies like 27 Dresses and What Happens in Vegas are perfectly watchable on the home TV, you really have to watch something like this on the big screen:

Yup, it’s the Mummy 3.  It’s scheduled for release in January 2008.  Gavin will be two by then so I wonder if Mummy and Daddy will be able to sneak out to enjoy a movie date? 

They say that all the spontaneous spark flies out the window when you have a toddler.  Indeed, all our plans revolve around how the little one will take it.  So how’s this for advance date planning - a movie date seven months in advance? 

I’m probably rather late in posting about this but anyway, here’s the other trailer:

Rob Cohen also has a production blog complete with pictures and various details about the movie.  It looks great, but I’m a little disappointed to see that Rachel Weiss won’t be back to reprise the role of Evelyn.

A friend once told me that “The opposite of love is not hate - it is indifference”.  So long as there is still emotion in a relationship, it is worth fighting for.  So when do you decide that there is too much emotion to keep it going?  When there is a possibility that you might end up killing each other?

Before we got married, I told the hubby I wanted a Church ceremony.  Part of that ceremony requires the attendance to a see a Marriage Family Counselor.  Many people, like the hubby probably feel offended by the idea of getting a third party to step in and help a couple discuss relationship issues.  As the hubby put it, “What have they got to say that I don’t already know?”  Unfortunately, having an arrogant attitude like that is exactly the reason why a third party is necessary. 

Being an outsider, Marriage Counselors can bring up subjects that might be difficult to raise between a couple.  Since they have loads more experience, they can direct the couple through potential difficulties in the road that lies ahead.  I, for one, was quite keen to attend counseling session even if the hubby thought it a complete waste of time.  Regrettably, we never made it to one - regrettably, because I never pushed hard enough for us to attend one.

I would be lying if I said that the hubby and I never had any problems.  Indeed, we often have our little tiffs and blow ups.  It’s hard enough just between the two of us without having his parents or my parents getting into the picture.  Since my parents are usually in Australia, it’s more his parents than mine.  Although the potency of my parents probably make up for their infrequency.  But I digress…  It seems sometimes that what the hubby and I really need is to go on a Marriage Retreat.  Indeed, at times, it is about all I can do to stay in this marriage and not walk out.  I feel like throwing everything I ever listened to from Wayne Dyer out the window and tell the hubby to go shove it where the sun don’t shine. 

We somehow always seem to make it through the rough patches but the problem is that we always seem to fight about the same things.  We make up and brush everything under the carpet until the next tornado comes along and blasts that carpet away.  It always seems that the people who need to attend Marriage Family Counseling are those who are on the brink of divorce if something major doesn’t change soon and fast, but perhaps it needs to happen sooner to prevent couples from getting one step away from signing on the dotted line? 

The big question is when is it time to get professional help and what is just normal marriage squabble?

After reading PL’s post on “On Love After Three Years“, I was inspired to write my story.

On Love After One and  a Half Years

When we first met, we barely noticed each other. He thought I was rude and I saw another non-climber that I wasn’t interested in. Our circles collided ever so briefly only because we had one common friend - one of his drinking buddies, one of my climbing buddies.

We met on and off for a year with little more than a polite “hello” and “goodbye”. We were acquaintances more than friends until the fateful night when we were thrown into each other’s company by accident or perhaps by our mutual friend’s cunning. The three of us talked our way into the night and I discovered an entertaining conversationalist. He was not at all like I had assumed and I am sure I was also not quite what he had expected.

In retrospect, he was a perfect match for the old me – the hopeful, idealistic teenager – a person I was convinced I could never be again. The person he met was carefree and uncontrolled - a vagrant, drifting rock climber that made it her sole purpose in life not to care about anyone or anything. A friend once told me that that had been a period of my life where I was trying to relive the years of a missed “teenage rebellion”.

Always the well-behaved daughter, I never knew what it was like to let my hair down, to go wild, to throw all responsibility to the winds and to let people dislike me. It was always about straight A’s, my reputation, the perfect daughter and what other people would think. To be finally free of the brand that marked everything that I never wanted to be was a heady and intoxicating feeling. Drunk and hell-bent on being reckless, I chased the bohemian lifestyle, promising myself that I would never again be controlled as I was, and that meant never letting anyone matter to me. This was me, warts and all, and it was this or the high road.

Personally, I felt that it was a phase of my life I went through because I was lost. A culmination of experiences led me onto the road to nowhere. I didn’t know where I was going or what I wanted out of life. I was purposeless and life was meaningless.  Yet I was forced to continue the drudgery of life with haunted eyes. I shunned all the people who might have cared for me because relationships were a complex matter I didn’t want to deal with. In a strange paradoxical way, I enjoyed the monotony of my uncomplicated life even as I was intensely bored of it.

I would walk into relationships looking for the back door until I grew tired of the games. I decided that isolation was better than the stress of putting on the shackles of a relationship so that I could find a way to be emancipated again. I told myself that I could do without the company of a man and so I lived until the loneliness became too much to bear and I yearned for companionship in spite of myself.

On the suggestion of a friend I decided to try a fling – a concept that I had never believed in because I felt that it hurt people. Whether fate intended it that way or not, it had been the moment when I decided to entertain a casual relationship that I met him again on that fateful night. Everything I knew about him told me that this man was “for keeps”, he was the wrong material for a fling, but I went ahead with the relationship intending to end it well before the six month mark.

When I look back, I often wonder why he didn’t walk away. I was, as the character Meredith from Grey’s Anatomy described it, broken and damaged. I think that is why I find the series so captivating – not because it is set in a hospital but because of the manner in which they explore human relationships. It is because the character Christina reminds me of the “me” I had been when I first started dating my husband.

But I digress… I asked him once what was it he saw in me that prompted him to give “us” a chance and his reply was, “I saw a flower but I didn’t know whether it was blooming or dying and I wanted to see which it was.” To this day, I think he believes that he saw a flower that was blooming. The truth is the flower was dying but he brought a watering can and sunlight.

It hasn’t always been a garden of sweet smelling roses. Some days it feels like we have a one-way ticket headed for a disaster. I often wonder how I could marry a person who makes me so mad until the blood in my veins is broiling. Then I remember what a friend once told me – that “the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference”. That he can make me feel such powerful emotions, albeit negative ones, is not a sign that we are over. The day it is over is the day that I feel nothing.

Another friend once said something along these lines, “true happiness comes when you accept suffering,” although I think he stole this wise adage from Buddha. I guess in order to know the times when you are truly happy, you need to be aware of all the times when you are deeply unhappy because the presence of a negative helps us to recognise the positive. Yes, in an uncanny way, it is like saying good cannot survive without evil.

What was true of me, which I think is true of many people is that we go through this world living like we don’t deserve happiness and so we shun it every time it comes knocking on our door. I guess I was lucky that it came banging on my door this time around.

Something interesting I received a long time ago and thought it wise to keep. Funny thing is, I completely forgot all about it when I was busy choosing my life partner. After reading through it again, I think the advice Heller provides is very sound and practical. If you’re thinking about getting married, these are some great questions you should be asking yourself.

5 Golden Rules For Finding Your Life Partner
by Rabbi Dov Heller, M.A.

A relationship coach lays out his 5 golden rules for evaluating the prospects of long-term success. When it comes to making the decision about choosing a life partner, no one wants to make a mistake. Yet, with a divorce rate of close to 50 percent, it appears that many are making serious mistakes in their approach to finding Mr/Ms Right!

If you ask most couples who are engaged why they’re getting married, they’ll say: “We’re in love.” I believe this is the #1 mistake people make when they date.

Choosing a life partner should never be based on love (alone). Though this may sound not politically correct, there’s a profound truth here. Love (alone) is not the basis for getting married. Rather, love is the result of a good marriage. When the other ingredients are right, then the love will come. Let me say it again: You can’t build a lifetime relationship on love
alone. You need a lot more.

Here are five questions you must ask yourself if you’re serious about finding and keeping a life partner.

QUESTION #1: Do we share a common life purpose?

Why is this so important? Let me put it this way: If you’re married for 20 or 30 years, that’s a long time to live with someone. What do you plan to do with each other all that time? Travel, eat and jog together? You need to share something deeper and more meaningful. You need a
common life purpose. Two things can happen in a marriage. You can grow together, or you can grow apart. Fifty percent of the people out there are growing apart. To make a marriage work, you need to know what you want out of life - bottom line - and marry someone who wants
the same thing.

QUESTION #2: Do I feel safe expressing my feelings and thoughts with this person?

This question goes to the core of the quality of your relationship. Feeling safe means you can communicate openly with this person. The basis of having good communication is trust i.e. trust that I won’t get “punished” or hurt for expressing my honest thoughts and feelings. A colleague of mine defines an abusive person as someone with whom you feel afraid to express your thoughts and feelings. Be honest with yourself on this one. Make sure you feel motionally safe with the person you plan to marry.

QUESTION #3: Is he/she a mensch?

A mensch is someone who is a refined and sensitive person. How can you test? Here are some suggestions: Do they work on personal growth on a regular basis? Are they serious about improving themselves? A teacher of mine defines a good person as “someone who is always
striving to be good and do the right thing.” So ask about your significant other: What do they do with their time? Is this person materialistic? Usually a materialistic person is not someone whose top priority is character refinement. There are essentially two types of people in the
world: People who are dedicated to personal growth and people who are dedicated to seeking comfort. Someone whose goal in life is to be comfortable will put personal comfort ahead of doing the right thing. You need to know that before walking down the aisle.

QUESTION #4: How does he/she treat other people?

The one most important thing that makes any relationship work is the ability to give. By giving, we mean the ability to give another person pleasure. Ask: Is this someone who enjoys giving pleasure to others or are they wrapped up themselves and self-absorbed? To measure this,
think about the following:

1) How do they treat people whom they do not have to be nice to, such as a waiters, bus boy, taxi driver etc?
2) How do they treat parents and siblings?
3) Do they have gratitude and appreciation?
4) Do they show respect?

If they don’t have gratitude for the people who have given them everything, you cannot expect that they’ll have gratitude for you - who can’t do nearly as much for them! Do they gossip and speak badly about others? Someone who gossips cannot be someone who loves others. You can be sure that someone who treats others poorly will eventually treat you poorly as well.

QUESTION #5: Is there anything I’m hoping to change about this person after
we’re married?

Too many people make the mistake of marrying someone with the intention of trying to “improve” them after they’re married. As a colleague of mine puts it, “You can probably expect someone to change after marriage…for the worse!” If you cannot fully accept this person the way they are now, then you are not ready to marry them.

In conclusion, dating doesn’t have to be difficult and treacherous. The key is to try leading a little more with your head and less with your heart. It pays to be as objective as possible when you are dating, to be sure to ask questions that will help you get to the key issues.

Falling in love is a great feeling but when you wake up with a ring on your finger, you don’t want to find yourself in trouble because you didn’t do your homework.

Isn’t that always the way? In life we reject the things that come too easily. We don’t want the ones that want us. We want the ones that don’t want us. When the ones we don’t want no longer want us, we want them back. When the ones we want decide they want us, we no longer want them.

What a paradoxical little world we live in. If only we could learn to be content with what we have, then perhaps everyone will be a little happier in life.

I’ve had a number of friends pass this way lately and I think this message is a very apt one for them:

In the movie Before Sunrise, the character Celine makes a comment about an elderly couple fighting on the train that runs something along the lines of:

“That’s how marriages last - as the woman grows older, she becomes deaf to low frequency sounds and as the man grows older, he becomes deaf to high frequency sounds so they can both shout each other and neither will hear what the other is saying.”

I used to think it was amusing. Now I’m wondering about the truth to it because I seriously think my hearing to low frequency sounds is started to get impaired…

Sad to say, I don’t know who wrote this. It’s one of those beautiful pieces of writing that gets passed along through email that I happened to save. While cleaning out my hard drive, I came across it. I felt that the words captured here are too precious to keep to myself, so I’m posting this out.

I’ve known too many couples who were perfect for each other but failed in their relationships because they left everything up to chance. They failed to make that choice. So here it is…

When we meet the right person to love when we’re at the right place at the right time. That’s chance. When you meet someone you you’re attracted to, that’s not a choice. That’s chance. Being caught up in a moment (and there’s a lot of couples who get together because of this) is not a choice. That’s also a chance.

The difference is what happens afterward. When will you take that infatuation, that crush, that mind-blowing attraction to the next level? That’s when all sanity goes back, you sit down and contemplate whether you want to make this into a concrete relationship or just a fling.

If you decide to love a person, even with his faults, that’s not a chance. That’s choice. When you choose to be with a person, no matter what, that’s choice. Even if you know there are many people out there who are more attractive, smarter, and richer than your mate, and yet, you decide to love your mate just the same, that’s choice.

Infatuation, crushes, attraction comes to us by chance. But true love that lasts is truly a choice. A choice that we make.

Regarding soulmates, there’s a beautiful movie quote that I believe is so true about this: “Fate brings you together, but it’s still up to you to make it happen.”

I do believe that soulmates do exist. That there is truly someone made for you. But it’s still up to you to make the choice if you’re going to do something about it or not. We may meet our soulmates by chance, but loving and staying with our soulmate is still a choice we have to make.