“What happens to cause the death of romantic love for our spouse? Why does this death happen to most of us four to ten years into our relationships? One main reason: We stop doing the things that create deep emotional feelings.” -David Clarke, Ph.D.

That sounds logical doesn’t it? But too often when life gets busy the first thing we forget to do is to take care of our love for each other. That’s what we’d like to discuss this week. We’ll be gleaning thoughts on this subject from the book, “Men Are Clams, Women Are Crowbars,” written by Dr. David Clarke. On this subject he writes:

“Our initial love for each other springs up without effort. When we first meet and are going out, the passion is just there! Boom! We instantly get it. It grabs us, and we’re swept along by this amazing, intoxicating river. It’s chemistry; it’s infatuation; it’s hormones; at least, in the beginning of the relationship. Our feelings of love aren’t connected to the higher intellectual centers of the brain. For once, even the man’s logic deserts him. It’s all one big emotional chain reaction.

“We have the feelings first. And the feelings motivate us to do things that are intense and exciting. Feelings come first, and then behavior. This is how all love relationships start. Because we’re ‘in love,’ we become a couple. We go out and do fun things together. We laugh and play and touch. Everything we do is driven by the feelings we have for each other.

“As our original feelings leave (hormones only carry us so far), we slowly stop doing loving behaviors. We end up, most of us, with the emotional connectiveness gone —wondering what happened —wondering why we are so far apart. We look at our spouse, and there’s no spark —no heart-pumping, adrenaline-rushing reaction. There’s just a certain fondness —an affection —a ‘you’re a nice person’ familiarity. It’s fine to feel that way about great-uncle Harvey or a household pet —but not about the person we married!

“Right here, many couples quit. When the feelings of being in love are gone, they think it’s gone forever, and they’ll never get it back. So they throw in the marital towel. ‘It was a nice run, but this is the end of the road.’ The relationship is, for all intents and purposes, over. A slow, hideous death begins. The couple will do one of two things. They’ll stay together out of duty and just bump along in a cold, emotionless marriage. Or, they’ll get divorced and try again with a new partner, and often the same cycle takes place.

“The culture’s answer to this loss is divorce. Culture says: ‘Look, nobody stays together forever. Life is too short to keep on suffering in this marriage. You have only 70 or 80 years to live. Get out while you’re still young enough to attract someone else. The kids will be fine. You’re just hurting the kids anyway by staying in your marriage.’

“Millions of persons, followers and non-followers of Christ are taking culture’s advice. I should say Satan’s advice. That’s who is really sending this message. It’s too bad, because those who leave marriage when the emotions leave never get to the good stuff. They quit too soon! Real, deep, lasting love is only reached after your initial emotional feelings run out, after the “cloud nine” experience. That’s when you can build the marriage God wants you to have.

“I see clients all the time in my office who want to divorce. They feed me culture’s advice, trying to persuade me to believe it. They’re disappointed and tell me: ‘We just fell out of love.’ I reply: ‘I know. Of course you did. Everybody does. That’s not a good enough reason to divorce.’

“Frustrated, they try again: ‘but, you don’t understand. I don’t love my spouse anymore.’ I respond: ‘I do understand. So? I’m not surprised. One partner always runs out of infatuation before the other. It just happened to be you. That’s still no reason to get divorced.’ I tell these clients that every couple loses their original love. It is a difficult and painful place to be. But it isn’t unusual. It’s universal. Then I tell them that now is the best time to build a real marriage. A marriage based not on infatuation, but on authentic love —the genuine article.

“I tell them: ‘you haven’t had a marriage yet. You’ve had a nice run on infatuation and hormones. That’s over and now you have a choice. You can divorce and have three, maybe four more infatuations before you die and never know true love. Or, you can build one great love relationship with the person you’re married to now. What’s it going to be?’

“I share God’s perspective with these out-of-love clients: ‘God wants you to stay in your marriage. He wants you to avoid the pain and suffering divorce inflicts on its victims. God’s perspective is eternal. It’s not 80 years and it’s over. It’s 80 years on earth, and then living forever in heaven or hell.’

“I try to convince these clients that, with God’s help, they can forge a brand-new marriage. Some have already been divorced, and are still searching for love. I tell them they can find an intimate, forever love with their present marriage partner. What I tell them is: ‘your marriage is dead. Go ahead and bury it. Let’s start over and make a marriage that is filled with life and love.’

“At the point in the marriage when you lose your feelings of love you have to do something revolutionary —something you’ve never done before. You have to reverse the process. You have to begin doing loving behaviors in order to bring back the emotional feelings. You won’t just wake up one morning and suddenly have the feelings back. It doesn’t work that way.

“From now on, it will be behavior first, and then feelings. For the rest of your life as a couple, you will have to work hard at creating and maintaining loving emotions. It’s worth the effort; believe me, because the alternative is grim. Living without loving feelings for each other is depressing and empty, and not pleasing to God. This isn’t what God had in mind when He designed marriage.

“God wants you to experience the deepest human love possible with your partner. And if you do the right things, you’ll get an ever-deepening love with your marriage partner. This love will be much more fulfilling than the hormone-driven love you had for each other back at the beginning. Loving emotions is like a fire. You must keep adding logs to keep it going.”

Amen! Amen! Amen! This is exactly what God showed us when years ago our own love had died for each other. But when we seriously committed our marriage to God and started to do loving things for each other, our feelings of love started to grow and became stronger than we ever thought possible.

It is our deepest hope that every Christian couple that reads this message will put the intentional effort in, to help your marriage relationship grow, as God would ordain. In doing so, you will experience an enduring love for each other beyond your imagination –one that reveals and reflects the heart of Christ. We pray the best for you, now and in the future.

Cindy and Steve Wright

~ The above article was shared by my aunt. More insight on marriage and relationship building can be learned through Marriage Missions International website. 

Every one or two days and most often twice a day I get an email from Apple. Being a former employee and a Mac user myself I feel a sense of pride of being in the Apple community. And like most computer users, Steve Jobs is as iconic as the logo he’s created himself (next to Jonathan Ive, of course).

Browsing over my emails this morning I almost spewed the coffee in my mouth as I read of Steve Jobs’ resignation. I haven’t met him personally but he is a cult leader and alas I had become a follower over the years. It’s no surprise really, he’s got cancer for crying out loud. And in the pancreas! I’ve yet to learn of any person who’s survived that - and I mean be-cancer-free-for-the-rest-of-their-life-no-remission-survival. Every WWDC keynote he presents people’s moods shift to somberness as they watch his progressing frail arms and legs walk to the stage and enthusiastically promote the latest Apple toy. I meant no disrespect but the next news bomb would most likely be his death and Jack Layton’s won’t even be remembered in a year. 

But today is not a good day today. And hopefully not for a very very very long time for Mr. Jobs. The primary reason I wrote this post was simply when I read the email that he stepped down as CEO I remembered the Commencement Address he gave to the graduating class of Stanford University on 2005. I’ve posted it before but then hearing and reading about it again is as inspiring as the first time.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5￠ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Yesterday a friend shared that a person we've known for awhile has passed away from lupus. This morning I found out thru Facebook that a former colleague died from stroke. Those two death notices have left me wondering about the inevitable.

Death is not something new to me. When I was highschool my aunt died suddenly from blood poisoning. Back then I was consumed by the guilt that maybe I caused her death. And then one of my cousins died from a car accident. I still feel a slight shudder down my spine when I recall his mother's wailing and calling me "Antoinette" as me and my cousin had similar features. My grandfather died not soon thereafter, but by then I have grown too distant to my relatives and family that I felt only a bit of sadness.

In between then and now I was consumed by work and any death notices were brushed aside and for those that were too shocking to understand I rarely felt much still. Until now.

I suppose this is a late quarter-life crisis or an early mid-life one, but the news of acquaintances' deaths made me wonder what I have done with my life and what memory I will leave behind. Sadly there hasn’t really been anything I’ve done with my life I’d consider meaningful and this realization has gotten me worried that if I die today or tomorrow my life will be nothing but bland memories for those who cared and hurtful ones for those who didn’t. 

When I imagine my funeral I know I will not get tearful faces or any gun salutes or heartwarming accolades and even my headstone would probably be just my name and the year I was born and when I die. And all of that don’t mean much to me, what’s quenches my heart is imagining people who knew me wouldn’t even care less if I died. Sad. So sad I wish I could live eternally. 

But I can’t. And so I have taken the time to think of my life and the legacy I want to leave behind. It’s not easy. It’s not like I have the making of a person who can cure cancer or give jobs to the poor. I know though that in my own small way I want to make a difference. Starting with those around me --- the people I have close relationships with, the people I work with and for, the people I live with --- I can serve and help ease their burdens instead of being selfish. Though I may not have power, influence and strength I know that my every action will be as a drop of water in a clear still pond to the Maker’s eyes. And at the end of my life perhaps even though no one comes to my funeral, it will not matter because I gave every moment of my life being a woman after God’s own heart.

In my first year in University I first discovered the wonderful world of orgs or organizations. In my first week alone I discovered the University has an org for those cowboy wannabes, people who are passionate about a particular sport or hobby or subject, and then there were orgs for the people who had similar taste and sexual affinity. I cannot help but giggle as I watched the transgenders who have gone a sex change brag about their recent cup sizes and even squeezing each other’s breasts to feel how “real” this operation is compared to the real thing. I thought to myself if the Colonel was here and seeing what I was watching he will probably march across them and start preaching the Word of God and make them confess that they are vile sinners for impugning God’s work in their lives and bodies.

I have recently read an article in Maclean’s regarding kids being diagnosed as transgendered. This article tackles the growing number of teenagers in Canada who have been diagnosed with gender identity dysphoria (GID) or transgenderism.

Perhaps it is not common in Canada such that this diagnosis will render a three page article. However, in the Philippines transgenderism is a way of life. You go out anywhere and it is common to see lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. And because it is common to see the “third gender”, these individuals are socially and economically integrated in the Philippine society and play an important role in shaping our culture.

For as long as I can remember, transgenderism is something that did not merit a doctor’s diagnosis in the Philippines. It had been the sociocultural identity of Filipinos. Yet despite Filipinos being open to transgenders, for some in the older generation denying is still the way of life. Like their counterparts in first world countries, there is a fear of rejection, humiliation, and abuse. Society’s expectation of manhood and femaleness as well as the religious upbringing is still prevalent among the older and admitting to be gay to your family is usually met with disdain and ridicule.

The article discusses the high suicide rates for GID teens as they are obsessing about their sexual preference as well as the burden of their secrets. But because of treatment thru hormone therapy Pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Daniel Metzger said, “...the new generation of young transgender kids are so much luckier for being able to do what they knew they wanted to do when they were 12”.

Yet despite my ability to be open to the LGBT people a huge part of me still questions if sex-reassignment surgery, hormone blockers, or even empowering children “to do what they knew they wanted to do when they were 12” is the way to go. I am not saying that we must encourage the child to play and dress the way that reflects their biological sex hoping that this may help them grow out of GID. But at the same time tolerating and reaffirming their anxiety of being born into the wrong body and is actually of the opposite sex is not right as well.

It may seem hypocritical of me to say these things given I have countless number of LGBT friends and acquaintances but on the other hand I have known a lot of LGBT people who used to be transgender yet reverted to their birth gender eventually. Perhaps this is a rare case, but in each of these rare cases I have discovered that when they recognized the depravity of their choices for perverting the way God created them and realizing that the only way they can change is through Jesus Christ it became a natural choice for them to stop.

I know for some the last sentence I’ve written may be deemed offensive. But whether you label me as bigot and remove me from your list of friends is all up to you. All I am writing is my observation. I do not have a child and I do not know of a family member who had to go through a difficult reconciliation whereas their child tells their parent that he or she is transgender.

Although I must acquiesce that it is very hard to understand what is inside a transgender person to have such a burden to make that change, I am also adamant in my belief that God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve, and definitely not Adam in Eve. And either way one words it, I believe He does not make a mistake by putting a man’s soul in a woman’s body. As usual, it all boils down to free will and the choices we make out of the situations we are faced upon.

I came across this story of father and son, Dick and Rick Hoyt. The video pretty much says it all.

Truly, an inspiring story.