The Providence Journal/ All About You/ Sunday May 6, 2012
By Rita Watson
With the advent of Mother’s Day, I knew it was time to change my home to its summer look. That meant removing the Valentine wreath from my front door and putting away the coffee table collection of love books to make way for decorating magazines. But removing Hugh Morris’ “How to Make Love” and Pietro Ramirez Sr.’s “The Art of Kissing: Tips & Techniques from the 1930s” made me pause. I decided to re-read them to see how today’s men are measuring up.
Morris tells men in the ’30s: “Tenderness for each other is one of the surest signs of love.” And he advocates the generous gesture of writing a love letter, for which he gives men an example.
Advice on kissing from Ramirez is also generous: “As in all matters pertaining to love, don’t hurry the process of kissing. A kiss is too rapturous a thing to be enjoyed for the moment and the moment only. Linger longer on her lips than you have ever lingered before.”
In talking with friends who have been involved with online dating, I learned that today as in the ’30s generous men are good lovers and good kissers in contrast to cheap men who also happen to be bad tippers and have a penchant for “splitting the bill.”
Dr. Richard Nicastro tells me: “Stingy people exist in a psychic state of lack — they experience themselves and the world as having finite resources and therefore have to hold onto their small piece of the pie. They do not feel that by giving to another they are somehow or in some way replenished. They perceive giving as a one-way street that drains them of emotional and/or material resources …
“Being generous in some way by giving emotionally, sexually, or energetically feels threatening because it is a selfless act which requires a loosening or letting go of one’s self or psychological boundaries,” he said.
Nicastro (strengthenyour relationship.com ) earned his doctorate from the New School in New York and taught at the University of Hartford before moving his practice to New Mexico. He pointed out that “withholding is an unconscious way of regulating intimacy and keeping the other person at arm’s length.”
In writing about the benefits of generosity for Psychology Today, Judith Orloff, M.D., an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and author of “Emotional Freedom,” challenges us to be giving: “Give what you can; it doesn’t have to be a lot. Feel the growing sense of abundance it produces, an energy which circulates far and wide. It’ll find its way back to you.”
Sad to say, those who lack the capacity to be giving miss out on the generous abundance of love.
Rita Watson, an incurable romantic, is our relationship columnist and a regular Journal contributor whose web address is ritawatson.com .