Tag: romance

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Fun Stuff Metaphysical Connection

Metaphysical Connection: Attraction Magic

Don’t be afraid to attract and manifest the things that you want and need. (Photo: Elias Maurer | Unsplash)

February is the month we associate the most with love and romance thanks to Valentine’s Day.

Regardless of the history of Valentine’s Day — or how you feel about the holiday — it is not a bad thing to be reminded of love this time of year. We have finally settled back into our normal routines after the holidays, which could be a bit of a letdown. Taking a bit of an emotional break in mid-February to celebrate love in any of its forms can help break up the monotony.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to attract love and manifest it in your life. Everyone deserves to find a loving partner if that’s what they want. Maybe this Valentine’s Day you’re not looking for romance, but instead a little more self-love. This can be a good time energetically to work on self-love as much as it is an opportune time to work on romance.

Often when we hear the word “attraction,” we think of romance. But when it comes to spell work, attraction magic can be about much more than love. Attraction magic is any work that you do to manifest something in your life, be it love, money, an opportunity, or a specific item.

Attraction magic can be one of the easiest and one of the most difficult types of magic to do. To oversimplify, you can work attraction magic by simply wanting something really, really hard and focusing on having it. However, attraction magic is also easy to undo without meaning to.

Many of us are good at self-sabotaging, even if we don’t mean to be. When we are working on manifesting something it can be easy for us to negate the work we have been doing with our thoughts, comments, and actions. That does not mean that we do not want what we are trying to attract. But it can mean that we feel like we are unworthy of what we are trying to manifest. If we feel like we don’t deserve something or that something is impossible for us, those insidious feelings and thoughts can subconsciously undo your attraction work. No matter how many times you burn a candle or write a petition, if you don’t believe in what you’re asking for all the way to your core, you might not get it. If you are trying to manifest a new job with spell work but then tell your friends that you probably won’t get the job, you just undid all your hard work.

We all have insecurities. And most of us will likely have moments of doubt when we are trying to attract something into our lives. I don’t believe that a single occurrence will completely erase your attraction work. But if you don’t catch yourself in those moments of doubt and correct your thinking, eventually it could overwhelm your magic.

Self-love work is an ongoing work that we must do in our lives. Having more self-love and self-confidence can make any manifestation work you do easier and more potent. When you genuinely love yourself and are confident in your abilities, this will be reflected in your energy and your magic.

Regardless, don’t be afraid to attract and manifest the things that you want and need. Even if your self-love or confidence isn’t at an all-time high, that does not mean you do not deserve love or that you are not capable of loving someone. Just be sure to manifest someone who will help bolster those feelings in yourself.

One of my favorite, tried-and-true spells for attraction is to make a list. First, decide what you need or want to attract. Then write a list of all the qualities or attributes you want or need from that thing. Be realistic about it though, and understand that the list is a compromise. There’s not one person or job or thing that is going to be absolutely perfect, so you will not get everything on your list.

As we grind our way toward Valentine’s Day, don’t get caught up in the hype of the commercial holiday. Focus on your needs and desires, and manifest it with attraction magic.

Emily Guenther is a co-owner of The Broom Closet metaphysical shop. She is a Memphis native, professional tarot reader, ordained Pagan clergy, and dog mom.

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Opinion Romance Language

It Ain’t Me, Babe

Photo: Irina Silayeva | Dreamstime.com

I am breaking my own rule not to discuss my current love life.

That rule is meant to keep a comfortable distance from any unhealed bruises to my ego. It’s a technique to keep me from using this platform as a pulpit from which to indict lovers who could’ve been more. I am trying to favor reflection over catharsis. I believe in perspective. I know I have it in me, waiting to explode like a field of dandelions or a big drum solo. I know it’s coming.

It’s not here yet. As I write, I am waiting for one final disappointment, the last unkept promise I’ll hear from my most recent lover. Once, at an art gallery, we walked into a room, and he gasped at one of the paintings; it was beautiful. Once we kissed under an archway of peonies. We dated for two weeks, spent Thanksgiving together. He dumped me.

I’ve never been more classically dumped in my life. Fired by the book: “I’m busy,” “I’m not ready to commit,” “I’m in a strange place right now.” I’ve had lots of soft rejections. I’ve felt the vibes change before. I can tell when someone is slowly backing away, quietly gathering the confetti of defunct grand overtures. But I’ve never had someone dial me up to confess something nagging at “the pit of his stomach.”

I was blindsided. I wish I wasn’t, but I still am.

I’m gentle with people. I try to understand. There’s an armchair therapist inside me who desperately wants to connect the dots between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors; yes, even when their effects hurt me. I’m tough on myself. I hold a swinging lamp to my memory when things don’t work out, trying to torture a confession out of some past self who was willingly duped by the lover. Where were the red flags? I demand. Show me how I failed me.

None of this is revelatory. My friends are like this. We grill ourselves, and over the years, as we’ve gotten older and gripped with some self-development cocktail of psychiatry and yoga, we’ve toughened on each other. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve had much support from friends in the vein of demonizing my once-lover in well-meaning consolation. But I’ve also had two friends mention, “I wish men would just tell the truth,” to which I’ve asked, “That he’s just not that into me?”

“Yes.”

This one was already slated to be a challenging long-distance relationship, of which I was immediately suspicious. So much so, in fact, that during our very first kiss, I paused to say, “You’re not moving to Memphis” — a dramatic suggestion made to me on a few occasions that I simply found far-fetched. I trusted this would work out because I was told it would. For obstacles I hadn’t even perceived yet, solutions were presented. Timelines. A plan for how it would, indeed, defy the odds. So I became a believer. When someone is doing and saying everything right, and you feel appreciated and secure in a courtship, you believe. “Ain’t it nice to be courted proper for a change?” I joked on Facebook. And it was.

What followed was a surprise in the way disappointment always is, and I was emptied of the hope that buoyed me. Plans to phone or see me never materialized over the course of about 48 hours until a break-up call that was so jarring I still cannot understand what happened to change the trajectory of this relationship. I’ve been so confused that I’ve entertained this kite catching a second wind even as I’ve cried and booked a spontaneous house-swapping trip to Sweden as a big self-love Christmas gift.

But that’s just it. Life is mysterious. It is not for me to understand every lover — devil or angel — nor is it productive to accept so much fault in not being the psychic who could predict it wouldn’t work out. Sometimes the signs aren’t there. And even when they are, improve yourself with discernment, sure, but forgive yourself with sympathy, too. Outrage at what I didn’t and couldn’t and can’t know has never helped me move on or take care of my heart.

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Opinion Romance Language

The Iron Swipe: Online Dating

Tero Vesalainen | Dreamstime.com

My last three relationships and my last approximately 74 star-crossed situationships all began on the World Wide Web. This might shake the sensibilities of readers who have ever said, “I’m glad I met old so-and-so before online dating. I couldn’t possibly imagine doing it now. Perish the thought!”

After the last year of homebound communication, I don’t need to explain the uncomfortable value of internet connectedness. We all happen to be at the same 24-hour party of social media, and it’s strange. It makes love matches appear more possible as a by-product of numbers. We can “meet” people we haven’t seen in our daily lives. We can connect with people in niche fandoms all over the globe. The plenty of fish in the sea are multiplied.

And while social media platforms do their best to mimic the organic meeting of souls in a gigantic cacophony — rife with mutual ties and deceptively complete with life lived in words and images — dating apps take it a step further. The first time I ever created a dating profile was a few years ago at the onset of Facebook dating. This seemed to make sense given that data on my preferences had been mined for a decade. Why not let Cupid Zuck use it for good! I was wrong. I encountered the typical experience in all its superficiality and power. I rejected interested parties en masse with my iron swipe. I talked to a few people and eventually felt overwhelmed maintaining conversations with lots of men with whom I shared the delicate desire for romance.

Both details are problematic:

1. The truth is that someone in real life who doesn’t catch my heart-eye might with time. People can become exponentially more attractive through building rapport. I’ve developed crushes on probably 326 coworkers in this way — unlikely candidates whose familiar quirks grew appealing. The dating app invites you to treat humans as bad résumés — a slush pile to screen as quickly as possible. The ethics are debatable, but it just doesn’t accurately represent the complexity of attraction in the real world.

2. Okay, so you matched. You made it past the split-second gateway. You are joined in the revelation of your common intent to grow that precious flower of love. In the everyday emotional availability desert, simply wanting a relationship is an oasis. It’s intoxicating. So much so that it’s easy to overlook other metrics for compatibility.

Compatibility: that naturally occurring thing we taste when we meet someone at a concert and can assume we share interest in the band or setting. Meeting someone entirely new on a dating app can seem suspicious. Where has the beloved been? Is this person cool in a way that means something to me? If I’ve never seen this person at events I attend because they’re important to me, do we have enough in common to make it last?

This is absolutely unfair. You can be new to town. (Ah, I remember the days of being the coveted transplant fondly.) Or maybe you’re freshly single. Maybe you’re overcoming paralyzing social anxiety. Maybe you just haven’t yet found your love of the thing at the center of the scene in question. There are reasons.

My last relationship began on a dating app and proved incompatible. We shared some relationship preferences, some priorities, and a few personality traits. It wasn’t enough. Even so, I still have hope it’s possible to meet some undiscovered Romeo on the likes of Hinge or Bumble. In vibrant Midtown, where we same 50 people attend every art show, concert, and film screening, where we inevitably date all of the same few singles left, it is important to see reminders of a world beyond the bubble and into the realm of single, available people open to partnership.

Besides, dating isn’t appreciated enough as a leisure habit. Life is short. Drive to Clarksdale on a full moon to meet that match and have the best one-night stand of your life; then gather your tattered little ghosted heart for the next adventure. Just hypothetically, I mean. Live a little.

Categories
Opinion Romance Language

Divorced, Single, and Overwhelmingly Lucky in Love

Can romance be in the cards? (Photo: Daphne Maysonet)

If I wrangled all the romantic encounters I’ve had in the past five weeks, I would seem ridiculous to you. The last five years? You’d think I was daft.

A crushaholic. A codependent. A masochist. A machine. How could anyone look romance in the face — in so many different faces — and not turn to salt when it sours? What kind of person could wake up and march through the rituals of dating again: texting through the butterflies, dressing for dinner, singing the familiar date duets of sibling names, favorite bands, career milestones, pet peeves, major losses, and the embarrassing hope of one day making a life with someone you just met?

Before five years ago, I wouldn’t believe it. I was married. I’d entered my first real relationship at 18 years old, and it managed to last until 27. In that relationship, I grew up. I learned how to share bills. I learned how to plan meals and iron perfect creases into slacks. I learned how to take someone to the hospital in an emergency. I learned how to confess when my body was doing something decidedly gross. I learned how not to mention — out of the kindness of my heart — when my partner’s body was doing something decidedly gross. I learned how to reveal my fantasies to someone I had to look in the eye every day for presumably the rest of my life. I grew up in other ways: I began my careers in education and publishing. I learned how to drive. I discovered how much I sucked, and then I started therapy.

Eventually, mundane conflicts became irreconcilable. Then, like many: I had a loving marriage that failed.

Failure is a harsh word that someone landed on to describe a break-up. I had an amicable divorce. He’s still among the first people I call for career advice or after an accident. When you’re having coffee together at Waffle House after signing away your lifetime commitment, you’re family.

At a certain point, I had to wonder: Is a bond that brought you joy but didn’t end in partnered bliss a personal shortcoming? Is an ended relationship a failure?

Before it ended, I was afraid no one would ever love me again. I’d had a rough childhood that lacked closeness and affection. I spent a lot of time alone with my drawings or stolen library books, and I won over my teachers to cope. The partner who became my husband was the first person who made me feel understood. All of the evidence suggested I was blowing my one shot at love — that prized grail of the television shows and movies and books that raised me.

I was dead wrong.

Just three weeks after moving to Memphis, someone I’d met on my first night out at the Lamplighter drunkenly yelled, “I’m in love with you!” outside of a bar at a Jack Oblivian show, and I was Midtown baptized. The rest is the history with which I come to you, dear reader.

The years have been stormy weather. I’ve been ghosted. I’ve been broken-hearted. I’ve been deceived. I’ve ridden the low hum of casual disappointment. I’ve talked to friends, I’ve talked to shrinks, and I’ve consulted the stars. I’ve been spun on dance floors. I’ve been driven to buy groceries in freak Memphis snowstorms. I’ve been inspired. I’ve been respected and listened to deeply. I’ve had my wildly imperfect body worshipped. I have been loved. And I’ve done a lot of loving; therefore, I’ve done a lot of losing.

As of a few months ago, I am once again freshly single, and I am once again, dating.

The last one wasn’t suited for the unique demands of being my life partner. The next may not be. I can’t help but feel like the struggle of love — finding and keeping it — isn’t a failure, but a fortune of mine that, like all else, won’t last forever. There will come a time when the phone stops ringing.

So now, I am open to love like a holy fool. The romantic relationship — not critical to leading a fulfilling life, but mysterious and beautiful — a reason to leap if ever there was one.

Join me.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Cinderella

It was strange to watch Disney’s new, live-action Cinderella so soon after seeing Into the Woods. In Stephen Sondheim’s fairy tale musical mashup, Cinderella, who was played in last year’s film adaption by the extraordinarily talented Anna Kendrick, is a flighty, witty presence who toys with the Prince because she can’t seem to make up her mind about much of anything. But the new Disney Cinderella played by Downton Abbey‘s Lily James is none of those things, which is why Sondheim’s take on the character is labeled “revisionist.” For better or worse, this Cinderella is as familiar and unthreatening as Disney’s branding department needs her to be.

The director Disney chose to revamp the intellectual property Walt appropriated from the cultural commons of fairy tale land is Kenneth Branagh. A prolific Irish stage actor who was hailed as the second coming of Sir Lawrence Olivier, Branagh is no stranger to screen adaptations, having began his film career in 1989 the same way Oliver did in 1944, with a re-imagining of Shakespeare’s Henry V. And while he has done yeoman’s work adopting the Bard over the years (Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Hamlet), lately, he’s found success adopting Marvel heroes (Thor) and Tom Clancy novels (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit).

Even working within the Disney corporate environment, Branagh’s hand is evident in Cinderella. He approaches this adaptation in the same classy way he approaches Shakespeare. But here’s the thing: It’s not the Grimm version of the tale he’s adopting, like Sondheim did in Into the Woods. Nor is it the 17th-century French version of the tale Cendrillon, which introduced the Fairy Godmother and the glass slippers. Branagh’s bailiwick is to adopt Disney’s 1950 animated musical Cinderella into a live-action, non-musical version.

I’m still pondering why anyone thought this would be a good idea. Cinderella is extremely important to Disney. It’s widely credited as being the film that saved the studio, reversing Walt’s sliding fortunes after a decade of war and bad luck had pushed him to the brink of bankruptcy. After all, Disneyland’s centerpiece is Cinderella’s Castle. It’s built right into their corporate logo. And no one has been more successful with musicals in the 21st century than Disney, as hordes of parents who can’t get “Let It Go” from Frozen out of their heads will be the first to tell you. So why strip out the music from the corporate flagship, dooming it from the very beginning to be a tinny echo of the original?

Branagh does his best, as he always does, and over all, the production benefits from his taste and style. Cinderella reads Pepys to her melancholy father (Ben Chaplin) after her mother (Hayley Atwell of Agent Carter fame) dies. The diction is much higher than with most movies aimed primarily at preteen girls, with narrator and Fairy God Mother Helena Bonham Carter opining about how “economies were taken” when Cinderella’s father dies offscreen, leaving her stepmother (Cate Blanchett, who steals every scene she’s in) and stepsisters Drisella (Sophie McShera) and Anastasia (Holliday Grainger) without any means of support. James’ Cinderella and the Prince (Richard Madden from Game of Thrones) actually have good chemistry, and they appropriately share some of the film’s best scenes together, such as when Branagh has them circle each other on horseback when they first meet in the forest, and when they steal away during the ball so he can show her his “secret garden.” Visually, the director takes frequent inspiration from the animated version, from the color coding of the wicked stepsisters to the way Cinderella’s pumpkin coach dissolves when the Fairy Godmother’s spell wears off.

Branagh’s swooping camera and sumptuous CGI palaces look good enough, but they can’t replace the classic, hand-drawn animation of the old-school Cinderella. And even without the songs, this version is almost 50 minutes longer than the classic. Most of the extra running time comes in the beginning, when Branagh spends time exploring more of the family’s backstory, although he wisely gives Blanchett’s Wicked Stepmother as much screen time as possible. Cinderella‘s not a bad movie, per se, it’s just turgid, overly long, and desperate for a reason to exist beyond the boffo box office numbers it put up last weekend. But we all know that, for the House of Mouse, $132 million is reason enough.