Lust to love - what next?

We like to think we live in an age where sex can be utterly casual, no strings, no commitment. But sex is a powerful bonding mechanism, and so very often - and this goes for the lads as well as for the girls - something that started as pure pleasure turns into something much more significant and much deeper. If you find yourself falling in love with someone with whom you've agreed to have a 'casual' relationship, what should you do?

• Be honest with yourself; don't keep on pretending you don't care when actually you do.
• Give it space. Take the time to think things over and find out what you really feel about your partner.
• Be honest. Tell your partner what you feel - it's only fair. If they back off, then they were a lost cause anyway.
• If your love isn't returned, don't wobble or pressure: there's no law to say that just because you have fallen in love, your partner should too.
• You can't make someone else love you - but you can save yourself from heartbreak. Set a time limit of - say - three months, then walk away.
• Don't rush into more casual sex - after rejection, you'll just be that much more vulnerable to falling in love again.
• If your love is returned, celebrate hugely. Lust that turns into love is a wonderful thing!
  

The Ninety Day Plan

I love spreading the word about good new ideas in personal development. This one's courtesy of my friend Charley Ferrer, a wonderful American therapist whom I met at the World Conference of Sexology in Montreal in 2005. Charley suggests that, rather than wobbling about whether a new partner is The One for you - and particularly if you find yourself either treading on eggshells for fear you'll lose him (or her) - you simply put together a Ninety Day Plan. which is guaranteed to sort the wheat from the chaff, and the viable relationships from the ones that are never going to work.

Here's how to do it.

1: When you get together a new partner, make a judgment first whether they are obviously a 'no'no' - continuing track record of alcoholism, drug abuse, violence or infidelity. If you know they are - or if at any time you discover that they are - end the relationship immediately.

2: If there are no obvious danger signs, then make a commitment that for Ninety Days, you are going to commit to this person as if the relationship was going to work. Let them know that is what you're doing and that you're not going to back out before that period or over. (Also let them know that this doesn't mean you are assuming you will marry them or have their babies, just that you're theirs for three months.)

3: Now relax. Be kind, generous, loving and caring, without worrying whether it's being returned - give and take may even out over time. Don't worry or wobble - again even if there are slight glitches, love takes a while to bed down. Hang on in there, and give it time to develop.

4: But also, be authentic. Be open, honest, the real you without trying to impress or win your partner over. If you think something, say it. If you want something, say so. If you have an impulse to do something, do it. Within reason (no truly bad behaviour) do what you feel like.The Ninety Day Plan gives you the stability to do this.

5: At the end of the ninety days, take audit. Are you disillusioned with your partner? If so, then walk away - but don't reproach yourself; you have absolutely given it your best shot. Is your partner disillusioned with you? If he is, then best for him to walk away now rather than do it years down the line when you're married or pregnant.

But if you are both happy, then this is good. He has seen the real you and he knows who you really are. That means you have a really solid and hopeful basis to go forward - for the next Ninety Days.

If after four sets of Ninety Days, things are getting better and better, you'll probably find that nice things will happen - like you'll move in together or buy a ring!

Arranged or rearranged

I was fascinated to see a report in the Times on Monday that Arrange Me a Marriage, a new primetime show for BBC Two, aims to discover whether arranged marriages would work for British singletons. The presenter, a Glasgow matchmaker called Anella Rahman, aims to explore whether the principles of Asian marriage (match couples through background and life goals, provide prior vetting by family, tally expectations of marriage) will work better than the love criteria that most young Brits work to when choosing a mate.

I'm fascinated by the report for two reasons. First, this programme began conceptual life aiming to use a team of experts - and I was one of the people initially approached. I'm glad to say the producers changed their vision - glad because I genuinely believe that fielding use of just one Asian matchmaker creates a stronger and more interesting focus than the original scenario. So go, Aneela Rahman, go!

I'm fascinated secondly because I agree with the programme's premise. Of course I recognise the dangers of people marrying sight unseen, and of course everyone - including the most fervid supporters of arranged unions - would condemn forced or unwilling marriages.

But I also know, from the sharp end, that the traditional Western route to marriage has major drawbacks. For a start, it allows lust to massively dictate partner choice - and we know from research that the lust component of a union lasts a few years at most. But more, research also shows that the criteria that make for a long lasting and happy marriage are not the ones that many Western couples use to make their choice - but are the ones that inform the best arranged marriages. Common values, common opinions, common relationship expectations, common life aims - these are the things that recent studies show matter in love, not looks, or being 'cool', and certainly not the emotional neediness and dependency that motivate so many unions today.

I shall be watching Arrange Me a Marriage avidly, not only through enjoyment but also in the hope that it will hold love lessons for us all - and particularly for those of my readers who are currently in the process of choosing their life partners.

But what do you actually dooooo?

As I've mentioned earlier, my working life has no clear pattern - any two days are usually utterly different. But Mondays and Thursdays have something in common - on both I write and submit agony columns. Today, it's my column for That's Life, a woman's weekly for whom I've written for over a decade now.

My postbag always moves me. A few sentences on lined paper torn from a notebook and hand-scribbled in a guy's coffee break. Several paragraphs inside a pink card with kittens on the front carefully printed by a fourteen-year-old, probably during a maths lesson. Fourteen pages of stream of consciousness, almost certainly written at the dead of night and downstairs, while the hated and feared spouse sleeps on upstairs.

How do I respond? Always from the gut. Yes of course I research around the problems presented, of course I refer on to an appropriate organisation. But the core of my answer is always instinctive, a reaching out to the letter writer, to make them feel understood and to give them a way forward.

I haven't got the answers. But what I can do - what my expertise and experience enables me to do - is to help my readers see their problems differently. The guy writing in his coffee break needs to realise that ending his affair will be hard but not impossible. The schoolgirl writing at her desk needs to realise that she doesn't need to sleep with the boy in order to get the love she craves. The spouse writing in the dead of night needs to realise that leaving the violent partner is the best thing for everyone.

Of course, I'm not just addressing those people. Yes, I originally write person-to-peson, but I'm published to an audience of millions, who buy the magazines and websites that run my columns. What I say needs to help them too see their problems differently - needs to give them permission to stay, to leave, to say yes, to say no.

Above all, my agony aunt columns need to give people the message that when times get tough, they're not alone - and that they deserve not to be alone. If not from friends and family, then from advisors, counsellors, therapists - and from agony aunts - people should feel able to reach out and get the help and support they need.

I can't believe I just did that!

Psychologists at Exeter University have made a neat discovery. Apparently they've tracked down a brain mechanism that alerts us, in the present, to mistakes we've made in the past. So volunteers who messed up on a set task experienced a sort of instinctive mental flinch when they were about to repeat that mess-up. Useful, say the psychologists, because it provides us with an early warning system in skills such as driving.

My thought was this. If we have such a mine detector for physical competencies, what about emotional competencies? Wouldn't it be great if we could learn not to date the partners who make us miserable, or not to run the addictive behaviours that cause us heartbreak? Wouldn't it be great if we could learn to avoid mistakes in our relationships?

Well actually, we do learn. We develop emotional mine detectors from the day we are born - and many of them stand us in very good stead. Problem is, we also overlearn. We learn, too quickly for our own good sometimes, that we need to flinch and run away from certain situations. And then, because of our past mistakes we can end up emotionally paralysed, scared of ourselves, scared of other people, scared of living our lives.

The vast majority of my agony aunt correspondents - and the vast majority of people worldwide who turn up in therapy - are folks who have a wired-in early warning system that leaves them believing that they can do nothing, be nothing, love no-one - for fear of making the same mistakes again.

Note to Exeter, then. Once you've tracked down not only our physical but also our emotional early warning system, can you please work out a way that - when we need and want to - we can also put that system on hold for a moment, relax, and start trusting the world and trusting ourselves