Ms Cyprah

Q. I wonder if anyone has any great ideas regarding the handling of very serious grieving that has gone on for a long time and has damaged the person? Everyone knows of support groups, therapy, medications, exercise, finding laughter and the like…but is there anyone who has a new or solid tested ‘cure’ in dispelling serious grief, profound sadness, intense sorrow or long suffering broken-heartedness? I do carry a lot of guilt myself in the way that I could have done a lot differently in my life and saved a lot of heartache for myself and others. But this question arises out of a desire to help others, too.

A. Many people who stay grieving for an unduly long time are likely to be reacting to a lot of guilt they feel and have no way of overcoming, and so grieving endlessly makes up for that feeling of impotence in resolving that guilt. Time heals every pain because we are on a journey and everything is designed to help our development on that journey. It means whatever happens to us, we have to move on from it because life has to go on. We cannot be stuck in that time frame forever, otherwise we take our life for granted, we take every blessing we have for granted and we wouldn’t really have any future.

Yet, in view of the fact that nothing in life is guaranteed, we have to make use of each moment fully. Allowing grief to overtake us on and on simply robs us of a life when we should be celebrating that person’s life with joy, not just focusing on their death. In other words: “Smile, because they lived, not cry because they died.” We all have to die at some point and the only way we can truly appreciate life is to grieve for someone and move swiftly along to celebrate their presence, not get mired in negative thoughts which make us feel even worse, yet doesn’t bring them back.

As to your statement that you feel some guilt about your past because you could have done things differently. That is rather sad, yet avoidable. You are using hindsight, and the new you NOW, to judge that person back there which never serves any purpose. If you could have done anything differently, you would have done it. You acted the only way you did then because you felt that was the only way you could express yourself or draw attention to you at the time. You did not have the maturity, information, vision, knowledge or experience that you have now. So it is pointless ever looking backwards and blaming the younger you with your older self. It is not only unfair, but a pretty futile exercise.

The best way to cope with an unhappy past is simply to learn from it and endeavour to improve on it. Otherwise the guilt becomes a kind of unmoving morass; a means of beating yourself up without really changing anything in the long run, except to get stuck in that guilt. I always remember that the past is for reference, not for residence, and leave it right where it is because it only exists inside our heads, nowhere else.
The best way to cope with grief is to grieve as much as one wishes, but for as brief a time as possible, and celebrate for as long as possible. It then puts things in a much better perspective while allowing yourself to move on with fond memories of the loved one.

Dating sites are public companies offering a specific service - to bring people together. They are not very private clubs with stringent membership rules. They are there for any member of the public who wishes to partake of their services. As such, they should aim to offer the same service to everyone, particularly through making participation inclusive. Currently, there are over 7 million users of dating sites in Britain, so any racism in the operations would be significant.

Most dating sites serving the UK have a choice of the colour of a partner. As they are predominantly white in membership, there is a virtual proliferation and promotion of racism against those who are not white, while encouraging them as members too. Yet that offensive choice is not necessary at all because everyone has the opportunity of screening out whom they do not like privately by ignoring certain approaches or politely declining any contacts from unwanted daters.

The worst culprits are Dating Direct (more than half of all males seem to use this option of choosing ‘White/Caucasian’) and the template used by the Times, Guardian and Telegraph dating sites which has the ridiculous anomaly of matching people up at a very high rate, yet without properly acknowledging the colour selected. How can someone wanting a white person match highly with a black person when the very act of being racist in choice would have negated that person from the very beginning?

As a Black woman who would have paid my money to use the service too, I would feel aggrieved to go into a profile which matches highly with me, only to see that the person has put “White/Caucasian” only. How on earth can I be a match for someone who wants a white partner? Surely, as that is an important requirement for some people, once they select that choice, it should make the match either very low or zero. I really cannot be an 84% match for a racist!

We are all entitled to the person of our choice, but in a mixed and diverse society, we have to ensure there is inclusion and fairness. There are three main reasons why such offensive choices are wrong and merely promote racism:

1. Every customer of any dating website deserves the same quality of service because they all pay the same fee to use it. The least one would expect is that they are not insulted by having to read profiles which are clearly exclusive and discriminatory of them. A customer is not being served if they are treated in any kind of offensive way.

2. Allowing people to make racist choices in a public forum belittles the users of that forum who do not match with the majority and treats them in a derogatory way.

3. It encourages racism in a public place, allowing it to be tolerated openly, when it would be against the law n other organisations.

There is no need to actually state a choice for colour on any dating site, unless that site specifically caters for a certain type of daters (like mixed relationships etc.), and that would be most obvious in its promotion and guidelines. Anything else is offensive and discriminatory and merely panders to the worst racism in users.

Q. Everyone has heard the old saying, “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” but has anyone thought of the other side of it: all the pain and heartbreak you would save yourself if you never got attached to someone? Most normal, healthy, functioning adults require some kind of companionship that could very easily lead to love. But is it really worth it?

A. Everything we do in our lives is ‘worth it’, simply because life is a journey and we start off very green, very inexperienced and rather ignorant of it then finish up very wise, resilient and much stronger for what we have to endure. Everything we experience along the way is designed to toughen us up. We cannot avoid pain and hurt no more than we can avoid pleasure because they are two sides of the same coin. Nature is about balance. If we only had pleasure, we would not be able to deal with the crises in our lives and if we had only pain, we would be very weak in health and fortitude. Everything we go through also teaches us something.

The reason why some people suffer more pain from their relationships than others is because they tend to blame their partners for any disappointments and repeat the negative patterns in their behaviour with others down the line instead of reviewing what went wrong, learning the lessons from it and being an even better person for the next connection. Many people don’t really know what they want and often settle for second best until they get burnt later on. Others prefer to live in denial about their lives and so tend to keep getting what they’ve always got. It is better to love than not at all because pleasure always comes first in the relationship. One has to go through pleasure to get to that pain. Not loving might keep away the pain, but that is not living either, as there would be no pleasure too, just a fossilised human being wallowing in their fear without any real life or joy.

Every experience in life has a purpose - to help us to be the best we can all round. When we deliberately resist experiences and fear to take risks we remain stunted in our growth without exposure to the new challenges in life which are essential for our development and evolution. It doesn’t take much to be an onlooker in life and do nothing. But the person who does nothing is usually nothing too, in fact rather insignificant and very bland, in the eyes of others.