The late 90s Cosmo girl, 7: Living alone - Tales from the home front

 I live in Denmark today, but pay an annual visit to the Philippines without fail. Each visit I open up one of the boxes containing my writings (journalistic and creative) dating back to the fun years I spent working in Manila, as well as to my superficially normal childhood. This year, the box I chose yielded a clutch of magazines from the Summit group, which published the Philippine edition of Cosmopolitan. I wrote for Cosmo in the late 1990s, and now that nearly 30 years (gasp! I was a veritable kid!) have elapsed, it's time to share them with a digital community.

How will they be read by young women who have been formed, over the last 15 years, by the very visual platforms of Instagram and Tiktok, for whom Facebook probably resembles a retirement community?  

Back when this was written, one of the most anticipated rites of passage of young adulthood -- moving out of one's parents' house to carve a life of independence, alone -- was something shocking, especially for well-brought up young women in the Philippines (possibly with a convent school background). For the less well-off, economics rather than the need to preserve one's reputation was the reason young women opted to share lodgings. Living with a man was unheard of. 

(Text of article and publishing details to follow)

The late 90s Cosmo girl, 6: Is he Mr. Right, Mr. Wrong, or Mr. He'll Do For Now?

I wrote for Cosmo in the late 1990s, and now that nearly 30 years (gasp! I was a veritable kid!) have elapsed, it's time to share them with a digital community.

How will they be read by young women who have been formed, over the last 15 years, by the very visual platforms of Instagram and Tiktok, for whom Facebook probably resembles a retirement community?  

The piece below was commissioned by Cosmopolitan and was among the first I wrote for them. One of Cosmo-Philippines' directives was to infuse the articles with local color, which included strategic use of Tagalog expressions and quotes. Today, I disagree with this approach, preferring to use Tagalog (or any other language) only when an English translation is impossible.   

*** 

Is he Mr. Right, Mr. Wrong, or Mr. Puwede Na for Now?

Lakambini Sitoy
Cosmopolitan-Philippines (publication details to follow)

To Leah and her freshman law classmates, Mike was perfect. He was tall, carried a briefcase to school every morning, drove his own car, lived in ritzy Dasmarinas Village. He looked as great in jeans as in a button-down shirt and a tie. Even better, he went to Mass before exams and, with the kind of grades he pulled, was destined for the Dean’s List. 

The first week of school Leah set her sights on Mike. It wasn’t long before the entire class learned of her program for social improvement, a program that had nothing to do with studying hard and passing the bar. Mike was one of the first to find out but, being a true and experienced Manila gentleman, played along with her game. 

Prettty soon Leah ran into a few of Mike’s flaws. For instance, he was an avid gossip and had a tendency to put down his inferiors. This Leah found cute. She herself had no patience with people who were stupid and ignorant, and besides shewas of good stock, nobody could put her down. 

And thus it came as a surprise to Leah, near the end of their senior year, when she discovered that she was pregnant by a Mike who had no intention of marrying her, who denied the baby was his, and who immediately took up with a smarter and prettier undergraduate, as if to prove a point.

***

Leah, like most of us, was in search of Mr. Right. She thought she’d found him in Mike, who had all the traits that society values in men. Trying her best to find a partner with all the correct trimmings, she failed -- or refused -- to go beneath the shining achiever surface and relate with Mike, the person. She turned him instead into Prince Charming; Mike, resentful of this kind of reductionism, obligingly turned himself into a frog.

Women on the look out for the perfect man and the perfect relationship need not be discouraged by Leah’s story. For there can be a “Mr. Right” for each woman.

But he most likely won’t be Prince Charming.

“It would be easier to define who Mr. Right is if one keeps in mind that Mr. Right is a human being like the rest of us: failures, flab and all,” says Rachelle Layda, a counsellor for abused women who is completing her Master’s degree in Psychology at the University of the Philippines. “Once a woman defines the idea of Mr. Right in more or less this way, approaching and dealing with men (in and out of relationships) will be less disappointing and more realistic.”

Most women are careful and selective when they enter into a relationship with a man, although they may not be as snobbish as Leah. They have also been burnt enough along the road to adulthood to know that good and lasting relationships do not just happen to you. For one, they must be worked on. Furthermore, they must be with the right kind of person. 

The first few months (or even years) of a relationship are necessarily a time for assessment. No matter how wonderful he may seem during the courtship and honeymoon stages, it would do a woman good to assign her lover a temporary sort of status until she gets to know him better. Conversely she need not send him away just because he has lots of pimples or picks his ears in public.

“Every man has character flaws. What one has to do is to see which of these flaws matter and which ones don’t, and these differ for each woman,” Layda says. “For instance, smoking might be a critical flaw for one woman, a minor flaw for another, and not a flaw at all for a third. To your mind, if a man has more critical flaws (e.g. philandering, substance abuse) than minor flaws (e.g. poor table manners) then he is not Mr. Right for you.”

Layda thinks even one critical flaw disqualifies a man as a potential Mr. Right, because if this one flaw would negatively influence the way the relationship develops---and if the inevitable personal changes that arise from a relationship are likewise adverse---then the relationship might not be worth pursuing.

But if a man has some minor flaws, she continues, he could be a potential Mr. Right, especially if he doesn’t have a critical flaw. 

“It all depends on how many minor flaws you can accept and tolerate. And these are two different things,” Layda says, adding, “Of course, if a man is mostly or all minor flaws, he may not be Mr. Right.”

The idea here is that flaws do not cancel each other. More importantly, a man’s redeeming characteristics do not cancel out his flaws.

Chemistry and work

Relationships are a dynamic. They are a product of chemistry and yet require a lot of work; and the proportion of these two varies at different points in time. Take the case of Cristina, who got married a few months ago, to a man who was part of her college barkada at first, and then became her lover when they transfered to Manila. Although they slept together for six years, living together for the last two, both were hesitant about absolute commitment. To Cristina, he was more of “Mr. Puwede Na for Now” at the beginning of the relationship, a warm body she could cuddle up to and release her sexual energy on. She didn’t like his unreliability and the way she had to compete with his male Manila barkada. And she wished he was making as much money as she was.

“Tony started earning points when his friends told me how much change they had observed in him since we started going together,” Cristina says. “His attitude toward relationships changed. He was less flighty, not as footloose as before.”

During a six month cooling-off period they’d agreed on, Tony got another woman pregnant. It was a taboo topic between him and Cristina, but one day Tony brought up the issue, and eventually was able to explain to her his obligations to the child.

“I felt he was urging me to accept the child and the situation, and if I did not matter to him, he would not have gone to the trouble,” Cristina says.

Tony is an ordinary man, a far cry from the dazzling Mike, and yet to Cristina he was Mr. Right. Although their relationship had taken several hard blows, they were able to repair its fabric by confronting their most serious problems.

So how can a woman tell if a relationship is one that can be improved? How does she know whether to stick around to repair the damage, or whether to walk away?  

“A relationship is reparable when both partners are willing to change specific aspects of the relationship,” says Layda. “By this I mean his behavior, their communication style, their commitment status, etcetera. This also means that her partner likewise recognizes that there is a problem that needs to be dealt with and that he is willing to do his part to deal with it.”

He’ll do for the moment

Layda opines, however, that a relationship is not reparable if the partner doesn’t recognize that there is a problem, or if he does, refuses to do his part in working the problem out, or believes that it will fix itself. 

This was the case with 30-year-old Elena, whose professor husband of five years has two unforgivable personality quirks: he is chronically tardy, and he is a slob. These two, seemingly minor flaws have grown to monstrous proportions over the years. Because it is Joel’s task to drive Elena to work every morning from their home in the suburbs, she is always late, too, a factor which her boss made clear to her when she was passed up for a promotion. A public relations officer for a small hotel, she tries to moonlight by writing for lifestyle magazines, but can never complete a project on time because she is constantly losing her materials amid banks of his students’ papers.

Yet Joel maintains that it is her fault. Attempts to talk things out end in loud arguments. He blames her for not keeping the house neat; however, when she tries to clean up he accuses her of “hiding” important papers. He claims that if she would only get up early enough, he wouldn’t have to wait so long for breakfast, which he must have before getting dressed. It is a routine he has followed since he was a boy.

Despite the fact that they are legally married, Elena regards her husband as “Mr. Puwede Na for Now.” She knows that if she exerted more effort, she might get him to face the problem and work out a compromise. But this would be unfairly shouldering the burden of accountability for the relationship. Instead, she’s thinking of moving some of her stuff into her sister’s apartment in Manila, close to where she works. She’ll sleep over three nights a week. 

Elena loves Joel enough to stay married to him, but knows she must distance herself from him a little and focus on herself and her work. Perhaps on his own he’ll learn to clean up his life. More importantly, she refuses to delude herself by thinking of him as the Mr. Right she must stick with through thick and thin. Instead, she wants to believe that her options are still open, that nothing is really permanent. She refuses to see herself as a trapped animal. This would only make her bitter, and prejudice her chances of a happy relationship, with him or with someone else.

Other women, especially those without legal commitment, would find it easier to walk out on a man like Joel. Sometimes that’s the less painful solution. 

But there are many women who prefer to stay in a relationship that’s less than perfect, even when there’s little chance of that relationship improving. They love their partners, but are aware of circumstances that would make a permanent union impossible. Either or both partners may be married. Either or both of them may be interested in building a career first, or perhaps working abroad. One partner may be at an emotional or perhaps financial low point, and his or her needs may be answered by the other.

The point here is that both parties have no illusions about the future. They may have invested a good deal of emotion in each other, have actually been sexually intimate, may even have been pressured into marriage by their respective families. In a good “Puwede Na for Now” situation, both partners must be willing to break up when it’s time.

But it’s never that easy. Most Filipinos (women and men) put a premium on marriage. It’s the way we’re socialized. We anticipate the day when we can bring a future partner home to our parents; it’s as much a rite of passage as menstruation or circumcision, or loss of virginity. Thus Filipinos of either sex may decide a relationship is temporary and gamely enter into it, only to a) fall in love deeper than they expected, or b) realize that they’d been hoping all along the relationship would take a more serious turn. The point is to be clear about what you want and to talk it over with your partner.  

Mr. Wrong

So much has been written about wife beaters, philandering husbands, liars and other unsavory types that most women already know whom to avoid. Although stories about abusive partners generally crop up after marriage or after the relationship is cemented with an emotional bond, the symptoms as early as the “honeymoon” stage, if not the courtship period. A man’s excessive jealousy and obsession with a woman’s past or her other friends may point to a violent personality months before he even lays a hand on her. Dory Hollander, PhD., in her book 101 Lies Men Tell Women (available in National Bookstore branches) asserts that men may avoid telling the truth, even about trivial things like what bus he took to get to the mall, to prevent genuine intimacy from developing between himself and a woman. Other lies may be used to cover up areas in which he feels he is inadequate. He may be into a relationship with another woman---or be hiding something more sinister, like a drug habit or a criminal record. 

What a woman must surmount is the tendency to go into denial when faced with the evidence. Others make excuses for their man, saying there’s not enough proof for them to draw a conclusion about, say, a man’s violence or his philandering. Some women would prefer to sit tight and wait for the man to reveal his agenda. Even when the relationship has gone irrevocably wrong, others persevere, believing that suffering is a test of love.   

Hollander believes that intuition is a powerful thing and a woman should act on it if she senses that something fishy’s going on. The power to take action, to save herself, is in her hands. She shouldn’t sit around bemoaning her fate and waiting for someone else to rescue her.

There are men, however, who are not wholly obnoxious but are simply the wrong sort for a particular woman, thanks to differences in temperament, interests or values. Experience is the only tool for determining when a man is right for you. Combine this with constant assessment of yourself and your priorities, and an acceptance of the reality that you will get hurt from time to time. If you’re careful, though, you’ll survive the search for Mr. Right with minimal scars and loads of wisdom. This is life, after all. 

SIDEBAR: 

Warning signs for dating violence

Physical Controls

• Hitting, grabbing, kicking, choking, pushing

• Breaking furniture or punching walls

• Physical intimidation

Emotional/ Verbal Controls

• Criticism, name calling, swearing, mocking, put downs, ridicule, accusations, blame

• Interrupting, changing topics, not listening, outshouting

• Excessive jealousy and possessiveness

• Threatening suicide

Sexual Controls

• Sexual coercion

• Accusations of “sleeping around”

• Threats of violence towards her or her friends if she refuses to interact sexually with her partner

• Coerced sexual contact

Information on dating violence is available at these websites: http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/3623 and http://www.multnomah.lib.or.us/lib/outer/rbytes/feb97/page4.html

Who is Mr. Right?

(from Who is Mr. Right, by Susan H. Brent, available at National Bookstore)

• Someone with whom you can always be yourself.

• He never embarasses you.

• He would never hit you.

• He appreciates the things you do for him.

• He listens to you even though he knows the things you’re going to say.

• He treats you as equal.

• He rarely becomes angry at other people.

• He respects your opinion.

• He is responsible for paying his bills.

• He never puts other people down.

• He feels good about himself.

• He loves your mind.

• He’s physically attracted to you.

• He has or had a good relationship with his mother.

• He has a steady job and his employer respects him.

• He is not secretive.

• He keeps promises.

   

The late 90s Cosmo girl, 5: Why we fall for bad boys

I live in Denmark today, but pay an annual visit to the Philippines without fail. Each visit I open up one of the many boxes containing my writings (journalistic and creative) dating back to the fun years I spent working in Manila, as well as to my ostensibly normal childhood. I've been paging through a clutch of magazines from the Summit group, which published the Philippine edition of Cosmopolitan. I wrote for Cosmo and Preview in the late 1990s, and now that nearly 30 years (gasp! I was a veritable kid!) have elapsed, it's time to share them with a digital community.

How will these articles be read by young women who have been formed, over the last 15 years, by the very visual platforms of Instagram and Tiktok, for whom Facebook probably resembles a retirement community?  Back in the day we only had novels and American magazines to read and emulate; we wrote long and thoughtfully; we wouldn't known how to reckon with today's deliberate destruction of the English language on social media. 

I was on a roll when I wrote this; I'd just won another Palanca Award (first place, Short Story for "Touch", a piece that, thankfully, I am still associated with to this day). I like the language in this article; it's punchy, literary and quite angry. 

Why we fall for bad boys

Lakambini A. Sitoy

Cosmopolitan Philippines
November 1998

Ginny’s in love with a married man. Their lovemaking is always furtive, rapid; afterwards, a couple of minutes of tenderness before he must get dressed. He moves with the grace of experience--this is the sixth time he’s cheated on his wife. By day, she sees how suavely he handles himself, and suffers in silence. But she’s used to suffering.

Before him, there was the compulsive liar whom she went with for two years. Until now she doesn’t even know his origins, his family, what he did before he met her. Prior to that one was the uppity med student she pursued for a year, who did shabu to stay awake and ultimately flunked out of  school. And then there was the boyfriend in college who would load her, like a doll, on the back of his motorcycle; who was forever knocking on her door in the middle of the night, drunk, bruised from a tiff with a tongits buddy, begging for a loan. Incredibly charming but bad to the bone.

          Ginny, late 20s, is no loser. Relatively pretty, with a winning smile and a gentle voice, she’s fairly successful in her field, which is public relations. In her pastel suits, hair in place, she seems a poster girl for propriety--the sweet, diffident type that boys are supposed to take home to their parents. Yet, she gets turned on by the unconventional: washed-up rock musicians, alcoholic newsmen with no money, bratty ex-preppies. As she puts it, “I don’t go for the garden variety types. I’ve dated them. They’re too uptight, you can’t f--k with them and they bore me.”

Bad to the bone

Ginny is compulsively attracted to men who are not only bad for her, but are bad according to society’s mores. The worse they are, the more she seems to want them. Her case is not an isolated one. Dr. Bernadette Nepomuceno, a psychologist, has counselled persons like her, and attributes her compulsion to what Karl Jung described as the process of individuation--that innate drive in the human being to seek his best potential, which ironically may be found in the perverse.

          “Certain sides of every person are undeveloped, and when you’re attracted to someone, you are actually attracted to the undeveloped side of yourself, which you see in a man,” Nepomuceno explains. Nice girls, brought up by their parents to be chaste, refined, smart and career-oriented but not too outspoken, have an overdeveloped socially-acceptable side. Some must compensate in some way for this imbalance.

And what of the men who seem so compelling to them? We know who they are: they have been much documented--or celebrated--by media. James Dean, Tommy Lee; closer to home, Robin Padilla, Ace Vergel, Gabby Concepcion and, more recently, Joko Diaz. Their behavior--the tough guy pose, the drugs, the womanizing, the lies and the bola, the wild parties, the way they walk out of jobs--is their way of working out some major psychological issues. They’re angry in some way. Perhaps the trouble started at home. Perhaps they were middle children, or their parents split pre-adolescence, or they grew up in an overly critical household. Perhaps they suffered sexual trauma when they were very young--this is the worst of all; the man unable to love and trust until the wounds are addressed. In any case, says Dr. Nepomuceno, their anger translates into disruptive behavior, which breeds more hostility from mainstream society, which in turn hurts them even more. 

Some of the “badness” may be part of the man’s “persona”--that is, the mask he dons to avoid getting hurt. For instance, says Dr. Nepomuceno, if he’s in a defensive phase, brought about by a need to ward of criticism, a guy learns to come up with a mean, macho exterior. This type of person is easier to change than, say, a victim of incestuous abuse, for once he enters into a trusting relationship with someone, he finds that there’s no need to wear the mask. All a bad boy needs, it seems, is a woman (or a friend) who trusts, loves, understands and accepts him.

Girl gone wild

The situation gets complicated, though, when the woman who loves him is actually working out baggage of her own. Take Ginny, who gets excited by illicit lovemaking. “I think I’m rebelling against the principles of morality and goodness that my parents raised me on,” she says. “My cousins were getting drunk and drag-racing and having sex with ‘bad women.’ They’d come home in the wee hours of the morning and brag about what they’d done. They were protective of me; they would have beaten up anyone who tried to hurt me. The truth is, I always wanted to be part of their club.”

May-Anne, who had a three-year relationship with a restaurateur secretly hooked on shabu, says, “It made me feel good to see how much I seemed to influence him sometimes. My opinion didn’t count much at home. And then I saw the chance for me to save somebody, just by being there for him.”

We all have our reasons for falling for “bad boys.” Most women claim it has something to do with the way they were raised. 

Dr. Nepomuceno begs to disagree with this rationalization. “It’s not a rebellion against the principles of morality and goodness per se, but against your having allowed yourself to be constrained by your principles,” she says. “It’s not about conditioning. This only sounds like a refusal to accept the wild side that is inherent in all of us.”

Nepomuceno recommends that, instead of focusing totally on the “bad boy,” women look more closely at themselves. They should ask themselves what they like and dislike about the object of their obsession, what it is about him that is so tantalizing. 

In fact, they may discover that it’s not the “bad boy” they are drawn to, but the “wild man” in him. “Wildness” has nothing to do with morality, with “goodness” or “badness.” What it does is attract the woman who is overly tamed.

For a “tamed” woman would rather assign responsibility for wild behavior (getting plastered at a party, having an orgasm, letting out a primal scream) to whatever bad guy she’s with. She can’t abide the thought of herself as being less than virginal. The challenge is in confronting, and welcoming, the wild woman inside her and in being accountable for her actions.

Wipe the tapes

Unless she does this, a woman will be condemned to repeat the pattern of falling in love with, and being hurt by, “bad”/wild men. If she listens to the advise of friends as well as her own inner voice (“Leave him; he’s not good enough for you), she will only find herself flitting from relationship to relationship, unsatisfied and confused. If she stays, and continues to play the nice girl, the martyr, the relationship will probably end as well.

“The irony,” says Nepomuceno, “is that although the ‘bad-boy/good girl’ duality was the basis of the attraction, it cannot sustain the relationship. It’s the very thing that will break up a couple.”

A woman who’s already suffering in such a relationship must get back her projections, Nepomuceno says. She must find the things she wants in him that she needs in herself. She must learn to see the man, and not the projection. Eventually she will find out whether she loves him for who he is.

In a situation where she’s emotionally dependent on a man, or a type o man, yet knows she’s unhappy, she might try to find out how she can love herself more. This would transcend buying herself nice clothes, scent, whatever. It means getting totally involved with herself--keeping a journal perhaps, or writing down memories, or meditating. Being aware, too, of baggage--the daughter of an alcoholic will most likely find an alcoholic husband; a woman who is afraid of intimacy may seek the serial adulterer. 

Nepomuceno offers more tips for the woman longing to be wild: First, stop the old tapes that keep playing in your head--the disembodied voices of your mother, your lola, the Mother Superior at convent school. Alternately encouraging and admonishing, they ask you when you’re getting married, chide you when you fall in love, build up the gilded cage in which you, a proper young animal, are to reside. Find your own voice, and learn to discern it from that of others.

Secondly, stop moralizing. This can be the most hurting thing you can do to yourself. Attraction is a completely unconscious process. So forget what the rest of the world says. Instead of concluding “A ‘good girl’ isn’t supposed to love a ‘bad guy,’” just get in touch with yourself. 

After all, love is a private transaction between two beings, each of whom, as Jung put it, has an innate motivation to seek his/her individuality. It would be cruel and inhuman to frustrate yourself, and your lover, in your quest. 

This article originally appeared in Cosmopolitan Philippines, November 1998

The late 90s Cosmo girl, 4: Riding the roller coaster of love

Each time I return to my family home in the Philippines, I open up one of the boxes containing my writings (journalistic and creative) dating back to the fun years I spent working in Manila, as well as to my superficially normal childhood. 

This year, one box yielded a clutch of magazines from the Summit group, which published the Philippine edition of Cosmopolitan. I wrote for Cosmo in the late 1990s, and now that nearly 30 years (gasp! I was a veritable kid!) have elapsed, it's time to share them with a digital community.

How will they be read by young women who have been formed, over the last 15 years, by the visual platforms of Instagram and Tiktok, for whom Facebook probably resembles a retirement home? Will the tales of breakups and tears, of crafty manipulation and the quest for sexual fulfillment, ring true, though they doubtless have found other ways of articulating their experiences?

At the time I was finishing this article (to be printed and faxed a few minutes later to my editor at Cosmopolitan-Philippines), the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Love Rollercoaster" was on my TV (eternally tuned to MTV in those days, haha).

***

Riding the roller coaster of love

Lakambini A. Sitoy
Cosmopolitan Magazine-Philippines
October 1997

Kira knows that she should have kept quiet this time, and let Jimmy run on and on about how she’s always late for their dates. After all, she’s been an angel for the past three weeks, saying nothing about his drinking and the way he patronizes her in front of his friends. Too good, she thinks, in the split-second before her control snaps and she tells him the rush hour traffic held her up, something he would understand if he quit trying to broker shady business deals and got himself a real nine-to-five job like her own. 

She’s hit a sensitive nerve. For the rest of the evening he’s cold and sarcastic. He’d intended to spend a couple of hours at her place, but as soon as they walk through the door they begin yelling at each other. The evening comes to its inevitable end, Jimmy growling,“Leave me alone! We’re over!”as he shoves her out of the way and slams the door after him.

Kira cries herself to sleep, and spends the rest of the weekend moping about the apartment. On Sunday night, she finally convinces herself that her already-wounded dignity can take yet another bruise, so she picks up the phone and calls her boyfriend. An hour of weeping, of acrimonious silences elapses before they mutually apologize. In the wee hours of the morning Jimmy drops by, as expected; they make love, and Kira is thrust into the clear light of Monday swollen-eyed and shaky, but relieved at the prospect of several weeks of bliss, at least until it’s time for the next fight. 

Over and under and back again

Relationships like Kira’s and Jimmy’s follow a rhythm that is as predictable as it is destructive: a period of honeymoon-like happiness, followed by tension occasioned by a build-up of strife. The tension breaks when there is some sort of provocation, resulting in a major argument that may or may not lead to a break-up. During the cooling-off period that comes afterwards both partners come to realize how much they depend on the other, and in the end both of them reconcile, each making an effort to be as sweet as possible to the other. This is the honeymoon phase once more; inevitably the tension builds and the whole roller coaster ride repeats itself.

“A lot of women find themselves addicted to this kind of cycle in a relationship,” says Dr. Letitia Penano-Ho, a clinical psychologist who is counsellor consultant for the Center for Women’s Crisis Counselling of the University of the Philippines. “Some women feel such gratification during the making-up and honeymoon-stages of the cycle that they willingly go through the pain of quarrelling with their partners just to experience it.”

But such patterns are dangerous: if they are institutionalized in a relationship, over time the verbal and emotional abuse could lead to physical violence. 

Even without actual physical blows, frequent quarreling with one’s spouse or partner is already a form of domestic violence -- verbal and psychological.

Ho asserts that this cycle of intense conflict and forgiveness is commonplace: it can be found in relationships between people regardless of age, socio-economic background, race, religion or culture. So, for that matter, can the physical violence that is often part of the cycle. Data is lacking, however, since there have been no wide-scale studies of domestic violence or plain conflict within relationships. As a result, the public perceives conflict as happening mostly among lower-income couples, since it is they who tend to report their troubles to the authorities. The swollen and distraught faces of lower-income women are what are published by the enterprising tabloids -- with upper and upper middle class women working extra hard to keep their personal problems confidential and avoid a “scandal.”

Though women do try to put on a brave face on their affairs, and although the periods of bliss seem to compensate for the pain, the roller-coaster ride will eventually take its toll.

“I’ve seen women who can’t get away from a relationship,” says Ho. “Some manage a very empowered facade, but they actually feel very small inside. Eventually they do show it -- the way they look and talk, their inability to make very basic decisions. At work, they are very able, but when it comes to decisions about the home, themselves, they are lost. You see the sadness in the eyes, the loneliness, the inability to talk about it.”

The constant quarrels only distance a woman from her lover or husband, and the strain of living a double life distances her from herself, making her feel like an impostor. So, too can the humiliation of having to beg forgiveness from the “aggrieved” man: since women are conditioned since birth to be the emotional caretakers of a relationship, the burden of initiating reconciliation often falls on them. Many men know this, and are aware that their partners will move heaven and earth just to fix up the relationship. So as time goes by they cunningly raise the stakes, growing harder and harder to placate.

“Why not just dump him?”

Many women trapped on the love roller coaster wonder why they don’t have the guts to end the relationship. They feel like failures, and know that their friends are disappointed in them. What outsiders can’t empathize with is the devastation women experience when the relationship “ends” for the nth time. Their self-esteem plunges to an all-time low during this period; unable to love themselves, they feel they are incomplete without the beloved, and will never find love at any other time with anyone else. 

The period after the “break up” or “conflict” phase of the cycle is the worst time to make concrete plans for the future. Ideally, both parties should wait until they’ve attained a measure of calm before major decisions are made. But in the heady moments of reconciliation, women tend to persuade themselves that this time they are at least free of the damaging cycle. Sitting down and talking about the relationship might very well destroy the feeling of heightened bliss, so they cross their fingers and limp on, perpetually silenced and unable to do a thing about it.

“If you decide to cut a relationship, bear in mind that it’s never easy,” says Ho. “But you just have to accept it and work on the hurt, and then try to heal the pain. There’s no way you can save yourself from the hurt. But you must tell yourself: I am a capable person, complete and apart from the person I had a relationship with.”

Talking it out

Ho asserts that not all roller-coaster relationships deserve to be terminated.

“The parties can work at it, as long as there’s openness between them. It may be difficult to communicate at the beginning, but at least if there’s that willingness to express both positive and negative emotions, they have a chance.”

Where the relationship has not descended to the level of physical battery, the chances of saving it are much better. Both parties generally retain a higher measure of self-esteem, feel less guilty or disgusted with themselves, have fewer grudges to bury and less of an emotional investment to recoup. 

Physical battery complicates recovery efforts by putting the victim (90 percent of the time it’s the woman) at risk. Ho advises a battered woman to get away from the relationship, if temporarily, to give both partners a chance to cool down. In fact a cooling off period--under the guise, perhaps, of an extended vacation--can enable most couples to distance themselves from the situation and thus examine it levelly.

Studies have shown that people who can’t deal with stress are the ones who find themselves sucked into disagreements. Unless they learn -- or are taught -- to deal with the difficulties of living with their partners, they will continue employing ineffective mechanisms for dealing with stress. These include name-calling, focusing on a person’s defects rather than specific offensive behavior, or inflicting pain for it’s sake. Potential batterers, says Ho, also have very poor communication skills, cannot deal with their anger, have difficulty envisioning an alternative way of behaving.

Ho suggests that couples seek professional help if they can no longer handle their own problems. They may go to private clinics, to non-governmental organizations, to university counselling programs -- even to a priest. The important thing is to have access to a non-subjective point of view to make sure grievances are properly aired and processed.

The bottom line

At some point the roller-coaster ride must come to an end, by mutual agreement of the parties. The thrill of breaking up and making up is a cheap one, after all -- but it will cost more than a person can afford in the long run. For unless the cycle is checked, a woman may find herself constantly devalued, shelling out apologies for things that are not even her fault in exchange for those ever-diminishing moments of peace, and moving back the barriers of permissible behavior as the degree of abuse escalates. The words “I’m sorry” and “I love you” should never be used as emotional currency to buy tickets to that bittersweet honeymoon show.  END

The late 90s Cosmo girl, 3: Prenuptial agreements

On my annual visit to the Philippines, I open up one of the boxes where my writings (journalistic and creative) dating back to the fun years I spent working in Manila, as well as to my superficially normal childhood. This year, I found a clutch of magazines from the Summit group, which published the Philippine edition of Cosmopolitan. I wrote for Cosmo in the late 1990s, and now that nearly 30 years (gasp! I was a veritable kid!) have elapsed, it's time to share them with a digital community.

How will they be read by young women who have been formed, over the last 15 years, by the very visual platforms of Instagram and Tiktok, for whom Facebook probably resembles a retirement community?  

Back in the day, smart young women began to contemplate the thought of settling down as they reached their late 20s, the age I was when I wrote this piece commissioned by Cosmopolitan editor Noelle de Jesus-Chua. The first paragraph says it all. 

Prenuptial agreements

Lakambini Sitoy
for Cosmopolitan Philippines, June 1999
(publication details and image to follow)

Jackie Ejercito’s marriage to Manolo “Beaver” Lopez has to be the wedding of the year; already, three months before its solemnization, it’s already been the stuff of front page news. Everything about the forthcoming union between presidential daughter and ABS-CBN heir has been duly chronicled, including Beaver’s paean to true love: “There will be no prenuptial agreement between our two families. My intention is Jackie. I have no hidden agenda.”

Which doesn’t do much good for prenuptial agreements, making them sound like the ultimate weapon in a fortune hunter’s arsenal, after the slinky dress, the rented sports car, the killer smile.

A prenuptial agreement -- or marriage settlement, or “prenup” -- is a contract entered into before marriage to govern the property relations between husband and wife. It’s one step beyond the plain “usapan tungkol sa pera” that convention dictates upon couples before they tie the knot.

“From what I’ve seen, coming to an understanding about how money should be used contributes to the success of a marriage,” says lawyer Evalyn Ursua, co-founder of the Women’s Legal Bureau and recipient of an Outstanding Young Filipino award for her work in women’s developmental law.

But couples generally discuss their finances; why bother to put it in writing and have it notarized?

“For people with property prior to their marriage, a prenuptial agreeement is a practical instrument,” she continues. “The point is to make sure the property arrangements during the marriage are crystal clear.”

    Under the Family Code of the Philippines, in the absence of a prenuptial agreement, a system of “absolute community of property” applies. This system should give contemporary women pause. As the name suggests, everything the individual spouses own becomes common property once they tie the knot. This includes his stereo, her couch; her Dalmatian, his rowing machine; but also the house in Tagaytay inherited from his aunt whom she’s never met and the graphics design busines she put up 10 years before he entered her life. 

“The most practical reason therefore is to protect the spouse’s interests in their property,” Ursua continues.

“Protection of interests” implies an ominous reality that most people in the first flush of love would prefer to ignore: that not all marriages will be happy, and that many will come to a catastrophic end. One of the worst things that can happen to any marriage is a property war, with possessions held as ransom or used as bargaining chips. When the love is gone, the emotional blackmail continues, and property makes a handy weapon for the sole purpose of inflicting pain.

Unfortunately Filipinos seem to have an aversion to discussing money, especially when the matter of love is involved. Charisse and Dino, who executed an agreement to have some apartments belonging to his family registered in his name and for her to keep her share of her family’s business, had to hide the contract from Charisse’s parents until after the honeymoon. Charisse’s mother found it distasteful to talk about properties at so early a stage -- “Hindi pa nga kayo nagpakasal, usapan na ninyo ang pera,” she would grumble. Dino felt he was accused of being selfish and individualistic, Charisse that her parents weren’t giving her the autonomy that, at 26, she had long deserved.

Sometimes the parents may provide the wisdom and objectivity that a couple needs. When Fiona found herself pregnant by a boy she had been sleeping with barely two months, she immediately wanted to marry him. She had the finances anyway: cash, hectares of farmland and a share in the family business, which supplied dried fruit and spices to snack food manufacturers. Her sensual lover didn’t have a cent. 

But her parents put their foot down, virtually forcing them to sign an agreement in which most of the property she already owned or was due to inherit remained her own. Less than a year after the civil ceremony, a kind of cloud descends whenever she talks about her marriage. Though it’s not certain which was more responsible: that harsh contract or a basic incompatibility that no amount of good sex could erase. 

The question of empowerment

Because in the Family Code, provisions on the “marriage settlement” are contained a section (Title IV)  concerned with the property relations between husband and wife, most people believe that only the rich -- the only ones with property of note -- should execute prenuptial agreements.  

This is not the case. Even middle class couples are advised to do so.

“Kahit wala kang properties, kahit konteng kaperahan ang kasal, magiging malinaw ang arrangement diyan,” Ursua says. “Based on the experience of the women I’ve talked to a prenuptial agreement gives a degree of control to either spouse over his or her money. It also facilitates a more egalitarian arrangement in the family.”

Ursua, whose organization has counselled battered women who would have left their husbands years ago if they had only managed to put aside some of the money they earned, observes that most women end up poor or poorer when a marriage ends.

“What usually happens in a marriage is the man controls the resources of the family, and women are left out, without access to the money, much less control,” she says.

Even when they don’t have substantial amounts of property when they get married, it would still be a smart idea to execute a prenuptial agreement. The contract could define the apportionment or use of what is in fact there, as well as whatever is acquired in the future. 

Lulu’s case illustrates this. The shy scholarship coed got married right after college in 1978, before the Family Code took effect. There was no prenup. Under that part of the Civil Code which then applied, the regime of conjugal partnership of gains governed the property relations in her marriage. Working herself to the bone as a nurse in the States for eight years, she accumulated several million pesos, a small fortune in their province. Most of it went into a joint account with her husband and built them an airy three-bedroom bungalow -- a bungalow that for the last quarter of her absence, her husband shared with his mistress. On her return Lulu found out she had even been supporting this woman’s two children by another man. 

Lulu is now back in the States, trying to save enough to bring her own kids over. She is starting from scratch, having been too tired to engage her husband in a lengthy court battle over property. “If only I’d had the foresight to take care of myself early on --” she is fond of saying. She is now 42.

The old regime of conjugal partnership of gains which applied in default of a prenuptial agreement is said to be more gender-friendly than absolute community of property. But it is of no help in the case of lower-middle-class women like Lulu, who do not inherit assets but acquire them usually after marriage by dint of hard work. 

Admittedly, there’s no point in having a prenuptial agreement between two totally impoverished people. Why write things down when there’s nothing, aside from the usual vows exchanged at the ceremony, to agree on? 

Three times a week, MWF 

As befits all contracts, the provisions of the marriage settlement must not be contrary to law, good morals, good customs, public order and public policy.

This stuffy rule has some interesting ramifications. For instance, a man whose business includes the sale of shabu can’t validly arrange to split his profits with his wife-to-be. And a model whose best friend fixes her up with foreign businessmen at P50,000 an evening can’t arrange on paper to enjoy the proceeds of her sideline exclusively, even if her fiance knows and is liberal enough to condone it. She is technically a prostitute, and prostitution is illegal under Philippine law. 

  According to legal authority Manresa, whose commentaries are excerpted in Philippine civil law textbooks, the marriage settlement must generally confine itself merely to property relations. Note the word “generally,” and the fact that the law presents no impediments to kinkier matters.

Atty. Heidi Galos, law firm partner of celebrated trial lawyer Katrina Legarda, opines that prenuptial agreements can cover provisions on living arrangements, rearing of the children, and even conjugal relations, i.e. sex. 

Obviously, nothing is too holy for the law. “They say when Aristotle Onassis and Jaquelyn Bouvier Kennedy executed their prenuptial agreement, it even provided how often Onassis could visit her,” Galos says. “And of course that means sleep together, have relations.”

A provision regulating the amount of lovemaking seems to run counter to a Family Code provision that says the spouses are obliged to live together and observe mutual love, respect and fidelity. But in reality it doesn’t: the law tells you what to do, but not how to do it.

“You cannot force someone to live with you or even have sex with you,” Galos adds. The latter amounts to marital rape.

While arranging for both spouses to sleep with other people is contrary to law, it would be interesting to see what a court would have to say about an agreement for both spouses to be celibate. Celibacy seems to run counter to the very notion of marriage contemplated in the Family Code, which subsumes “lovemaking” in legal passages like “living together” and “conjugal family life.” 

But it’s not prohibited under the law. So far no one has brought forward a celibacy provision to be ruled upon, and anyway you’d have to be out of your mind to swear off sex for life. 

You, me and the world

Galos suggests that before the couple take the decisive step of approaching a lawyer they, and their families, should already know what they want. This would save them the embarassment of arguing in front of a stranger. It would also reduce legal fees.

They should definitely seek professional advice to determine what aspects of the prenuptial agreement are valid, and what legal ramifications may be seen in future. All revisions to the agreement should be made before the marriage is celebrated.

Couples should bear in mind that marriage settlements were devised to help in the administration of their property, and that marriages are still bound by the vows exchanged at the ceremony and, ultimately, by the provisions in the Family Code. These provisions reflect the mores of the society that drafted them. A couple can’t just rewrite the concept of marriage, via a  prenup agreement, to suit their fancy. When a man and woman decide to marry, in a way they subject themselves to a convention and are expected to act accordingly. This means they must, among other things, be loving, sedentary, friendly, faithful and fecund -- enough to make some of us glad for the option to be single and available!

The late 90s Cosmo girl, 2: When he makes less than you

I pay an annual visit to the Philippines without fail (except for the two years we could not travel into the country on account of the Covid-19 lockdowns that is). Each visit I open up one of the boxes containing my writings (journalistic and creative) dating back to the fun years I spent working in Manila, as well as to my superficially normal childhood. This year, the box I chose yielded a clutch of magazines from the Summit group, which published the Philippine edition of Cosmopolitan.  I wrote for Cosmo in the late 1990s, and now that nearly 30 years (gasp! I was a veritable kid!) have elapsed, it's time to share  digital copies with the world.

How will they be read by young women who have been formed, over the last 15 years, by the very visual platforms of Instagram and Tiktok, for whom Facebook probably resembles a retirement community?  

Cosmopolitan-Philippines is/was primarily a magazine that offered advice on the best way to achieve a particular lifestyle, one that in retrospect seems fake: Sex and the City plunked down in the middle of Ortigas Center and the grimy Epifanio de los Santos Avenue at its side. I wrote this article on an inelegant but all too real subject -- how women must suffer the company of boyfriends who are emasculated by their inability to top them in terms of earnings (and behave accordingly). Note the determinedly buoyant words of advice at the end. 

***

When he makes less than you

Lakambini A. Sitoy
Cosmopolitan-Philippines, March 1998

I once had a relationship with a guy who didn’t have any money. I was young, and the figure he cut--shabbily-clothed, hunched over, tattered copy of The Communist Manifesto in one hand--seemed wildly romantic. This was during my brief flirtation with activism, and somehow the notion that he was working on behalf of the masa excused him from footing the bill whenever we went out. 

Where are we headed tonight? I’d ask him. Italian? he’d reply, and, as soon as we’d reduced the obligatory pizza to a smear of orange grease, he’d start fidgeting, a sheepish smile on his face.

Uhhhhh, he’d begin, slapping his pockets, furrowing his brow, but I’d already have pulled out a couple of bills and slipped them to the poker-faced waiter.

I’ll pay you back next week, he’d say. I’d wave my hand in dismissal, ignoring the tension building about us.

At the time, I was fresh out of college. Living with my parents in our province, I relied on a sizeable allowance from a writing grant and a plethora of little jobs that generated income without requiring much effort. I painted t-shirts, typed my dad’s manuscripts, gave art and composition lessons to grade-school kids.

My boyfriend could do none of these things. He couldn’t even pass CMT, let alone graduate and find a job. Worse, he was constantly at odds with his parents, always getting his allowance cut off.  In a strange and twisted way, I became the banker, picking up the tab whenever we’d go out, lending him money in emergencies.

At first I didn’t think there was anything wrong with this set-up. The guy was poor; it was incumbent upon the more fortunate to spread the wealth around. Despite my friends’ advise, I didn’t want to dump him. After all it was his company I cherished, not his money, and I certainly didn’t need him to pay my bills.

Besides, I was determined to change the world by setting an example. No more would I be trapped in sexist patterns of behavior; I was a 90s woman, I had a right to earn what I could and love whom I pleased. And I absolutely refused to go hunting around for a wealthy male. The thought of becoming a mistress-type, a “kept woman,” was more abhorrent than the accusations that I was “supporting” him.

Did I feel good about it? Did it make me more confident? No. Because the more generous I became, the more his self-disgust increased. Like most red-blooded Filipino males he simply couldn’t stomach the notion of being “mendicant” (his word), and because he was powerless to change his situation, he learned to rewrite his view of our relationship. Eventually my dwindling stash of money became my sin; and our family and the academic set took their place among the hacenderos and “comprador bourgeoisie” that, in his own private revolution, would be the first to hang from the treetops. Needless to say, he’s not my boyfriend anymore. 

I wish women and men alike could get rid of the notion that a guy must earn more, at least the same, as his girlfriend. If his salary is less it seems to reflect negatively on the woman, as though she had neither the beauty nor the breeding to find herself a better man. It leaches away a guy’s confidence, constraining him to act macho in other ways (getting gloriously drunk every night, for instance) or turning him into a hen-pecked wimp. A woman, too, learns to compensate, turning down major responsibilities at work that could lead to a promotion, or serving her partner hand and foot at home. 

What’s more, people seem to forget that there are some jobs that don’t bring in the lucre, yet make an important contribution to the world as a whole. Literature professors, marine researchers and Meralco linemen are all underpaid, but only the most mata pobre among us would think of them as inferior beings. Avoid the holier-than-thou types, though, the ones who won’t compromise their “principles” and get a decent job; or the deluded artistes forever scratching away at blank canvases. Ditto for the professional spongers, those smooth, good-looking guys perpetually on the lookout for naive and generous women. 

Despite that awful experience with my boyfriend, I believe relationships where the guy makes less money can work. Just remember to be sensitive to his feelings and talk things out. Avoid flaunting your wealth or putting him down in subtle ways, and remember, if after a year or two he still hasn’t caught up with you, don’t dump him. He may already be trying his best. If you really love him you’d respect his efforts.  END

The late 90s Cosmo girl, 1: Love fantasy impromptu

I live in Denmark today, but pay an annual visit to the Philippines without fail (except for the two years we could not travel into the country on account of the Covid-19 lockdowns that is). Each visit I open up one of the boxes where my writings (journalistic and creative) dating back to the fun years I spent working in Manila, as well as to my superficially normal childhood. This year, the box I chose yielded a clutch of magazines from the Summit group, which published the Philippine edition of Cosmopolitan. I wrote for Cosmo in the late 1990s, and now that nearly 30 years (gasp! I was a veritable kid!) have elapsed, it's time to share them with a digital community.

How will they be read by young women who have been formed, over the last 15 years, by the very visual platforms of Instagram and Tiktok, for whom Facebook probably resembles a retirement community? In late 1990s Manila, it was vital to start a discussion about the notion that a woman enjoyed being taken by force, that the only way to have sex with a good and proper girl outside of marriage was to restrain her and rob her of her purity. The thought is appalling today. 

***
Love fantasy impromptu

Cosmopolitan-Philippines
August 1997 

by Lakambini A. Sitoy 

In a cramped room in Pandacan, Manila, Dulce tries to make love to Isko. It’s not easy because her live-in lover is tipsy and rough. She hates the red nylon and lace nightie that he insists she wear, almost as much as the view of squatter shacks from the lone window. So quietly she conjures her own private world -- she is on a beach somewhere in Latin America she has seen only on TV, kissing a darkly handsome man named Sergio, her hair miraculously blonde. Her guilt feelings are somehow cushioned by the relief a few minutes later when Isko rolls off and tells her how good it was.
Halfway across town, in plush Greenhills, Katrina arches her back as her husband Nonoy’s mouth travels lower and lower down her body. Though she would never admit it to her friends, Katrina has always been intrigued by soft porn -- the idea of being watched and filmed as she languidly makes love. Now, as she feels the inevitable climax drawing closer, she relaxes completely and imagines a trio of cameras rolling just a few feet from the bed, recording her every undulation.
Whether or not they do it deliberately, many women often fantasize during sex or foreplay. Most keep their thoughts entirely private, a few others share them with their partners, going so far as to create scenarios in which the two of them play out agreed roles.
  “Fantasy can be beneficial to a certain extent,” says Karen de la Cruz, M.A.. “It serves to relax a person, turning sex into more than just an obligation. It seems helpful to women who are frigid or who are going through problems with their partners.” De la Cruz, a psychologist, has a couple of radio programs, one of which is called Huwag Solohin, Pag-Usapan Natin. She is also a counsellor, and has talked to people from all walks of life, some of whom have confided their fantasies to her, after an initial (and lengthy) period of reserve.
De la Cruz observes that younger, upper middle class women, Westernized in their way of thinking, are quite open about their sexual fantasies. However, women from the lower-income brackets -- secretaries, rank-and-file employees, etc. -- are hesitant to talk about, or indulge in, sexual fantasies, especially if they involve sex with a person other than their partners. The usual explanation given is that these thoughts are impure, morally wrong, tantamount to adultery even, especially if the women are Catholics. Members of fundamentalist groups are particularly averse to the idea. Another factor is the heavy burden most lower-income women must bear: at the end of the day, having come from their 9-to-5 jobs and seen to the kids and the housework, they are often too weary to do more than yield to their husbands -- and sexual fantasies require some initiative, even if they happen only in the head. 
De la Cruz speaks of private sexual fantasies, saying she has never met people who fantasize in tandem with their partners: constructing scenarios, wearing kinky costumes, pretending they are someone else. 
“This behavior is seen as not quite Filipino,” says Jess, 37, who claims he has had sex with more than 50 women of different nationalities and was once married to a Canadian. “Most Filipinos would prefer to fantasize alone. Acting out a fantasy seems deviant, as though you were making love with someone else, parang nakakahiya, parang hindi Pinoy, hindi Asian.” He opines that Caucasians are “better” participants because they have no inhibitions about acting it out. He himself has played Batman in full dress regalia, to his ex-wife’s Catwoman, though it is not certain whether he enjoyed it.
Jess believes that there is a gap between what men want and what they believe is proper. The former is often played out with prostitutes, the latter with their wives or partners. But despite this, most men would want their regular partners to at least try acting out a fantasy. He admits, though, that most men won’t wait, prefering to go directly into sex without using participative fantasy as a way of enhancing foreplay. 
The cramped conditions of lower-income Filipino households aggravate the situation, putting a damper even on “regular” sex. Males heading full-throttle into a bodice-ripper fantasy with their partners may find themselves interrupted by a contingent of concerned citizens from the sari-sari store next door. 
However, rape fantasies are not as frequent among women as popular mythology would have it. De la Cruz says only three women have related fantasies that may be said to involve force. One woman, of college age, said she was dissatisfied with her boyfriend’s lovemaking -- in the backseat of his car, pressed for time and with the threat of discovery hanging over them, he inevitably came before she did. “It would be more exciting if I were forced into it first, and then I’d make pakipot. I would like to give him a hard time for a while.” For her, there is pleasure in depriving both of them of sex and then ultimately giving in. Another, also a student at a prestigious university in Manila, said, “Ako naman, I prefer a little agressiveness. If he’s too gentle, he seems too soft. I don’t feel his touch anymore.” 
Perhaps it is because virginity, and the qualities of aloofness and reserve in a woman, are given such a premium in this society that many women tend to fantasize about being seduced or pressured into sex. This does not necessarily mean that they would want to be raped.
For fantasies may turn violent, triggered by drugs or alcohol or bottled-up anger. When a man, or, in some instances, a woman, carries the fantasy out in real life, irreparable damage may result. Or, inebriated, a woman may end up being victimized by a person with whom she has no relationship, as she or he plays out a fantasy.
Another instance when fantasizing can do harm is when the person is very unstable -- has a lot of pent-up rage or has a manic-depressive personality (she can be deeply crushed when unrealistic expectations are not met). 
De la Cruz says there is always a goal in the “visualization” exercises she teaches her counsellees: improvement of the relationship. But a person may be unclear about her goal. A woman not in love may force herself into something she subconsciously doesn’t want. Visualization may be used not to aid a relationship but as a means of concealing a problem (such as infidelity) or of denying the existence of another problem (such as basic incompatibility). In these cases the best thing would be to break up the relationship.
But if used well, sexual fantasies, whether or not they occur during lovemaking, can relax a couple mentally and physically and strengthen their relationship in the sexual aspect. Both partners wind up satisfied.
Anyone may try the visualization techniques that de la Cruz uses to help women, especially the frigid ones. First she asks them to think of a person, real or imagined, that they feel comfortable with. One of the first stumbling blocks that her counsellees must get over is the idea that it is not wrong to fantasize about someone else at first: sometimes women freeze up when they insist on putting their husbands or partners into the fantasy. Others get worried because the face of their partners turns into that of another man. In this case, it could be because they’re forcing themselves to think about their partners exclusively. The thing to do then would be to work at strengthening the relationship with their partners.
Second, de la Cruz asks her counsellees to situate the fantasy. Third, she asks them to identify the most satisfying thing they expect from the mental encounter. Fourth, she helps put them in a state of relaxation through breathing exercises, allowing their minds to take care of them for as long as is necessary. Many women have told her that as they entered into more intimate acts -- kissing for some, full intercourse for others -- the face of the fantasy partner becomes that of their actual partner.
Lastly, she asks the women to think about how they felt during the fantasy, and to anchor themselves onto that good feeling. The women who do keep in touch with her swear that the technique works, that they have become less “distantiated” from their partners. Eventually they learn to summon up fantasies on their own. It goes without saying that their sexual relationships improve as well. 
***