Letter to Jil

My dear Jil, he’s a chipmunk! That’s what he is! You know about chipmunks? They have an interesting quality. They have three-day memories. They can’t remember much beyond three days. So when they store food and don’t retrieve it before three days, they begin to scurry about searching for where they kept the food, desperately.

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My dear Jil, you won’t understand and can’t understand: fathers are particularly protective of their daughters. That’s the problem you have with your father. It’s why he’s giving you all those troubles over marriage.

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My very own Jil, my one in a billion… It is that time of year again, when men express their feelings of love and appreciation to their woman. As I have done in previous years I write you once again, not just to express my love to you but to tell you how much I appreciate you.

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My dear Jil, my belated New Year greetings! Was out of town. How are you and how are you doing? Apart from the issues you raised in your letter.

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My dear Jil, I present a few lessons from my letters to you in 2017. I hope you take them to heart as you enter the new year. Here they are: Continue reading →

My dear Jil, you could have solved this whole thing with just three words – “I am sorry!” If you had said those words right after you discovered he was upset, and really meant it, you wouldn’t be at this impasse. And we can say “I’m sorry” and not mean it, you know, say it as something that’s meant to be said, just so we say we placated our partner. But it comes across very wrongly. Continue reading →

My dear Jil, we underestimate the importance of happiness in marriage. You shouldn’t go into a marriage in which you’re not going to be happy. It’s horrendous. You will be frustrated beyond measure, unable to communicate what’s really eating you up.
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My dear Jil, I’ll try and explain it to you, this friendship stuff. But we’ll need to do some visualisation. It’s my way of “seeing” things. Imagine a long span bridge. Rather long. At one end you have “Sex” signage, and then just few meters after, you have “Romance.” Then imagine that at the very other end you have “Obligations,” and further after, you have “Disagreement.” And so at one extreme, you have “Sex” and “Romance,” and at the other end you have “Obligations” and “Disagreement.” Continue reading →

My dear Jil, remember that couple we spoke about, the man and woman with beatific marriage? Well, when I asked him why he loved her so much his answers proved telling. There’s an ease about her, he says. Things are so easy. There’s a fit between them. It’s kind of hard to explain. It’s why he says relationships must not be enforced or forced. Continue reading →

We all have a past Jil, there’s none of us without a past. There’s none of us who hasn’t done something he or she is not ashamed of in life. We all have unrevealed stuff that make us cringe in regret, actions we’d rather not talk about, memories we’d rather not revisit. Unless of course you somehow did a quantum leap over the period of youth and arrived at adulthood suddenly. Even as adults there are things we’ve all done we’re ashamed of. Everybody has a past, everybody has a present. Agreed some pasts are grosser than others and some sins more egregious than others, but we’re all sinners.
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