Hitting the Motherload

I was non-chalantly checking my e-mail yesterday when I got a message from Tickle. They were having a survey and to entice people to answer it, they promised a month's access to their premium site for free. I completed the survey thinking it's some sort of ploy but was I in for quite a surprise. It turned out to be true!

I checked out the made-by-people-with-Ph.D's-test section and it turns out that I answered quite a lot of them. Good thing the thought of ordering one of their personalized reports never crossed my mind as they were very expensive (they're $19.99 a piece and there's about 50 or so tests at the present time). I now have free access to all the results that I could not get to in the last 2 - 3 years and I've been very busy downloading them. It's nice to know how much I've grown in just a short span of time.

I find some of their tests silly but some are very insightful. I particularly love The Ultimate Personality Test and a couple more that deals with understanding my psyche. I'm now able to unravel the what's and they why's of myself that pop up in my head every now and then. I just adore the tests about one of my favorite topics - sex ;p

Haha, do I have news for the girls when we meet up later!

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After reading Cathy's recent post, the lightbulb in my head popped up - everyone of us has a distinct relationship pattern whether it be in dating, pre 0r post relationship stage. Some people may be aware of what theirs are (mine would be older guys), some people don't. Psychologists argue that if we're not aware of our relationship patterns, we are bound to go after the same thing albeit in a different form. I'm thankful though that my pattern is very trivial compared to people in very bad relationships. When I say bad, I mean abusive relationships - mental/psychological, verbal, physical or a combination of any of those.

I've never been in any type of an abusive relationship and heaven forbid I'd be in one. We've all seen in tv or heard from friends or neighbors or through the grapevine about someone being a battered girlfriend/wife. I wonder what's running in their mind when they continue to stay and suffer instead of fleeing to safety. Are they even able to discern the vicious pattern that they seem to chase?

If there's one thing I hate about gender relations is violence against women. I hate it when a husband hits or mauls his significant other (girlfriend, common-law wife or spouse) and the people around them, even authorities, refuse to intervene for the reason being 'away mag-asawa/mag-boyfriend lang yan' (it's just a lovers' quarrel). In India and some Arab countries, it is perfectly legal for the spouses to physically maltreat their wives if they are unhappy with them. It's even worse when women inflict suffering on their fellow women such as the chronicled cases in India about a year ago wherein mother-in-laws burn the spouses of their son if they don't like the way they do things.