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I just learned of two significant Romanian movie events in Toronto: Porumboiu's Whistlers is having its (wide?) release and TIFF a "survey" of 50 years of Romanian Cinema.

I’ve recently noticed a tweet that seems to indicate the Romanians are 3rd among EU countries least happy with free movement in Europe. That’s remarkable. Why would that be?

A while back, I was having an argument (well, it’s more like I was trying to have a conversation with my designated troll, banned since) about the downside of population decline (PD). He demanded to know why is it bad (which is what I was trying to say) and I thought I provided some studies, but while searching, I was unsatisfied with the quality of the studies I had found. (The title term refers mostly to economy (i.e., population drops below the level required to carry the economy or more specifically old age pensions) whereas PD refers to demographics.) Since then, I’ve found a bit more so here it is.

I’ve just read a piece of news that angered me a great deal as it smelled fake, but as I looked into it, I did not find the clear rebuttal I expected. It’s based on an obscure survey question that had not been reported in the media and now is fodder for fake news sites. The title is based on an 80s Italian song which roughly means “rogue nostalgia”, combined with the Romanian spelling of the word that stands for “rogue”, which, in the latter language stands for an insult, meaning “scoundrel, villain, miscreant”. 

I try to make sense of who voted for whom in this election, and especially who voted for PNL. Surprisingly for me, PNL managed to attract a majority of women / rural / “unoccupied” voters.

The elections for the European Parliament are coming up soon, and this time around, I decided to ask all candidates a few questions and post their answers. But before sending these questions, it makes sense to look at the details, the first and most important being that the voting day is May 26 between 7:00 and 21:00, local time (EST) and there’s not voting by correspondence.

I just had today, on WhatsApp, a conversation with a former classmate, who posted some photos from Baile Herculane (Herculean Baths? – a touristic destination from Roman times with geothermal springs). The situation is dire. I advised her rather strongly to fight, to which she countered with the refrain I constantly hear in this situations: “you are disconnected from the Romanian reality”.

I struggle to write about my grandma’s passing away, between expressing all I have to say, and staying within the limits of what a reader might find interesting or useful, without falling into too much drama.

Romania is once again going through some convulsive protests and it's fun checking out how they are seen on the dark side. I started with Mircea Badea, about whom I’ve written extensively in the past (Romania’s Glenn Beck, censured).

As I’ve done in the past, I am publishing here my resolutions, mostly for this blog and wish all my readers La Multi Ani, Feliz Navidad (better late than never, right?) and A Happy New Year!

When friends ask me about immigrating to Canada, my first answer is always DON’T!. However, though I’ve already written about this in the past, I have yet do so in English, so I’ll do so here, especially since yesterday I answered another reader.

It's a sad day for Ioan Pop, his family, and Romanian Christian Orthodoxy in general, but on the bright side, the abused women are finally getting some closure and Ioan Pop won’t have a chance to repeat his weird brand of sexual religiosity. As usual, I am not content with only reporting on the news; I have a few other things to say.

The way I experience love, or at least what most people mean by it, is dumb and I haze it. I get jealous, obsessive, cheesy. This kind of love is not enjoyable for me, likely not for the other and I try to avoid it, yet this is the kind most girls I had dated in the past seemed to want.

As expected, we owe most of our understanding of love to the Greeks, who were collecting words to describe it. Some scholars prefer to talk about four kinds, others five, others seven and some go as high as thirty. Here are the most used Greek terms:

• Storge (family affection)
• Philia (brotherly love, co-workers, soldiers, shared goal)
• Eros (romance, passion, desire, sex, physical, strange)
• Agape (god-love – unconditional, self-sacrificing)
• Ludus (flirting, playful, euphoria, uncommitted, non-punctual, believable lies, lovefool)
• Pragma (mutually beneficial, enduring – e.g., marriage)
• Mania (obsessive or possessive; adolescence)
• Philautia (self-respect)

Hendrick^2 & Slapion-Foote^2 (1985) found (hsf-gdisa) that men were more likely to show the ludic type of love, while women were more likely to be storgic or pragmatic – though their research was done on undergrad students.

Purple haze all in my brain
Lately things don't seem the same
Actin' funny but I don't know why
'Scuse me while I kiss the sky

In his 1973 book (.CA, .UK, .FR, .DE, .IT, .ES), John Lee compared styles of love to the color wheel, basing them on the aforementioned Greek words.

Lee’s 6 Styles of Loving

• Three primary styles:
  1. Eros – Loving an ideal person
  2. Ludos – Love as a game
  3. Storge – Love as friendship
• Three secondary styles:
  1. Mania (Eros + Ludos) – Obsessive love
  2. Pragma (Ludos + Storge) – Realistic and practical love
  3. Agape (Eros + Storge) – Selfless love

Now that we have the basic vocabulary, we should also know that there are a few theories of love.

theories

In general, theories moved from a clinical standpoint to a more psychology and socially-based stance.

• Freud’s theory of love centered around the need for an “ego ideal”, which is the person one aspires to be, patterned after those whom one holds in great respect. (On Narcissism, Bourdieu-Lacan, Freud-Lacan)
• Maslow takes the view that only those at the top of his pyramid (self-actualized) are capable of love (Heylighen, Francis). 
• Reik conceptualized a more altruistic, agape type of love in Being love. (Amir, Mathes)
• Zick Rubin proposed that romantic love is based on three elements: attachment (the need to receive care, approval and physical contact), caring (valuing the other person’s needs and happiness as much as your own), intimacy (sharing of thoughts, desires etc). Based on questionnaires, he determined liking vs loving.
• Elaine Hatfield felt that compassionate love is characterized by mutual respect, attachment, affection and trust while passionate love is made of intense emotions, sexual attraction, anxiety and affection. According to her, passionate love is transitory, lasting 6-30 months and it arises when cultural expectations encourage falling in love, when the person meets your preconceived ideas of an ideal love, and when you experience heightened physiological arousal in the presence of the other person. It ideally leads to compassionate love.
• As psychology became more socially based, Sternberg’s (.CA, .UK, .FR, .DE, .IT, .ES) triangular theory of love emerged (not to be confused with Bizarre Love Triangle) and became dominant (w-triang). This theory, illustrated above, holds that “consummate love” is the most complete, as it involves Intimacy, Passion and Commitment. The other types of love involve a combination of only 2 or just one.

The Attachment Theory (w-att) is very important in psychology and it deals with patterns learned in early childhood and how they determine people’s response within relationships when hurt, separated from loved ones or perceiving a threat. Four different attachment classifications have been identified in children: secure attachment, anxious-ambivalent attachment, anxious-avoidant attachment, and disorganized attachment.

If you can imagine the central point of the triangular theory – consummate love – being elevated (through the power of love, of course) out of its planar complacency to a pyramidal vertex and what do you get? Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, of course! :)

Purple haze all around
Don't know if I'm comin' up or down
Am I happy or in misery?
Whatever it is, that girl put a spell on me

Purple haze is not to be confused with Purple Rain.

LE: Two things: I know about the "languages of love" and I think it's BS - the main idea being that most women prefer "words", while men, actions, so there goes that "theory" and secondly, Hendrix probably talks about love as an excuse for getting high with "illegal dreams" which is not my thing.

Sources / More info: inbo-jealous, w-4l, w-gw4l, w-triang, w-att, w-rolo, w-losty, hsf-gdisa

Recently, one of the few blogs I read went off-line, after publishing one episode of their epic sagas. It’s [sort of] about Dacians, and as a sign of solidarity, I’ve decided to give the non-Romanian world an idea about it.

There was a time when women were dreaming of a “knight in shining armour” but a steady decline in the prestige of shiny things coupled with a long set of economic crises have put an end to those romantic times. Today women seem to want a man who’ll pay and they rely on the State for protection and Facebook and/or Twitter for DIY reputation management (aka PR). A recent article on dating and paying for it (ctch-tspr) reopened a long-forgotten subject, a subject I haven't attacked in a while (since between 12 and 12-B, to be exact), despite a desire and even a plan to do so.

After introducing the reader to a Tutea-like blogger (but without the mandibular shaking, and as a blogger, he writes rather than talks), today I was going to continue the cycle of Alexic Danopathy, as promised. Recently, National Geographic has written at length about Trajan’s Column (research first covered a few months ago), and surprisingly, Alexic Danopathy “scholarship” and research is nowhere to be found there. There’s more to be said, but I got sidetracked by his conversation with someone he calls Tartina Lol (caba-tl). 

Simona Halep just won the most important title in her career thus far (“Premier Mandatory”) by winning at Indian Wells in a disputed game against Jelena Jankovic (ceremony, part I, part II). This is the 3rd part, after bye-bye boobs and an aborted attempt to write about Simona Halep in the context of Romanian education.

The name would be longer, but I’m running out of space and patience. I don’t care much about MihaElan (yes, she lost the “n” but kept the “Schwartzenberg”) MRRR née Tiganu and yet the scandals she so often gets into have a dimension that has not really been explored in Romania, a dimension I find very interesting: women seem to be far more interested in her (both accusing and defending) than men. Why would that be? The other thing that irks me is censorship – something we should all fight foragainst, whether it comes from Mihaela Radulescu or from her post-op model Zoso. 

A friend of mine published an article in medium on communism and entrepreneurship (ana-medium) and Aferim!, a movie a cousin of mine was involved in producing has hit the theatres, and I feel a debt of honour to write about each one. So hard to stay focused and write meaningfully is. 

My life has more and more strange, scary coincidences. Sure, some are part of the all-encompassing confirmation bias, but some are just out there. Maybe in my search for meaning I get too hung up on serendipitous occurrences, or maybe I'm turning into the bimbo cliché of RomComs who thinks that "everything happens for.. increased productivity". And no, it’s not this beach.