INDEX

ALL ABOUT JANE
Meet Jane
Jane's Filmography
Vital Statistics
Secrets to Staying Fit
Charities
Alternative Medicine
St. Catherine's Court
Meet James Keach
James' Filmography

ARTISTIC VENUES
Jane as Artist
Jane Seymour Handbags
Signature Collection
Household Collection
Children's Clothing

BOOKS
Making Yourself at Home
Remarkable Changes
Romantic Living
This One & That One
Two at a Time

MISCELLANEOUS
Voting Polls
Trivia
Tic Tac Toe
Rosie's Mom Squad

PHOTO ALBUM
Just Jane

GUIDE TO ROMANTIC LIVING

Chapter Five | Chapter Seven

Chapter Six: Keeping the Romance in Your Relationship

In good, lasting relationships you don't stare into each other's eyes all the time: you look together in the same direction. You share life together.

The old advice about joining a club to meet people really is good advice. By sharing an activity-tennis, photography, beekeeping, whatever-you get to know and like another person.

Of course, sharing an adventure is the best way of all to fall in love. The adventures don't have to be dramatic ones, though. You could just wander into an old cinema and find that you're the only couple watching a film and it would be something about the emptiness and the atmosphere that drew you close, made the occasion special, strange, memorable.

Search out these special moments.

In England, I used to love to hire a boat on the Serpentine in Hyde Park and glide out onto the lake, suddenly transforming central London into the Amazon. I'd close my eyes, and the sounds of traffic, the cries of children, would drift far away and suddenly all there was in the entire world was me and the boyfriend who was with me. I'd dress for the occasion, with parasol and pretty dress, and take along a picnic.

If you want a special life, with special romance, don't be ordinary and predictable. Suggest a picnic-and if the weather is bad have it on the living-room floor. Suggest taking a boat out on the river or lake. Suggest a drive down to the beach one night. I was walking by the Thames in London recently and I was amazed at the number of couples standing and kissing and talking by the waterside. Each one looked in love. There was a full moon; and the moon, and the dark restless river, and the couples belonged in a different, timeless London, far away from the traffic and the pubs and all those ordinary things.

Perhaps you are the kind of person just being with is an adventure-but most of us need the right settings and circumstances to flourish, to help bring out our romantic selves.

When life seems a little dull and run-of -the-mill, why not go to the airport, look at the schedule, and catch the first plane to where it's going? Or catch the first bus, or the first train. Take a gamble. Getting there-with a new boyfriend, a girlfriend, an old boyfriend, a husband-you can share an adventure. You might end up someplace that everyone considers dull, but your attitude will transform it. You'll wander around the place together, with no one knowing where you are, and the town or country will be somehow mysterious, magical. You'll find some little shop, or a museum with just one magnificent painting you never knew was there, or a superb restaurant in a back street. Whether the place you end up in is Minneapolis or Richmond, Virginia or Tunbridge Wells, you'll find something there, and you'll never forget it.

It's that kind of gambling, of imaginative thinking, that gives drama to a relationship. And the odd thing is, it doesn't take money or much time; it simply takes the romantic attitude.

Those kinds of adventures are more fun and more romantic than going to the predictably "romantic" places, which lack the element of surprise. Sitting on a bateau mouche on the Seine in Paris and being presented with a red rose at a prearranged romantic meal with lots of other couples isn't that romantic. It's what is expected, and romance is about the unexpected. It's the unexpected, the exceptional, that can turn an ordinary relationship into an extraordinary one, that can make you suddenly fall in love. It's the moment when something goes wrong and you laugh-you share the moments of horror, and then the moment of laughter. It's when you settle down for a picnic and a horse approaches you and you look at each other and realize you're both terrified of horses. It's the moment before a thunderstorm, when the atmosphere is tense. It is sharing all those extraordinary moments in ordinary lives.

If you're in England, take a day trip across the Channel. Take the trip with your husband, or your boyfriend, or just a friend. Try fresh cheese from a market there, and experience that heaven of tasting perfect French cheese in the gentle sunlight of a market square, in the early morning after a trip across the water. It will cost you very little, and that day's adventure will refresh you, interest you, make you closer to your companion.

Wherever you live, go to farmers' markets and buy wine from vineyards, apples from orchards, milk from farms. Buy bagels, fill them with smoked salmon, eat them on a riverbank. Make an effort not to live a predictable supermarket life, with everything prepackaged and prearranged.

Stint yourself sometimes on ordinary everyday things to afford the occasional luxury, It is the high points, the moments of luxury in an ordinary life-when you spend all your money on the best meal you've ever tasted, or one night in the town's best hotel-that are memorable. And when you look back on your life you will view its achievements in two ways: first, you will look at your achievements, public and private, and second, you will look back on the moment when you suddenly decided to open that bottle of champagne and drink it in the garden, or that moment when you both ran down the slope like children, laughing, with the sun on your faces and the wind in your hair. These moments matter.

Go to new places, do new things-never make do with the day-to-day.

One reason our family is so close is that we shared so much together. In childhood, our holidays were never planned. We'd set off sitting on top of suitcases and bed linens, with so many suitcases on the top of the car that I have no idea to this day how it ever moved, and with lettuce plants in the trunk to plant on arrival. (This was another of my mother's romantic gestures that made every place we went special. We'd plant the vegetables at the holiday cottage or wherever we ended up, and when they grew we'd have our own garden-fresh salad every day.) We'd do terrifically romantic things, like following the Rhine or the Danube and not knowing where we'd end up. We'd stop in a pension or a little hotel. We'd have picnics on the way, after stopping at a village shop and buying a loaf of bread and salami, which we'd eat somewhere beautiful, by a river or the sea, or in a field full of flowers.

My parents gave us so many memories of shared adventures that it is no surprise that we love them so much and are so close. It took a certain bravery on their part. Think of it: putting three small children into neither a new nor a very good car and hoping for the best as they set off for a destination unknown. We often used to end up in uncharted territory because my mother's map reading wasn't too good. But that was half the point of it. We were sharing our own, personal adventure, based on the personalities of those concerned: we weren't following someone's prearranged scheme. To this day, I dislike package tours as much as I dislike the whole package-tour mentality of life. We haven't been sold a life with a predictable beginning, middle, and end. We're all freewheeling adventurers in this world, and the more often you remind yourself of that, the better.

My father also shared his excitement about the world with us, as my mother did. They took us to castles on the Rhine and Danube, and told us all about them. In Holland he explained how windmills work, in Frankfurt he made sure we ate frankfurters. He treated life as an enchanting adventure, a magical mystery tour, and the sense of wonder he instilled in us has never left us.

If you have a similar sense of wonder, share it with others. And if you don't, find someone who will share theirs with you.