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Black Women On Black Men
"Defying a history of horror and nowness of brutality, black men
listen with strength; sparkle with wit and glow with love. I am the
daughter, the mother, the grandmother, the sister, the friend and
the beloved of wonderful black men and that makes my heart glad." --
Dr. Maya Angelou
In our community there is an undercurrent and perception of an
"us-versus-them" sentiment among black women about black men. I
have heard from a number of black women who feel that black men
aren't listening to them and don't care about what they think or
have to say. I don't think that's true, but I accept that that is
the feeling among some women. I believe that there are a number of
black men who are listening to their women and who care about what
the women in their lives think and have to say.
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your perspectives and thoughts can be read and evaluated by a
critical mass of caring men and women.
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help improve relationships between caring men and women.
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21
Points for Women Who Want to Get More Emotion from Men
BY
ONYEOCHA
A perfectly valid word
for an exchange of thoughts and feelings is “intercourse.” That
makes sense. For every complaint that women have about how we try to
get sex from them, we can make a similar point about how they try to
get emotion from us.
1. Don’t just snap your
fingers and say, “Open up.”
2. Though you may feel a
strong urge to “do it,” men are different. Intercourse does not
always have to be in and out, back and forth. Men value and enjoy
non-verbal intercourse, like being understood and accepted for what
they are, not what they say.
3. You can’t force
intercourse and expect your man to enjoy it. You might force him to
fake an understanding just to get it over with.
4. Men will not hop into
emotional intimacy with just anyone. Men know that women are always
ready to get into somebody’s head. You must convince him that he is
not just another piece of mind.
5. You should let him be
on top sometimes. Men are tired of being in the inferior position,
especially in hot and passionate intercourse.
6. Don’t perform tricks
that make him feel inadequate. Remember that you have been raised
with more skill in intercourse than he has.
7. Men were taught that
only women are supposed to enjoy intercourse. Help him not to feel
guilty and weird for doing it.
8. Let him take control
sometimes. Don’t insist on controlling whose needs must be met when.
9. Don’t talk and tell.
Don’t get him to “put out” and then rush to your women friends with
the intimate details.
10. If your thrusting and
probing hurts him, stop immediately. Don’t assume that he’ll start
to like it just because you do.
11. Allow him to
initiate. Don’t hit on him with so many requests for intercourse
that he never feels the urge to start intercourse at his own pace,
according to his own needs.
12. Men are often shy and
insecure about their flaws and blemishes, about whether you will
find them attractive. Don’t expect your man to show you everything
right away.
13. Remember that good
intercourse is not a wrestling match. There should be no winner and
no loser.
14. Respect your lover as
an equal partner. You don’t own him; he does not exist for the sole
purpose of providing your pleasure.
15. If you have ever
abused him during intercourse, understand that it may take a long,
long time for your man to open up to you again.
16. Keep in mind that
men’s and women’s rhythms are different. Don’t get angry if his
needs don’t coincide with yours.
17. If you simply want to
release tension, let him know. Don’t pretend that you’re doing it
for him. Men often resist intercourse if they feel pressured about
“getting into it.”
18. There is no such
thing as the ideal lover. Don’t try to make your partner into
something he isn’t. Accept your man as he is.
19. Foreplay is
essential; gentle stroking of the ego can help. If you encounter a
ravenous ego, remember it is ravenous not because it gets too much
healthy attention, but because it gets too little.
20. Don’t get hung up on
achieving simultaneous understanding. Men’s understandings take
longer, but they are usually more intense.
21. Respect him in the
morning.
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Seven Myths About Black Men by Scottie Lowe
Someone recently
posted in my Yahoo group a list of 7 myths about Black men. The
list was supposed to counter these lies with truth. Unfortunately,
the list didn’t really address the core issues; it simply was a way
for some poor soul to try to feel validated as a human being. I
understand that need but it should have been done with much more
introspection. Therefore, I’m going to step up to the plate and
dismantle his list of lies and myths of Black manhood summarily and
with efficacy.
1. Black men are
morally and intellectually inferior.
The intellectual
inferiority of Black PEOPLE, not just men, is directly related to
the fact the educational system is designed to keep Black people
stupid. Black PEOPLE are not inherently or genetically
intellectually inferior. If you under educate an entire race for
hundreds of years, yes, unfortunately, you are going to have a race
of people who aren’t intellectually superior. That’s not an
indication of our capability or potential as a race, it’s just a
manifestation of the fact that whites are the beneficiaries of a
better education in this country. Poor nutrition, a staple in the
black community, leads to lesser intellectual capacity as well.
That’s not something that is inherent to Black people; it’s across
racial lines. If a child is raised on sugar and processed food,
they aren’t going to be able to have their brains develop properly
because they lack the essential and key nutrients that stimulate
brain function. Again, not inherent to Black people, it just so
happens that we’ve been socialized to eat out of Styrofoam boxes,
not gardens. Black people are just as capable of learning and
intellectual superiority as any other race. Unfortunately, we were
denied education for our first 250 years and it takes a lot longer
to catch up. Unfortunately, the playing field isn’t level so we
haven’t been able to catch up en masse the way we could have. There
are plenty of examples of Black brilliance in spite of our handicaps
and that speaks volumes to our potential and our natural
intellectual gifts despite the roadblocks that white people have
institutionalized to keep us oppressed. Moral inferiority is a
joke. White people are so amoral it boggles my mind. Who else
could start a war that kills thousands of people, endangers the
environment for thousands of years, destroys hundreds of thousands
of lives, for MONEY? Serial killers and pedophiles and bestiality,
white people got immorality on lock down but the media is white so
they have a vested interest in making us look immoral.
2. All black men are
well endowed and are better lovers.
Many, many, many Black men are better endowed. Not every single
one, but a great many are. The reason why white slave masters were
so intimidated by Black men is because they did in fact have larger
penises. They would gather around in mobs and castrate Black men in
order to feel empowered. The fact that Black men tend to have
larger penises, and more muscle tone, which would make for a better
lover, is not a myth. The myth comes in making their larger sexual
organs and better skills something negative. The Black man is not a
sexual savage. He should not be defined by his sexual skill or
endowment. He is far MORE than just a big dick and a primal fuck.
Sadly, most Black men have come to define their manhood as just
that.
3. Black men prefer
white women.
White women are seen
as the standard of beauty in this society. They have been put on a
pedestal as the icon of beauty for hundreds if not thousands of
years. Black women, in this country, have been told for hundreds
of years, not only are we not beautiful, but that we are ugly and
undesirable. It’s no great shock that many, many Black men
subconsciously see white women as more attractive, better partners.
We have a nation of black women who are trying to change their
aesthetic to those of white women, wouldn’t it stand to reason that
a woman who doesn’t have to have a relaxer to “correct” her nappy
hair is better than one who does? Doesn’t it stand to reason that
if a black boy is told that he is black and ugly that he would want
to make sure that his kids have a chance at being mixed and
beautiful? A great many black men see white women as more beautiful
subconsciously. White people feed their subconscious lust for white
women by saying, “love knows no color,” and thus allowing them never
to heal their wounds and address their own issues of self hate.
Thankfully, not every Black man prefers white women, but the failure
as a culture to address the centuries of brainwashing Black people
have endured, does in fact create a large percentage of black men
who feel white women are more socially, sexually, and/or
romantically desirable.
4. Black men are
irresponsible fathers.
Seven out of ten black
children are born to single mothers. Black women are raising their
boys in homes without fathers, in emotionally incestuous
relationships that cripple their sons and make them incapable of
accepting responsibility as adults. It’s a cycle that will repeat
itself till the end of time unless we address the emotional maturity
of black men. Parenting skills in Black men are dangerously lacking
for the most part. Again, that’s not something that is inherent to
us or a genetic trait that is passed down. It’s a manifestation of
socialization and a byproduct of lessons learned, and unlearned, in
slavery. African men were just that, men, and completely capable of
raising their families. During slavery, breaking up the home,
preventing men from being good fathers was essential to controlling
the slave population. (THERE WAS NO GOD DAMN WILLIE LYNCH) The
model for the black home was set when responsibility was taken from
the black man and it’s damn near impossible to give it back to him
now. Even when black men are present in the home, their parenting
skills are usually based on a patriarchal “I’m the bread winner and
the disciplinarian: model which is unhealthy as well. Are Black men
incapable of being good fathers? Absolutely not. Are the vast
majority of Black men emotionally crippled as to not lend themselves
to being good fathers, unfortunately, yes, but it’s not an unfixable
problem, its not something that in inherent to Black men because of
genetics.
5. Black men are
superior athletes and entertainers.
Black men ARE superior
athletes and entertainers. Again, the problem isn’t in stating that
as a fact, it’s in relegating that to the only things Black men are
capable of. No, not every single black man is a superior athlete or
entertainer. Our naturally muscular bodies and our natural rhythm
lend themselves well to sports, dancing, singing, and playing
music. There’s nothing wrong with that. The problem lies in saying
that’s the ONLY thing Black men are capable of. The problem lies in
relegating Black men to roles of entertainer or athlete. Are there
some white men who can sing and dance and have muscular bodies? Of
course. But no one is telling them thats all they can be. Check
it, white people wouldn’t have kidnapped and enslaved us if our
bodies weren’t superior and our dark skin didn’t make it easy for
them to differentiate us. Anyone who could survive the middle
passage is a physically superior person, genetically. The fact that
white people like to be entertained by us is more of a commentary on
them than anything disparaging to us.
6. Black men are poor
businessmen.
I’ve never heard of
this, Black men are poor businessmen, myth. I’ve heard the myth
that black business are poorly run so I guess whatever Black man
wrote this list co-opted the myth to fit black men. It’s almost
redundant at this point to mention that there is nothing inherently
inferior about Black people that make us behave in negative ways
OTHER THAN the set of circumstances that white people inflict on
us. We aren’t as likely to have inherited businesses, trust funds,
endowments, willed fortunes, and insurance policies to give us the
capital to start and run a business. We also have, what I call, the
Black people disease. We have been socialized to fear our own
success; we would rather work for someone else. There’s no DNA code
for Black people that renders us more likely to be an employee than
an employer, it’s just that we have been taught to follow the rules,
not make our own. White people are taught that they can do
anything, its drilled into their heads from childhood, we are taught
that we have to do whatever we can to barely stay alive and that we
have to conform to do it. Those of us lucky enough to have gotten
different messages are more than capable of running successful
businesses.
7. Black men
contributed nothing to the advancement of civilization.
I’m not sure why
gender is an issue here. Black PEOPLE, both men and women, were the
architects of civilization. This propensity to erase women from
history is yet another example of how black men have been socialized
to accept the norms of the white man. Erasing Black women from
history serves what purpose, to elevate Black men to a position of
superiority? The need for black men to want to rule over Black
women, to diminish our contribution is one learned in slavery and
it’s self-destructive.
Oddly enough, the most
glaring myths about black men are missing. Black men are supposedly
more criminal, drug addicted, and lazy. Those are the myths I would
have love to seen addressed. In each of those instances, I think
white people take the award, hands down. Stealing land, stealing
people, stealing resources, slaughtering millions of people. THAT’S
Criminal. White people can find ways to justify their criminality
in ways that boggle my mind. In my local newspaper yesterday, they
had a picture of a black baby left in a car white the guardian was
robbing a bank, took up half the front page with a color picture.
Two weeks ago, a woman was arrested for embezzling a million dollars
from her company and her husband was the State Comptroller for the
state of Delaware. Page six, no picture, two paragraphs. Her
husband is the man responsible for the finances of an entire state
and that wasn’t even enough to warrant being on the front page.
White people might not be genetically more criminal but they
certainly are socialized to think their criminal behavior is
justifiable, invisible.
I don’t know about
now, but I know when I was in college 20 years ago, white people
were doing drugs like they were vitamins. Black parties I would go
to, everyone was concerned with dancing and rubbing your little
thing up on someone, there might be some weed somewhere. White
parties, there was coke, and pills, I don’t know what kind, and they
wanted to drink until they puked. Drug addiction certainly isn’t
genetic but white people have this, “I need to get fucked up,”
attitude far more than black people. Now, with all of these
manufactured drugs like X and meth, that are being produced in white
homes and neighborhoods, its hard for me to comprehend how anyone
could say that Black people are more addicted to drugs. We might
have more homeless drug addicts but that’s not a measure of us being
more drug addicted, that’s just a measure of how white people treat
their drug addicts and a whole measure of economics.
One could argue that
if white people weren’t so lazy, they could have built their own
nation rather than having to enslave people to do it for them. Is
that a trait inherent to them? Far be it from me to say that, god
forbid. In fact, SOME might say that white people are inherently
more violent, that they’ve made violence a form of entertainment,
that aggression is what they are capable of most. My great
grandfather was a sharecropper for a white man. He would work 16
hours a day to grow and harvest food for the white landowner. At the
end of the year, that white landowner would steal the profits he was
supposed to share with my great grandfather and keep them for
himself. One of those men was lazy, one was not. Sadly, the entire
system of sharecropping was built on the model that the black man
would work for an entire year and the white man would reap the
benefits of his hard work and not give him one thin dime, and in
many cases force the black man to pay him. If one were making an
argument about who was inherently lazy, it would be hard to form the
argument that it was black men.
Myths and stereotypes
have origins in truth. The problem becomes when Black people are
narrowly defined by their stereotypes. Black men are more than just
big black bucks who can run and jump and shoot and breed white
women. If one asserts that Black men are incapable of more than
that, that all they are is a collective of negative traits that have
been ascribed to them, that’s the definition of racism.
Scottie Lowe is the
founder, CEO, and the creative driving force behind
www.afroerotik.com.
Key Elements for a
Healthy Relationship by Scottie Lowe
It’s become more
and more apparent to me, over the course of the last couple of
weeks that most people are absolutely clueless when it comes to
what constitutes and establishes a healthy relationship. What’s
worse, we aren’t even interested in changing our behaviors in an
effort to move to a different place, we want to hold on to
obviously dysfunctional and destructive patterns, justify them,
and then blame other people for hurting us. The choices we make
in our relationships are blatantly unhealthy and then we cry and
boo-hoo that the other person has wronged us. I know that
everyone isn’t on the same path of healing but it seems almost
incomprehensible that it’s 2005 and people are not even willing
to make efforts to examine their lives in a conscious effort to
build a stronger relationship.
NOW, I’ll be the
first to say that I’m not an expert on relationships. I haven’t
been in a relationship for almost 15 years. In those 15 years
however, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to analyze why I’ve
chosen the relationships I’ve been in, what I did wrong, what
belief systems I need to change, and trying to conceptualize
exactly how I want any future relationships I enter into. I’ve
tried to determine exactly what I want my partner to be like,
how I want to interact with my partner, what I bring to the
table, and what things I will and will not compromise on in a
partnership. I’ve come up with some things that I think are
essential for building a healthy relationship and I’m going to
share my thoughts on the subject with the hopes that some other
people will come up with criteria that will work for them in
building a strong relationship.
1.
First and
foremost, in order to build a healthy and strong relationship,
you must, you MUST look at why you are the way you are. You
have to figure out why you like the men that don’t like you, why
you choose the women that need to be rescued and then you resent
them when they ask you for security. You have to look at the
reasons behind why you fall in love in a week and then three
months later you hate that person like they are a serial
killer. Why do you continue to love people that don’t love
you? Why do you feel like your life is over when you get
rejected? All of the reasons why we behave the way we do are
set up in our childhood. We duplicate the things we experienced
in our childhood so we must figure out what caused us to be the
way we are. Your dad wasn’t around, your mother played the
martyr “Strong Black woman” icon, you saw her have a string of
no good men come in and out of your life, you wanted your daddy
to love you, you wanted to be like your daddy, cool and aloof
and unattached . . . whatever the belief system, you have to
figure that out first and foremost so you can identify the
pattern in your relationships and work to correct it. When you
see that red flag pop up, you can understand where it comes from
and then work towards moving to a healthier place. The problem
with looking at our past is that it’s painful. We don’t want to
have to face the fact that we think we are unworthy of love
because we feel fat, ugly, insecure, or flawed. We don’t want
to admit to ourselves that we have fears of abandonment from
when we had to go live with our auntie when we were little. It
is that acknowledgement and that ability to examine YOUR OWN
LIFE that will make you a better person in a relationship and
without that, you are doomed to continue to perpetuate those
same horrible relationships over and over again.
2. You
must have a set of emotional criteria that you feel is essential
for what constitutes a loving relationship for you. You must
define your emotional boundaries and establish what you need
emotionally in a relationship and you have to demand that from
your partner. What does that mean? Everyone has different
things that would make them feel loved and valued, you have to
have that clearly defined in your head and then seek a partner
that is willing to help you paint that picture. If you meet
someone and they can’t subscribe to your vision of love, if its
too much of a burden for them to do the things you need to feed
you emotionally, that’s not the person for you. For some
people, you need a partner that will call you every day and
check in with you just to make sure you are doing okay. For
others, it means you need physical affection, constant hugs and
kisses, and intimacy. Others still might need a relationship in
which there is no fighting. You have to know what you want your
relationship to look like in order for you to be able to achieve
it. The trick is to identify the emotional things that build
strong relationships and not the material things that damage
them.
Suppose, as a
woman, you think love is having a man buy you all sorts of thing
and pay all your bills. You seek that out in a partner and then
he beats you, controls your every move, you feel trapped. What
you’ve done is identify a selfish material need, not an
emotional need. The emotional need would be to feel security.
Security comes in many forms and can be expressed in lots of
ways. If your man helps you organize your bills so you can pay
them on time yourself, helps you get your resume together so you
can get a better job with more income, quizzes you with
interview questions, if he helps you plan a budget so that you
can save to buy a house and you won’t have to be uprooted once a
year, that’s meeting your emotional needs, not your physical
ones. If, as a man, you want a relationship where you have a
woman that looks like she stepped off the cover of a magazine or
a video set every day in order to show other men that you are
better than them, in order to prove that you have what it takes
to get the best looking woman, what you are looking for
emotionally is confidence and self esteem. That can’t come from
a woman; true confidence and self-esteem must come from inside.
That woman that has her hair done all the time, her nails and
toes painted to match, that wears the designer outfit in her
two-seater, convertible sports car will not honor you as a man,
she will use you for your money and move on when the next man
with more money offers to buy her. The woman that will help you
go back to school and get your degree, and who will get up at 5
am on a Saturday morning to help you train for that marathon is
the woman that will support your accomplishments and be a loving
partner. As long as you go for the packaging and not what’s
inside, you’ll be doomed to be miserable in your relationships.
3. A
healthy relationship must be built on integrity and
selflessness. Integrity means steadfast adherence to a strict
moral or ethical code and selflessness means exhibiting, or
motivated by NO concern for oneself; unselfish. Those are
foreign words to most people these days because we’ve been
socialized to look out for self. The idea of putting another
person’s feelings above our own is impossible for some people to
grasp. You can’t be in a healthy relationship if you lie,
cheat, or make choices that benefit you and not your partner.
Every choice, every decision, every move you make has to benefit
your partner or your relationship. Now, here’s the rub. Your
partner has to have the same commitment to the relationship in
order for it to work. You can’t say, “I love XYZ, but I have to
go out on Friday night to party because that’s what I love to do
and if they don’t like it, too bad.” Well, that’s not entirely
true. You can say that but you will be in a very unhealthy
relationship if you do. To be in a healthy relationship, you
have to put your needs last and have a partner that is willing
to put their needs last as well. If both of you are working on
building a relationship where you honor and love the other
person, where you put the other person’s needs ahead of your
own, both of you will be in a relationship where neither on will
jeopardize the relationship by doing something selfish. That
means you can’t have instant gratification all the time. That
means you won’t cheat when the opportunity comes up because you
think you can get away with it because you will think about your
spouse and know that your actions would hurt them. You won’t
stay out all weekend without calling because you will know that
they will be worried to death about you. You won’t buy the
super expensive hot tub or the entertainment system you’ve
always wanted without asking permission first because you know
any selfish choice you make for yourself in the relationship
will negatively effect how you get along. You will ask your
partners opinion on things and come to a compromise that honors
both of you.
4.
It almost goes without
saying because it’s so essential and most people will say they want
it in a relationship but hardly anyone at all practices it. Honesty
is the foundation for a healthy relationship. Honesty means telling
your partner all your dirty little secrets, fears, fantasies,
dreams, and insecurities. Honest y is the ultimate measure of
respect for your partner and it’s the cornerstone for two people
relating in a way that will grow and build. You must start by being
honest with yourself. That means you must be able to admit to
yourself that you really do like the idea of having sex in a tub of
chocolate pudding and that it’s not going to go away, no matter how
much you want it to. You have to tell be able to tell your partner
all of the things that make you tick or otherwise you are only
presenting a shell of yourself to your partner and you are not
allowing them to love all of you. If you have a sexual fantasy that
you are afraid to share your spouse, that means you are ashamed of
your fantasy. If you are ashamed of your fantasy, that means you
are not being true to yourself. “But my wife will never understand
that I want to get fucked in the ass with a strap on, she’ll think
I’m gay.” “My boyfriend will never understand that I want to be
gangbanged.” If you are with a partner who will not be willing to
communicate and love you for who you are, you aren’t in a healthy
relationship. There is no consensual sexual fantasy or fetish that
should not be able to be discussed. You, as an adult, should be
able to A.) point to the emotional need it fills in you and work to
get that in other ways, and B.) keep in mind that if you choose to
fulfill a fantasy without your partner, you’ve violated the rule of
putting your partner’s emotional needs first.
Honesty goes far beyond just sharing your fantasies. You have to be
able to tell your spouse that you peed your pants in the third grade
when the teacher called you to the blackboard and you were nervous
because you didn’t know the answer. You have to be able to tell
your spouse that your cousin molested you when you were 10 and it’s
fucked with your head ever since. You have to have a commitment to
telling your partner that you’ve made a mistake and were unfaithful
and let them choose how to process that information in a way that is
healthy for them. You have to not keep the information that the
IRS is going to repossess your home for tax fraud you had before you
got married. Any time you keep a secret from your spouse, any time
you lie, and time you allow dishonesty to come between you and your
partner, you are chipping away at the foundation of your healthy
relationship.
“Well, I’m in a relationship and I know that he or she will leave me
if I told them the truth about all the shit I’ve done.” That is a
glaring indication that you are in an unhealthy relationship. There
are too many things that will work to destroy your relationship
outside your front door. Again, you have to have a commitment to
telling the truth and you have to have a partner that is equally as
committed to telling the truth. If you start letting dishonesty in
your relationship, your partner will not have your back when the
shit hits the fan. Having a healthy relationship is not easy, in
fact, it’s very hard. Lies and healthy relationship just don’t
mix.
5.
Good communication is
essential in building a healthy relationship. You and your partner
must have a way to disagree that doesn’t include yelling, screaming,
and calling names. Most of us don’t know how to do that so go get a
book on communication or go to counseling. You must be willing to
let your partner be mad without getting defensive. You must be
willing to let your partner have the space they need in order to
process their emotions. You have to be willing to look things from
their perspective and see things as they see them. You have to be
willing to find a partner that is committed to having the same
standard to communication as you or else you’ve just entered into
another dysfunctional relationship.
6. Similar
belief systems are a key ingredient to building a strong, healthy
relationship. I’ve heard many people say that they want a partner
who shares the same social interests as them but they don’t care
what their philosophical, or political, or spiritual beliefs are.
That is a recipe for a shaky relationship at best. It would be
great if you and your partner liked the same music and movies and
you both liked to bowl. Those things are entertainment and it would
be great to share those things with your partner. If, however, you
are looking to build a healthy relationship with you partner, those
things are icing on the cake and not the key ingredients to building
a relationship. If you are a radical libertarian and you get
involved with someone who thinks Bush is the best president since
Reagan (which is saying a whole helluva lot) then you are going to
be setting up arguments in your relationship about your core
beliefs. If you like skating and your partner likes chess but you
both are staunch Green Party, Pro-Choice, Anti-war, vegetarian,
Hassidic Jews then you can go out skating, your partner can go out
and play chess and when you come home you’ll be share your thoughts
and feelings over a plate of curry lentils and plan out a strategy
to hug a tree and rally for legislation to bring our soldiers home.
Those are the things that will make the community better and
building a strong community starts with building a strong family
unit first. If you like 50cent and your partner like Cold Play, you
can set times to listen to your music and his or her music that
doesn’t piss both of you off. If you believe in your heart that a
gay couple has a right to adopt and your partner does not, you are
going to go to bed pissed off and mad many, many night.
7. Compromise
is a huge keyword for relationships. People seem to confuse
compromising with your partner and compromising your standards. If
you have done your homework and you are really interested in
building a strong relationship, you’ve already decided what you need
to emotionally fulfill you. With that list in hand, you need to
compare every person you meet to that list and decided which things
are must haves, which things are “nice to haves.” On your emotional
list, you must be rigid in the selection of your partner because if
you compromise on what you need, you’ll end up unhappy and miserable
and you’ll end up sabotaging your relationship by trying to make
your partner feel as unhappy as you are. Now, there’s another list
of things that you want in your partner, the physical things. You
want a partner that is a certain height, weight, complexion, hair
length, etc. Other than hygiene, treat everything on that list with
a grain of salt. “Oh, but I know what I like and I can’t change
what turns me on.” That’s great. Mature adults in healthy
relationships, however, can see far beyond the outside of the
package. Make your priority the qualities of the heart you are
looking for and not the 38DDDs or the 10-inch dick. Compromise
inside of a relationship is essential. Once you’ve found the person
that has looked at their own issues, that is committed to being
honest, and putting your feelings ahead of theirs, that is
interested in communicating without yelling and has the same
passions as you, THEN and only then can you compromise on what movie
to go to Friday, whose parents you are going to for the holidays,
and what to name the children. In order to get the sort of person
that is worthy of that sort of compromise, you must BE that sort of
person first. All too often, we say, “Oh, I’ll change when I meet
the person that is worth it.” Sadly, you have to change who you are
first and then you’ll attract the sort of people that will be worth
it.
If you aren’t in a
relationship now and you want to be, how do you ensure that the next
relationship will be healthier than your last? Go down the list and
start by making a commitment that you are going to work on all of
those things before you enter into a relationship again. Practice
being honest, it’s not easy. Practice resolving conflic |
