Have The Relationship You Want

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How can we get fooled – even while we’re living with and alongside a man, day in and day out, for years and years and years?

Is it possible?

Or do we KNOW, on some deep – okay subconscious – level that our man is doing things he’s not telling us – things that would hurt us if we knew?

I’ve thought about this and thought about this. I’ve looked at Christie Brinkley walking out of court with a robotic smile on her face that could not have truly been real given what she’s had to go through – and wanted to judge her. I’ve wanted to call her “unconscious,” or that there must be something wrong with her that she’d choose a man who could lie to her and hurt her like that and not notice that something was off in him and the relationship.

I’ve wanted to think she did know, but just didn’t want to deal with it. I’ve wanted to think she knew, and decided to wait until her children were grown, or to simply lead separate lives with her husband and not go through a messy divorce that would surely cost her money. I’ve wanted to distance myself from her – to believe that I would never, ever be fooled like that.

And I hope I’m right about myself – that I’m somehow so in tune with my husband and the rhythm and realness and intimateness of our marriage that I would simply KNOW if something was off. “Certainly,” I say to myself “I would know if he was spending great sums of money without telling me. I would know that he was sleeping with another woman and lying to me.”

And I’ll bet Christie said the same thing to herself.

And so, when I’m tempted to judge her, I stop myself. I can only say that I hope I would be alert enough to know if something was wrong in my marriage.

If you’ve ever struggled with this – perhaps you’ve been betrayed in the past (I certainly have been thrown for a loop and completely shocked by a man’s behavior) – then let’s look at some ways to avoid ever having to go through it again.

1. Listen to what a man says. Believe him when he says things like “I’m not ready for a relationship,” or “my ex-wife thought I was a real handful,” or “I’m not sure I want kids,” or “I cheated on my last girlfriend, but I’d never do that again.”

2. Look at his relationships with his friends and family, and pay attention to how he talks about women – is he respectful, kind and appreciative, or is he angry, jokey and bitter?

3. Don’t take “intimacy” and “truth-telling” for granted, or mistake “comfort” and “friendship” for a real relationship. Pay attention ALWAYS to how you feel about YOURSELF when you’re with a man.
I’ll be talking in later posts about jealousy, obsession – and how to get over not being able to trust a man because of what’s happened to you in the past – in the meantime, you’ll want to check out my Commitment Blueprint program – it has a special section on jealousy and obsession, and is all about staying on your “Bridge” to Happy Ever After and not letting a man throw you off course.

Love, Rori

I know the whole idea of “saying what you feel” sounds wrong.

Men are supposed to HATE feelings, aren’t they?

A man gets really uncomfortable around “drama” and the kind of emotional intensity we’ve been talking about in this series of posts – where your energy is all bound up in a kind of “push-pull” tension inside you – but he LOVES “feelings.”

He loves to see you “uncovered.” As though you’re a transparent woman and he can see everything that’s going on inside you. Yes, even the “yucky” stuff.

What we’re talking about here is vulnerability, and vulnerability is a RARE thing.

“Fragility” is common, where a man feels you could easily break apart or fly into a rage or into tears at the drop of a hat. And he’s always on the lookout for that. But vulnerability requires inner strength, bravery, and a belief in yourself. In order to let someone see who you are inside – especially a man you love – you have to be “okay” with yourself. Liking yourself is even better. And loving yourself gets you the prize!

Because if what a man sees when he looks at you is that you love yourself – then he feels compelled to love you, too. He can’t help it.

So saying what you feel is a necessary part of being vulnerable. It doesn’t mean you have to say everything you feel ALL the time. (And most of the time we’re actually speaking about what we THINK, and what we think doesn’t count at all for vulnerability – we’ll talk more about that in future posts.) And it doesn’t mean you spew your feelings out in just any old way.

What being vulnerable and saying what you feel means - is that there’s a way to talk about what you feel that works, that’s soft and vulnerable, and there’s a way to talk about what you feel that’s dramatic, “intense” and makes him think you’re fragile and difficult.

In the next posts we’ll get to the exact ways to do it. If you’d like to quickly get my “Basics,” like Feeling Messages, down – try out my ebook, Have The Relationship You Want