Have The Relationship You Want

So I’m sick. A cold. Bad, obnoxious, noisy, icky cough. Not a big deal. We women blow through these things. But I ache, and I want to lay down. Puts me at a romantic disadvantage, I think. Don’t look great. Feel sloggy, so I must look sloggy to my husband.

All of a sudden, he looks even cuter.

Can’t do anything for anyone – don’t want to, anyway. Even so, I try to do myself out of my malaise. I write. I organize. I clean the kitchen. And just to make myself feel better, I have the urge to take care of my husband, who also has a cold. Or maybe my urge is not to make myself feel better, but to make myself feel more indispensable. If I don’t look good, I pretty sure better do good.

Suddenly, I realize all my activity is annoying. Sit down, I can hear him say, though he’s not actually saying it. If I got him dinner and massaged his head and brought him tea, he’d gladly take it. He’d take whatever I’d give. Take it all.

But he wouldn’t like me better.

In fact, he really doesn’t like it at all. Oh, he likes the good stuff, alright, but it doesn’t make him reach for me, or pet my hair, or try to have sex with me in the hallway even though neither of us can stand up for more than a minute. What inspires him to do that is the sight of me asleep in the bed at four in the afternoon because I feel lousy and I’m taking care of myself. He’s inspired when I take care of myself.

What he can’t stand is that air of  — I’m going to impress you all by getting all my work done and pretending I’m not exhausted, even though I let a complaint and an Oooooo I feel lousy slip out every once in awhile. He thinks, when I do that: Is she so much better than me? –  and turns away. So much for romance.

This is an extreme case, but it works the same if we’ve just had a bad day at the office, or our fellow hasn’t called, or we just feel somehow that giving to someone and nurturing someone is the way to his heart. It isn’t.

Have you ever noticed that on your worst days – bad hair, a cold, a huge pimple – you seem to be a man magnet? Every woman I talk to has noticed this (when she’s allowed herself to notice). It’s not because you look bad. It’s because you seem approachable. You seem vulnerable. Open. You seem, for a change in most men’s experience, to be a woman who might allow herself to be taken care of, by him. Instead of what he’s used to – a woman who’d be willing to take care of him.

Giving is what men are supposed to do. Women are supposed to receive the love, affection and gifts that men give, and then give love and affection back to them. Though many of us have caught onto this, it’s challenging to stop doing what we’ve always done, what we’ve been told is the way to do things, and to fly in the face of the fallout we fear. So I’m going to tackle one little issue – Nurturing.

Nurturing is masculine. If you want to get what he wants to give, stop nurturing your man.

Radical as this sounds, try it. Stop doing. Stop giving. Stop massaging a man’s feelings. Stop helping your date do the relationship thing and let him flounder until he figures it out. He will.

This whole concept of nurturing is a dilemma for most of us. We think of mothering, nurturing, caring for our young as a feminine aspect of ourselves.

It isn’t.

Nurturing and caring for others may be a female trait – motherhood is female – but it’s still about action! Nurturing is about doing. Giving. Your energy goes out of you and toward or into someone else. When you give, you are acting from a masculine energy place.

We are so accustomed to the idea of nurturing being feminine, we get confused. We think being loving to our men is nurturing them. Massaging their bodies, minds and spirits. There is nothing wrong with the idea of nurturing – it’s the form our nurturing takes that causes so much difficulty. We are all composed of masculine and feminine (yin and yang) energies. We move through them fluidly at our best, and are stuck in one or the other at our worst.

Too often, many of us find ourselves stuck at one extreme or the other. We either give too much all the time and then find ourselves resentful all the time, or we go the other way and make ourselves emotionally unavailable to our dates, our husbands, our boyfriends, and every man we meet.

Too often, our nurturing energies are perceived by men as mothering. Our actions seem intrusive. We seem to be judging them and finding them coming up short – otherwise why would they need taking care of? On the other hand, they love attention. Don’t we all?

To strike some sort of balance when we are all so mightily out of balance, I’m asking you to pull back to zero.

To at least imagine pulling back to zero. The baby steps you actually take may seem huge. When you stop doing for your man what he doesn’t need you to do, yet has grown accustomed to you doing and may resent you not doing (even though he’ll certainly find himself relieved that you’ve stopped doing them), things may get messy before they get better. But they will get better.

This is all about Overfunctioning. What does Overfunctioning and Overnurturing look like in YOUR love life?

Let me know!  Love,  Rori

I love letters with what you and I might call “extreme” situations — where we all gasp and swear we’d never let that happen to us — but we KNOW, deep down, that it COULD happen to us, that we have, and may still be, tolerating things we don’t like and playing “small” when we are, in fact, HUGE goddesses — all of us.

Let’s see how we can use this to help you:

“Dear Rori,
.
I wanted to share with you the wall I’m up against.

Brief intro:

17 years of Bliss, 3 children, were very happy, we moved and all went pear shaped.

He broke up over email and its been texting and emailing and fighting for 3 years. He comes back, he leaves. He spends more time with us than away.

Recently he has said he loves me and ‘ maybe’ wants to come back. He wants total freedom to come and go as he pleases. Me to ask no questions, For starters we stay in separate houses, and take it slow, he can still flirt and go out with other woman, and if I get upset the that goes against me and him getting back together.

He doesn’t want a jealous wife. I am not to question his behavior or where he goes, if I have a complaint I should tell a girlfriend not him. that will go against me. Over the next few weeks, he will judge me and my behavior and attitude toward him as to whether he thinks he wants to come back to me and his kids…

So I will be on trial - and I will be judged on behavior, attitude. etc. There is no problem with physical attraction, for my age and 3 kids I look great…

He will be flirty and being smutty on facebook etc with other woman and if I complain that will go against me.

Here’s the great bit, If I use - I feel, I felt, I am feeling with him .. that will go against me. If I try to play him with all the junk he says he reads on these web sites. .. so he’s across all of this..

How do I deal with this. i am not good at playing games, and he’s onto all these methods…

What do I do ? No Bliss”

***Here’s my answer:

Basically, No Bliss – What are you DOING???? (This is going to be tough love – don’t read if you don’t want to hear it.)

If you think that by allowing yourself to “be on trial” and wait for him — you’ll get him back, you are dead wrong.

The only way you have a chance of getting this marriage back (and I can’t imagine why you’d WANT to now –there are all kinds of great men out there who’d want you 3 kids and all…) is to put your wedding ring on your right hand, and START DATING. Break up with him. Tell him this is a separation, and so that you will be dating also. Period. If you can’t do this, then, please, get some therapy to help your self-esteem –and get my Targeting Mr. Right program – it will help you date without all the weirdness attached…

AGREE with him. Tell him that you don’t want the marriage at this point while you’re both discovering what it is you really want (this is not a game – this is TRUE for YOU, if you’ll let yourself see this…).

Good luck! You can DO THIS!!!

***Okay, now let’s see how we can use this…

For most of this letter, it sounds like No Bliss is joking, doesn’t it? Like she sees the humor in his ridiculous demands and behavior, and is almost about to wipe her hands of him…but then…you know she’s not joking at all. No Bliss is really caught up in all this.

And it’s so easy for us to say “ewwww” - but after 17 years and 3 kids and “bliss” — any one of us would feel invested and, well, caught up.

And this brings me to the hard question: “What do you do when things change? Unexpectedly. Suddenly. Seemingly without warning. What do you do when your man goes berserk all of a sudden?”

And my answer is: Unless there’s instantaneous dementia from a physical accident or a drug reaction — there’s no such thing as “all of a sudden.” There’s no such thing as a surprise that’s this huge. No way.

This kind of thing has to be growing. Gathering steam. It could be underground, where you don’t want to look. It could be right in front of your face, where you still don’t want to look.

You could be feeling your reaction to it, and not know what that reaction’s about. This is where we women can get “tunnel vision” and just look at everything and everywhere except at the exact spot where everything’s going wrong.

So much is subconscious - where we can’t see it –so let’s say we go into a temporary state of being where we’re not aware of what’s going on around us.

So — let’s say that when we get “unaware,” it’s not our fault.  BUT — if we don’t choose to LEARN from that unaware experience — then we embark on the non-stop beating up of ourselves that I FORBID you to do!

So, along with everything else we’re going to do here, I want you to EMBRACE and LOVE even your passing unaware moments. Let’s just say that the unaware moments describe not seeing what’s right in front of us just because it’s hard to see.

Now…The man just up and walks, he runs around, he blames you, he puts you in a cage of behavior with one THREAT: He will get mad, and then he will walk even FURTHER away.

And this threat is the one that decks every single one of us.

Even if we don’t want a man anymore, the moment he threatens to GO - we want him back.

It’s like LOSING is worse than being unhappy.

Well - sometimes losing is “loosing” — just opening our iron grip and letting a man do whatever he wants to do.

Because I can tell you this — if a man doesn’t want to be with you –he’s nothing to you. Period. He’s a drain on your energy, your spirit, your heart, your health, and “loosing” a man like that is the only thing that will serve you.

(Also — it’s the only way to invite him to come and get you. (After he cleans up his act, of course –because who would want a dreadful man in the state that this one is in?)

Waiting around for a man who is acting like a single man, jerking you around and daring you to “start something” is hardly worth even a moment to “contemplate.”

The answer is NO.  No, I don’t care if you get mad. No, I don’t care what you think.  No, I no longer care what you do.

The only thing you have here to say YES to is shared parenthood.  That means you stay civil, you stay calm, you refrain from arguing.  You work only for the good of your children.

You consider yourself separated, tell him so, and go about building a new life for yourself.  Should he ever regain his senses and want to come back (and the fastest ticket to that is to forget about him and get a great new life), then you’l think about it.

This letter riled me up, and No Bliss, I hope I was able to give you a bit of a push to discover your own sense of being “done” with this man for now, except as the father of your children.

And while you’re creating this new, fabulous life (right NOW, please) - you will be working with my Tools to undo whatever your part is in this.  Even if the only thing you can put your finger on is “unawareness.”

You will be discovering how you got here, and how you can have something blissful again - even if it’s not with this same man.

Love, Rori