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.
Posted on: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 03:52:43 +0000