| effective, enhancing logical, practical strategies for empowerment, self-control, relaxation & hope |  | dr. j's head-cleaners shrink rap & shrink think for practical, powerful healing & hope |
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Some Thoughts on Good Relationships (this will grow with time - come back and check) Love, Trust & Partnering - Relationship Happiness practical tactics, strategies, awarenesses | 
emails - trust, etc. | |||
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email & response "I want... to trust my boyfriend..." Dear Dr. Johnson - I want to learn how to trust my boyfriend. We've been together for almost a year, but I known him from before that. I can't seem to trust him for things I saw BEFORE we were together. Every time he says he is going to a happy hour, or he is going away for a couple of days with his friends, the picture of him getting shots from a girl's boobs gets in my mind. I also think he will start massaging some girls neck and shoulders (like he did in front of me to a coworker of ours). And I don't feel right about that at all. Especially when I had been his employee for a year before dating him and he never touched me a hair. The past week I found he had been looking at some porn online that has nothing to do with me. I'm talking about specific searches like big busted women, big nipples, big aerolas, big women, fat women, and like 8 searches that started with "dominican women" (dominican ass, dominican naked women, dominican girls, etc) I asked him, if that's what you want go for it, because I'm none of that. He said he wants me and he loves me, but I still feel hurt. After seeing what turns him on, I feel like when he makes love to me he is wishing my boobs were bigger, my nipples were bigger, or that I had a dominican ass, or that I were dominican. His search triggered in my mind a talk that we had about a girl he dated before me, that was dominican (and who I can't feel jelous at all because I don't think she has a better body than me, but looking at it through my boyfriend's perspective she might have because she is bigger than me, and her ass is bigger than mine). One day I've asked him why after being with me for 6 months he was resending to his personal email address an email of her that said "i will always love you, here is a picture of me" and he said that was the only memory he had from her. I told him if you miss her that much, go back with her, and after a long talk we had, he said to me: she was good, she was family oriented, there are not chances of us being together because she has kids and a husband and she can't have anymore kids and I want kids.... AND YOU ARE THE CLOSEST THING I FOUND TO HER." That hurt me so much. I can't still believe he said that to me. I got really upset at that. And it's something that keeps being in my head. So when I saw the search he did, looking for dominican women, that made me wonder: why is he with me if I'm not dominican, if I don't have big ass/boobs/nipples? He'll be going on a 3-day trip with all his friends in a month to play golf, and I feel that he will do something wrong. That to me is like letting him go on a "single weekend" and then come back to his normal life with me. I mean, who is going to think something good about a bunch of married and single guys going away for the weekend? He wants me to feel happy for him, because he is doing stuff with his friends, and unfortunately, I CAN'T feel happy for him because I just think that I would be getting happy for him going to stripclubs with his friends, getting lap dances, getting drunk and socializing way too much with girls, and then doing God knows what with them. He is tired of me not trusting him, and he said he wants me to think if I really want to be in this relationship. Please let me know what I'm doing wrong, because besides me feeling bad for not trusting him, I stopped feeling attractive as a woman (for him), when I know that from whoever other's eyes, I'm beautiful. RESPONSE I am so sorry to hear about all the pain you're experiencing. But, on the other hand, I like to cling to the hope that life is intended to be at least partially about a lot of challenging forms of pain - that these are good for us in several ways. You can choose to believe that life is about random crap and then we die - after which you will never experience another pain or regret about anything - or that life (this life) is about something purposeful and we experience all sorts of things to make us more complete, wiser, happier people through eternity, during which we can have pretty much everything and anything we want or wish for. It helps to look at things from a "bigger picture" perspective. Either works but I personally like the feel of the second one - that we go on and on. I hope this will all look like a good learning experience twenty years from now. Trust your boyfriend more? I fear it is foolish to try to trust your boyfriend more - at least in the sense that I assume you mean. What you are basically saying in your email is that he has "stepped on your toes" - hurt your sensitivities - in a lot of ways. (He told you he really wanted another gal but had to settle for you, asks you to be happy for him having fun without you, leaves little trails of breadcrumbs to porno of ladies with very different looks, etc.) What you are saying is that you have learned to trust him to step on your sensitivities and I think what you are asking for is guidance as to how to trust him less in that respect. You want to be able to trust him not to hurt you when he has, again and again, hurt you. And he is signalling to you that he is getting tired of your constant and possibly increasing concern that he doesn't care for you in the way you want him to. And instead of - or having failed at - asking him to recognize that he has been stepping on your sensitivities and asking him to convince you that he is understanding and he is going to try not to do that any more, you write to an anonymous online shink-type and ask how you can dumb yourself up so you can trust him to be some other guy that wants you to feel cherished and desired above and beyond all other possible women. I don't think I can, and I know I don't want to, dumb you up. I can enlighten you, though, about a few things and you can take it from there. I have some good ideas for you but I sorry that I might not have a magic solution and I can clearly imagine you sitting at your keyboard typing your email to me, hoping that there is a magic solution to what you fear you already know. Trust him more? No. That is folly. Trust him to be who he has shown you he is. Trust him to feel how he has repeatedly shown you he feels. Trust you. Work on trusting yourself more. Work on trusting yourself to be valuable and perfect for partnering - not for everyone but for someone or even some one of dozens of possible guys. Then test one person after another till you find one that sticks... and if he "turns" into someone else later - if you grow apart and split up - then work on finding another one that sticks with you and that you want to stick with. Trust you. Trust that you have value and that you can be cherished, loved, obsessed about, be devoted to. Trust that life is not easy and trust that it is simply a waste of time to be wasting time with someone who doesn't seem like he can be expected to have good values, or to cherish you like you're the most beautiful babe in the galaxy (even as you approach your eighties and walk around bent over your walker), or keep a job, or keep a promise, or be sensitive to your sensitivities, or learn from mistakes or respect your opinions. Trust that there is a soul mate out there somewhere - though you might not be scheduled to meet up till later or perhaps not in this particular life at all - and that your soul mate is the perfect fit for your eternal life and your eternal mind - and trust that pretending somebody else is him will just make things tough in general and might result in missing the actual meeting (if there is a meeting scheduled in this life) with your actual soul mate. That doesn't mean that you can trust your soul mate to show up with a big glowing "S" above his head that only you can see - or so he can be spotted in a crowd. It doesn't mean that you can trust your soul mate to never argue, worry you, step on your toes or be a jerk or a pig now and then. Guys will tend to be guys. There is a DNA thing, you know. And there is the basic reality that all of us - M and F - have a basic foundation of irritable wretch tendencies that we are constantly trying to keep under control. One of the things you are apparently not fully aware of is that one year is no way near enough time to find out if someone is a good fit for you. I usually advise people to hang in there, taste-testing or whatever you want to call it, for a good three years before you marry or make a baby. It takes that long to find out if you will work together. It takes even longer if you are very wealthy or have some sort of most-fabulous-object-in-the-world. If you are an amazingly sought after babe-a-licious babe, maybe four or five years. If you are dirt poor, reasonably pretty - three years. It takes that long for a person to feel comfortable that a partner candidate has had enough time to reveal obscure attitudes or tastes that clash with yours and for a partner candidate to slip up and let down his masks if he has any. That means that even if you have managed to be together and found yourself matching on all things for 30 months or so, you could still stumble across a deal-breaker. It doesn't mean a relationship will certainly last if you do put in the three years but it means you should have a good chance if both are committed to the relationship above career, money, fame or extended family. Another thing you seem to not be fully aware of is that guys are different from gals - more than most people realize. Most people interpret others on the basis of their own head and never realize that they make all sorts of assumptions that are way, way wrong because the other persons are way more different than recognized. They just imagine what they themselves would be meaning if saying or doing what the other person is saying and doing - but that doesn't work well in M-F situations. DNA-wise, there are roughly twice as many differences between you and your boyfriend than there are between you and a female chimpanzee. Twice as many differences. You have a whole chromosome of difference between male and female. There is only a bit more than one percent difference between us humans and chimps. How well would you be able to communicate with a chimp? Could you just assume what the chimp understood or meant in your interactions? Males and females are DIFFERENT. You and your boyfriend think differently, your way of talking is different and your sexualities are very, very different. I would like to be able to tell you that you have simply misunderstood your boyfriend and he is really really in love with you. However, though you seem to have not really understood how normal your boyfriend is - maleness wise - and how his interests don't mean he isn't interested in you - it does sound like there are a lot of problems in your relationship that are not just you being oversensitive or whacko. Male sexuality is really not so simple as you seem to possibly be thinking and, though I see a lot of problems, too, I see different problems. A lot of the things you have gnawing at you are sort of normal guy things, especially when you refer to being hurt by his arousal vis-a-vis types of bodies. The way guys are built is that they are very easily aroused by different. Find a copy of the movie, When Harry Met Sally. It has a huge body of wisdom about male-female differences and realities and their impact on relationships (spouted by Billy Crystal througout the scenes to Meg Ryan). It is gold. Also, the book, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus can be very helpful in at least understanding what you are up against. Many women (not to mention many if not most men) never realize that there is a huge difference in sexualities between Ms and Fs. For example, when a woman has an erotic dream, it is almost always about someone she knows. Not so for a guy. When a guy has an erotic dream, it is almost always about someone he has never met. There is a strong issue of difference-related attraction for guys. If a guy has a wife who is tall and buxom, she finds him looking at short, skinny, boobless girls. If his wife is a short, skinny, small breasted woman, she finds him looking at tall, heavy, large-breasted gals. It is simply a difference thing. It doesn't mean that he will naturally feel a need to reach out and touch one or more different women but it does mean his eyes will catch and be drawn to them. If he has any sensitivity at all and a reasonable degree of self discipline, he doesn't get caught looking too often. If he has a brain, he never risks losing a good relationship for a chance to maul a different babe. (Big if) But of course, a lot of guys have little such sense - especially in a culture that so heavily promotes throwing away the used to buy new. (Ah, corporate attitude cancer.) Another little (big) difference is the male ability to objectify women. Women can do this to some extent but it is a very male thing - built into the wiring. This means a guy can really enjoy a picture or a video of a babe that he will never have a meaningful conversation with. This is the underlying reason that a guy 60 can want a relationship with a young woman 20. He doesn't even think about the issue of ever having a conversation with her, he just thinks of her as a collection of arousing body parts. It seems that most guys wouldn't even be concerned about needing to gag a much younger woman to stand being with her because they - the guys - have a wired in ability to not even listen when women talk. They operate on the assumption that a woman has little or nothing of interest to say, ever. It doesn't seem like this is learned. It seems more like it has to be unlearned in order for a guy to be a successful lover and partner to a woman. But most guys never hear that they should listen because they only talk to other guys who never learned to listen, either. This is the way guys are wired. I do not mean to imply that you should settle for a guy who is an idiot about being able to hear, listen to, understand or do anything about a woman's sensitivities or his own stupidities. I just mean that most guys are going to be pretty poor in a relationship. This is not by choice. It is luck and wiring. The wiring is there and if they are lucky they are raised by or around a number of very touchy, bitchy, chauvenist-sensitive women. (I suspect that such an upbringing results in either an angry serial killer of women or a very cool guy who is able to listen to women, be sensitive to women and partner well and work well with women. Luck plays a big part there.) All guys are pretty much wired like all guys. Though they are rare, a really cool, wise, caring guy will have the thought pop into mind about other women, different women, but he will know it is stupid to imagine grab-assing someone other than his lover for more than the three or four seconds it takes to come to his senses and think about something else like religion or politics. He will not want to risk damage to a real, solid love affair with a woman who is his partner and peer. He will know that the difference thing is a worthless, troublesome, self-sabotaging glitch in his arousal system. He will hear his woman's concerns when he lets slip that he also finds someone different attractive and he will energetically and thoughtfully find ways to make sure he reassures his woman that he finds her amazingly, totally, absolutely attractive. I think that a really cool guy for someone with your sensitivities would be a guy who valued pleasing you and assuring the cementing of your relationship above all else. He would make mistakes but he would be interesting in correcting them. He would tend to be very concerned about hurting your feelings and try to change his behavior, not try to insist that you change your sensitivity. I suspect that if you hear your current boyfriend discounting your concerns about work things or friends things or porn things - and he doesn't not clean up his act with a confrontation or three (come on, he is a guy and guys don't come ready to use right out of the box - you have to do training) - you will one of these days be getting your mind straight for a period of no relationship happening. The problem is not that he looks at porn and therefor wants someone different - or that he is going out with his buddies and leaving you home to be happy for him - or that he had a love before that was not going to work out. The problem is that he does things that make you feel he wants someone else, no matter how misunderstood that is, and doesn't work night and day to make you feel cherished, special and fabulously beautiful. The problem is that he steps on your sensitivities and asks you not to have them. And neither of these would be as big a deal if he had not told you he was settling for you because he couldn't have the girlfriend he really, really wanted and never realized that he needed to do a lot of work on getting you to erase that from your mind as a mis-statement or an incredibly dumb statement. Even the issue of continuing to love someone from the past is not a bad thing from the perspective of being a person who continues to love everyone who was ever important - as long as he makes it very, very clear that this is an affection that is not at all threatening to any current relationship. Bottom line, though, is if you want a guy who values your love and sensitivities (even if you have the sensitivities of a crazy, crazed, banshee bitch on wheels) above all else, then you need to tell any partnering candidate that is not meeting those goals that he is messing with your head and see if he can comprehend it and care, and - bottom line, change. If he tells you that this is you being overly sensitive, weird or crazy, you might think it through and ask yourself if you are being any of those, but I get the impression that you actually want a guy to love you even if you are crazy, weird or overly sensitive and you want him to be sensitive to your sensitivities above all other things - whether he understands them or aggrees with them. If I am right about what you really want and he is showing you that you can trust him to not be that guy, then no matter what you might have believed you saw in him, partner material -wise, I think you need to face the fact that you were possibly mistaken. This is what the three years is for - finding out if the guy you are kissing, arguing with sleeping with is, in reality, the actual guy you have been hoping he is. It is not for pretending to be someone else to fit who he wants or for making him pretend to be someone else. It is not a period in which you find out what kind of brain damage you need to inflict upon yourself so that you can keep pretending he is who you thought he is, even though he has again and again told you he is someone else. Be forgiving of yourself that you are not the absolutely most sought after female for all males of all kinds, types, inclinations and ages. Nobody is. Be forgiving of whatever forces have designed life to be a lot of challenges. Be forgiving of guys who are somewhat brain dead about relationships with women or who are not who you hoped. Even if it seems like a guy has tricked you into believing he was someone you could love and who would love you - and then he turns out not to be. People are usually, if not always, trying to do their best. Just because you mistake an emotional retard, a rat or a snake or a scorpion for a nice guy - or mistakenly belief a guy has similar interests and turns out not to - it is not reason to add to the anger and ugliness of the world. Forgive retards for being retards, rats for being rats, etc. and just try to learn from mistakes and have faith in your resiliency. Don't try to avoid all relationships with guys because of being burnt because obviously you want a relationship with a guy and trying to pretend you don't will just keep you from being careful. And DO NOT base your sense of self esteem on the insensitivities of males. That is beyond doorknob dumb. Most of them, in spite of looking good on the outside, have next to nothing on the inside that would make them a good husband. Be sad for them. Be forgiving. Kick them out but be sad and forgiving (- at least until you make the commitment and start making children - then if they go wrong, work at it as fast as you can to get them back in your heart in the right way.) Look. You have a right to expect a guy to value your relationship above all else and you have a right to a guy that makes you feel like the most beautiful woman ever. You can try to do your best at being relationship material, yourself, but beyond that you need to understand that you have to take a hard look at a lot of guys to find a good one. Most guys will not make good parteners, no matter how much you contort, pretend, ignore, squint, promise or beg. Try to be as smart and as good a person as you can. Brush your teeth and bathe now and then and those things. But then find a guy who likes you YOU YOU. Do not settle for anyone who doesn't seem like he might be your soul mate or anyone who puts career, buddies, money, porn, politics, pinochle or anything else above you and his relationship with you. That doesn't mean a guy should be that quality right out of the box and it does not mean you should know he is in the first couple of years of dating him. Put in the time, make sure you tell him how you feel, work with him as best you can and when it seems like you come across some attitude or behaivor or whatever that you know deep in your heart you will not be able to live with for fifty years or more, then gently and calmly inform him that it is not working. If he hustles to change every weakness and asks for a second chance, give it to him. But three strikes and he is out - or whatever rule you want to make - but don't give unlimited chances. And watch out for pretended change. Pretended change is change with no intent behind it. Real change will slip back to the old way several times before it becomes standard attitude or behavior but it comes along with apologies and anxiousness to get it right so he does not lose you. (Keep in mind that if you ask for change and then don't mention backsliding, a guy will assume you no longer care and won't work on reinstating the change you had asked for.) Trust. Trust yourself to be valuable. Trust yourself to have a soul mate out there. Trust that there is a God or cosmic something driving the events of your life with your best interests at heart. Trust guys to be built out of guy DNA. Trust anyone who exhibits a consistent behavior or attitude to be likely, in the future, to exhibit that behavior or attitude, regardless of what words come from his mouth or on cards with flowers. Never trust anyone to have your best interests at heart without realizing that this is a leap of faith on your part and that you really are trusting yourself to survive such a leap. Don't be angry with guys that do not realize how to love you. It is not their fault and it is not yours. You are you. If a guy does not have a mind and heart that is keyed to your mind and heart, it is just a mismatch - it doesn't mean there is any cause to be angry at him or yourself. See if you can fix a guy's sillinesses and see if you can fix your own sillinesses but have faith that there is a guy out there that will be just right with some work - a guy who can actually fine tune his behavior when you make it clear that it is important to you. Maybe the guy you have right now is your soul mate. Maybe not. Hold on to the idea that you might actually have eternity to make this all work and the more struggle you have on the path to getting to the guy that makes you feel humongous love in all its splendor, the more you will appreciate and value him. It is the same principle as hamburgers tasting better, the longer you wait to get fed. I really do recommend the assumption that this life has purpose and we go on forever with our experiences adding up to more and more wisdom and happiness. If it turns out there is no next life, you will never, ever notice - not for even a second. Assume there will be a next life and when you die, expecting that, you will either discover you were right or not ever have another discovery, negative or positive, or any pain or disappointment, ever again. I really do recommend that you expect to settle for no less than a guy that can make you feel fabulously beautiful, cherished and loved - for at least three years and probably for at least three million millenium... and no less than a guy that you can expect to highly value keeping a promise, trying to really listen to you, respecting your ideas and wanting to be in a meaningful, cooperative, healthy co-dependent relationship. I love being in love. I recommend it as a goal to everyone. It is just practical to realize that you can't make it happen with just anyone. You can make romantic love happen with anybody, true, but you cannot make meaningful, longstanding relationship romantic love happen with anyone other than the guy who has all the right matches with you. (And even then - even with the most romantic thing in the world going on - you will still want to murder your partner every once in awhile. I am insane in love with my wife of 30 years - 35 years together - but I wanted to kill her twice in the last few days and I am sure she would have been tempted to put me out of her misery if a gun was handy when we got up this morning. And we talk a lot about being together forever - till death do us part and we like to believe that we won't actually ever die even if our bodies do.) Love is worth the work and it is worth waiting for. And it is worth the adventure and the pain, too, though it doesn't feel like it when in the midst of it. Decide if you think you can shape him up while enjoying the relationship for what it does have right. If you think you can, stay, enjoy, and stop looking so hard for more evidence that makes you feel rejected (you've found enough). If you realize you need to split up, then split up - using some sense and calm. I have a recording or six that might help you in your struggle with life. The best two for the stuff you are struggling with are Self To Self Partnering and Healing Tree 2. The first optimizes attitudes you have about your self - to keep you from letting any of this make you feel thrown away or devalued and to make sure you recognize how not to sabotage your own self esteem or prospects. The second is about realizing that all the panic and fear actually makes you tough and resilient and you can actually trust yourself way more than you have been. There is another that you might have noticed if you looked over my recordings - Letting Love Go To Dizzying Heights - but that is not appropriate until you are in a really solid relationship with a guy who tries to be smarter and smarter after every argument and hurt about cherishing you and making you feel valued and loved. That one works when the only hold up is not wanting to really commit to a relationship that has proved itself solid for years. |
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email & response
I was dating a 30+ year old man for a year and a half. I'm 30+, had gone through a bad relationship prior to him. My ex had trust issues because his dad abandoned him as a child for another family. I had trust issues also so we decided on a relationship of 100% honesty. A month ago I gave him my password and asked him to go into my email to just see if I had anything new. He did and he started to just delete old emails that were there for months. I had another folder marked important which I hadn't gone in to in over a year and a half. He went in to it and found an email from an old friend of mine saying that I wanted to seduce him. This email occured almost two years ago and right after my bad relationship and I sent it kind of jokingly but almost testing the waters because I was lonely and hurt. My friend responded positively. Needless to say we never followed through. My friend and I never discussed anything like this in our 10+ years of knowing each other either. My ex confronted me and I said I sent it as a joke, that nothing ever happened, but did not divuldge all details until a week later. I never cheated on my ex, but if I was ever inconsistent he would be suspicious and question what I was doing. He refuses to believe that I have told him the truth about my friend and now doubts everthing he questioned before without real proof. We have broken up, but it hurts to know that he thinks I am a liar when I have now told him everything. I know I was wrong for not telling him about that email when he asked me about my relationship with my friend, but is this extreme? answer: Did you do the right thing? According to quantum physics, either or consciousness somehow influences reality or there are an infinite number of universes, one for every possible decision or choice. If there are actually an infinite number of universes AND if there is an afterlife where we might be able to meet up with our other selves from all those parallel universes -- THEN perhaps you might some day be able to compare notes with the you from the universe where you did things differently. And then you might be able to have some data to base a decision on with respect to whether you did the right thing. Short of that you probably have to stick with the probability that you made the right moves. Basically one cannot even keep breathing if most of his or her decisions don't go well. Whether you have a good grasp of why you did this or that and why he did this or that is also a question that is difficult to answer. We make a lot of decisions on the basis of thoughts, perceptions, wants and fears that are not readily available to notice being made. When relationships break up on the basis of a silly little thing, then it is usually the case that the relationship broke up for real, serious reasons that one or both parties weren't paying attention to -- little irritations, discomforts or mismatches. Also, it takes time to find out if a relationship is going to work -- if two people are going to match. My hunch (no science behind this, but my hunch) is that it takes about three years to find out if you can work together with another person. If after a year and a half, you find yourself butting heads on something like comfortable interchanges with friends, jokes, insecurities and sensitivities, you may also just be finding out something that would have broke you up if it had happened a year before or a year later. Its great to be in love but it also hurts. According to the Law of Entropy (physics again), everything tends to go to heck. It is thought to be logically based on the fact that there are a lot more ways for anything to go wrong or be trashed than to go right and be whole, stable and healthy. Even after a year and a half there is a greater likelihood that a relationship will not work than there is that it will. Off hand it sounds like you and he simply weren't a good match when it came to issues like male friends and closeness. It doesn't sound like you did bad things, wrong things. You just didn't match on this variable. Worry when you notice a pattern in relationship difficulties that cause you to ask yourself if you tend to either pick a certain type of problem person to fall in love with or if you do something routinely to cause the relationship to falter. As far as hurting that he thinks you're a liar, some things will have to heal with time or not heal at all. I'd wager that it's not the first time nor the last time that someone thought badly of you. Not only can you not please all of the people all of the time, you can't see eye to eye with all of the people either. Good luck. Dr. Johnson |
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