DATING TO RELATING FOR MEN – WEEKLY COLUMN– 10/18/10
Dating To Relating For Men- Advice By Mr. L. Rx
Released by AssociatedNews.US
Mr. L. Rx is the author of the popular DatingToRelating.com website and the author of the popular book “Dating To Relating – From A To Z”. Have a question? Send it to Column@DatingToRelating.com and it may be selected for answer in this column. (Sorry all questions cannot be answered.)
Question: Mr. L. Rx, in your book you talk about the things that guys do that cause a woman to move closer or further away from a guy. But what about external causes that have nothing to do with your actions? How do you deal with those?
Answer: Very good question. In the book, we do tend to focus on our own behavior as it is the thing that we can most control and change as needed. However, there are times when external factors can influence your relationship and it has nothing or very little to do with your own efforts.
Pre-existing relationships with family or friends can be one of those external factors. Jobs and relationships with people at work can be another source of external influence.
For example, family members such as a mother or father can put pressure on your spouse or girlfriend to do something that you don’t want or even to look at you in a negative light. Sometimes people external to your relationship can create extra hurdles and problems for your relationship that wouldn’t exist if they weren’t there.
For example, my ex-wife’s parents use to exert pressure on my wife to “take it easy” and “not work too hard” and “take vacations” at a time when we were starting a business together. They would invite us to come visit them or they would come visit us. We really couldn’t afford to take any time off from our young start up business, but my ex-wife’s pre-existing relationship with her parents was such that she could never say, “No” to any of their suggestions.
As a consequence, every suggestion they made moved my ex-wife and myself a little further apart, because I could see the malice in their intentions, and all she could see was a command that had to be obeyed.
Can you overcome such external obstacles as these and others when they are happening? Perhaps, but many times it will be near impossible to overcome such influence. The best way to handle this external influence potential is to qualify for it when you first meet a person.
Look for and spot any negative relationships that your potential mate might have amongst her family, friends, or work cohorts. What is important is that you learn and observe how your potential mate deals with such relationships. It isn’t how “bad” or “mean” the mother-in-law is, for example, it is more, “How does your potential mate deal with such a person?”
The kind of relationships and situations that will cause you grief to no end, are those relationships in which your mate can not stand up for themselves – those relationships where they have to do what the other person says “no matter what” – those relationships which cause your potential mate to lose their integrity.
I have had girlfriends with the most abusive parents in the world, yet these situations caused me no grief because these girlfriends had the ability to stand up to their parents and say, “No” to anything the parents said that was unreasonable.
On the other hand, the situation in which a wife who couldn’t say, “That is not a good week to visit, can you come some other time?” to her parents led to all kinds of distress, arguments, and external turmoil.
Negative external factors are not easy to handle if they are entwined into your relationship. The best time to handle them is before you get too involved with a person. No matter how much you might love a person, no matter how cute or attractive they are, if you see that they cannot handle abusive parents, siblings, friends, other relatives, etc. be very careful about your decision to get involved with that person.
It is not something we are trained to look at when “looking for love” but if you want a sane and a lasting relationship, it is something that must be confronted and looked at from day one.
Mr. L. Rx
