DATING TO RELATING FOR MEN – WEEKLY COLUMN– 6/28/10
Dating To Relating For Men- Advice By Mr. L. Rx
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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, what does it mean when you really don’t like your girlfriend’s friends or she doesn’t like yours, but you both like each other? How do you handle it?
Answer: Good question. I think it is something we have all run into at one time or another. I think it goes back to one of the basics that I teach at Dating To Relating which is personality.
People come in many different personality types. Not all personality types get along with each other. On top of that, people have a social personality type – a personality that they, in a sense, “put on” because they have been educated that that is the way they should act. Then they have the real personality – the one they are despite what they have been trained to be.
Most upsets I see in dating are not because men don’t understand women or women don’t understand men, they are because people don’t understand people. There are more personality differences between a happy man and an angry man, then there are between a happy man and a happy woman. We understand the opposite sex a little better than we think we do.
It is people and personality differences that most of us don’t understand. Sometimes we find ourselves hanging out with relatives or people that we grew up with just because we have known them a long time, not because we like them. Or maybe it is because we work with them, or know them from school. Nonetheless, we call them friends and feel obligated to see them and hang out with them even though we don’t particularly like them.
A real friend is someone who supports you in your life choices and makes you feel good about yourself in general. Anything less than that and the person is an “acquaintance” not a friend.
And of course we have to look out for those few who will “help” you in a time of need, just so they can berate you and make you feel bad about yourself at other times. Who needs that kind of help?
So what happens in relationships is sometimes you end up attracted to someone who hangs out with a bunch of people who are not like the person that you are attracted to. The person that you like probably has an inability to pick good friends.
Or, on the other hand maybe you are the odd one. Maybe that person has good friends and you are the one that they shouldn’t be hanging with. Or maybe you are the one with a bad choice of friends or maybe you have good friends and have made a bad choice in a girlfriend.
There is only one way out of these kinds of situations. You will have to communicate your feelings to your significant other and see where the chips fall. Perhaps they already suspected what you point out but never had the encouragement to disconnect from the “so-called” friends.
Or, maybe their friends are much more important to them than you. Right or wrong, it is better to find out where you stand early on in the relationship, rather than waiting for a “blow-up” a few years down the road.
Communication is the only way out after you are in a mess. Before that, learning to discern personality types when you meet people is the way to avoid these kind of messes in the first place.
Mr. L. Rx
