1843. Sex Difference Redux—Part 86: Where Love Begins—02

Romantic love begins with his eyes and your ears. Enduring love begins with your knowledge of men generally, your man particularly, and yourself intrinsically. How those factors combine to fit together continues here.

11.  The more masculine you act, the less respectably and admirably appealing you appear to your man. The more admirably masculine he acts, the more appealing he appears to you. (If not true, then you, he, and perhaps both have likely bought into feminist-think.)

12.  After being criticized, you try to improve. Criticize your man and he proves it undeserved or you wrong. Either way you lose. He knows and values you highly for being able to correct him more indirectly. (Correcting him directly initiates competition which inspires him to avoid losing—to a woman.)

13.  You can expect your man’s immaturity to show up as mistreatment of you. If you mistreat him, look to yourself for immaturity. (Female-dominated maturation in childhood teaches one not to mistreat others.)

14.  Your man’s self-image is more important to him than his self-esteem. Confirming and expanding his self-image earns self-admiration that self-esteem does not. You are the reverse. Self-esteem is a foundation of your self-importance and self-image governs how you interact in life.

15.  You expect your man to provide affection; among other blessings it confirms your sense of self-importance. He expects to be admired as significant, so he focuses on your physical appeal and proving his significance in bed. He can’t understand why you don’t see it as fulfilling your expectation for affection. (It’s compounded by his nature not matching your craving for intimacy.)

16.  Just as yours wounds him, his sharp tongue wounds your spirit. A mature woman with a wounded spirit works harder to recover and do better. Men and immature females with wounded spirits seek someone else to nurse away their hurt. (Not taught in childhood to handle one’s hurts shows up later as reliance on others.)

17.  You can criticize your man and remain in love with him. Men can’t do the same. If he criticizes you, it weakens his respect and consequent love for you. Or, it signifies lack of his self-respect. (His respect for others is limited by his self-respect; our natures don’t allow us to share what we don’t have. In courtship, a man that persistently criticizes waves red flags as short of self-respect.)

18.  You are the relationship expert. Your man acknowledges his inferiority in this matter by paying little attention to the need for or the fulfillment of relationship maintenance.

19.  You can live with your man’s physical infidelity, but he can’t live with yours. You can’t live with his emotional unfaithfulness. He’s at a loss to understand it, but instinct tells him to argue to the contrary of whatever you assert. (Thus, he ends the competition of disagreement before he loses the argument—to a woman.)

20.  Your man’s drive to be head of the house far overpowers your natural objections to it. If you elevate him to chairman of the board, the vacuum makes you chief executive officer which empowers you perfectly for your other roles as chief nester, wife, and mother.

Hundreds of sex differences determine the outcomes of your interactions with men and your man. This ends the first 20 differences, but many more follow at ten per post.

1830. Sex Difference Redux—Part 78: Created to Do Good — III

Theme: The female sex can use a unique genetic predisposition for exemplary leadership.

Women have a vital interest in relationship maintenance. They also have unique talent for finding gratitude in themselves, others, and all that happens—if they but take an interest in doing so. Combined, a woman’s interest and talent enables her to overcome a man’s shortcomings while she also develops children. It’s another facet of her relationship expertise.  

A woman’s natural leadership turns exemplary when she finds gratitude in everyone and everything. It’s a 1-2 punch. She finds gratefulness and spreads it as credit to praise others and as salve to ease the ups and downs of those she loves. It makes her far more important than trying to get her way with a critical attitude.

Gratitude-finding leadership keeps hers, mate’s, and children’s eyes focused on the positives instead of the criticizing negatives (reprinted at the bottom). The self-fulfilling prophecy enables her inspirational good in life to rise and intensify as if drawing compound interest. It tends to drown the ‘ungood’ negatives that so easily erupt from the ungrateful heart and disrupt compatibility and harmony.  

It all sound overly promising, does it not? Well, consider these benefits that flow from grateful-oriented family-wide habits of searching and finding gratitude. (Leading by example outshines all other leadership.)

1. Impatience is suppressed and fades in moments.
2. Affirmations prevent ill feelings from emerging or—even worse—accumulating.
3. Accusations fade; finger pointing isn’t compatible with gratefulness.
4. Criticisms not verbalized leave faults in the deserver’s conscience for at least different and perhaps better performance next time.
5. More alert and active consciences resolve issues before they arise.
6. Mutual understanding weakens interpersonal defensive barriers.
7. Mutual respect strengthens as understanding and praise turn huge problems to ashes.
8. Mutually agreed upon gratefulness confirms pledges of mutual love and likeability.
9. Trust arises out of turning blame into acceptance, which also enhances mutual respect.
10. Acceptance as a good person in spite of one’s wrongdoing strengthens the bonds of love, friendship, and leader-follower.
11. A woman’s self-importance and man’s self-admiration are reinforced immensely by forgiving others.
12. Gratefulness discourages this: Acceptance of responsibility becomes distasteful when demanded by someone else, and it distorts the outcomes of fulfilling that responsibility.   
13. Antagonisms never raised indirectly convey and promote common values, religious beliefs, and interpersonal closeness.
14. Gratitude bonds emotionally attached people, whereas lack of mutual gratefulness indirectly encourages searching for it elsewhere.
15. Mutually grateful people work more diligently at doing good together than ‘ungood’ individually.

WADWMUFGAO, we all do what makes us feel good about ourselves. Finding the good and being grateful usually does that. On the other hand, using the negatives makes us feel good, but it’s inevitably at the expense of someone else. Progress made when someone pays extra isn’t progress in the long run.

Experts have unique advantages built through experience. Women through congenital inheritance have a unique relationship advantage that men can’t match. They can find, exemplify, and spread gratitude as inspiration for living better lives among those bonded in marriage and family.

——

The Negatives Reposted from 1828, Part I: Criticism weakens acceptance of the criticizer. Lack of trust weakens respect and vice versa. Faultfinding weakens mutual respect and likeability. Contradiction of mom weakens motherly authority. Reproach of father weakens his usefulness. Censure of husband weakens his value. Censure of wife weakens her harmonizing leadership. Complaining weakens the leadership ability of the complainer. Blaming others for one’s mistakes sparks hatred. False accusers lose credibility. Disapproval of a girl’s choices devalues her importance. Scorn of masculine behavior turns boys toward rejection of parental values. Contempt for a child’s immature values causes loss of self-respect. Condemnation of a child’s friends solidifies the child’s opinions. Immature, disrespectful, and untrusting treatment wires children to duplicate it later with their own. Parental scorn of adults and authority figures causes children to disrespect them. Continual scorn of father and men in general inspires boys to be something else and girls to do without men. Impatience spreads unwanted pressure to others. Sour attitude causes loss of respect and full appreciation of others and generates the same from them. Manipulation destroys manipulator’s credibility. Wife denying sex insults husband. Husband denying sex convinces wife she’s unimportant. Not respecting teen as an adult and toddler as a person stimulates rebellious thoughts. Verbalizing parents’ disagreement before children empowers kids to play parents against each other. A negative spirit makes positive affirmations virtually worthless. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

1805. Sex Difference Redux— Part 55: Mutual Respect I

Theory. The traffic signal just turned green. With a phone at her ear, a woman’s car starts to roll several seconds after the guy in the next lane also with a phone at his ear.

Women are generally better multi-taskers, but the stop-light intersection brings on this exception. Faced with multiple sensory inputs, men react faster to the visual and women to the audible. Simultaneously hearing a voice or involved in talking, women delay in responding to visual stimulation. Men are opposite; being hunter-conquerors they respond first to visual stimulants and then to hearing. So, when both parties are on the phone at the light, men handle the multi-tasking more easily and are quicker clearing the intersection.

Reality. I post that stop-light trivia as a reminder that women can anticipate, figure out, and resolve relationship problems before they happen. Day after tomorrow at #1806, I will restate the ten prime motivators that inspire this blog. They also trigger hundreds of minor sex differences that work to the advantage of both sexes when one relationship characteristic is present—mutual respect.

1765. Sex Difference Redux — Part 19: Love II (w/ Kathy Petersen)

Conditional Love

God designs, Nature endows, and hormones energize the male and female natures. Out of that bundle of blessings, specific motivations stir everyone, love emerges in three forms, and the sexes love very differently.

• Romantic love is seemingly unconditional and very crowded with unexplainable and often unjustified emotions. It’s also temporary, because it fades a year or two after a couple’s first sex together. (Consequently, unless otherwise called to your attention, romantic love will not be addressed further in this series.)
• Mother-love is unconditional, born of birthing and nurturing, and is the most stable and enduring of all forms of love.
• Enduring love is conditional love based on factors of mutual attractiveness. The attractiveness must be magnetic enough to withstand time, social pressures, and the whims and quirks of individual and often competing self-interests. Enduring love bonds friends, relatives, and—after their romantic love fades—couples. It’s the primary love for holding marriages together.

By way of examining the natural differences that govern the way that men and women love, consider three stimulating principles that play major roles in life and love.

• We all do what makes us feel good about ourselves. This natural characteristic motivates men and women to love one another. Women because they need it. Men because they like it.
• We can’t pass on to others what we don’t possess. For example, only to the extent we respect or love ourselves can we respect or love someone else. To the extent we don’t believe in ourselves, others treat us accordingly. If we don’t respect others, our children won’t either. If we are short of self-respect, we can’t endow our children with more self-respect than we have.
• Self-respect is the foundation. Respect for others is the structure. Mutual respect is the key to successful human relationships. Without all three forms, then dislike, distrust, doubt, and even suspicion prevail to squeeze out room for love. If we don’t believe in someone, they won’t respect us. If we don’t respect someone, they won’t trust us.
• Consequently, the root of husbandly excellence lies in boyhood. It starts with parents, teachers, and other opinion leaders treating boys with respect such that their self-respect develops as high as possible. Following that, boys must be taught to respect others, to learn from experience the blessings of mutual respect, and to develop belief in the unique worth and benefit of females. All of which is essential to the process of womanhood ‘growing’ good husbands.

Boiled down to equivalents, love is to women what respect is to men. Relationship compatibility is either built on that combination, or it doesn’t last. And so females, the relationship experts, are challenged to breathe life into the development of boys, men, and husbands. That’s why they get paid the big bucks of seeing their hopes and dreams come true.

Tomorrow’s article describes how the sexes differ on the subject of love.

1764. Sex Difference Redux — Part 18: Love I (w/ Kathy Petersen)

Ladies: This series within a series has a lot of new material. I am immensely grateful to my pretty co-author. Kathy Petersen. She wrote this introduction and help develop the rest of this series on love. Your reading should be easier because of her skills, diligence, and desire to help both me and you.

Introduction

Women never hear about how men love. Consequently, women frequently make a fundamental mistake of treating men more or less as if they were women with slightly different anatomy. They treat men like they do women, expecting the result from a man that they would get from a woman. They then end up confused, bitter, or angry when their actions do not yield the expected result. It’s often the opposite result of that intended.

Sure, women give lip service to the idea that men and women are different—books and articles and movies abound with titles like, “Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus” and “What Women Want.” Yet far too often, even while we recognize that men and women are different, we still treat each other as if we are the same. Consequently, when an action blows up in a woman’s face, when something she does to help her relationship actually ends up hurting it, she tends to blame the man.

This is not to say that a man is never or can never be at fault; but merely that women are the relationship experts, so when there is a problem, they are usually the first (and sometimes the only one) to recognize it, and it is primarily if not solely up to them to fix it. For those who are tempted to say, “That’s not fair!” Remember what our mothers told us: Life is not always fair. It may not be fair that women shoulder the relationship burden, but this series is not about placing blame, but about getting to the root of the problem, exploring the reasons of the problem, and demonstrating how to fix it. It is ultimately “What Women Never Hear”.

Books and movies are filled with things that women always hear, yet the state of marriage and male-female relationships are suffering at an ever-increasing pace. If What Women Always Hear worked, marriages should be lasting longer, relationships would be stronger, and divorce should be nearing nonexistence. The fact that the reverse is true indicates that What Women Always Hear is not working. It’s time for a paradigm shift – time for a change in thinking – time for What Women Never Hear. Specifically, it’s time for women to hear about love—both the giving and receiving.

1755. Sex Differences Redux — Part 09: A.D.D. for Two

Both sexes have A.D.D. Females have Affection Deficit Disorder. They never get enough from their man, although they dispense affection liberally. Males have Affection Delivery Disorder. They never provide enough to their woman, although they receive more than they need. The difference disgruntles females such that they blame men for merely following their nature; however, women deserve an explanation.

Both variants of A.D.D flow from their respective natures. Unlike females, males do not readily and easily show affection. Being primarily hunter-conquerors, men do not shoot their best bullets when unnecessary. They do not routinely put their best foot forward. They keep something in reserve and hold back, they save something extra for when its needed more urgently. The scarcity makes manly displays of affection many times more valuable, and men save it until they seek another bout of sex. Men know it is necessary then, but not really, truly, absolutely essential before that.

Women as the relationship experts—compared to men, that is—are much better equipped to accept, adjust, and compensate for the unequal distribution of affection. Seemingly forced to do it, women are plagued by disappointment with the men in their lives.

1409. Validating Husband—Prudent Wife

Yesterday’s post described the spectrum that has prudent wife at one end and doting wife at the other. Doting wife is described at 1408. Prudent wife follows here.

‘Prudence’ means having good sense and carefully considering consequences. Synonyms: practical, careful, discreet, wise, far sighted. Going to the end of the spectrum is too far, because it takes a woman out of her marital character, too logical, too manlike. Displaying prudence somewhere short of the end of the spectrum enables wives to win the marital game. These behaviors signify wifely prudence:

• She dotes on their marriage but neither him nor her. She seeks to have both live up to something bigger than themselves and do it together. At least live up to their marriage and hopefully with God’s help.  
• She expects him to stand up for her and even against him. That is, she very rightfully expects him not to belittle or put her down. If he does, she stands up for herself—until the bitter end if it comes. (People lose respect for those that won’t stand up for themselves, men especially and less respect means less love.)
• She keeps her focus on the future and empowers him to handle the present as he leads the way. Then, she compensates uncomplainingly for whatever he lacks or fails to do.
• She steadfastly but without offense elevates and defends their marriage over him, her, the children, and everyone else.
• If he’s wrong, she discloses it so discreetly that he doesn’t realize it. Or, even more promising, he doesn’t take offense at her. (When she opens her mouth to criticize, it slams shut the door to his guilt ever arising from having to live with his decision. Not losing to her is far more important than whatever damage he caused doing whatever he did or didn’t do.)
• She knows when to be a doting wife such that husband appreciates it because she appears more likeable.

Needless to say, the doting and prudence lists could go on for thousands of words. But you get the picture. The major difference between doting failure and prudent success lies within the mind and decision-making power of the relationship expert, the wife.

Most wives understand the need to be both doting and prudent. The question is this: Where on the spectrum wins the day for her and her marriage? Not too doting, not so prudent that she’s out of marital character, but somewhere in between. What wifely behaviors enable her to balance things such that husband continues to respect (aka love) her?

You’ve heard this before. It’s not the big positives such as love, vows, commitment, and friendship that hold a marriage together. It’s the long-lasting absence of large and small negatives that irritate, cause friction, weaken the marital spirit, and cause mutual likeability to dissolve. As that happens and builds, he loses respect and love of her. She loses interest in caring and showing gratitude for who he is and what he does. Both consequences energize husband to break up sooner than wife wants to part company.    

I offer this theorem to balance between doting and prudence. The more likeable he becomes to her, the more likeable she has become to him. (That is, likeable as friend, spouse, lover, mate, character, unique person, and potential something or other.)

Good female logic flows out of this: At the altar they both liked one another. Elevate it to the top, put mutual likeability over other wifely expectations for husband as spouse, lover, and friend. Make herself more likeable to husband and work toward finding more things that make him likeable to her.

Much more than her expectations of glorious romance and love, permanent likeability generates permanent glue. It’s kind of like friendship evolves to dominate their marriage. (Not to be confused with the questionable strategy of basing marriage on becoming friends first.)

Mutual likeability works so well because each spouse continually makes the other feel good about their self. You recall, WADWMUFGAO, we all do what makes us feel good about ourselves. When one’s spouse helps out in that eternal endeavor, the gluing effect of appreciation for each other can’t be far behind. Make it mutual and marriage shifts without guarantees but toward success.

Going a step beyond doting and prudence, good wifeing makes husband dependent on her presence in his life. Her primary objective should be a carryover from courtship to make him dependent on her to feel great about himself and good about his life. Once he’s there and ruling the roost, she’s able to learn how to rule her rooster.

858. RANDOM THOUGHTS — Group 15

♫      Free and easy unmarried sex discourages marriage in the first place, family responsibility in the second, and male help to fulfill female needs, hopes, and dreams in the third.

 ♫      Of course one should marry for love. But the romantic love one feels before marriage is not the love that holds a couple together. They need to find a better way. I call it enduring love, and relationship experts are best at developing it.

♫      Female standards resist male dominance. When a woman provides unmarried sex to a man, she weakens all her standards to his encroachment. As a competitor he always wants to come out on top, and other standards stand in his way until she yields her ultimate.

 ♫      Why can’t modern women see that if dignity makes men more admirable and influential, it can do the same for females? Because so few men exploit dignity these days, the game’s wide open for women to exploit it.

 ♫      Both sexes have been conditioned by feminist theories and expectations for forty or so years. Women accepted but men didn’t. Men now refuse to let the shoehorn of sexual plenty slip them into the blister-creating shoes of husbanding and fathering.