1742. Hope, Respect, and Trust — Part I

Emerson said “The world turns on hope.” Without it, a person’s energy is stifled and they sit down to do nothing or worse, perhaps with drugs. Hope motivates individuals and each has his own version. However, personal ability to influence others is required to mutualize hope between individuals, such as in a couple or family.

The world of influencing others turns on respect, which generates trust in return, which reinforces the initial respect, which reinforces the initial trust, and which continues to compound until their respective hopes find mutuality and compatibility. Respect sends the message, “I hold you in high regard.” Trust sends the message, “I’m grateful for associating with you.” Mutual interests are thus enabled to join as the person influenced shapes his self-interest to match more closely that of the influencer.

If the respect of the influencer is missing or lost, it takes some inducement, threat, or force to complete the process of influencing others.

Most people know how to show respect for and to others. But I’ve uncovered a way by which moms, dads, and other leaders screw up their good intentions. It follows tomorrow.

712. Make Mr. Promiscuous Faithful — Part 6

I close this series with thoughts from a previous post. It applies to men with a conscience about faithfulness to their wives and not to repeaters and serial cheaters.

Three noticeable phases face each marriage. Awareness enables wives to prepare, prevent, and prevail. (Some women also pass through these phases, but we describe men here.)

The two-year glitch arrives quietly as romantic love fades away in a couple’s second year together. Both undergo transformation. If an enduring kind of love has not developed mutually, unfaithfulness and separation may not be far off. 

·        Husband’s enduring love lies in the foundation of respect she has earned, especially before conquest, and her likeability as supportive mate. Her enduring love springs from the current and anticipated gratefulness for him and what he does. He looks at what she is; she looks at what he can be.

The seven-year itch arrives when his wandering eye opens. Many situations challenge him. Devotion to her and commitment to vows are essential for surviving natural pressures on him.

·        She’s in charge. Years earlier she chose a man susceptible to wander. Or, she chose a man devoted instead of just committed to her, and a man with sufficient character to honor his vows. If she didn’t or couldn’t, avoidance is difficult. Forgiveness is the next best thing, and forgetfulness is absolutely essential.

The twenty-year switch arrives when he wants to start over and hopes to do so with a trophy.

·        It’s a dream that slowly builds as his sense of significance fades, which the mid-life crisis is all about. He aspires to rejuvenation, and he’s just dying to prove it to himself with an attractive woman. He may even aspire to raise another child to overcome earlier mistakes. Or, he may simply want to prove to himself that wife has been wrong all these past many years.

For the glitch, itch, and switch, she prepares best by knowing men and her man, females and herself, and that she has unique and powerful skills for relationship management.

Throughout life and these crisis points, the harder she tries to ensure his fidelity, the more likely she will fail. We all get what we think about the most. If she constantly worries about his faithfulness, she sends signals that push him away from her. Honest-to-goodness trust provides the greatest help for her.

548. Femmy Secrets Promote Harmony — # 1

This series highlights practices and habits that produce female advantage or prevent relationship reflux.

♫     She bases her love around his masculine values, rules, and expectations that help fulfill female hopes and dreams and particularly hers. (It sounds anti-female, but it fulfills a primal urge to brighten her future.)

♫     She trusts more than suspects, offers friendship warmth instead of co-dependency, and extends loving appreciation for instead of direct involvement in every little decision he makes.

♫     She cooperates with her man in his domain, so she can dominate in her own.

♫     She encourages her man to improve his sense of personal and family responsibility. She indirectly tells or suggests WHAT to do and lets him determine the HOW and the TIME. Patience energizes his conscience about pleasing her.

♫     She endorses ‘how one plays the game’ as vital for mentoring children into maturity and minimizing the seriousness of marital disputes. ‘Winning is everything’ applies only to males and outside the home.

♫     She resists the male conquering drive to earn greater respect—the precursor of a man’s love. She further delays conquest throughout courtship in order to confirm his devotion and solicit firm obligations.

474. What Moms Never Hear — E: Parents develop too

There’s no such thing as motivation, there’s only self-motivation for both parents and, except in the earliest years or under threat of hurt, children.

Parents inclined to see their parental roles as ‘motivators’ may want to consider other methods. Love and nurturing fade in effectiveness for influencing and changing a child’s mindset as a child ages. Common sense counsels parents to develop new skills and techniques. These work: leadership guided by principles in the tweens and coaching guided by respect and trust in the teens.

Ø Self-interest is the psychological force that energizes self-motivation. The same psychological function motivates each child, albeit underdeveloped, unpredictable, and often nonsensical.

Ø Except to relieve anxiety and assuage hurt, both love and nurturing become increasingly ineffective to energize children after age six or seven.

Ø A leadership hierarchy, one parent more powerful and respected than the other, shapes toddler thinking best as the little ones transition toward the tweens.

Ø Leadership overpowers love and nurturing in the development of tweens.

Ø Good leadership specializes in respect and trust downward before it’s earned and upward after it’s earned.

Ø Parents that split leadership roles into primary and secondary functions enable their selves to balance practical hard-headedness with loving soft-heartedness—the essence of raising tweens. 

Ø Effectiveness of both parent leaders depends upon acceptance, endorsement, and backup of each other in front of the kids. Otherwise, respect for one or both weakens, and kids pick up more details for later getting their own way.

Ø After puberty, love and nurturing don’t work well in the teens, although they can help with angst and hurts. Leadership also weakens. Consequently, coaching works best to retain parental leverage.

Ø Mutual respect and trust exchanged between leaders and followers in the tweens provides the best foundation for successful coaching in the teens.

Considering only parental leverage in the teens, leadership principles provide good guidance for parental development in the tweens.  

NOTE: More later about leadership principles and coaching. Nurturing is addressed in the series of that name listed in the CONTENTS page at blog top.

Details about the perils of co-equal leaders follow as next post facto.

442. Trust but verify

Advice for lovelorn females: Women get confused, desperate, and make poor choices. She should take time to trust a man but verify his actions. The learning process will unclog her mind and heart, especially if she starts to learn early in adolescence.

Unless she ignores it, as the unfortunate do, each woman’s love is built on a foundation of her self-love and hopes and dreams for a bright future with a man. She has three options to work toward: To be cherished, get his commitment, or generate his devotion. The former goes too far, the second disfavors her, and the latter option improves odds for marital success.

Cherished, the kind that princess daughters enjoy from their fathers, goes too far. Nevertheless, some women seek to duplicate father’s presence, or they missed the father-princess phase of life.

If she finds such a man, disappointment sets in. She can’t always get her way. He’s not as much like real or imagined father as she hoped, so she judges him continually on a father-standard. Her ingratitude and disrespect follow, because he never measures up to what he can’t read—her imagination.

Commitment is short term, present oriented, full of loopholes, and favors men over women. Couples stir their infatuation, lust, and romantic love with words that herald commitment to each other. It works well until domestic life intervenes and romantic love fades in a year or two.

More than words are needed to seal their future together. So, the wise woman searches for confirming actions that signal his devotion. A man’s feelings and intentions are expressed more in actions that mislead her than words that please her. Long courtships thus enable her to discriminate and evaluate his worth to her.

Devotion can be seen in actions that outshine a man’s words. He acts out rather than expresses his feelings, fulfills his promises, and spends what time he can with her for the sake of nothing else. He looks to her for confirmation, comfort, and companionship. He works harder outside the home to fulfill his manly role of provider and protector. His devotion shines from what he does for her, even though his affectionate words will be more scarce than she likes.

Summary. Being cherished as by father can’t be duplicated by a man worth keeping. Commitment too strongly favors a man over her. Practical living confirms devotion as essential to the females’ preferred domestic life.

282. Non-verbals in action

     Finding a decent man is not the challenge. Being a marry-able woman in every man’s eyes is the challenge. This empowers her as the buyer, and turns men into sellers. Good buyers read and play the non-verbals.

♫ To the male mind:

·        Nearness without touch pulls magnetically.

·        Her touch of him signals trust.

·        His touch of her signals more to come.

·        Almost, but not quite, energizes.

·        Curiosity satisfied stops interest in that one thing.

·        Erotic suggests short term interests.

·        Suggestive suggests long term interests.

 ·       She yields her independence with promises of ‘not now, later’.

261. Newlywed Bonding #7 — Look, then leap

Here’s more to help guide newlyweds. These principles, beliefs, attitudes, and convictions can be tailored to fit or rejected by each couple to help fulfill their hopes and dreams. Advice is labeled as such.

♂$♀  Budgeting comes easily if a couple focuses on building a successful mixture of spousal interaction. Lots of imagination, small bits of will power, negotiable cooperation, and frequent confirmation of mutual trust can all be energized through the budgeting process.

♂$♀  Ignore what’s past. Assume decisions already made were sound at the time. Else, you would not have made them. Hindsight sees too many mistakes; those little buggers trigger spousal disputes. Why pay attention to what can haunt, irritate, and demotivate you or generate distrust for spouse or your budgeting process?

♂$♀   Pay yourself first: Save at least 10% off the top for long term savings for home purchase and retirement. Otherwise, late in life you will limp financially before physically. It’s best the other way around.  

♂$♀  At the start of the year, allocate for church giving and short-term savings to cover Christmas and vacation spending. Then, commit to not overspending on the last two items.

♂$♀  This is ADVICE: Determine the level, develop a plan, and purposely live a lifestyle at considerably less than 100 percent of income. Doing it is critical; the percentage goal is less so.

Evil incardnate comes in next post.

[More about newlyweds appears at posts 257, 254, 247, 242, 230 and 224. Scroll down or search by number with dot and space following it.]

241. Her sexual history? —Part 08

♂ ♀ Her known past generates many more suspicions than acceptances and assurances. Her unknown past generates fewer suspicions to eat away at the mutual trust she hopes to build.  

♂ ♀ Counselors often advise full disclosure. When men actively pursue more about her past, they cannot not use the info they gain. Talked into full disclosure, women expect fairness and equality. The male nature does not originate fairness, and equality is a female concept.

♂ ♀ Full disclosure comes out uneven, unequal, unrepairable, because the male nature values her virtuous past far more than the female nature values his past virtue.  

♂ ♀ The harder a man works to draw details out of her sexual past, the more likely he will use it against her. It’s available to hold over her head and to rationalize or compensate for his future ‘mistakes’.

♂ ♀ Forgiving her sexual past with a lack of knowledge is far easier than forgetting what he learns from disclosure.

♂ ♀ People argue that trust cannot arise without full disclosure. Hah! Trust arises from convictions drawn from beliefs and speculation about a person. Trust does not arise when specific knowledge undermines such convictions.