Baggage Reclaim » Abusive Relationships

Am I Too Picky? The Tricky Issue of Quality Control In Dating & Relationships (P2)

NML — Thu, 20 May 2010 15:00:58 +0000

Yesterday in part one, I talked about the tricky issue of being too picky, not picky enough, or perceived as being picky when you are reluctant to be involved with people who detract from you, where others are OK with it. Ultimately, the truth is, only you know how picky you’re being and as you may have already learned, you can only live by your own values, not others, as they are personal to you. When people question what you’re doing, they’re talking about stuff from the perspective of their values.

Some of the worst culprits for this are mothers and I’ll cover this in a whole other post as it deserves a post or several of its own! My own mother used to ask me if I had met someone every time we spoke and had advised me not to look gift horses in the mouth of assclowns with money… Other red handed culprits are other members of your family who think your relationship status is something to be pitied even if their own house isn’t in order. You might even be victim to ‘smug marrieds’ who think they ‘know it all’ and what all of these people forget is that you all value different things.

When you don’t act in line with the values that you hold, you end up being disconnected from your actions and involved with dubious people in dubious relationships, or find yourself wondering why you seem to be incompatible with someone who feels so ‘right’.

This is why it’s important to have an honest conversation with yourself and ensure that you are being authentic and living a life that is congruent with your values – not only will you recognise when you are or aren’t being picky, but you’ll also either be around people who share similar values or will recognise when they don’t and understand the significance of it.

When it comes to being picky, that veering between being too picky and not picky enough is caused by valuing the wrong things, and/or mixing up primary and secondary values.

Primary (core) values are fixed for long periods of time and tied to your beliefs and only really shift when other aspects of your life change. For example, as we mature, we may not value the same things that we did, for instance, in our twenties, and if we do, we may find ourselves at odds with someone who has moved past that stage of their life, both mentally and in age. Primary values are tied to your belief system and work in tandem with your boundaries.

Everything else is secondary values and this is the variable stuff like more superficial stuff such as appearance, as well as tastes, hobbies, interests, some personality traits and qualities.

If you don’t share common primary values with someone, no matter how many secondary values you share, it doesn’t matter. The latter only take on value and importance when the former are in existence.

So in terms of being picky, it means you’ve either got some skewed ideas about your primary values…or your secondary values are being treated like primary values.

In the first case, it can mean that you might be someone who makes the values of security, money, and sexuality/intimacy as a priority over other things. This could mean that because you tie security and money closely together, if someone doesn’t have a lot of money, no matter how many other values you share, you are likely to kill of the relationship. They could act with love, care, trust, and respect but it won’t matter a damn if you value money so much that if they don’t have what you think they should, you feel insecure and undermine the relationship.

With mixed up values, you mistakenly believe that because the person possesses the secondary values that it will correlate to the primary values – they often don’t.

The secondary values that you share with someone give a limited amount of information about their primary values and should not be relied upon for drawing conclusions about what to expect from someone. The fact that you both like football, means you both like football. The fact that they have blonde hair, blue eyes, and are tall and like football and the fact that this is the look you like and you share that interest, means nothing about their primary values – nothing.

I’ve mentioned relationship insanity many times on this blog – it’s repeating the same types of behaviours, picking or looking for same guy, different package, carrying the same baggage, beliefs, values, and the whole kit and kaboodle, and then expecting different results. Then you wonder why it doesn’t work out…and then try again.

While we are all creatures of habit, it doesn’t work very well with dating and relationship habits that yield not so great partners and relationships or that have you undervaluing great opportunities for a relationship and overvaluing insubstantial opportunities for a relationship.

There’s no point in feeling horny and attracted to someone who’s an assclown that can’t give you the relationship you profess to want.

If you want a relationship, if you want change, if you want things to be better, you are in charge of this. It’s not them; it’s you. Don’t leave it up to the randomness of hoping that just one of the same types of people and situation that you choose will throw you out a different result because it’s a mighty big gamble that is unlikely to pay off. Don’t kid yourself about any pickiness you may have.

When you’re commitment-resistant and dealing with issues around emotional unavailability, you’ll find ways to undermine your possibilities of actually having a committed, emotionally available relationship – being picky will filter out healthier prospects and being not so picky, but picky enough to recognise that they’re someone that reflects your outlook, means that you’ll filter in people who offer the least likely prospect of having a committed relationship giving you the self-fulfilling prophecy.

When you don’t like or love yourself and look for others to validate you, you’ll choose people that reflect the negative things you feel about yourself and then try get them to value and validate you in a way that you don’t value or validate yourself, and then feel bewildered when you don’t. In this instance, you’ll likely opt for the waifs and strays of the dating pool. On the rare occasion that you find yourself involved with a healthy, ‘normal’ man, you’ll feel suspicious and pick faults with him even though in unhealthy relationships, you’ll refuse to see the person as they are, often blowing smoke up their bums and putting them on a pedestal they don’t deserve.

If you have a relationship pattern that involves you being involved with assclowns and Mr Unavailables or where you are habitually single but wanting a relationship, I suggest that you abandon any ideas that you have about compatibility, type, and common interests, and get wise about values, boundaries, and being involved with people that don’t throw out a litany of red flags. Make sure that whatever you are being picky about, that it helps you to act upon judgements you are making about people and the situations that you are in. Work out what you believe and why, so that you are walking around with healthy beliefs instead of negative ones that you act upon, using them to be picky about the wrong stuff or not having any quality control.

If you’re going to be picky, be picky about the stuff that makes a fundamental difference to how well you are treated in the relationship and how compatible you will both be – that’s primary values and boundaries.

Anything else, like looks, rigid age requirements, the size of their bank account, how many gifts they buy you, how many of the same interests you share, the books they read, how many sparks shoot out of you when you’re in touching distance, and yada, yada, yada – knock it off ‘the list’, especially if you are asking them to be or do things that you are not being and doing yourself. Same for expecting them to create feelings in you that you can’t even feel for you.

Anything on your list that has the hallmarks of you looking for a fairy tale or romcom ending or where the person has to practically revolutionise the wheel in order to be with you by going through the hands of change, knock it off. That means that if you’re choosing partners based on their willingness to change into the man you want – knock it off. If you’ve believed that your contribution to relationships has been wonderful and your qualities are great, even though you have a dubious relationship history, get real with yourself because these ideas will affect your choices, whether it’s because you hold onto dubious partners, or fail to see great guys right in front of you.

Are you being too picky? Really, only you know and time will tell, but keep your feet in reality, not just about your partners and relationships but also about yourself. At least then, you know that you’re closer to the truth.

Your thoughts?

Learn more about values and common interests with my special ebook bundle. You can also check out my ebooks including The No Contact Rule, a dedicated guide to getting over someone by cutting contact and injecting some boundaries into your life so that you can move on to a happier you, and Mr Unavailable & The Fallback Girl, a no holds barred guide to emotionally unavailable men and the women that love them, in my bookshop. For personal advice or analysis of your relationship/situation, check out my consultation service.

Am I Too Picky? The Tricky Issue of Quality Control In Dating & Relationships (P1)

NML — Wed, 19 May 2010 15:40:04 +0000

Back when I was single, and before I got wise to my Mr Unavailable-loving, commitment-resistant ways, I regularly explained to prying friends, family, colleagues, the strange man at the bus stop and anyone who questioned my ‘selectiveness’ with men that, “I don’t think that there is anything wrong with me extending a little quality control to a prospective partner and if that makes me picky, then I’m picky.”

On reflection and the wonders of 20:20 vision provided by hindsight, I realise that I veered between being too picky and not picky enough – like many things that create issues with dating and relationships, I lacked a balanced middle ground.

I have a confession that I’m not proud of – seven or eight years ago, I went on a date with a guy that I met a club. Admittedly, he was unlikely to last too long as I thought he was too much of an eager beaver (yep – contradictory woman put off by a guy being ‘too nice’), a bit ‘vanilla’, and I couldn’t look at him for very long because he appeared to be constantly blinking. I have a vague recollection of watching a horror film called ‘Dolls’ as a child and the blinking reminded me of a bonkers porcelain doll and it distracted and unnerved me on the date. I didn’t see him again. The blinking wasn’t the only reason but truth be told, it’s the one that stood out…

Readers, friends, and acquaintances regularly tell me that they have ‘well meaning’ people in their lives who advise them that if they don’t want to be left on the shelf (yeah people still say that rubbish) that they need to stop being so picky.

‘Natalie, am I being too picky?’ they wail and as I look through the long list of Mr Unavailables and assclowns, I suspect that they have no boundaries hence no limits hence they’re certainly not being picky….at least with the guys they’re choosing to be with…

If you have a dubious relationship pattern littered with drama, ambiguity and pain with Mr Unavailables and assclowns, the likelihood is that you’re not picky about who you date – you’re very picky about who you don’t date.

How else do you explain the many men who’ve been discarded to the ‘friend’ or ‘too nice’ bin because they don’t behave dodgy and ambiguous enough to trigger interest and ‘sparks’?

There are a few ways that your quality control functions can be set to filter the men that you end up dating:

You have a list longer than your arm of ‘requirements’ filled with things to make potential prospects jump through hoops and making it super easy for you to rule them out, where you get to tell yourself that it’s not your fault that the dating pool is such low quality and how you’re waiting for the ‘right’ guy. You may come across quite exacting on dates and appear aloof and critical, and you may be saying stuff like ‘I can’t find a man who can cope with my success’.

You have on assclown and Mr Unavailable goggles. You ‘choose’ people that reflect what you believe about love, relationships, and yourself, and when you have negative ideas, you see and are attracted to people who ‘vibe’ with those beliefs. You’ll likely not even recognise a decent guy if he jumped up and bit you in the bum!

You overvalue the wrong things and undervalue the important stuff. This means with misguided ideas about values, you’ll likely attach yourself to someone who you’re actually incompatible with and you’ll fail to recognise the ‘value’ of more compatible partners. If you’ve heard yourself saying stuff like ‘I could never go out with someone who wasn’t into poetry’ or other such guff, think of yourself as guilty as charged.

You go on appearance. This can be looks or even money, but this is basically where you filter out based on superficial stuff. Someone emailed me recently and said that she can’t help it if she likes long haired men with dark skin and asked if she should continue to wait for one…. Others have emailed me saying that no matter how great the guy, without the chunky bank account, he needs to step!

You work off your libido. Women have long lamented how ‘some’ men are seemingly led by their penises but if you use how horny you feel or how much jitters/flutters/sparks etc to determine who you should be involved with, you’re actually guilty of exactly the same thing. You place too much credibility in your va-jay-jay’s ability to choose your partners.

If you are doing one, some, or all of these things, they are basically helping you do your ‘natural selection’ and helping you to gravitate to what you think works for you.

The more you use these reasons and attitudes to determine who you get involved with, the more signals you receive where you get to convince yourself that the position you’ve adopted is ‘correct’ and that your beliefs are valid.

This is why some women say stuff like:

There are no good men to date.

I have no choice but to go out with these assclowns because it’s the only type of guy that I’m interested in.

I can’t help what my ‘type’ is.

I need to feel attraction and that’s why I’m alone/still dating jackasses/surfing dating sites looking for The Ideal Man.

We wouldn’t have this amazing sexual connection if it wasn’t for the fact that we’re so compatible.

Men are afraid of my success/ambition/education/assertiveness.

If you have good dating habits, with boundaries, a reasonable level of self-esteem, personal security, and recognition of the importance of values, you’re probably not being picky.

If you have poor dating habits, little or no boundaries, a dating past littered with dubious partners/experiences, lack of personal security, and misguided ideas about compatibility, type, common interests, and a lack of awareness on the importance of values, you will veer between being too picky and not picky enough.

If you’ve made the decision to opt out of a dubious situation and are not prepared to allow someone to treat you poorly or convince you that your crumbs are a loaf, you’re not being picky – you’re being authentic and acting in your best interests.

One of the things you will come up against, whether you are single, or in a relationship and pondering whether to get out, or are already opting out, is so called ‘well meaning’ people who will tell you that you’re being ‘too picky’, ‘all men cheat’, ‘you won’t do better’, ‘he’s a good man’, ‘he just needs time’, ‘you won’t get a better offer’ and other such rubbish.

When people tell you that you’re being picky, more often than not, they’re projecting their insecurities and beliefs on you rather than actually thinking about you.

They imagine themselves in the same situation as you or even think of their own relationship, imagine being on their own without the ‘security’ of a poor relationship, financial or material trappings, or the ‘acceptance’ of their peers, and they quake, or even recoil in horror. And then they tell you that you’re being too picky.

Some people are more desperate for you than you are for yourself.

This situation in itself represents a difference in values. When someone tells you that you’re too picky while at the same time encouraging you to stay in and accept a situation that is detracting from you, it’s because they’re the type of person that places a high value on the security of any relationship, just as long as they have a man in their life. They have little or no personal security themselves and whatever decision you have made or are contemplating throws an uncomfortable spotlight on themselves – this is why I’ve had many women say that they have found that certain close friendships suffered when they stopped being involved in the drama of being with a Mr Unavailable or assclown. In these instances, the changes that these women made put them at odds with the friends who were comfortable where they were and didn’t want to see anything different.

Your thoughts? Back in part two.

Excerpt: How To Lose An Assclown in 90 Days – Offloading The Fairy Tale Of Turning a Cockroach into a Frog into a Prince (P2)

NML — Tue, 18 May 2010 16:00:45 +0000

Following on from part one yesterday here is the second part of the excerpt:

Loving, trusting, and choosing blindly are all things that I address in How To Lose An Assclown in 90 Days, particularly on the issue of not realising that we’re often choosing men who are lacking in substance and then wondering why the relationship and the behaviours that they display are insubstantial.

The jig is up. If you’ve experienced pain as a result of being involved with an assclown, it might be occurring to you that you’re caught up in your own bad fairy tale. The excitement, fireworks, and the happy, sappy ending, have created massive illusions which when they get pierced, cause us to come crashing down because we realise we have little or nothing.

There is the weight of too high expectations or unrealistic ones about the type of man we’re holding out for and many women don’t realise that the excitement, fireworks, and passion they pursue, are often tied up in negative patterns of relationship behaviour. In fact, I can assure you that if you’ve been in your share of dubious relationships and use excitement, passion, and chemistry as your benchmark for choosing who to become involved with, it’s likely that you don’t recognise the familiar feeling of fear and the lure of it that draws you into your relationship pattern.

You may also have a lack of awareness about your own contribution to your relationships because you’re too busy focusing on their actions.

You’ll soon realise that if anything feels familiar when you start dating someone and you’ve got assclowns dotted in your past, it’s probably an early warning sign to take off the rose coloured glasses and the fur coat of denial, and check for warning signs in the form of red flags. In fact, you also need to acknowledge that you may have a relationship pattern that’s standing in the way of you actually forging a relationship with prospects.

But we could ask, ‘If we want a ‘prince’, why not chase a prince?’

Well that would be too easy wouldn’t it! For a start, there is no ‘prince’ and the type of world we live in, particularly with online dating and the idea that there is a never ending supply of people to date, means that we have to weed through a lot of chaff to get to a decent guy. Even worse, many of us actually believe that there are no ‘good men’ to date, that most men put in sniffing distance of a cheating opportunity will drop their pants, and that it’s more important to find a man, any man and work on loving him and building him from the ground up than it is to be focused on quality. And let’s not forget that for some of us, we’re so used to dealing with assclowns that we’re damn near suspicious or completely disinterested when a genuinely good man is interested in us.

I wouldn’t even start to pretend that it’s easy to date and that it’s easy to meet decent guys, however, you will quickly realise that irrespective of the type of guy that you are meeting out there, you are likely to have some relationship habits that mean you are far more likely to gravitate to assclowns than you are to be interested in someone who actually offers genuine prospects for a relationship.

The reality is that when you’ve been chasing assclowns instead of chasing a ‘prince’, it’s because you either believe that you can’t do better, or believe that it will be easier because the assclown will be grateful that a lovely, decent woman like you will be interested.

Other people’s dodgy behaviour is very distracting especially from our own issues that place us with them in the first place, and when faced with feeling that we love someone who behaves like a value lacking, unappreciative dipstick, we cannot fathom their behaviour and are often convinced that people who don’t behave very well are looking for, or are in need of someone to show them the error of their ways.

We mistakenly think we are the solutions to many a problematic mans problems. We think we can fix, heal, and help them and love them into being different. We believe that all that’s been missing has been someone to love and believe in them and swoop into their lives and magic away their problems and assclown ways. It’s a major challenge – it’s a message to your self esteem that if a man loves you, no matter how much of a jackass he is, he will change. In fact, we believe that if a man will change for us, that it finally creates that validation we’ve been seeking that we’re worthy and loveable.

Therein lies the problem though, because in viewing yourself as a ‘solution’ to their problems, you’re acknowledging that there’s a problem, but not assessing the risk and scale of the problem. Of course, the confusion and horror sets in, when it becomes apparent that they don’t value you, which in turn causes you to wonder what on earth is wrong with you and kick into high gear trying to win them over because it beggars belief that someone who behaves in this way couldn’t want you. Doesn’t he realise how lucky he is? Doesn’t he appreciate how accommodating you’ve been? Doesn’t he realise that he’s not really that great? No. And so, a little tale of assclownville begins…

Your thoughts?

This is an excerpt from How To Lose An Assclown in 90 Days, out Tuesday 25th Friday 28th May 2010.

You can check out my ebooks including The No Contact Rule, a dedicated guide to getting over someone by cutting contact and injecting some boundaries into your life so that you can move on to a happier you, and Mr Unavailable & The Fallback Girl, a no holds barred guide to emotionally unavailable men and the women that love them, in my bookshop. For personal advice or analysis of your relationship/situation, check out my consultation service.

Excerpt: How To Lose An Assclown in 90 Days – Offloading The Fairy Tale Of Turning a Cockroach into a Frog into a Prince (P1)

NML — Mon, 17 May 2010 16:00:28 +0000

Whilst you may not call it this, if you’re habitually being involved with assclowns or just can’t seem to let go of one, it’s because you’re looking for a ‘happy ending’. I think most of us in our early years have been fed on a reading diet of fairy tales but this seems to have continued into our adult years, and between romantic comedies and societal messaging, we have some really unrealistic ideas and expectations about relationships and the type of guy that will give us a ‘happy ending’.

For a start, the notion of a ‘happy ending’ implies that for women, we are on a quest to find a man and that when we find The One, or The Ideal Man, Mr Perfect, or our Knight in Shining Armour, we’ll live happily ever after. The End.

However, the sun doesn’t rise and set on men and ‘getting’ a man doesn’t signal the end of your story as if all of your life’s desires have been achieved, but for those of you who persist in trying to get an assclown to ‘choose’ you and commit, it can signal the slide of your self-esteem to new depths. It can signal the end to whatever happiness you have left.

Somewhere along the way, the modern woman has rewritten the fairy tale.

Whilst there are various different types of fairy tale and they go back hundreds and hundreds of years, it’s the ‘happy ending’ ideal with princesses that get their princes that has been given a rewrite. In the modern day fairy tale, we ‘princesses’ are choosing ‘assclowns’ and hoping that they make us the exception and change their ways, effectively turning into a prince, so that we can live happily ever after.

In the fairy tale, we’re battling evil and drama with the assclown by trying to love him into being a decent person and seeing something that he either doesn’t know that he possesses or is absent but desired by us.

Miraculously, he’ll have an epiphany, a lobotomy, a mid life crisis, or The Ghost of Relationship Past will pay him a visit in the night and scare the crap out of him, and poof, he’ll come crawling on his hands and knees, begging forgiveness, professing to be a changed man, and whisk us on to his white horse and ride off into the sunset. All of the pain to get there will be forgotten and we can clasp our hands together tightly and say ‘Praise be! He must be a true prince, because he changed his ways just for me. None of those other princesses could get him to do this!’

This repeatedly gets perpetuated by the ‘rom com’ film, where girl meets guy, they have a series of cock ups, misunderstandings, and drama with a soundtrack in the background, and in the last ten to fifteen minutes, some more calamity occurs to throw the stubborn pair together, they share a long kiss, and everyone gathers around for a beach wedding and toasting babies.

I get women saying to me ‘I want to be treated like a princess!’ Do you really think a man who has some pretty deluded ideas about who he is with a litany of bad habits has the capacity to treat you like a ‘princess’? What does this even mean?!

Now I know that there was adversity in fairy tales but they never had to deal with lazy communication in the form of text messages, email, instant messaging, and online dating. In the fairy tale, the prince didn’t swoop in and rescue her when she was in danger, tell her that he’d be back later, and then disappear for weeks or even months on end. In fact, in the fairy tale, they weren’t dealing with men that cheated on them, lied, borrowed, begged, twisted, manipulated, and drew them into a world of contradiction, inconsistency, passive aggression, denial, and an absence of empathy or responsibility. In the fairy tales, they acted with love, care, trust, and respect. In reality, assclowns act with selfishness, single mindedness, distrust and untrustworthiness, and total lack of respect.

In turn, the women that love assclowns act with lack of self-love, too much care for other people, lack of faith, trust, and judgement, and without enough respect for themselves. Why? Because we believe that the perceived reward for ‘winning’ over an assclown will outweigh the pain en route.

We have become obsessed with being the exception. We want our tale to be different.

We have to realise that the fact that we need someone to make us the ‘exception’ to what for them is totally normal, unthinking, bad behaviour, speaks volumes about the type of men that we are engaging with but also the mentality that we are going into relationships with.

We keep seeking validation from men, especially from assclowns.

Unfortunately seeking validation from an assclown means that you end up validating negative beliefs, not positive ones, because the fact that you would seek validation from someone who isn’t really qualified to be passing judgement on you considering that they can’t bring themselves to act with real love, care, trust, and respect, ensures that you stay believing the worst.

And I make a point of saying ‘real’ because as I discuss further in the book, women who love assclowns turn crumbs into overblown loaves of bread. Things that would barely even raise a ripple of movement out of other people take on a new magnitude in your relationship because you haven’t got very much to work off.

When we seek validation from people who can barely see past the end of their noses, it’s a bit like having a valuable property and asking a random person off the street who has no idea about property value and doesn’t give a hoot, ‘How much is this worth?’.

It’s also a bit like leaving your handbag in front of a kleptomaniac and wondering why they take the contents out of it and then wondering what it is about you that they couldn’t resist the urge to help themselves to your handbag.

Somewhere along the way, the lines have become more than a little blurred. When the frog turned into a prince, it was about looking beyond the superficial and realising the substance. In the modern day fairy tale, this message has been lost and instead we are ignoring fundamental characteristics and behaviour that will make it very difficult, if nigh on impossible for us, to forge a healthy relationship.

The frog has become symbolic of taking a man, any man, and no matter how badly he behaves, believing with all of our hearts, minds, and souls, that in there, lies a prince. After all, one day, our prince will come, won’t he?

Your thoughts? Part 2 is now available.

This is an excerpt from How To Lose An Assclown in 90 Days, out Tuesday 25th Friday 28th May 2010.

Florence Nightingale: Why needing to fix/heal/help in the name of ‘love’ is unhealthy (P2)

NML — Mon, 10 May 2010 15:03:59 +0000

Over the last few posts, I’ve been talking about the tricky subject of being a Florence Nightingale who uses fixing/healing/helping as ‘loving’ because she needs to feel needed. A difficult subject, especially for those of you who don’t want to give up your nurses uniform and shift your position, the reality is, if you’re in this role, you’re reliant on there being varying levels of drama in your relationship so that the ‘need’ can be created.

As Florence Nightingale, you need your partners to be dependent on you for help, whether it’s that they say they can’t manage without you, or you decide they can’t manage without you and you position yourself as their ‘helper’. I’ve spoken with/met several Florence Nightingale’s recently and aside from all being over-understanding, over-compassionate, over-forgiving, and heavily invested in the extreme makeover and the potential, the relationships were all one-sided and/or co-dependent.

One-sided – You’re there even when he’s not there and you’re using the glimmers of good times and their ‘good points’ and covering up the remainder of the time. The relationship may be casual, it may not even be a relationship, or it might be, but he’s realised that you’re not listening and you’ll be there anyway. Check out my post on Yo-Yo Girls and boomerang relationships.

Co-dependent – You’re basically mutually dependent on one another in an unhealthy manner and one enables someone’s destructive behaviour and/or their addiction.

Either way, these are seriously unhealthy characteristics for any relationship.

You can find out everything you need to know about a person and your relationship by taking off the fur coat of denial and the rose tinted glasses and paying attention to their actions (or lack of them) and what they say (and don’t say) and recognising when they line up, or where there are disconnects. However, in order to be real about what you’re involved in, you need to be listening and watching, plus you also need to be honest with yourself about your own behaviour. Florence Nightingale has no time to be listening or watching as she’s too caught up in her ideas about how she thinks he can be, how she’ll feel etc.

But…you’d think that when these people you’ve chosen to fix/heal/help become healthy that you would be happy, but more often than not, you’re anything but happy. Why?

If you fix/heal/help someone and you have not resolved the very issues that drive you to choose these relationships, you’ll get left behind, your own issues will seem more obvious, and if you persist in not being willing to change to the same extent that you expect of him and others, you risk also being a sore reminder of the unhealthy or ‘broken’ person that they were before.

I have women tell me, ‘I want a man who is open to change’ or ‘I want someone who is open to personal growth’. Do you know what they’re really saying? ‘I want someone who is open to being moulded‘.

Invariably, the very people who say that they want partners who are open to change are resistant to change themselves. By choosing partners who they perceive to need changing, they take the focus off themselves and put it on other people because they believe their problems to be bigger than their own.

If you stick to your Florence Nightingale role and show a resistance to change, it shows a distinct lack of authenticity and a disrespect of the very people you profess to love.

When we seek out partners, we need to choose people who share common primary values and anything that we are seeking in others are values that we ourselves should possess.

The trouble with being a fixer/healer/helper, is that the role expects the people who you make your cause to put you on a pedestal and whether it’s consciously, or subconsciously, you end up having a superiority complex. This may also mean that you don’t see your qualities or contributions to relationships accurately because by choosing ‘broken’ partners, you’re assuming automatically that what you bring to the table is bigger and better, when in actual fact, you may be ignoring real issues that are counterproductive to you forging healthy relationships.

If who you want to get involved with, is dependent on you perceiving them to have more problems than you that you can fix/heal/help and hide behind, you have some big problems and a very unhealthy basis for starting a relationship.

But, in spite of the unwitting superiority complex, in a strange twist, you may also put the object of your fixing/healing/helping on a pedestal, betting on potential, being too compassionate, too understanding, and ‘loving’ without limits – yep, little or no boundaries.

The thing is, ‘broken person’ or no broken person, putting someone on a pedestal and focusing your efforts on what you believe them to be or what they could be with some help from you, means you end up blowing smoke up their bums and have an unrealistic relationship – yep, illusions.

They’re like Play Dough or clay and you’re not seeing the real person in front of you and having a real relationship – you’re seeing who you think someone will be and what they will do with your influence.

You also need to be careful of being an enabler. It may seem like you’re being ‘understanding’ and caring, sharing, and loving like a Care Bear in unconditional love land, but you may actually be adding to the problem, trying to split their dependency or switch their dependency, and in the worst of situations, not really understanding the extent of the problem so minimising it, or taking it into disaster zone by actually taking on the problem yourself. Again, I hear from women who have ‘acquired’ drink and substance abuse problems in a ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ mentality…. In other instances, you may be bulldozing into their life, in effect demanding that you take the priority – prove how much you love and care about me and choose me instead of the problem.

When you’re involved with an addict for instance, the priority, if they want to deal with their addiction, is to focus on dealing with the addiction, not to give you an opportunity to be needed so that you can get validation. It may be overwhelming for them to be dealing with an addiction and feeling the pressure and weight of expectations from a ‘well meaning’ Florence Nightingale.

It is one thing if you have been involved with someone in a relatively healthy relationship for a few years or even many, and they end up going through personal difficulties – you have a basis and a foundation to your relationship – you actually have evidence that they have consistently been a particular way for a long time and are currently struggling.

But choosing to be with someone because of the opportunity to be ‘needed’ or seeing red flags from the outset of the relationship or early on and deciding to stay because of your need to be needed and seeking validation through getting them to change, is unhealthy and at times, downright dangerous.

Often where there is one boundary crossing/red flag, there are others, so someone can be physically abusive, cheating, drinking, stealing – It’s rarely just one thing. How can we even think to solve all of these problems? Don’t you think you deserve better than this?

Remember: if people don’t believe that there are consequences to behaving in a certain way because no matter what they do, there are always people there championing them and sticking to them like glue, making them out to be great relationship partners, where is the impetus to change?

If a woman will decide to love and be with you, without having any real knowledge of you, or meeting you as a walking bundle of red flags and still think you’re a hot catch, why change? Remember, a lot of guys work off, “Well if I was really that bad, she wouldn’t be with me!’ or ‘If there was something wrong with me, women wouldn’t be falling all over themselves to be with me’.

There are men all over the world who’ve had a Florence Nightingale weave her way into his life making herself indispensable and coming up with suggestions as to what he should do and how, and trying to show him love. He might start out flattered by the attention and even believe in the potential that she sees, and then he’ll start to feel panicked at the pressure. Or he’ll start to feel resentful by her lack of acceptance and when he moves on to someone else, often an improved version of what he was with her help, it’ll be because she accepts him as he is.

For others, they’re the ambivalent guy who has shown that they’re not interested or have no desire to be different, but she won’t take no for an answer because she thinks she knows better and that he’s just ‘not in the right frame of mind’ because of his problems. She sees his wounded little soul and decides it’s the issues he has, not the fact that he doesn’t want a relationship with her, why they’re not together.

And for some guys, they’ll take advantage of the fringe benefits because she’s just one in a long line of women who see way more than he does. He may even tell himself that the ‘right woman’ will cause him to change his ways, even though I should stress, he’s deluded, because the impetus to change his ways has to come from within him. Which one of these women are you?

There will be some of you that have read this and my other recent posts on Florence Nightingale and feel galvanised to make a change and quit the relationship insanity (doing the same things repeatedly and expecting different results), and there will be others, who hear me but are not listening because they the need to be ‘right’ and to be made the ‘exception’ and to avoid being in charge of their own happiness (even though they still will be).

Everything in life is a choice, and while it may seem like it’s them that has you caught up in this situation, that’s giving them just far too much credit and power. Even though it may make you miserable, you are actively making this choice because this familiar uncomfortable works for you, albeit dysfunctionally. You could choose different but you’re afraid of the ‘unknown’ and it’s easier to focus on Other People’s Problems. You can say it’s him, but we’re 100% accountable for where we are and we can always choose differently.

You are free to stay where you are fixing/healing/helping but when you end up in a limited relationship with limited results with a limited person, remember you made a limited choice. If you stay, be accountable for where you are and focus your energy on fixing/healing/helping yourself, and if after all that, you still want to stay, go ahead, although I doubt the relationship will be attractive. If you go, you still need to address your issues so that you don’t repeat the cycle and remember, you can empathise with someone without trying to leap in and provide and/or be the solution.

Your thoughts?

My ebook The No Contact Rule is now available to buy and provides a dedicated guide to getting over someone by cutting contact and injecting some boundaries into your life so that you can move on to a happier you. For a no holds barred guide to emotionally unavailable men and the women that love them, you can also get Mr Unavailable & The Fallback Girl. For personal advice or analysis of your relationship/situation, check out my consultation service.

Recognising Things About Yourself In the Man You Profess to Love – Part 1

NML — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 11:41:26 +0000

As I pull together my forthcoming book, How To Lose an Assclown in 90 Days , one of the things that I think it is important for women who engage in poor relationships with assclowns, is that you can instantly recognise things about yourself based on the character of the man you profess to love or pine for.

I have repeatedly stressed how we choose men that reflect the things that we believe about ourselves so when you are filled with negativity about yourself, love, and relationships, you will choose men that reflect those very things. A very common example is being terrified of abandonment or losing him and then choosing a man who in fact makes your worst fears a reality by pulling disappearing acts and finishing it with you on a habitual basis. It’s not that you said ‘Hmmm, I need man. Oh, I know…I’ll choose someone who likes disappearing’ but because you have your own issues where you don’t think you’re good enough for someone to want to stick around, you choose men with poor qualities that add up to someone who is highly likely to behave in this way, because they have no respect for you or the relationship you think you both have.

When I explained about what How To Lose an Assclown in 90 Days would be covering, I mentioned that I have split assclowns into 5 key categories of behaviour:

Flip Flappers, Controllers, Liars, Manchildren, and Assholes.

So to give you some food for thought, and get you to into reality about your relationships with assclowns, here, in their simplest terms is what being involved with a man that fits into these groups means. In this post, I explain Flip Flappers, and you can check out Part 2 for the remainder.

What does a Flip Flapper say about you?

Flip Flappers are men who don’t know their arses from their elbow and are stuck in the land of limbo. They want you today, they’re not sure they want you tomorrow, but they might want you in a month, but not the following one. They stall on divorcing, they dawdle on separating, and when you have a man like this, you never know where you stand, which is how they like it.

You are indecisive. You place the responsibility for change, progression, or ending things on the guy and relationships with these men are attractive because their behaviour provides the perfect foil for cruising. It appears that you know what you want and what stands between you both is him taking action and sticking with it, but what we fail to realise is that when a man is habitually indecisive, he has still made a decision to not make one and instead feather his nest by being in limbo on your time.

You don’t know what you want but because he openly displays his flip flapping tendencies, you can fool yourself into believing that you do. You may find this filters into other areas of your life where you coast and hide behind what seem like plausible reasons and excuses.

If you did know what you wanted, you wouldn’t continue to be around someone who couldn’t commit to a decision and also couldn’t commit to you. But…this is all because like every woman involved with an assclown or in a relationship lacking commitment, you lack commitment too.

Read about the other assclowns in part 2.

Your thoughts?

Get ahead on understanding waste of space men and relationships with my ebook, Mr Unavailable and the Fallback Girl. Find out more and download. Also find out more about my No Contact Rule web seminar, or if you need personal advice or analysis of your relationship, check out my consultation service.

A selection of posts

Relationship Advice: How do I forgive my narcissist ex and my friend for flirting and the private dance?

NML — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:15:37 +0000

Angela asks “About a year ago, I went with my emotionally unavailable, narcissist ex, whom I was so deeply in love with, to see my “best friend” of about 6 years. She was graduating with her degree and exhibiting her work, so I went to see her, asking him to come along for the trip. After the show, we went to her bar where she worked, and on the car ride there, he began asking her for directions. Being already drunk, my friend began acting and saying obnoxious things, to which he began yelling, calling her names, and to which she yelled back. It became obvious there was some sexual, flirtatious tension in it all, which I definitely noticed.

When we arrived at her bar, she began dancing on the bar, drinking more, etc. He would not come inside, sending his friend to tell me he was sorry, etc.

After a few hours of this, he did come inside, and, to my horror, I witnessed my friend dancing/laying on the bar in front of him, while he sat, apart from everyone at the bar. I didn’t say or do anything, her friends separated them, and I didn’t say much the rest of the night, much less the next day, or the trip home. I asked them both if they were attracted to each other, and they both said no. But I am having a very hard time letting this go and forgiving, much less forgetting. I am currently not speaking to my ex, and I haven’t spoken to my friend in over a year as well. I have deep fears that they are in fact, together, that I should have said or done something, or that I could have stopped this by acting differently. I am trying to let this go, and I don’t know how to treat my friend. I am very confused and still very hurt by this.

Can you help with some advice? “

There are 2 core things that you need to drill into your head from this moment onwards:

1) When it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and acts like a duck, it is a duck. Don’t be afraid to accept your gut reaction or what you process with your judgement skills. Stop doubting yourself.

2) Stop assuming the blame for what is quite despicable behaviour on both of their parts. You can’t stop the irrational, the uncontrollable, the bad behaviour of a narcissist, or the attention seeking behaviour of a predator friend.

Whilst I appreciate that it would not be nice to discover that they are together, what can you do? With two personalities like theirs, they kinda deserve each other.

Let’s remember some key things here that you should use as a reminder of how lucky you are to have made an escape:

1) This guy is emotionally unavailable AND a narcissist – sweet Jesus you don’t know how lucky you are to be shot of him! No matter what you do or say, if he is a narcissist and ignorant to his poor behaviour, there isn’t a damn thing you can do to change him or the highly likely outcome of the demise of your relationship. These narcissists are a hop, skip, and a jump from crackerjack central and the best thing you can do is run for cover. Switchy at the best of times – attentive and adoring one moment, aggressive, arrogant, and out of control the next.

2) Didn’t you just want to get the hell out of there when these two dipsticks started arguing like two 7 year olds in the playground? This was aggressive, sexual tension! A total and utter disrespect on the parts of BOTH people!

3) Who the frick dances on bars and does a ‘private performance’ for their friends boyfriend? She sounds out of control! She certainly doesn’t sound like someone who you need as a friend because with friends like that to take you down, how on earth can you rely on her or trust others?

Aside from these factors, the main issues that concern me here is that you don’t feel prepared to trust you, your gut, your intuition, and basically your judgement. Why ask them if they’re attracted to each other? They both said ‘no’ when it was quite obvious that something strange was going on between the two of them and at the end of the day, you couldn’t let it go and you’re not speaking to them. Why? – Because at the end of the day, no matter what comes out of their mouthes, you know what you saw, you certainly shouldn’t forget it, and if anything, it should serve as very strong evidence that neither party should be in your life.

If they are together, there is nothing you can do and it is further evidence that you are well shot of the pair of them. The reason why this bothers you is because aside from their actions being incredibly hurtful and disrespectful, you’re still at a point where you are blaming yourself and thinking that you could have intervened and changed the outcome. It’s a bit like, two against one, so it must be you that’s at fault. You haven’t accepted what happened because you don’t want to. But you’d better because it’s happened, it’s not going to change, and it is, what it is.

The only person that you can control is you. I suspect that when dealing with a narcissist and a disrespectful friend that regardless of what you do or say, they’re gonna do what suits them anyway. Don’t think for one second that your feelings are of any importance to either one of them, especially with him, who by his very nature believes that he is the centre of the universe….

You didn’t create their behaviour – you enabled it and that’s different. You should be asking yourself why you want to be with a narcissist. You should be asking yourself why you want this friend back. You should be more concerned with why you want to allow people to mistreat and disrespect AND take the blame for it too!

You have to let go of trying to find some comfortable place with the situation so that you can either get with him or your friend. The person you need to forgive…is YOU.

The best thing you could do is stop refusing to accept the situation and their poor behaviour and characters, feel your hurt, feel your anger, forgive you and recognise that you didn’t create their behaviour. Deal with your own issues about why you want this guy and put some closure on the situation. We choose men that reflect negative things we believe about ourselves and if you want to be with a narcissist and were deeply in love with him in spite of his behaviour, that in itself shows that you have self-esteem issues and poor love habits to resolve because being with a narcissist is an abusive relationship. Oh it might feel like the most amazing time on earth when they’re having a great day, but there is more bad and low days with people like this.

If you haven’t got over it after a year, it’s because it’s unresolved, but the fact that it has a dragged on for a year is too much.

You have to let go of him, her, your unresolved feelings, face things, and move on. Unfortunately…they are already getting on with their selfish lies whilst you’re still stuck at 365 days ago. Let go and don’t ever blame yourself for other people’s disrespect and instead focus on ensuring that you don’t place yourself in the firing line of disrespect by being around people that diminish you.

Relationship Advice: He’s abusive and possibly a narcissist but I love him. Will he change?

NML — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 13:48:43 +0000

Steph recently contacted me with regards to her ex boyfriend. They broke up more than six months ago but she can’t get over it. Like the typical Mr Unavailable, there was an amazing first month and then he seemed to transform into a bit of a nightmare.

He could be verbally abusive, flying into rages, lying, suddenly only having time for partying with his friends, abusing alcohol and drugs, and even occasional physical attacks on his friends (yeah I know, this guy is a real catch!). He even claims that he owns the town and can make her life hell, which may go beyond the usual ‘narcissistic tendencies’ I associate with typical Mr Unavallable’s.

Steph blames herself for the end of their relationship and rationalises his behaviour with the belief that “nobody is perfect”.

She still loves him and believes that it ended because she was cold to him after his last rage. She describes him as “the loveliest person on this Earth most of the time” but can’t understand how he can switch from sobbing and remorseful, to cold and finishing the relationship the next.

Steph’s own father was a narcissist, prone to raging and even threatening her and she is a high achiever with a great job, lots of friends, “the perfect look” yet still insecure.

Despite a therapist describing her ex as a “psychopath with a truly shallow emotional span”, Steph got in touch with me to find out if what her therapist true and also wondered if she could have ‘saved’ the relationship by not being so harsh with him over the phone.

When readers tell me stories like this, it hurts to be reminded that as women, we are actually prepared to put up with so much and quickly blame ourselves when we are getting so little from these pathetic assclowns!

Steph is right – nobody is perfect – but does that mean that you should be with an abuser and wait for the occasional good times? Should we just say ” F*ck it, nobody is perfect so I’ll take the first guy that comes along?”

I think the very act of writing down the problems in itself should be a wake up call but if in doubt, break it down to facts:

He had displayed his true overriding character which is:

He is abusive to himself, her, and others

He is disrespectful

He abuses drugs and alcohol

He goes into rages even fighting with others

He isn’t just displaying narcissistic tendencies – talk about frickin delusions of grandeur with the whole owning the town mallarky and being threatening, plus the temporary remorse.

The whole thing is just one great big abusive cycle.

I fail to see what is so attractive about this guy – Serial killers are often quite charming and can even be kind to people when it suits, but that doesn’t mean that you can suddenly write off all of their awful qualities and focus on the few glimmers of good!

And this is where we keep falling into the trap – focusing on the initial behaviour that is displayed by these men, ignoring the real consistent behaviour, and betting on the potential of the original behaviour.

This guy is an abuser and even if he isn’t a narcissist, he is certainly displaying narcissistic tendencies which is unpleasant enough. Making excuses for this mans behaviour and trumpeting his amazing qualities is like when the woman who is being physically abused by her man says that he is so sorry about what he’s done and if only she hadn’t left a crease in his shirt/answered him back…or breathed…he wouldn’t have beat her or got mad at her!

That is BULLSH*T!

What Steph is doing is ignoring red flag behaviour and fatal flaws in the relationship because she doesn’t want to let go. She is focused on the good moments, and she essentially knows no better.

Steph has been raised by a man who is a narcissist that threatened and raged at her and even though she recognises her father’s poor behaviour, she, like many women who have issues from childhood, is more comfortable with the familiar behaviour than she would be with the unfamiliar.

In situations like this, you’re gravitating to the dysfunctionality that you know.

And why wouldn’t you? You get let down by the primary male figure in your life and if you don’t quickly resolve these issues as an adult, they become the primary basis for bad relationship patterns.

When we find ourselves with someone like our parents, it can often be about righting the wrongs of the past – I couldn’t help or fix my father but I’ll do it with this guy.

Trust me, that’s like letting yourself in for a lifetime of pain.

The problems that this guy has deal fatal blows to the relationship because they are the type of problems that irrespective of whether he has some good qualities, these issues are extremely destructive and damaging and are bigger than you or the relationship.

His love is his hugely inflated ego and the drink and drugs first. At the very least that puts her in fourth place but either way, those are the things that he is having a relationship with.

All of this has the hallmarks of an abusive relationship and the best thing that Steph could do is keep seeing the therapist and deal with the demons of the past so that she can heal, build her self-esteem, and lose her interest in parasites like this man.

There is no fairy tale ending with men like this and you can’t love a man into being Mr Wonderful.

Love is not enough.

We can’t just decide “I love him” and then place our love on them as if bestowing some magical healing power. The world doesn’t roll like that and there are millions of women out there that are living testament to this.

Deciding that you love someone is not a justification for continuing the relationship, especially when the feelings about yourself, love, and relationships originate from negative places.

Men like this behave in this manner regardless. He would be emotionally available and possibly a narcissist if she licked his feet and behaved like the perfect woman. And he’d still be this way if she behaved badly.

Ultimately, without respect, well, everything else falls down around it. If a person behaves without respect to himself or others, he cannot love or do anything that benefits himself or others in a positive way.

It’s not a phonecall or her being cold towards him why the relationship ended – it’s because he’s an emotionally unavailable, abusive, nasty, controlling, potentially narcissistic assclown with a drink and drugs problem.

What drives a Drama Seekers need for attention and Relationship Crack?

NML — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:26:53 +0000

Yesterday in my first post in the 30 Days of Drama Reduction series, the theme of attention came up repeatedly.

The type of woman that finds herself knee deep in drama all the time is seeking attention. Like a celebrity, for her, attention is attention and when the relationship is at it’s most dramatic, for that period of time she will feel like the centre of his universe and the focal point of his attention, regardless of whether it is positive or negative. This is your Relationship Crack.

If you are a Drama Seeker, accidental or otherwise, you’ve come to crave the type of attention that can only be derived from unhealthy relationships.

So how did you get here?

Hard as it may be to hear, the modern day Drama Seeker is like a child who rebels or creates problems to bring the attention back to her, and this for many women is where it starts; in childhood.

Absent or emotionally distant father. There can be a sense of abandonment if you never knew him hence you may live in fear of constant abandonment and choose men that perpetuate that feeling. Or he may have been around but you had to fight hard for any type of attention from him. Or, if you didn’t live with your father but still saw him, you may wonder what it is that you did to drive him away.

Second Best syndrome – I come across a lot of women who are for example, The Other Woman and they are used to coming second because they may have grown up in a house where they believed that another sibling was loved more than them, or they just generally had to compete with something or someone for their parents attention. For example, you may believe that one or both of your parents put their pursuit of their relationships ahead of you. Many readers who have emailed me mention growing up in households where their mother’s latest dodgy partner took centre stage.

Raised by a Drama Seeker. It is amazing the number of readers who have a Drama Seeker for a mother. I have one! The temperature of your household will have been controlled by the drama. Even if you feel repelled by her behaviour, it can be very difficult to avoid repeating subconscious patterns, particularly if you have very few positive lessons about love and relationships. Unless you address the issues created by living with someone like this, even in the face of knowing that you don’t want to be like her, you’ll be drawn to men who you’ll end up creating drama with.

You’re going out with carbon copies of your parents or mimicing the type of people they were involved with. Obviously this would be OK if they were positive influences but clearly they aren’t! For example, readers tell me that they are going out with habitual cheats, alcoholics, emotional abusers, physical abusers, etc and lo and behold, a bit of digging reveals that they were often raised by one of these, or watched a parent struggle with a partner like this. Often these kinds of relationships are about trying to fix, heal, or help the guy because you may have felt hopeless when you were younger and it’s a bit like righting the wrongs of the past.

You have merged thrill seeking and the man. There are some women that go out with men that are thrill seekers. They do dangerous things, screw around with your full knowledge , or have extreme sport hobbies, or may just appear to have a lot going on that makes them appear to be exciting and edgy. With the extreme version of this guy everything that comes out of his mouth and what he does is focused around his thrill seeking and he may struggle to emotionally engage. Hence when there is nothing to ‘do’, things may feel very awkward to you, so you create your own extreme sport of high drama. Very often, the type of woman that will go with a man like this chooses him because he seems to fill that gap with an exciting feeling, so when he isn’t around, you feel at a loss.

One man can spark a new relationship style. You may actually have managed to avoid some of the issues thrown up by emotional schooling and then found yourself inadvertently in a relationship with a man who was not all that he professed to be. Even if you were not emotionally unavailable yourself when you met a Mr Unavailable for instance, unless you realise what you’re dealing with and get out quickly, it is very difficult not to leave the relationship emotionally unavailable yourself because they almost end up teaching you a whole new relationship style. You may not have had any leaning towards drama but one day you may have discovered that he stuck around a bit longer, the sex was amazing, or it bought you some more relationship time, and you just kept repeating the behaviour.

The key with understanding what motivates you as a Drama Seeker is to understand what drives your need for attention and Relationship Crack because only then can you start to understand your Drama Seeking Triggers – those things that set you off and have you seeking out a ‘fix’.

Exercise! What is motivating you to be a Drama Seeker? Something about this works for you and is familiar – what is it? Do you fit into any of the groups above? When you ‘act up’ and create drama, what triggers it? If you can start to understand where you are coming from and be aware of your triggers, you can home in on your pattern and break it to create a more positive relationship style.

Your thoughts?

Do you have a post or tip to submit for the series? Get in touch! Read other posts from the series.

Check out my ebooks including The No Contact Rule, a dedicated guide to getting over someone by cutting contact and injecting some boundaries into your life so that you can move on to a happier you, and Mr Unavailable & The Fallback Girl, a no holds barred guide to emotionally unavailable men and the women that love them, in my bookshop. For personal advice or analysis of your relationship/situation, check out my consultation service.

Why YOU Are The Problem â€“ The Repeater Boyfriend

Hot Alpha Female — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 12:00:37 +0000

I know I know – A lot of you may be thinking â€¦ what is Hot Alpha Female on about now?! Well let me explain because I guarantee that a lot of you have been in this situation. This post came from a realisation that I came across today. It was quite shocking actually .. made me feel a little sick

What am I referring to exactly? What is the repeater boyfriend?

The repeater boyfriend is essentially a guy that you are currently dating that is a replica of all your ex boyfriends. Just with a slightly different car, haircut, and brand of jeans.

Still confused? Well let me elaborate by explaining a hypothetical situation that I may or may not have made up….

You date and date and date and then you find someone who is worth dating and getting involved with on a more serious level. You stay with them for, lets say in this instance, 2 years ( really long time for some people…) and letâ€™s just say this guy disrespects you, abuses you physically/emotionally, and uses you for sex and money. So finally after two years you realise that he is no good for you and you decide to break up with him. You stick out being single for a while…for let’s say…6 months.

So in that time you date and date and date until you find someone that you think is worth dating long-term. You are happy and things seem to be going well. But then you take a breather and a step back and you realise that this guy â€œdisrespects you, abuses you physically/emotionally and uses you for sex and moneyâ€.

That my friend is what a repeater boyfriend is. Its essentially like dating the same guy over and over again because that is what you are attracting.

Seriously guys think about it. How many of your exes have been of a similar nature? Do some exes remind you of the previous ones before that? Why do we tend to date the same kind of people that may not be good for us?

Why do I raise this point? Well there are two reasons actually. The first is that you need to realise that we can take control of our love lives and the second is that the people we have attracted into our lives have not been a mistake but have been attracted into our lives because we LET them. Here is the harsh reality. If all you have attracted previously are guys that cheated and disrespected you … It was because YOU asked for it.

Maybe not intentionally, but on some level you did.

I know, it sounds harsh right? But I donâ€™t say this to upset you, but rather to build your awareness that if you have the power to attract disrespectful guys into your life, you also have the power to attract great, genuine, and loving guys into your life too!

How can you stop falling into the trap of the repeater boyfriend?

Well donâ€™t worry, its nothing that you havenâ€™t heard before. The reason why you are attracting people into your life like that, is because there are certain beliefs that you hold about yourself that is attracting them in the first place.

If all you have preciously attracted into your life were cheaters, then ask yourself do you really believe that you are worthy of someone who has the heart to love you totally and completely. A lot of the time it’s not so much of how much we can give, but rather allowing ourselves just to be able to receive the love that is out there for us.

You guys want to know how you can stop the repeater boyfriend and how you can start attracting a different, more suitable type of man? Well this is one of the reasons why I always talk about self love first. Thatâ€™s why I believe that you need to focus on building beliefs around yourself and relationships before you enter into anything and that is why I am an advocate of being a happy and fulfilled single because its only when you truly enjoy your own company, that you will be able to find someone who appreciates it too.

Good luck Girls

Hot Alpha Female is a new weekly contributor to Baggage Reclaim. She’s a vibrant twenty-something that loves talking about dating and relationships, as well as skiing and laughing uncontrollably.

Are emotionally unavailable men narcissists?

NML — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 12:00:58 +0000

What’s the difference between an emotionally unavailable man and a narcissist? A thin line and someone defining it, but there is a line there nonetheless.

Since I published my ebook Mr Unavailable and the Fallback Girl which focused on the behaviour of emotionally unavailable men, I’ve had several emails requesting that I discuss the subject of narcissism further because many women do believe that they are going out with a narcissist.

So what’s a narcissist?

For me, someone being a narcissist has always represented someone with excessive self-love, who pretty much fancies themselves.

According to the Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) group it’s “An all-pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behaviour), need for admiration or adulation and lack of empathy, usually beginning by early adulthood and present in various contexts.”

How do you know if he’s a narcissist?

There are nine criteria of which five need to be met:
1. Feels grandiose and self-importance.
2. Is obsessed with fantasies of unlimited success.
3. Firmly convinced that he or she is unique and, being special, can only be understood by, should only be treated by, or associate with, other special or unique, or high-status people (or institutions).
4. Requires excessive admiration, adulation, attention and affirmation.
5. Feels entitled. Expects unreasonable or special and favourable priority treatment.
6. Demands automatic and full compliance with his or her expectations. Is “interpersonally exploitative”, i.e., uses others to achieve his or her own ends
7. Devoid of empathy. Is unable or unwilling to identify with or acknowledge the feelings and needs of others
8. Constantly envious of others or believes that they feel the same about him or her
9. Arrogant, haughty behaviours or attitudes coupled with rage when frustrated, contradicted, or confronted.
Source: NPD

In general, the points that I’ve highlighted in bold reflect the most common complaints from women about their ‘relationships’ with Mr Unavailable. I’m not a psychologist; I’m just an ‘expert’ on assclowns and seeing things for what they really are. I always say that Mr Unavailables have ‘narcissistic tendencies’ which essentially makes them a hop, skip, and a jump away from being a narcissist, but they often fall short on the criteria notch.

In my ebook, I describe in depth ten core behaviours of Mr Unavailable that enable him to do exactly as he pleases and keep himself emotionally distant. Every single one of these actions are the behaviour of a selfish, egotistical, and often deluded man and they all tie into the three criteria above. For example:

They maintain The Status Quo – Mr Unavailable’s have already defined what you’re going to get from the ‘relationship’. Everything is about managing it back into a safe, comfortable area where he gets exactly what he wants.

They blow hot and cold – This is how they manage The Status Quo so that you fall into line. All of the blowing hot and cold manages down your expectations and after a while, you feel OK with what he is offering.

Mr Unavailable is a walking contradiction – He sees himself as Mr Wonderful, a great catch even, when in actual fact he’s Mr Nightmare. You don’t know what you’re getting with this guy. Here today, gone tomorrow, back in a few months. He might make references to the future today but if you bring up the future next week, he’ll tell you off for being needy. Whatever role he feels like playing, you are expected to jump to his beat and play along.

Mr Unavailable looks in the mirror and thinks ‘Hmmm, I’ve still got ‘it’. I work hard, I pay my bills, I don’t beat up women, I’m not a pr*ck, I go to the gym five times a week and I think I look pretty good. There are a lot of men out there far worse than me. I am doing the best I can. I’ve just got a lot going on. It’s not my fault. If X would just lighten up a bit, stop busting my balls, and appreciating what she’s got, I might just think about getting serious with her…”

In amongst his various behaviours, Mr Unavailable’s tend to have a stock of women on tap, or what some readers refer to as a Narcissistic Harem. These are the various women family, friends, ex shags, ex girlfriends, acquaintances, women online, other women he’s dating etc, that he turns to get his ego massaged. Not only does he get to convince himself that he must be a great guy because of all of these women giving him attention, but by spreading himself thin he keeps his distance from everyone but always has a woman to ‘fall back’ on.

But what if you are with a narcissist?

Well the first thing I have to bluntly ask is what is in it for you? Women who date emotionally unavailable men do so because it works for them. They get to avoid certain things and these men reflect negative beliefs that they hold about themselves, love, and relationships. Now it is bad enough for these women with three of these criteria to deal with, but if your man makes the grade of five criteria, you need to come up with a plan of action.

If you are waiting for him to change, whether he is ‘just’ a Mr Unavailable or a bonafide narcissist, you are in for a hell of along wait. That wait will extend itself further if you are with a narcissist. You can’t win with a man like this and no matter what you say or do, he will defend himself against your ‘accusations’ and challenge and browbeat you to take his view of things. I would certainly seek some form of counselling and even as first port of call visit the NPD group. Whatever you do, don’t run home and tell him that he’s a narcissist. You have no idea how he will react and it could even be dangerous.

Be very careful of tarring all emotionally unavailable men with the narcissistic brush. I think that some women find it quite easy to casually pin this clinical term to their men because it gives a ‘medical’ reason which can imply that it’s out of his control, which in turn can imply that it’s out of her control, which leads back to the tried and tested route of making excuses for remaining invested. What I will say though as a word of warning is that Mr Unavailable’s tend to numb you to inappropriate behaviour which means that at some point you may unknowingly find yourself with a narcissist. This is why it is important to become aware of the type of relationships you are engaging in, their behaviour, and most importantly your own behaviour and patterns so that you don’t get drawn into these self-esteem, depleting relationships.

As for Mr Unavailable…

Mr Unavailables aren’t necessarily sitting there saying ‘I love the arse off myself’ but it is all one big ego trip where they love thinking that at least one woman that they can habitually ‘fall back’ on loves him. This is why he often keeps coming back or tries to come back because his ego can’t take the idea of someone not being there for him to use for an ego massage. He’ll often disappear though when he thinks that he has at least one other woman out there that will give it a rub. Unfortunately, there is always a woman out there to welcome Mr Unavailable with open arms but the more of us that get wise, is the less there are for them to turn to.

My ebook The No Contact Rule is now available to buy and provides a dedicated guide to getting over someone by cutting contact and injecting some boundaries into your life so that you can move on to a happier you. For a no holds barred guide to emotionally unavailable men, including separated guys that flip flap in indecision, and the women that love them, you can also get Mr Unavailable & The Fallback Girl. For personal advice or analysis of your relationship/situation, check out my consultation service.

Advice: How do I deal with my abusive boyfriend?

NML — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 08:50:07 +0000

I have been involved with my boyfriend for a year and a half now. We have recently become long distance, but were in the same city for a year and a half. He has rage issues. He gets mad at the smallest of things and if he does, watch out. I’ll give you an example:

We went on a cruise together and on the cruise, one day I wanted to walk around the ship and he wanted to bum around the room, so I told him I was going to go walk around because I was bored. He got SO MAD. Saying I was calling him boring and how dare I? He basically would not let me leave the room, locked it behind me, and then ended up punching the CEMENT wall behind me and called me a bitch.

His anger is never proportionate to the event he claims made him mad. He has punched a wall two other times in my apartment. I have been told that signs of property abuse can often translate into physical abuse later. While I am not physically intimidated by him (he is much smaller than me in size( i.e 5’7 and 120 lbs), the anger befuddles me. He also engages in calling me explitives. He will say “F*ck you,” “F*ck this,” and just use words this like to me when he is mad. His explanation is that I make him mad and if I did not make him mad, he would not need to yell. I am a mature 24 year old woman and I do not seem to buy that I can “make” someone so mad and cause anger that is beyond an individual’s ability to control, especially when the situations that seem to set him off are trivial. I am a very patient person, but my patience is running thin and I feel like he is having some sort of effect on my emotional well-being. Please help!

NML says: This guy is out of control. You are recognising the red flag behaviour – disproportionate anger, verbally abusive, uncontrolled, displaying violence – but you’re not doing anything with your knowledge.

This is one of the fundamental traps that we fall into as women – we look for reasons to stay and we look for reasons to absolve them of their bad behaviour. Don’t try to make a silk purse out of a pigs ear…

Saying that you want to go for a walk because you’re bored does not translate to ‘You’re boring’. Talk about making himself the centre of the universe! I think he also suffers with a bit of Short Man Syndrome – He feels that he doesn’t look physically intimidating so he flexes his muscles and mouth in other ways to compensate.

When a man, when anyone in fact, displays disproportionate anger and is abusive whether that is physically or verbally, it is a massive red flag that says that it is time to get out. This is not the type of behaviour that you can fix and it deals a fatal blow to your relationship. His behaviour is highly disrespectful, aggressive, and an attack on your self-esteem and character. You don’t ‘make’ him mad – he chooses to respond to you by getting mad – he could always choose another route…

You are worried that he is having some sort of effect on your self-esteem – you’re right, he is. The fact that you are still there despite his disgusting behaviour speaks volumes. The difference between a woman that sticks around for a mans abusive behaviour and the one that doesn’t is a level of self-esteem and self-awareness. At some point this guy has affected you enough that you have made enough allowances for his behaviour to stick around.

I don’t doubt that you are mature but you need to put that to good use and walk away before he turns his punchbag activity onto you. This man needs to grow up and get a life…but not on your time. You are always better than a man that behaves in this way and don’t sell yourself short to a man who can’t control his anger and display positive character traits towards you.

Advice: Am I right not to be too quick to commit?

NML — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 11:52:45 +0000

“I left my abusive marriage 5 months ago – we had been together for 11 years in total (I am 29) and he was the only guy I have ever slept with. I feel really positive about leaving him and although it was hard, it’s the best decision I ever made. I met a really lovely guy 2 months after I left my husband and we went on a few dates. He wanted to start a relationship with me but I refused to commit because I wanted to be single for a while and get to know myself again. Also I didn’t want him to be my rebound relationship. We are still in touch as friends which is great. He is a genuine nice guy and we get on so well and are really attracted to each other. I know that if we started a relationship we would be together for a long time so I was concerned that perhaps in the future I might regret not using this time alone and to go out with other guys.

I have been asked out by other men and I feel guilty because although I think I should experience what it’s like going out with other guys, all I can think about is the guy that I’ve already met and if it will ruin our relationship/friendship? Would I be betraying him if I went out with/slept with
someone else?”

NML says: It most definitely wouldn’t be a betrayal of him and I think it’s very important that you give yourself a lot of space and time before you start a new relationship because you have been through a very difficult relationship previously and only have experience of one man, and he was abusive. Not only do you have to be careful of rebounding, but you also need to ensure that you have dealt with your past and that you are free of anything that may put you into a situation where you could be abused again. You are vulnerable and you need the opportunity to be you, free of the shackles of being tied to someone. If this new guy cares about you, he will respect your wishes. I think it is totally understandable that you want to explore who you are and what the dating world has to offer. You have been in a heavy relationship for the prime years of exploration.

Be very careful of emotionally investing yourself too quickly in this guy. Much as you may like him there is a reason why you didn’t feel that you should commit to him and you need to listen to yourself, rather than the insecurity of what may or may not happen if you do what you want to do. I think you deserve to do what feels right for you and to enjoy yourself – you’ve just come out of an abusive relationship – don’t worry about what yet another man thinks.

Signs That You May Have an Abusive Boyfriend

NML — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 09:23:00 +0000

He is very jealous and possessive and tells you that this is a sign of his love for you. Jealousy and possessiveness in it’s extremes are used to control a person and it also allows the offender to take no responsibility for their attitude and put the onus on you for them to be different. When jealousy or possessiveness becomes irrational, this can lead to physical violence or can manifest itself in systematic emotional abuse which leaves you with low self-esteem.

Disproportionate feelings far too early into the relationship which can translate as smothering. I have received emails from women who have been involved with men that have told them that they loved them after a week, pressured them to get pregnant and wanted to move in. The men in question saw this pressure to be serious as demonstration of their love but in reality, not only was it more than a little odd, it is often an early indicator that further down the line, this behaviour turns into jealousy, possessiveness which feeds into either emotional or physical abuse.

Humiliation, swearing, insulting, put downs are often used as devices to control and manipulate a person into doing what they want. By eroding the self esteem and systematically engaging in these behaviours, this is emotional abuse.

Control Freak – If your boyfriend tries to control who you see, when you see them, how you dress, where you go and much more, this is a very strong sign that you are with someone who is abusive. With someone who is like this, it is worthwhile addressing his behaviour and pointing out that his behaviour is controlling as with the right kind of guy, he will adjust his behaviour to appropriate levels.

He is handy with his fists: Mr Physically Agressive – It is totally unacceptable for any person to abuse you physically. No excuse is appropriate and no person should be used as a punchbag. Be very wary of someone who has already physically abused someone else. Don’t fall into the trap of ‘I Can Change Him’ syndrome. Oh and keep an eye on any guy that wants to destroy your property as a demonstration of his rage.
Threatening physical violence is just as bad as committing the act itself because ultimately it’s about ruling with fear and this is emotional abuse.

He abuses drugs and alcohol and blames them for his actions. How many women have found themselves with a black eye and had substances blamed for it? That doesn’t make it any better and absolves him from responsibility.

He likes to be the decision maker and won’t entertain anything that you suggest. Control of this level is never a good thing.

Forcing you to perform sexual acts which can be combined with any of the above to coerce you.

If your boyfriend/partner is displaying any of these signs, I would certainly have some serious concerns. Use common sense and your gut and get out before you find yourself an empty shell of your former self. There is no excuse for abusing someone and seek help as soon as possible. It is important to ensure that your abusers behaviour doesn’t destroy your self esteem and trust or have a long lasting impact on future relationships.
NML is the editor of Baggage Reclaim.

Open Your Eyes

Vixen — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 07:20:44 +0000

I got a long email from a reader the other day in which she detailed the course of her relationship with the first guy she ever had sex with. They were together for 14 months and started having major problems. His excuse was that she was too needy and he couldn’t deal with it. “Before the break up in about 3-4 weeks he got abusive, physically,verbally,emotionally…you name it. And I still hung around. His friends came first, I was always left out..I even felt he was cheating again that’s why I broke up with him…”

She booty called him for a while and then tried twice to stay together with him in which those make-ups lasted for 3-4 months. She broke up finally with him after his best friend confirmed that he was still cheating on her and decided never to date him again. Fast forward a month later, he now has a new girlfriend and she is dating a guy but neither of them have the ability to let go of each other. They were still calling/texting each other incessantly and he gets jealous and possessive whenever he sees her and her boyfriend together. He finally broke down her willpower and she ended up sleeping with him again. Now she’s sneaking around, officially the Other Woman, lying & cheating on her new boyfriend and she’s wondering how she got here, why she can’t let him go and what to do about it.

There is so much going on here that I don’t even know where to begin. First of all, I know the attachments that can form when you get great sex, and even when you fall in love for the first time. However, let’s call a spade a spade. He CHEATED on her. Several times. How she can overlook that and continue consorting with him is beyond my imagination. Secondly…he abused her. For several weeks. How he managed to redeem himself from emotionally and physically hurting her is beyond me. That is a flaming RED FLAG. Something is seriously wrong with this guy. Add to the fact that ever since they broke up, the guy has consistently shown that he’s not into her anymore besides sleeping with her. Him saying sweet things to you on the phone and being nice once in a while does not mean that he’s head over heels in love with you. It’s just him reeling you in hook, line and sinker for more heartbreak. Sure, she’s 21 and still has alot to learn about love, life and relationships but some things just scream Run, Run, Run!!!

A guy that cares about you will not have you in compromising situations on a consistent basis. Obviously he’s a flagrant cheat and can’t be loyal to any woman, so why the great thirst for him? I know you are still in love with him (that’s the only reason I can think of to put up with his bs) but there is no way you are going to get back to his heart through sleeping with him. Men don’t equate sex with love, so you shouldn’t use your body as a bartering chip for his affection. He’s getting to eat his cake and have it too and you are the one strung up with a broken heart that will never heal, all these confused emotions and questions. You don’t have the ability to give your heart to another at this point, so I suggest you stop using your Rebound Guy (breaking his heart in the process) and cut him loose.

You already know the right thing to do. You just want confirmation about it. End it. End all of it. Enough with the soap opera already. Cut him out of your life totally and stop talking to him, reading his emails, messages….everything! Most especially stop sleeping with him. He’s moved on with someone else. He’s a philandering cheat. He’s not worthy of you.

You are the only one that can put an end to this madness. You are in charge of your life and accountable for the decisions that you make. Take charge and do what’s best for you.

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