Drama Seekers: It’s time to get off the relationship crack
March 31, 2008 by NML · 4 Comments
Today is the very first day in the 30 Days of Drama Reduction series.
Lot’s of women believe that drama is part and parcel of relationships. Some are purposeful Drama Seekers, actively pursuing men that cater to the high adrenaline factor, but there are a hell of a lot of women out there that are ‘Accidental’ Drama Seekers.
You say you want to be happy. You say you want to settle down. You say you want to have better relationships. You say you want to stop being men with an emotional age that’s in the minus category. You say you are sick and tired of the same sh*t, different man, yet…it’s Here We Go Again Time.
You just seem to have a lot of drama going on in your relationships.
Your actions and relationships are in contradiction with what you profess to want. You actively pursue relationships you say you don’t want. You are heavily emotionally invested in relationships you say you don’t want.
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No Ex On The First Date
March 20, 2008 by NML · 3 Comments
You’re on a date. You’re both nervous and you make polite chit chat. Maybe you order a drink and loosen up a little and you’re both tentatively finding out about each other. You start talking about dating/relationships/how you’ve come to be on this date and somehow the conversation slips into the shock infested waters of Ex Territory. Now I don’t care how you got to the conversation, exes do not belong on dates in any way, shape, or form, and certainly not on the first few. If you talk about your ex you might as well have brought them along with you and plomped them in between the two of you.
The most common misconception about asking about exes or blabbing about them is that people believe it’s an opportunity for either party to find out how the other ticks within relationships. People think that you can find out how ready a person is for a relationship, whether they are looking for something serious or searching for a shag, whether they are crazy, and how they think this person will behave if they were in a relationship with them. Now I’m not saying it’s impossible to glean some information from conversations like these but there are two factors that skew any information that you get:
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Drama Seekers: ladies do love drama…
March 12, 2008 by NML · 7 Comments
There is one thing that is missing out of my relationship with the boyf and it’s drama. I don’t miss it, I don’t want it and when I think back to previous relationships and this one, aside from the fact that they were all annoying assclowns, there is a serious lack of drama.
We have a fun, exciting relationship which has a new dimension with the bambino thrown in and I do not miss all of the negative feelings that are associated with the type of drama that comes your way when you’re in a dubious relationship.
Ambiguity. Anxiety. Frustration. Loneliness. Infrequent highs followed by frequent major lows. Inconsistency. Insecurity. Melodrama. Heartbreak. Redundant. Maligned. Insignificant. Anger. Despair. And the list goes on…
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Attraction: 4 key things that make you attractive…or unattractive…
March 6, 2008 by NML · 10 Comments
When it comes to dating and relationships, ‘attraction’ can be a word that automatically let’s us off the hook for engaging our brain in any rational thinking. “I’m so attracted to him; I just can’t fight it” she says even though she really should fight ‘it’ because he’s treating her like a booty call even though she thinks he’s her boyfriend. “She’s just…she’s just so damn attractive” he says about the woman who refuses to even acknowledge his existence. What becomes clear is that ‘attraction’ means different things to different people but I find that four things can certainly affect attraction in the first instance…
Make an effort with your appearance
I would be lying if I claimed that the surface doesn’t come into ‘attraction’. The exterior is what most of us notice first but the reality is that unless you are the shallowest of the shallowest, you will take the whole package – looks, character, and personality – into account which can actually affect your perception of their ‘attractiveness’. At the end of the day there is no point looking like Angelina Jolie if you you’re a nasty person within.
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Sex – When Sex is Just Sex: It is what it is but how about the guys speak up!
February 29, 2008 by NML · 6 Comments
A few days ago I wrote about The Justifying Zone, that slippery slope that women can find themselves on when they stick with a guy so that they can justify their emotional or sexual investment, even if they recognise that that the relationship is doomed. A couple of male commenters raised the point that sometimes a guy just wants sex, which of course made me want to revisit this subject.
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The Justifying Zone: when a woman needs to justify her emotional or sexual investment
February 26, 2008 by NML · 16 Comments
The Justifying Zone is that slippery slope that a lot of women find themselves in, especially after they have sexual contact with a guy. Many of us feel that we need to justify our emotional and sexual investment and this justification is effectively attempting to close the door after the horse has bolted.
The Justifying Zone will always appear when a man fails to live up to the initial promise that he first exhibited or does something inappropriate or that raises a major red flag that could potentially scupper the possibility of the relationship. If for instance, he’s a Mr Unavailable and the ambiguity increases along with all of his other core behaviours, the potential to stay in the zone and cling to it for dear life becomes even bigger.
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Advice: Why won’t he contact me?
February 13, 2008 by NML · 33 Comments
Last month I advised Astelle with Advice: Help me understand how my emotionally unavailable man has been treating me and Advice: Why did he respond if he’s not interested in me?. To do a quick recap, Astelle was involved with an emotionally unavailable man who she wouldn’t hear from for long periods of time unless she made contact. Occasionally they would meet up and they would go through brief spurts of togetherness, but for the most part, it was very off. Astelle has stuck to The No Contact Rule since then and when she started this I explained that he was unlikely to make contact and now I explain why.
Astelle asks “In your response you said that it’s unlikely that HE will make contact with me. My friends tell me that as well, but I think they tell me that because they don’t want me to wait for him and they know he is a user and a piece of crap.
Read more
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Is women loving jerks and Bad Boys really a dating myth?
February 11, 2008 by NML · 31 Comments
I’ve been reading a couple of thought provoking posts over at one of my favourite blogs 40s Singleness, in particular a post about women loving jerks being a dating myth, and of course it’s got me thinking.
Women do love jerks, i.e. the perpetual ‘Bad Boy’. Or if we put it in a language that makes us a bit more comfortable: we love men that create drama. We want excitement, passion, fireworks, and whilst we sometimes get that, we often get plenty of mistreating, emotional unavailability, and ambiguity. ‘Nice Guys’ aren’t claiming a rough ride for no reason; it’s because they often get relegated into the friend zone for behaving half way decent and being available.
Very few women would hold their hands up and say they like assclown Bad Boys and those that do, well they’re a different, rather honest kettle of fish, but every day women blindly pursue relationships with men that reflect the negative things that they believe about themselves, love, and relationships.
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Breaking Up and Moving On By Cutting Contact. Part 2
February 1, 2008 by NML · 17 Comments
The No Contact Rule means that you have to go cold turkey but you put yourself in the driving seat, create your own closure, and you start to control the relationship that you have perceived as uncontrollable. It is an exit strategy and trust me, you will use the No Contact Rule if you truly want to exit a poor relationship and want to get back your sense of self.
In Part 1, I explained what the No Contact Rule is, why we avoid it, and some tips to get you started and in this post I am giving some guidance on when to apply the rule.
How do you know if you need to apply the No Contact Rule?
No contact is a pretty harsh way to cut things off but it’s increasingly needed because of the type of dating habits that both men and women are adopting. As women, we seem to love being with men that are disconnected and unavailable for relationship duty, and who can’t commit to being with us…and can’t commit to not being with us.
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Being The Other Woman - The Lessons I Learnt - Part 2
January 23, 2008 by NML · 9 Comments
on this post
Yesterday, in the first of my three part series about what I’ve learned about being the Other Woman (OW), I talked about how you’re an escape from reality, that all the cheating guys are liars, that the situation is far from being unique, that these guys are manipulators, that they rarely leave their wives or girlfriends, and that as women we treat the dysfunctional relationship we have with these men like a competitive sport.
But of course there is more.
I relate to Oprah’s admission that she felt pathetic and powerless. Often, when we are involved with attached men they reduce us to feeling or acting pathetic and they remove your power. I remember often feeling helpless and I attributed it to this overwhelming amount of feeling I had for him, but in fact, the helplessness arose from being stripped of everything I knew that was right and wrong about relationships, and also the good things about myself. All the arguing, discussing, crying, threats, ultimatums, crying, screaming, and whatever else you’re doing reduce you to feeling utterly powerless as you go round and round in a vicious circle where he never does leave ‘her’ but he keeps screwing with your mind to keep you invested. But what gets me most is that aside from feeling deep regret about my actions with him, I look back and see not only how pathetic I was at times but also remember the pitying looks that some people use to give me. How often did I hear the words “You can do better.”; “He really isn’t worth it” and “What’s a great girl like you doing with a lying cheat?”
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