Healthy Relationships Support Group
No relationship is perfect. A long-term relationship requires constant effort to understand each other, fix misunderstandings, solve problems and continue to grow as both individuals change and evolve. How we deal with our misunderstandings is the focus of this community. Join us to find support, get advice, and share your experience with your relationship.
Watching Montel now (I know, too much free time on my hands) and there's a psychologist on there talking about men and women's changing roles in American society. With the sexual liberation movement of the 1960s, women have become more educated, higher-earning, etc., in many cases, than their male counterparts! Yet women still expect men to be "men", i.e. strong, powerful, intelligent, sexually virile, etc. Men are struggling to measure up!
I consider myself a pretty powerful person (and ultimately, all our power comes from God, although, to survive on this Earth, money helps), yet I have no problem with being with a woman who is equally if not more powerful than I am, as long as she is respectful of me, that I have value and talents too. I don't think I want to be with a flower that requires constant watering, that is, a woman who has frail self-esteem and needs constant reassurance that she is beautiful and wonderful, yet I don't want to be with a cold-hearted independent bitch who doesn't need me at all either.
This is my ideal of a Healthy Relationship: One where men and women SHARE their power, combine their power, pool their power, exchange their power, for the common good, a good, strong relationship. I like to build up rather than tear down, although it is always easier to destroy than to create. Sometimes building up is acknowledging that letting go is what's best for both of us. But, even when we're together and it's good, no matter how shitty I feel, I try to build up my woman. Takes my mind off my own sometimes melancholy state (I get depressed sometimes--with great highs come great lows, what comes up must go down), and is simply good karma.
What I keep reading here on DS is "power-struggles", that is, where one person caves into the other's power, or one person hoards all their power to themselves. This perpetual power-struggle is the root of a lot of problems. Is "power-hoarding" pride or ego which disguises fear? Do we all want to "keep something for ourselves" so that we're not totally consumed by the other? Or do we cave in because we can't live without the other's power? Thoughts?
I consider myself a pretty powerful person (and ultimately, all our power comes from God, although, to survive on this Earth, money helps), yet I have no problem with being with a woman who is equally if not more powerful than I am, as long as she is respectful of me, that I have value and talents too. I don't think I want to be with a flower that requires constant watering, that is, a woman who has frail self-esteem and needs constant reassurance that she is beautiful and wonderful, yet I don't want to be with a cold-hearted independent bitch who doesn't need me at all either.
This is my ideal of a Healthy Relationship: One where men and women SHARE their power, combine their power, pool their power, exchange their power, for the common good, a good, strong relationship. I like to build up rather than tear down, although it is always easier to destroy than to create. Sometimes building up is acknowledging that letting go is what's best for both of us. But, even when we're together and it's good, no matter how shitty I feel, I try to build up my woman. Takes my mind off my own sometimes melancholy state (I get depressed sometimes--with great highs come great lows, what comes up must go down), and is simply good karma.
What I keep reading here on DS is "power-struggles", that is, where one person caves into the other's power, or one person hoards all their power to themselves. This perpetual power-struggle is the root of a lot of problems. Is "power-hoarding" pride or ego which disguises fear? Do we all want to "keep something for ourselves" so that we're not totally consumed by the other? Or do we cave in because we can't live without the other's power? Thoughts?
But I will agree on the reason that people believe they need control (power). People are afraid. And many people are afraid of anything and everything. So they feel the need to gain control.
So yes, it's all about fear. Get over it people. Everyone else is just as afraid as you are. If you can remove your fear, then life is worth living and you can truely love like you should.
Healthy Relationships require ACTIVE participation. You can't just hope for love and believe it will all work out. That's the lazy way out and it doesn't work.