It's a Guy Thing (27 page)

For instance: “I will not stay with you unless you are able to support yourself financially. I will be with you if and only if you are learning to support yourself without asking anybody for money. I will see you are learning this because within three weeks you will cease asking anybody for money.”

Or, “I will not stay with you unless you are able to listen to me for several minutes without turning away.”

Your partner makes the same kind of list. You each list your requirements for remaining in partnership, and you also use time limits, remembering that people need time to change. After you exchange lists you may need to negotiate certain points.

Now you have a contract. It’s just like a marriage contract or a premarriage contract. Remember that the requirements you list are requirements that serve love in the relationship. Your requirements should not only serve you, but they should serve your partner as well.

For instance, it doesn’t serve either of you when you support his lack of competency. So feel in your heart, what would serve him? Be concrete. Write this down as a bottom line.

Make your agreements, put time limits on them and stick to them. If your present partner cannot live up to your agreement, find someone who does. You could have any partner you want—you have the partner that you have now because you are holding on to him in some way.

Anytime you notice yourself hoping that your man will change, you are in the “battered woman’s syndrome” now. Anytime you think, “He will change,” but the way he is now isn’t good enough for you, then you are presently in an abusive relationship. The warning bells should go off any time he is abusing you today while you hope that he will change tomorrow. It is okay to want your partner to change, but only if the way he is today is good enough for today. You are both growing.

Suffering is part of any intimate relationship, but staying with an abusive man, or a weak and undirected man, is not. You may choose daily to be with a man like this, but it is not a necessary choice.

Should I Leave My Man If He Is Addicted to Drugs?

You cannot trust a man who is actively addicted. You might
love
a man who is addicted, but you can’t fully trust him. If he doesn’t have power over his own direction, how could you trust him with yours? If he doesn’t have the strength to guide his own life, how could you trust him with yours? He hasn’t surrendered his life to a Higher Power and hasn’t taken control of himself.

You might love such a man. You might feel very drawn to him and want to be with him. You might feel loved by him. But you cannot trust him, and you cannot trust your life with him.

If his addiction doesn’t impinge on his happiness, freedom and loving, then it is your problem, not his. But if it inhibits him in his happiness or in his ability to give love, then he needs to wake up.

You can’t condemn him for being in a unique moment of learning. His life may be unfolding perfectly for him, but you don’t have to trust him as a suitable partner, as someone with whom you share your life. And if you don’t trust him, you can expect that he will feel it. He will be hurt and will pull back.

To make such a relationship viable, clearly define the aspects of behavior he needs to change for you to be able to trust him. You can oblige him, through your love, to straighten out his life, because you cannot trust him as he is: addicted.

You need to answer this question for yourself: Is he the kind of man now—today, not tomorrow—with whom you are willing to commit your life and growth?

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

By fully developing our masculine and feminine energies, we can remain open in committed love with our present partner and also be willing to risk everything for the sake of growth. We can be willing to lose the security of our relationship and instead trust in the process of love. We can live our reality, what we really want to do, and face the consequences with an open heart. We can relax and love without becoming dependent on our partner. We can decide if our present relationship is actually serving us, and we can act accordingly. We do not stay in a relationship longer than our real growth indicates, nor do we leave merely because the going gets rough.

15
Succeeding in the Real Practice of Intimacy

How Can I Change Myself?

It is important to understand what you can change and what you cannot change about yourself. If you are Caucasian, you can squint your eyes and look a bit Asian, but it won’t make you Asian. If you wished you were black instead of white you could go out in the sun and get a little darker, but it won’t make you black. There is some flexibility, but not enough to change you into something you are not.

The personality is also relatively fixed. It can change a little, but basically it is what it is. Some people believe our personality is shaped by the astrological position of the planets at the time of our birth. Some people think past karma and past lives, gave shape to our present personality. Others believe our early childhood experiences shape our personality.

There are many ways of looking at it, but the bottom line is that your personality is more or less fixed. True growth does not involve changing your personality. It involves learning to love, no matter what your personality is.

You could be grossly deformed physically. You could be born without arms and legs. No amount of positive thinking will give you arms and legs. But you could still learn to love and be free and happy even though you had no arms and legs.

Our mission is to learn to love completely even though we have certain physical and personality characteristics. You might be an angry, challenging, insecure person for the rest of your life. It could become very humorous to you, a source of great amusement in your relationships, and not interfere at all in your love and work with people.

Your personality characteristics are what they are. They may change slightly and they may not. Whether they change or not isn’t as important as learning to love. You do not have
to change yourself, but you can learn to be present and open and loving just as you are.

Will I Ever Find a Man Who Gives Me the Love That I Want?

One of our basic emotional assumptions in intimacy is the feeling,
You don’t love me
. All of us have a “button” that is occasionally pressed by our partner which makes us feel,
That person doesn’t love me
. The “I’m not being loved” button is one of the most destructive buttons in intimate relationships because it is frequently pressed completely by accident. Our feeling of not being loved has nothing to do with our partner. We are feeling our own closure to love.

For instance, many men can suddenly switch from an intimacy mode to some other mode. Your man is with you in intimacy one moment. Suddenly, the phone rings, a football game comes on TV, or a thought comes to him—and he’s gone.

You may feel hurt or rejected because he turned away and forgot you. Your expression of hurt may make him feel constrained, unable to do what he wants. He may even feel resentful and angry toward you.

Much physical abuse of women by men, and also emotional abuse in the form of anger for no apparent reason, is based on this: Men tend to feel constrained by life and especially by their woman.

As a woman, the root meter or radar in your heart is, “Am I being loved or am I not being loved?” As a woman, you are very sensitive to the shift from being loved to not being loved. You are very aware of when your man switches from one mode to another.

Men also have a meter, but it doesn’t work the same way. The meter in most men measures, “Am I free or am I constrained?” That’s why men get unbelievably angry at things that seem ridiculous to women. For instance, many men will go crazy when they are trying to fix something. If it doesn’t go perfectly well, they will start yelling and swearing, “Goddamnit!”

When your man’s attempt to fix something becomes frustrating, he immediately feels very constrained. He feels constrained by a screw, or whatever won’t work or fit. Because his root meter is sensitive to constraint, the screw gets stuck and his meter flashes: constraint, constraint, constraint. He goes bonkers.

When men and women are in an intimate relationship, there is a feedback cycle between their two “meters.” He begins to feel more constrained by your emotional needs in the relationship, by your sensitivity to lovingness. And this sensitivity to lovingness is more and more jarred by his resentment and dissociation from you, his response to feeling constrained.

These buttons get pressed frequently in relationships. All he has to do is feel a little constrained and he will pull away. He pulls away, your meter goes off and you feel unloved. You pull away and he feels a “problem” that needs to be fixed, so he feels even more constrained. The cycle goes on and on.

A large transformation takes place in your intimacy when you realize that your partner has no control over his reactions. When you realize that both of you react automatically to emotional “buttons” that became part of you as children, then you are relieved of much guilt or blame.

If you take away a toy from a very young child because he is hurting himself with it, the child may start demanding,
“Give me my toy! Give me my toy!” He might kick you in the shin and run away. Naturally, you wish the child wouldn’t do this. You might talk to him, or give him a consequence for his behavior, or hold him and give him loving attention. However, you don’t assume the child purposely acted this way to hurt you and turn away from him. He is only a child. He is learning to love, share and communicate. You feel moved to help the child learn.

It helps to look at your partner this way. You can see he is only being reactive. One of his buttons, one of his childhood wounds, has been pressed. He reacts like he did as a child, communicating in words and actions, “You don’t love me! If you did, you would do what I want!”

Suppose your man turns away from you to play with one of his “toys.” Instead of collapsing in your own feeling of,
You don’t love me
, you could notice,
There it is. He’s getting distanced into a mode again
. You can relax in your heart and serve his growth rather than assume he doesn’t love you. Just because he kicks you in your emotional shin doesn’t mean you should kick him back or run away.

Each of us has a child within that responds the way we did as a child. “Give me my toy! Give me your love! If you don’t give me more attention I won’t give you my love!”

This inner child responds when our buttons, our childhood wounds, get pushed. Our feminine button gets pushed when we feel unloved; our masculine button gets pushed when we feel constrained and not free to do what we want. In response to feeling unloved or constrained, we act like little children. “If you don’t give me the love (or freedom) that I want, then I’m going to collapse or close down or leave you.”

No man is capable of
always
giving you the love that you want. When your inner child doesn’t get its way it will want
to run away, collapse or kick back. Intimacy, like parenthood, is a practice that requires giving love to your partner even while he is pushing your buttons or kicking your shins. Love begets love. Punishment and withdrawal without love do not provide the basis for trust and real growth in intimacy.