How To Love Him Better

I’ll come off my post yesterday to highlight a split side. It’s been hackneyed across relationship blogs, love influencers, speakers, that men love respect. Note that narrow minded people speak about love not from a place of deep understanding but as though it were a product, explaining love as if it’s an engine with definite parts. The nuances of love and emotional demands in love cannot simply be explained away by saying, “Men love respect, give them respect.” Men are different, their needs are different, but if you can approach this concept granularly, taking apart its constituent parts so you arrive at the soul of it, you can define a foundation as far as conversations that bother on love and respect for men is concerned. Because you have a solid understanding of the foundation, you can enjoy better relationships with the men you come across. For teachers who preach love, if one understands love one must break down its complexities- and this is where you become a true teacher of love, when you are able to take complex concepts as far as love and relationships are concerned, and break them down so that even your most simple minded listener can not just understand, but apply. If teaching is not effective, you are just blabbing. One of the ways you respect a man is by showing appreciation. Men are funny beings. If a man buys you a laptop because you need it for work, and you appreciate him both vocally and with your actions, his mind is interpreting that you liked the gift, end of. You are not appreciative yet. Where you become an appreciative woman and by extension, in his mind a woman who respects him, is in what I’ll explain below… The true test will come when he cannot afford to buy you a pair of slippers that you really need tomorrow. Are you going to start ranting about how much of a useless lover he is? Are you going to start frowning your face or create a hostile environment? If after all the times he has bought you things, the one time he tells you that he is unable to get you something you need, you use that to judge him, then you are just a silly woman. How you react will tell him if you respect him, and love him. Many women make a mistake here. Men will always make mistakes, men will always be incapable of providing all your demands on them, and if you use the times they fall short as the overarching story of their lives, then you are a silly woman with a short memory in love. Put his actions in a scale, always remember the 99 he has done when you want to address the 1 he didn’t do. A man can be consistently available to some woman and the one time she needs him that for some reason he is unavailable, she attacks this, dwells on it, nags about it, till it becomes the story of his life. That is not the friendship in love we preach. When you hear men talk about feeling pressured in relationships, it’s not because the woman is choking him with her hands to his throat, it is her unrealistic demands as far as love is concerned that are a problem for him. She wants him to always behave a certain way, to always be thoughtful and kind, to always provide and to always have the right words or the right behavior and the right answers, and many many demands she makes of him as if simply by virtue of his being a human being, he’s not fallible. The good thing I’ve noticed is, as women get older, they get wiser about this fact of men- that men are JUST MEN. When you place unrealistic demands on a man, you are creating a prison for him in love with you, and no man loves to feel caged. He is not a machine. He can’t operate at 100 daily. He is not going to be able to treat you like a princess every day and you must show him that you love and appreciate him for the efforts he makes, ESPECIALLY, on the days that he’s unable to provide or be to you the things that he often is. You must approach your concerns from a place of understanding not denigration. Instead of saying, “Paul you are not kind, you are not emotional to me…” Say, “Paul, you are usually kind and you show me you love me in many ways, what’s happening? Are you depressed about something, can we talk?” As a woman, the first sentence is apportioning blame while the second is layered with the kind of “respect” they talk about when they say men love respect. Both sentences are saying the same thing, but one is salted with wisdom. I hope you take the little lessons in this note and apply it in your relationships.