Lorena Bathey  

Show Notes

• Archived Blog Post

  Date / Time: 8/2/2009 10:45 PM UTC

  I am Fed up Essay on asking for Love in your Life!
  

  I am fed up!  Completely and utterly fed up with men, with women, and with anyone that allows any caviler and disrespectful behavior from these individuals, and I include myself in this mix. 

   

  We women have no one to blame but ourselves for the immature, unfeeling games that are being perpetrated against us by people in our lives.  Women are willing to put themselves out there to feel but they also willing to put up with behavior from people we want relationships with that we would never put up with from anyone else in our lives.  If our friends didn’t call us back when they said they would, we would make sure they knew that was unacceptable. If a friend disrespected us, we would verbalize the hurt and anger that we feel to set the situation to rights or to cut off the friendship right there and then.

   

  But what do we do with people that we want to have relationships with?  We give them ample opportunity to act like jerks letting their statements like “I’m not ready for a relationship” or “I’m not in a good place in my life” give them liberty to ignore us, demean us, and push us away leaving us to ask, “What did I do wrong?”

   

  I am here to tell you that we have done wrong is not making individuals accountable for their actions and by not being honest with ourselves.  I am just as guilty as any other women and have many unsuccessful attempts at clarification and closure to go unnoticed and not be responded to as I try to get to the heart of why people act this way it seems so damn difficult to find a functioning, mature relationship in this world.

   

  Just today I found myself staring in utter amazement at an instant message from a man that I have been dating.  It came instead of a phone call that I required and expected. I felt hurt and frustrated since I believed he should know to contact me in the proper way. In the same day I was with a friend who was supposed to have a date made a week in advance and had still not had a phone call from said man by late afternoon the day of the date.  I told her that she should not go out with him and should tell him that his behavior was rude and disrespectful towards her.  Not only had he kept her from making alternate plans for the evening but he finally did text message her…yes, I said text….to say that he was in fact ill and would not be able to go out with her that evening but could they go out next weekend.  My friend was angered yet I knew that because she wanted to go out with a guy that she might in fact, acquiesce and see him just to have something to do.  I told her that she absolutely should have nothing to do with him and should tell him how inappropriate his behavior was towards her.  My statement to her was, “If I had treated you like that, you would have had said your piece to me and been honest about the disrespect I had shown towards you.”

   

  Little did I know that hours later I would be seeing the same disregard shown to me in little less than a paragraph.  That was the final straw.  I had to look at how many countless times I had seen this behavior over and over again against many other women.  One women that had begun a relationship with a guy that lived some distance from her and they had been communicating and planning to meet and learn more about each other, that woman texted me to say she had found out he was already in a relationship.  I heard women saying that they had gone out with a someone several times only to have them simply stop calling with no reason why.  I have seen and been privy to myself, the mad dash that individuals make when they find themselves facing a person they seemed to want only to find out that once they met and began dating that person that the fear that drives them made them turn tail and run. 

   

  And while it would be easy to say that this is entirely someone else’s fault this is our fault too ladies.  We have allowed and even further created the monsters by which we now have to try to find love and romance with.  It is often said that people can only treat us as badly as we let them and this is absolutely and undeniably the truth.  By allowing someone to get off the hook with an email, text, or some other impersonal communication when we want and deserve more we are telling them, “Go ahead and treat me any way you want!”  This has to end.

   

  So what do we do?  I will tell you what we do….we get mad. We get strong. We get fed up.  We start verbalizing when something is done against us that is hurtful.  We listen and pay attention to the people who are dropping the hints sometimes like atom bombs on us and we pay attention to those bombs as they fall around us.  We stop rationalizing that they are just scared and have to get to know us and be disappointed all the while thinking that the love of a good woman will cure their ills.  This is not the case and never will be.  We must not allow an individual who is unsure of their emotions to tether us to apprehension and silence because we don’t want to “rock the boat” and cause them to stop calling.  Because we put our needs last we then ignore the signs, red flags, and screaming children out there that are really just lonely, but seem to not be lonely enough to put the effort into a relationship.

   

  I speak with women all the time about putting themselves as a priority and getting their needs met.  This statement goes for all aspects of our lives, especially our relationships.  If we let our needs be easily dismissed for the chance of having someone to hold our hands in a movie, then we cannot cry into our cosmos when they leave us sitting alone.  We need to get angry at ourselves for not calling people to their truths.  Disrespect is rampant in the world of dating and relationships.  Why is that?

   

  Disrespect…it’s a word and a feeling that can have the deepest impact against us.  We know what it feels like and we know when it is being done to us, however, we are often times willing to ignore it for the sake of not being alone.  I believe that if you do that then the chasm is too wide to jump across. Like a ripple in a pond one bit of disrespect will grow until it creates a tsunami of hurt and pain.  Disrespect makes us doubt ourselves.  Disrespect makes us wonder why.  And most importantly disrespect breeds hurt. 

   

  Today I changed my behavior.  Today I decided to change the way I did things.  I did something many of us are afraid to do….I was honest about my feelings and I asked for what I want.  That’s right, I asked for what “I” needed.  Here’s the crazy part ladies…it worked.

   

  This is the problem that women have not understood and have completely denied.  I am here to utter the absolute truth….People do not know how to read our minds.   And if they care about us that does not mean that they are going to know what we want and what we need.  The only way that they will know what we want is if we tell them.  Yes, I know it’s not romantic and that we all want the fairy tale of a person magically knowing our inner desires but we don’t live in fairyland, we live in the real world.  And if you want a real relationship where you get what you need and there isn’t always an undercurrent of resentment and frustration, then you are going to have to learn how to ask for what you want.

   

  What will happen might not only surprise you but bring some real love, communication and passion into your life.  Yes, it won’t be mindreading, but wouldn’t you rather have a terrific and open relationship than the fantasy of someone reading your mind.  We get angry at others for what we feel are their slights against us but who we should really be angry with is at ourselves for not being bold enough to say, “I need you to hear me and I need to have you respond to my needs.”

   

  You will find one of two things happen. A) They get scared, angry, freaked out and run the fastest sprint you’ve ever seen which has just saved you days, months, or years of misery as they have shown you what they are made of and how they intended on treating you.  Or B) they hear you and validate your feelings even uttering some of their own feelings or worries and you then have an open and mature conversation that actually grows the relationship.  Seems like a win/win situation to me.

   

  What we need to understand is that all people want love in their life.  I know they often people don’t act like it, but I know that as human beings we all want to feel that amazing feeling that you get from being in love.  However, here is something that women know….Women know that they have to talk out their fears and worries and do so with friends to move through the stagnating emotions to the truths on the other side.  But men and others don’t always have that luxury available.  They often don’t have or weren’t taught how to work through their emotions.  And if they get hurt it seems to take them longer to deal with those pains.  By moving past the romantic notions of the Hollywood film stages you will find that communication will bring not only the truths to light but probably will show you sides of your love interest that you never thought existed. 

   

  So do I want you to get mad?  Yes, I do.  I want you to get mad when someone treats you with disrespect, no matter who it is.  I want you to know that saying what you need is your right…they are your feelings and they matter.  I want you to be strong enough to tell someone that hurts you that they did that…they might not be aware and you may find that they are sorry when they discover this fact.  I want you to be tough enough to stand your ground when someone hurts you.  I want you to decide that you are fed up with business as usual and to determine that to find the correct partner for you, you gotta know yourself first.  And lastly, I want you to believe that there is someone out there that you can have the kind of relationship that you want with.  They do exist, even though you have been hurt and disappointed, true love does exist and our belief in that keeps our hope alive. 

   

  I learned a valuable lesson today.  I learned things about myself.  I learned that I have the ability to make things right if I have the courage to be myself and to value my feelings.  I learned that often times we make assumptions, listen to other people, or ignore important words that give us great insight.  So I ask you to look at your life and your relationship and ask yourself, “Are you getting what you need and if not, have you asked for it?”

   

  Remember in all relationships YOU are the common denominator.  So if you wonder why seem to meet the same men, have the same relationships, and feel the same frustration then may be you need to look inside and make sure that you know yourself, value yourself enough, and are willing to take a chance and put those two things out on the table for your partner.  I believe and have been shown today that even if it’s scary it can also be very rewarding for not only you but for the relationship you really want…..so you see, dreams can come true you just have to know how to get them.

   

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  • love
  • men
  • women
  • hurt
  • ask
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