8 posts tagged “husband”

What A Relationship Needs To Succeed

"If we were endowed with the same biological mating pattern as the [pair-bonding] goose, there could be no polygamy, no promiscuity, no celibacy, no harems, no group marriage, no trial marriage, and no divorce in any human community in any part of the world." and "The gibbon's 'very low sex drive' is a reminder...[of the fallacy] that pair-bonding is based on sexual attraction."
- Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman, Bantam 1972

The article title refers mostly to male-female relationships, though the first reason could apply to any relationship, including friendships. Let's examine that first reason.

Why so many relationships fail is simply that few people know what makes a relationship work. A large part of that has to do with the fact that living conditions for most people today are so different from those in the past.

In my country, Canada (numbers for the US are similar), a century ago 85 percent of the population lived in the country, in rural areas. That left only 15 percent in cities, despite what we hear and read about lots of people in cities in those days and very little about those who lived "off the land." Those numbers are reversed today.

Today 85 percent of North Americans live in urban areas, have access to everything cities have to offer, but miss out on so much that was good about rural life. Country living is simply not available to most people, for reasons beyond their control. More importantly, what was good about rural life in the past has not been replaced sufficiently by the good of city life today.

In agricultural areas and in areas where most people made their living from resources in the past, people had few enemies. They needed each other. Everyone people knew had value. No one knew when they might find themselves at the side of the road with a broken wagon wheel, homeless (or barnless) because of a fire, in need of someone to fetch the doctor in town but unable to get there for having to look after a sick child, or any of uncountable possible emergencies.

Rural people often needed someone else to help them. They couldn't afford to alienate others they may need to help them one day. Few rural people had money to spare, so volunteer help meant drawing on the goodwill of friends and neighbours, who were often one and the same.

Kids learned in their families how to get along with others because they had to. Sure, they had fights, many physical, far more than today. But they learned to make up after a fight and get on with their lives. Friends were often combatants of the past who made up so they wouldn't have to live as hermits without any friends in areas with few other people around. Grudges were rare because people couldn't afford to have enemies living nearby.

Today people in cities believe that most of their needs can be satisfied with money. We hire people to do whatever we need done. Friends are often workmates, fellow church parishioners or other people life brings together frequently. We may know our neighbours little more than on a nodding acquaintance basis.

Friends tend to be those from whom we can derive some benefit, such as people where we work or fellow club or church members. When it's clear that these people can no longer provide us with any benefits or potential benefits--they or we change jobs, one leaves the club, one moves some distance away--the friendship dissipates with the disappearance of the potential for mutual support. Friends have become another form of object in the throw-away society. There are always more people become friends with in a city. Of course this generalization, like all generalizations, is not true of everyone and not necessarily entirely true of any one person.

Because of this impression that anything we need can be bought, we have allowed ourselves to lose the feeling of needing others in times of tragedy. In the process, over a period of decades we got out of the habit of teaching our children the skills of making friends, of keeping friends through all adversities, of knowing what makes a friendship work. Again, that's a whole society, not necessarily true in every family.

Though most of us now see more people in a day than our ancestors of a century ago saw in a month, we tend to have fewer close friends, people we can count on when the going gets rough, when worse turns to worst. We no longer teach relationship skills because they were not taught to us. We don't know what to teach because most of us don't even realize there are great gaps in our knowledge about relationships.

To make a friend, you have to know how to be a friend. To find a good mate, you have to know how to be a good mate.

The second reason most relationships fail is that we don't know our obligations in a relationship. We know what we want from others, but we give little or no thought to what they may want or need from us to maintain a healthy relationship. As relationships are two way affairs, when one person feels no great commitment to the other, the relationship fails or wanes away at the first crisis.

For any relationship to succeed, each person must believe that they contribute more to the success and health of the relationship than the other. The perception of an imbalance is usually not real because we don't fully appreciate what the other contributes. But if we perceive that we contribute more to a relationship than we receive and we can be comfortable with that, the relationship has a chance.

The best examples of why relationships fail is demonstrated by the staggering divorce rate in western countries. A husband or wife believes that the other is not giving what they used to, that their own needs in the marriage are not being met, that the spouse is "not the person I married." It's usually true. However, what most people fail to appreciate and understand is that their own commitment to being a devoted spouse may be equally weak.

You can't be a good husband or wife if you have very little idea of what is required of a good husband or wife. Ironically, we all seem to have pretty good ideas about what is required of the other, our mates, even if we don't know what is required of ourselves.

The third reason why relationships fail has to do particularly with male-female relationships. Especially the requirement of fidelity in a marriage or common law relationship. If there is one thing we have taught each other and our children about marital and marriage-style relationships it's that each partner should be monogamous.

The trouble with that is that there is nothing in our natural or evolutionary history to support that. Humans, like all the great apes, are genetically and hormonally programmed to spread their genes as widely as possible. That means that men are genetically programmed to want to bed as many women as they can. And women are programmed to find as many healthy males with whom to procreate future offspring as they can.

Many people will find those last two statements offensive. But why? Nature didn't teach us to be monogamous. Religions did. Religions even decry (in some cases even threaten death to participants of) male-male and female-female relationships. Why? Because those who formed the religions knew that most gay men are still capable of passing along their male genes to fertile females, just as most lesbians have the ability to give birth to children, can be impregnated by healthy males.

Religions, in the past, wanted desperately to expand, to enlarge their congregations, to increase their power as unelected bodies of social influence. That meant, in addition to sending out missionaries and conquering other cultures and nations by war, encouraging their own followers to have as many babies as possible. The financial ability of parents to raise children, the likely health of the children and the knowledge of parental skills held little importance compared to the lust for expansion. What was important was numbers.

As a result, homosexuality was forbidden and banned, while having large families was encouraged. To keep order among the families of congregations, religions dictated that families should consist of one adult male, one adult female, and the only other adults allowed would be those who could help to tend to the children while the parents were busy creating more or working to support the ones they had. Polygamy and infidelity were considered sinful because the resulting "families" would be hard to manage, to control.

Science doesn't care much for the word monogamy. It likes "pair-bonding." You have heard of animals that pair-bond, that stay together for life, through thick and thin. Like geese--most examples of pair-bonding are birds, including northern gannets and penguins. However, the only pair-bonding along our branch of the evolutionary family tree is the gibbon. Though gibbon mates are totally devoted to each other, they are comparatively anti-social. They have little to do with other gibbons or other animals of any kind. They keep to themselves.

Gibbons, like other pair-bonded animals, have low sex drives. Not an attractive characteristic for us humans. In fact, sex is of so little importance among pair-bonded animals that some gibbon couples are homosexual and some heterosexual couples do not engage in sex. Do we really aspire to pair-bonding for ourselves? We should see pair-bonding as it really is in other examples in nature.

Let's switch back from the term pair-bonding to monogamy. Monogamy, while a charming and attractive concept in certain contexts, is fundamentally unnatural for us humans.

If monogamy is unnatural and many people insist that they could never live with a mate who is "unfaithful" (i.e. not monogamous) then the marriages and marriage-like relationships that depend on monogamy will likely fail. Estimates in the US of infidelity among married men range around 85 percent, while most estimates of infidelity among married women range between 65 and 75 percent.

A priest commented to me recently that it's up to each member of a couple to fulfill the sexual and other needs of the other so he or she doesn't need to go looking elsewhere. Good idea in theory, doesn't work in practice.

If a marriage depends on monogamy, that makes sex the most important component of the marriage, literally the tie that binds. There are two things wrong with that. One is that a marriage must be based on much more than sex or it doesn't have enough to sustain itself. The other is that few people with a lower sex drive than their partner feel compelled to engage in sex and its accompanying gestures and procedures if they don't feel like it. They may not want to have sex, even if their partner does, but they also don't want the "needy" partner to go out and have sex elsewhere.

It may not be the actual act of infidelity of a partner that results in the breakdown of a marriage, but the attitude of the mate that feels "cheated on" who feels the partner should be something he or she was not naturally programmed to be.

Few "unfaithful" partners want to break up their relationship. They just want to be fulfilled in ways they can't get at home. Nature tells them to find it somewhere else.

A wife who says "You may be the perfect husband in all other ways but you can't be faithful to me, so you must get out of my life" (even though she can't give what the husband needs sexually)--reverse the gender words if it applies--can be the partner who makes the marriage fall apart. If doing what nature dictates and what all other primate animals do causes a marriage or relationship to fail, then the marriage was not well founded in the first place.

We humans have the ability to use our intellect to overcome our natural inclinations. Few of us use that ability. Every war that ever was, most murders, almost every person behind bars in a prison or jail and almost everyone in a mental institution or on mood altering drugs give an abundance of evidence that we tend to give in to nature much more often than we overcome it using our intellect.

When following what comes naturally to us causes a relationship to fail, there is something wrong with how the relationship is constituted. That is, we don't know what a close human relationship is, what it should consist of.

When you don't know what you're doing, expect something to go wrong. It will. If you want a relationship to succeed, you need to learn what the other person needs and how you can fulfill that.

A successful relationship means two people each committed more to the welfare and happiness of the other than they are to their own. That's hard. But no one ever said it was easy.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers, parents and grandparents who want to give their children what they need at each stage of their development, rather than leaving it all to chance.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

For a woman, finding the right man to love her the way she wants to be loved, to be a good father to the children they create together and to provide a healthy, vibrant, creative and enjoyable family environment that will last a lifetime is almost impossible.

Why? While there are many reasons, a few stand out.

Most commonly, a woman goes looking for the wrong guy. Back in prehistoric days, a woman wanted a strong man, the best warrior in the tribe, someone who could provide for and defend her family. If he was good looking, even better. If he fertilized other women, so be it, so long as he looked after the best interests of her family.

That attitude persists today, even though almost everything else in life has changed. Women still want the handsomest, strongest, sexiest guy with demonstrated ability at leadership as he gathers other guys to follow his lead. Anyone who doubts this should check out how girls in the latter years of grade school and in high school tart themselves up for the guys. They may want to be treated as sweet and innocent, but they look and act like hookers because they know what guys like to look at.

No question, guys like to look at attractive women. If they could, they would take every one of them to bed. But they wouldn't necessarily want to spend their lives with them.

If I guy can score with a girl who looks and acts like a hooker, but not have to pay fees, he considers himself a winner. And so would his buddies. But guys don't want to marry hookers, because...they have proven that they have too many other sexual interests. Girls who look like hookers and put out sexual vibes like hookers may get the attention of guys, but those guys don't want to marry them.

The same applies to the captain of the football or basketball team, or any other jock who looks good stripped to...well, stripped. While most girls are attracted to these guys, many have none of the other qualities a woman should be looking for. That "get the best possible male to mate with" attitude persists even though we no longer live in tribes.

The best warrior in the tribe in prehistoric days seldom lived past age 24, almost never past age 30. Since the tribe did much of the teaching of children anyway, getting the best set of genes seemed wise. The warrior would always be busy with matters other than those relating to the family, and women knew that. Today, the same guy would be a terrible person to depend on for personal and family values.

Today, most men live past 30. It's the next 50 or 60 years after that the women who marry them can't stand.

Very few of the skills a young man learns in high school apply to the fulfillment of responsibilities of a family man. We don't teach the skills that families need, that women should be looking for. So young women continue to want the best looking guy they can get. And when they marry and he fails to satisfy the needs of her or their children, they can't figure out why.

The most popular girls and guys in high school get so used to constant attention from members of the opposite sex that they continue to want that attention into college, into their work lives later and into their time as parents. They don't need commitment, they need attention. Girls should want a life partner who gives attention, not one who seeks it from them.

Girls naturally favour men with confidence. Whether in men or women, confidence is the most important characteristic of beautiful people. An average looking person with lots of confidence and a big smile can be a sex symbol. Just look at the stars of movies, only they have the addition of makeup to make them look even more perfect. Brad Pitt may be great for the imagination, but few women could tolerate spending a life with that kind of man.

As great as confidence is--I firmly believe it is critically important to a person's well-being--it does absolutely nothing to make a man a better husband, lover, father, provider or planner. Confidence is but one characteristic of a person. That characteristic can be taught and learned. Most people who have confidence learned it by themselves, though it can be learned by taking classes of various kinds.

Those who don't have confidence in themselves and their abilities and strengths should take a class to learn how to show confidence, to feel confident.

Men need more skills than confidence, good looks and rippling muscles to be good husbands, fathers and long term friends. For a woman to depend on the looks of a man as the main feature she loves and wants would be the same as a man loving a woman because she has breast implants, a tummy tuck, butt rounding, a nose job, reconfigured ears and a hair transplant. Every study ever done shows that most men don't want those features in a wife and mother. A majority of men want "natural" women, no matter if they have body features that are not perfect.

Women shouldn't depend on good looks and popularity as characteristics that will make a man a good husband and father. In fact, nothing about the appearance of a man, good or not so good, can be held as predictors of what he will be like as a husband, lover, father, provider, friend or sleepmate.

Advice to women: When looking for a mate, search for one who has the characteristics you want in a man for what you want to do with him in the years to come. If one you like doesn't have those characteristics, make sure he is the kind of man who will gladly learn what he needs to know. If he won't, look elsewhere, quickly.

Advice to men who have read this far: The same applies to you when looking for a lifemate. Paris Hilton or Salma Hayak or someone with the name of Diaz or Cruz may be great to ogle, but they won't necessarily have the characteristics you want at home. And they will always want the attention they get now from other men.

It's not just a matter of caveat emptor. It's a matter of looking for what you really want rather than wanting someone who looks good but has nothing else to offer that you will find valuable in the years to come.

Think ahead. Unfortunately, most people don't get better with age. If you want a partner that will, look for that characteristic before you settle.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who know how to cope with the needs of their lives instead of depending on television and movies to tell them.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Your life today is a result of your thinking yesterday. Your life tomorrow will be determined by what you think today.
- John C. Maxwell (Think on These Things, Beacon Hill Press, 1979), American leadership coach (b.1947 )

Don't think you are alone in believing that life is mysterious, that reality is impossible to understand. Anyone who doesn't think that has allowed his brain to settle with what he has been told to believe and to understand.

As you read this sentence, there are nearly seven billion versions of reality among us humans. What's more, by the time you finish reading this article, many of those realities will have changed. Some people will think differently, thus they perceive the reality of that moment differently than they did before.

Can you remember what you thought about the world ten years ago? It's not the same as it is now, is it? In fact, it wouldn't have been the same for you five years ago, one year ago, even a few days ago. Everything you experience alters your sense of what is real.

If you pay attention to (believe) what the media tell you, you will believe that the world is rapidly becoming a more terrible, even horrifying, place. It isn't, based on a huge survey of factors around the planet, but it serves the needs of the media for us to experience some fear about the way of the world, enough that we will tune in to their next broadcast or read their next newspaper or magazine.

If you believe those who criticize you--many do, even if you are not aware of it--then you will see yourself as a clearly inferior being among a much more superior group of fellow humans. They want you to feel that way. If you do, then they have changed your reality. If you do not believe them and act contrary to what they think of you, eventually you will change their reality by giving them a different impression about you.

Even the belief you have about the reality of the world--your world--this moment will be different from someone close to you, such as your spouse. What's more, your spouse's (friend's, mate's, mother's, sister's) sense of reality where it concerns you will differ significantly from your own sense of reality about yourself.

I am reminded of the chipmunks I see outside my window where I live. Chipmunks (known properly as the eastern chipmunk) are solitary squirrels that live in burrows they dig in the ground. They fight with every other chipmunk they meet, usually over food or burrow space, throughout the year (except when they are sleeping during winter). But when mating time comes, they are great romancers and lovers. Once the deed is done, with as many mates as they can find, they return to their solitary existence. When the females have tended to their young, they send them off to fend for themselves, as most rodents do, so they can be alone again.

Being more sociable creatures, we don't try to live alone for most of our lives except to mate. Yet mating is one of the few things we do that we all agree about. Many of us try to avoid procreating during the process, but we still want to have sex because it's fun, pleasurable, satisfying and most of us get a good feeling by helping our partners to enjoy themselves and to feel good.

Once the sex is over, we become relative strangers who cohabit, friends and roommates who live together for their mutual benefit. Until it's time to have sex again.

How can two people ever stay married under circumstances like that? Actually, it's not that hard. But the condition is that we must always consider and work toward the best interests of our partner (or immediate family). Sometimes (often) that means putting their best interests ahead of our own. When that doesn't happen--when one person's own best interests take precedence for themselves most of the time--a relationship is little more than a way to pass time between episodes of sex. Eventually, the relationship will fail.

For some people in a failing relationship, their reality is that their marriage is good and healthy, until the other person passes them the word that it isn't. We may call it betrayal or cheating, but it's simply a matter of two people having realities that are too different from each other's.

A good relationship is not a matter of compromise, as we are taught. Compromise is part of it, but only as a consequence of putting the best interests of the other person first. Compromise comes after, not first. Compromise only comes first in business relationships.

How can we put the best interests of our significant other first if we aren't sure what those best interests are? If you think that your other half's best interests are the same as yours most or all of the time, then you likely don't know what the other person's best interests are.

It has wisely been said that a good relationship is not a matter of staring lovingly into each other's eyes, but of looking outward in the same direction and seeing similar realities.

Just a little something for you to think about.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of solutions to social problems that most people and governments consider realities of modern life, but that aren't. They can't see the solutions because they don't look in the right directions. The solutions are easy and cheap, but hard to find it we aren't looking for them in the right way.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

That's "bonding" in a social sense. It doesn't mean a male and a female stuck together, mid-copulation, for life.

Monogamy in a sexual sense virtually doesn't exist in nature. The red fox, noted for its devotion to one mate, slips away occasionally to spread around the good will. The Adélie penguin, also famous for its monogamy, gets away occasionally (the females, that is) to mate with unattached males.

The female penguins exact a fee for this service. The male has to pony up a bunch of stones to bolster the nests of the female. Some skilled female penguins can even get a male to offer up the stones without offering her services later.

"Genetic testing has put the lie to the myth of monogamy" according to narrator F. Murray Abraham, of the PBS series Nature. Ninety-nine percent of mammal species never form pair bonds. Of the few that do, the genetic material of the devoted pairs can still be found in offspring of others. In the case of the red fox, that figure is about 80 percent.

So, in nature, monogamy means devotion to one mate in a relationship sense, not in a sexual sense. Nature cares about genetic diversity, not relationships.

Though life began on our planet some 3.8 billion years ago, sexual reproduction didn't evolve until about two billion years later. Scientists aren't sure why it even developed since they believe asexual reproduction has advantages over the sexual variety in several important ways.

The excuse that close relationships of paired animals required it falls apart when you realize that sexual reproduction developed first in plants. Unless, maybe, plants that reproduce sexually send signals between each other that we can't detect. "Hey, Baby, how about we put your pistil together with my stamen?"

The earthworm Dendrobaena rubida has the best of both worlds, with both male and female reproductive equipment. It can mate with any other of its own kind. In a pinch, it can even double itself around and mate with itself. Successfully, without having idiot offspring. And they don't call each other by nasty names either.

We know a fair amount about the mating habits of monkeys because they have been studied intensively for the past few decades. Bonobos, which are quite similar in appearance to our nearest DNA relatives, chimpanzees, are notorious lovers. They go at it many times each day, with no thought about jealous mates. Bonobos are also known as the least aggressive members of the ape family. Do the math.

Barbary macaques have maybe the noisiest mating procedures. Once the male engages the female, the female yells to get the male to ejaculate. Without the yelling, the males often don't climax. My sources didn't say if the yelling was of the "Get it on, you....!" or of the accentuated sweet talk variety.

If people did that, it would be on YouTube. Or YouPorn, a new site for amateurs.

The spiny anteater, native to Australia and New Zealand, has a penis with four heads. (You can't make up stuff like this. No one would believe it.) However, only two of the anteater's penis heads will fit into a female at once. No mention in my sources about threesomes.

The ultimate in mating--at least the ultimate in mating sacrifice--must be the tiny paper nautilus. It's an octopus. The smaller male impregnates the much larger female by shooting his penis into her. Then he has to leave it there and take off or the female gets mighty grouchy.

Nature has lots of examples of homosexual behaviour. About 1500 species of mammal, fish, reptile, bird and even invertebrates do it.

When two male geese decide to keep company, a female will often slip between them and mate with both. Later, the males share fatherly duties. I have seen that happen with mallard ducks as well. It was a bit strange to see two males and one female together constantly for weeks at a time each year.

Fruit flies have been studied in laboratories because they are such easy subjects. At the University of California at San Francisco biologists exposed male fruit flies to high levels of alcohol, then turned them loose. The males were ready to mate with anything they could, including other males and other species of flying insect (if they could).

One expert said that eventually the test turned into a homosexual orgy, with "a chain of males chasing each other."

The more alcohol the males had in them, the less likely they were to mate successfully, despite their lack of discrimination. No wonder they're a great model for studying human-like behaviour.

While bonobos and orangutans join humans as the few species to mate face to face, few other primates do. Hamsters and beavers are among them.

French kissing is rare in nature. The white-fronted parrot is the only species other than humans known to do it. The birds open their beaks prior to mating, then touch each other's tongues. After that, the male spews his lunch over the female's chest.

While the latter behaviour is not common among humans, it's not unknown among college frat boys.

Size does matter. Tall people tend to choose each other as mates. People also tend to choose mates with the same hair colour (check out how many blonds are coupled with blondes), skin colour and education level.

One British study even showed that obese people tend to choose mates with comparable levels of body fat. While the reason for this may seem self evident, the mates usually select each other before they become obese.

Finally, nature plays some dirty tricks on us dumb humans. Young women with the most curvaceous figures usually become fat as they get older. Rounded butts and eye-catching breasts are almost entirely composed of fat. For many women, fat collects first in the places that men pay most attention to. Then it spreads. As always, caveat emptor.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today' Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach kids what they most need to know to avoid getting into trouble, before the trouble presents itself.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

The greatest motivational act one person can do for another is to listen.
- Roy E. Moody, motivational speaker

Judging by Google search results, this Roy Moody quote ranks as his most popular. And rightly so. A motivational speaker (president of Roy Moody & Associates) giving his best advice about how to motivate others.

But listening? Don't we do that all day long anyway? People natter at us for one reason or another and we have to respond.

That's just the point. Most of us consider what we say to be of value, while what others say is, at best, mildly interesting.

More often than not, our most common form of oral communication would be labelled as small talk. Stuff we talk about but have little or no commitment to. The weather. The results of a popular local sports team. The mischief a well known politician or Hollywood star has been up to. Nothing to spill your coffee over.

Yet everyone we meet has a story to tell. It's the story of how they got where they are. For most of us, it's a tale sprinkled with tragedy, life lessons about survival, the consequences of misdeeds, broken and failed relationships and a few great stories about good things that happened to them. Each person is an expert on that story.

But we have our own story to tell and no one wants to listen to it, so why should we listen to the story of someone else we don't care about and we don't want to hear the story anyway?

Because everyone's story is interesting if we give them a chance to tell it in some detail and with thought given to the telling. And because giving someone your attention long enough for them to tell their story is one of the beat ways to make a friend.

For many of us, friendships are more like business relationships than true friendships. In today's world, friendships are as disposable as old toasters. When someone (a "friend") can no longer provide us with something of value, we find someone else who can. We tend to spend more time with those who can give us more of what we want than with those who may deserve our attention. That's business. That's the business model of life.

Giving someone our time to listen to what they believe is important is giving them our most valuable commodity, our time. People not only appreciate that gift, they treasure it in many cases.

We all have busy lives, which we use as excuse for why we don't have time to listen to the life stories of others. Their lives are busy too. When no one cares enough to give that gift of time and caring about another to listen to what they have to say, true friendships and even good working relationships are impossible.

It has truly been said that a smile can make someone's day. It makes them feel good. But listening to someone in a way that shows you care makes them feel valuable.

Most of us don't have many ways that we can feel valuable and worthwhile to others. If we want to have that feeling with someone, listening to them is a great way to begin.

And it's a great way to continue that relationship. When people stop listening to others who love them, the others feel they are no longer loved. Whether the loss of love is true or not, that is what they feel.

When no one wants to listen to us, we have no reason to think of worthwhile things to say. Think about how many people you know that really don't have anything worthwhile to say and you will understand how rare it is to find someone to listen.

When we give people our time to listen to them, we trust them with a valuable possession. That trust may be warmly appreciated the first time it happens. When it happens again, they know we care. They want to be associated with someone who cares about them.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want their children to grow to be competent and confident adults who feel loved and listened to.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Give whatever you are doing and whoever you are with the gift of your attention.
- Jim Rohn, motivational speaker, philosopher and entrepreneur

The fastest way to make people like you is to give them the gift of your attention. That's attention without distraction, without doing something else at the same time.

Listen to what they have to say and look them in the face while they are speaking. Don't stare because that indicates you have become distracted by something other than the words being spoken. Such as a pimple, a scratch, the colour of the other person's eyes or something that doesn't belong on his or her face. Staring is bad because it achieves the opposite effect to making them like you.

You don't have to look the person directly in the face, at the same spot--such as the eyes, or one eye--for long. A sentence or two should be enough. Then look somewhere else nearby, briefly, to give the impression that you are thinking about what the person said.

Then look back at the face.

In order to give the impression that you are paying attention, you have to actually pay attention. You must pay attention because you will need to add a comment, ask a question or suggest something that indicates you are considering what has been said. Since you won't care about making someone you dislike or have little respect for like you, you needn't fear that you will give the wrong person the wrong impression.

People like when others pay attention to them. We live in a busy world where seldom enough does it happen.

What happens when you pay close attention to what someone is saying--someone physically close enough to you so that he or she knows you are paying close attention--is that the self esteem of the person rises. Even a self confident person feels gratification when someone unexpectedly pays attention to them.

People like others who raise their self esteem. That can be your opening for friendship.

It's also worth remembering that allowing yourself to be distracted while someone is speaking, especially paying attention to someone who has interrupted your conversation, is a great turn-off. Self esteem plummets when in the middle of speaking someone who has been listening suddenly turns away to give attention to an interloper. You might as well say to that person's face "I don't like you and I don't respect you."

Giving your attention to someone is relatively easy. You can repeat it for those you see regularly, if you want to ramp up your relationships with them. For those you will never see again, you will have been a bright spot in their day. They will remember you the next time they see you, if you cross paths again.

When you end each conversation, be sure to smile. Leave the person on a high note, a smile and some sort of wish for their welfare.

If it works into the event, touch the person briefly on the arm as you say goodbye. Touch is another indicator of liking and of wanting to enhance the relationship.

Next time you see that person, offer something from the previous conversation to indicate you considered their words valuable enough to think about when you were apart. It need only be something brief, an enhancement of something the other person said. Then move on to another topic because neither of you will want to rehash the same conversation.

At some point, if you want to make that person a friend, you must offer something of value to him or her. If that offering relates somehow to spending of money, you are telling the person that your relationship is based on a kind of friendly business association. Such casual friendships evaporate when two people no longer see each other frequently.

Most new relationships that begin with people intending to find a mate fall apart because they are largely based on something relating to money, not on the value of the people to each other. For example, if a guy begins a relationship with a woman by buying a dinner and buying a movie, the woman will feel that her interest is being bought. If there is nothing more personal to the date--even if it includes sex--the relationship likely won't go anywhere because it's fundamentally a gigolo-prostitute association.

To make it a more meaningful relationship, you will need to offer something more valuable than money, your time. That may involve your skill, such as help to put up a chandelier and attach the wiring, or it may involve just your time and effort, such as helping the person accomplish something he or she is having difficulty with. Or help to do something the person wants company doing.

Making a new friend is not hard if you know the techniques. What is much harder is to be able to figure out whether the person is worthy of being your friend. And, more important to that person, whether you are worthy of being his or her friend. Remember, if you want the other person to want to be your friend, you must offer value to that person as well as that person must for you.

In any successful relationship, each person usually feels that they contribute more to its success than the other does. That's natural because we can seldom know all of what the other friend does for us. It just seems unbalanced.

In a marriage, that apparent imbalance may seem as high as 80-20, with each person believing that they contribute 80 percent to the success of the relationship. That's how much most of us miss of what our spouse does for us and to contribute to our security, our welfare and our comfort.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, grandparents and teachers about what they need to know regarding child development, how important each kind of development is and when to tweak each. It's the handbook everyone needs.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

If you aren't good at loving yourself, you will have a difficult time loving anyone, since you'll resent the time and energy you give another person that you aren't even giving to yourself.
- Barbara De Angelis, relationships coach

The first part of the quotation sounds like the basic material of any relationships coach. The second part, the part that most omit from the equation, allows the whole thing to make sense. It drives home the part about loving yourself.

I relate to most of the quotes I use because they conform so well to my own experience, either personally or through observation of others. This one describes much of my life.

My childhood was totally without love. It was without hate or rancor too. It could better be described as a business arrangement between my parents. One set of grandparents--the ones I saw often--exemplified the same business arrangement. My other grandmother, a widow, loved her children and grandchildren, but lacked the means or skill to express her love, so it went largely unnoticed.

When I married the first time, I made the best business decision I knew how to make, based on my experience growing up. My wife, who left me and our two children a decade later so that she could further her career, succeeded in the teaching profession, reaching the position of school principal before she died of cancer caused by excessive and persistent overwork.

Not long after her death, my new wife and I suffered a huge financial loss, so were unable to provide my now-twentyish kids with what their mother had led them to believe they deserved from me, in the sense of financial benefits. In turn, they made the best business decision they could, they dissociated themselves from me totally. I have not seen them for 15 years, or my grandchildren ever.

Working my way through my grief at being alienated (albeit illegally and by lying to their own kids about my being dead) I learned a very important lesson, how to love myself. That lesson showed me that I have value and worth as a human being, something I had not recognized before as everyone who knew me treated me as a business contact. That's how it works, people who treat others like business associates gather friends who treat them the same way.

Knowing how to love and respect myself gave me the insight to be able to love others. Lo and behold, I no longer resented others because of the love they withheld from me. They wanted to love me because I loved them.

What's more, the more love I gave to others, the more I received back. It was the goose that laid the golden eggs. Only the gold turned out to be love, not financial wealth.

My conclusion is that the resentment I had for others I should love--perhaps including my own children, but I'm not certain--vanished when I learned to love myself. I thought I loved them but maybe they sensed resentment. I certainly didn't know how to show them love very well then.

As a side benefit to my new life, I no longer feel lonely, even when I am alone for a long period of time. As another benefit, people come to me with their offerings of love because they know what they will get in return. It's a good deal both ways.

Now I see a world of lonely people who have business arrangements as relationships, who don't know how to give or receive love fully, who have troubled children even though they tried their best to raise them well, who can't keep a marriage or "significant other" relationship for long because "the business" changes.

Money is the most important thing in their lives, though they tend to think of it in terms of possessions--"he who has the most toys when he dies, wins." They think I'm simple because I'm happy without being rich. They don't even appreciate that they are rich without being happy.

I don't know how to explain it to them.

No one should have to go through hell to get to heaven, as I did.

There are important lessons to learn and we need to teach them. Those of us who know. We may fail with some, but we will succeed with many if we keep trying to teach them. We will regret our failures, but only until we consider our successes, those we love and who love us in return because of what they have learned and received from us.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow happy, loved and successful children into happy, loved and successful adults and parents of their own children.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

The Secret To Finding Your Ideal Mate

This technique shouldn't be a secret. It's only a secret because not many people know about it. It should be taught to all young people.

In early adolescence we begin to overtly take notice of members of the opposite sex. Many kids have noticed before that, but family and peer pressures forced them to be quiet. That's why many kids go through the "I hate girls/boys" phase, depending on the gender, right before adolescence hits. They feel clumsy, awkward, ignorant of what to do to get the attention of those they have noticed.

As adolescence kicks in, hormones take over and the fact that kids don't know what they're doing matters less. They all know very little (though some fraudulently claim to be experts in the locker room or at sleepovers), but it doesn't matter because they are driven by nature to find partners. Nature says "It's time!" even if the kids don't have much idea about what to do.

So they look, and look. Through high school they try to match up with the most attractive others they can. The most popular kids get the most dates (and the most mates, judging by the bragging), even if they aren't the best looking.

What kids this age never seem to be told is that the kids who are the most popular in high school tend to become socially lost after that. In the real world, the wider world outside of high school, they are more average so they lose their following. And their narcissistic belief in themselves as social magnets.

The most physically attractive ones may find others as attractive, but the ones who were most popular and most attractive in high school have very poor records for choosing mates they stay with for a lifetime. In general, they have sad records on the happiness scale.

The salient point here is that young people look for the best deal they can make in a mate. They want to find "the one who is best for me." This may or may not result in love later, but that's not the point. It's a selfish, self-centred approach. Eventually, that wears thin with mates who have their own interests at heart and they separate.

What young people don't realize is that they should be trying to make themselves as attractive as possible to potential intimate friends. Dating should not be so much a matter of "What's the best I can get?" as "What do I have to offer to someone else?"

Dating is a buyer's market. But when the deal is closed, both parties need to be happy with the arrangement. That means that someone looking for a new dating partner needs to have enough to offer to potential dates to make them worth the investment by the other.

When kids look for the best they can get, the results usually reflect the self-centred approach. Those who make themselves attractive as mates will have the best chance at attracting the kind of partner they hope to find. They have something to give rather than wanting to take something.

Think of it this way. Walking through a parking lot, you likely wouldn't bend down to pick up a penny (unless you're superstitious). Some won't even bend down to pick up a quarter. Most everyone would reach down to grab a $10 bill. The $10 bill has a value far beyond that of the small coins.

In the dating market, potential partners look for mates with the most value, with the greatest potential to fulfill as many of the items on their mate wish list as possible. The shiny quarters may look good, but they usually get discarded after a while. Or they get cast off or traded in for something better, someone with more personal value to them.

Dating is a prelude to marriage for most people, according to the tradition of nature. In marriage we want different things, seek different values, than we do when dating in high school.

Almost no one meets the love of their lifetime in high school. The reason may be that we're all looking for attractive and popular partners for short term relationships, while we want people with real value, lasting value, for long term relationships such as marriage.

The secret? Build value into yourself. Make yourself valuable to the partner you want. To make that relationship last, never forget that when you don't offer your partner the value he or she expects, something will go tragically wrong. Real value lasts a lifetime if you want your relationship to last that long.

People look for others with different characteristics, so no one will work for all. You can choose values for yourself that you would want to find in others. Make sure you demonstrate those values and don't lose track of them later.

Someone with values similar to yours is looking for you. If you're looking for a mate, advertise your values and state clearly the values you are looking for in a mate. That may turn off most, but it will get the attention of the ones who will matter to you.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how, what and when to teach children the knowledge they need to lead successful adult lives, including finding the right mates.
Learn more at http://billallin.com