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Attraction
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A dozen fallacies about romantic relationships
07 Sep 2006 by Rod Smith / No Comments
1. If you try hard enough you can make someone love you, or to stay with you when they have already decided to leave.
2. Habits you find annoying will disappear after the wedding, or after the new house is built, or when he or she gets a new job or a new car.
3. Having a baby will fix a troubled relationship.
4. Living together is the same as being married.
5. Men want sex more often than women want sex.
6. Real love means you will love everything about the person you love.
7. Forgiving means forgetting.
8. Time heals.
9. Jealousy is an indication of love.
10. Loving another requires self-denial.
11. Real love is two people in the “same boat.”
12. People who are in love always know where the other is, and what the other is doing. -
He wants sex to see if it works with me…
26 Aug 2006 by Rod Smith / 1 Comment
Reader’s Question: My boyfriend says we have to have sex to see if we are sexually compatible before he will continue seeing me. What do you think?
Rod’s Answer: What an old and ridiculous line. Move on! Your boyfriend is what I call a “pp” or “penis propelled.” If you really want to assess sexual compatibility it can be done without removing a single item of clothing!
First, compare credit reports and financial statements to see how each of you handles money. How you respect, use and save money, will exert more power over your long-term sexual compatibility than any immediate sexual encounter will indicate. It’s very hard to be passionate, faithful lovers when you are fighting over maxed-out credit cards.
Second: Compare your attitudes toward and your relationships with your immediate family. You can tell everything worth knowing about a person by how they respect and appreciate their parents and siblings. People who show little respect for their immediate family, or little desire to care for them, are unlikely to be a successful long-term husbands or wives, no matter how good or passionate they might be in a bedroom.
Third: Assess attitudes toward hard work. A shared, healthy attitude and high regard for hard, honest work, will give both of you useful insight into your long-term compatibility much more effectively than will the immediate experimentation with each other’s bodies.
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Thinking about authentic love…
20 Aug 2006 by Rod Smith / No Comments
Those who are growing in authentic love try to listen, prefer to negotiate mutually agreeable decisions when conflicts arise, yet boldly and lovingly enter disagreements when agreement is not easily established.
Those growing in authentic love know that such love often hurts, perhaps even more than it experiences good, warm, and soothing feelings. This is partly because those who are growing in authentic love are constantly reminded of how little power and control people really have over each other.
Those growing in authentic love forgive people even when forgiveness is not requested. They forgive because they know resentment, bitterness, and hardness hinder everything that is beautiful about the process of personal growth.
Those growing in authentic love expect those whom they love to know what they want from life and from love. They themselves have a clear sense of who and what they are and understand that self-definition is an integral component to nourishing enduring relationships.
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He wants sex to see if we are “sexually compatible” before we can go on…
12 Jul 2006 by Rod Smith / 4 Comments
Reader’s Question: My boyfriend says we have to have sex to see if we are sexually compatible before he will continue seeing me. What do you think?
Rod’s Answer: What an old and ridiculous line. Move on! Your boyfriend is what I call a “pp” or “penis propelled.” If you really want to assess sexual compatibility it can be done without removing a single item of clothing!
First, compare credit reports and financial statements to see how each of you handles money. How you respect, use and save money, will exert more power over your long-term sexual compatibility than any immediate sexual encounter will indicate. It’s very hard to be passionate, faithful lovers when you are fighting over maxed-out credit cards.
Second: Compare your attitudes toward and your relationships with your immediate family. You can tell everything worth knowing about a person by how they respect and appreciate their parents and siblings. People who show little respect for their immediate family, or little desire to care for them, are unlikely to be a successful long-term husbands or wives, no matter how good or passionate they might be in a bedroom.
Third: Assess attitudes toward hard work. A shared, healthy attitude and high regard for hard, honest work, will give both of you useful insight into your long-term compatibility much more effectively than will the immediate experimentation with each other’s bodies.
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Girlfriend and wife behavior at parties gets lots a mail…
27 Jun 2006 by Rod Smith / 9 Comments
Recent columns about friendliness, interpreted as flirting, have generated a lot of mail. Of course I do not support deception in relationships, and of course, when a partner salaciously fishes for the attention of the opposite sex it can damage the sanctity of a committed relationship.
But open (not covert) friendliness at parties that generates a jealous and anxious response from the partner, suggests deeper problematic issues between the couple, quite apart from the “flirting.”
A person who tries to curtail a significant other’s open friendliness through threats, withdrawal, the angry eye, by driving home in silence or in a rage, has a bigger issue than the one who “flirts.”
Love, aside from being the polar opposite of controlling behavior, resists jealousy. Love refuses to accommodate the demands of the jealous party. No relationship benefits when jealousy gets it nasty way.
I’d suggest women who are openly friendly at parties, who innocently enjoy people, continue to do so. I’d suggest jealous husbands deal with their jealousy without blaming it on the woman.
Then, if a woman is so desperate for male affirmation that she is truly salacious, I’d suggest something more helpful than curtailing her behavior at parties is required if the relationship is to survive.
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Verbal log-jam
When I was a boy I’d endlessly practice the fluent delivery of my name but it seldom flowed easily from my lips. As if it was new news to me, adults pointed out my stutter. Perhaps they thought I was beginning, at that precise moment, for the first time in my life to spit from the mouth, twist at the neck, jig my head back and forth trying to expel some inane statement log-jammed between my gut and my throat.
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Life in our beloved 122
If the inside of a house (outside, too, I suppose) is a metaphor of the lives of the people who live in it – which is something I once read somewhere – gosh, are we in trouble. Our house is a mess.
I consistently clean it room by room, thinking often of the legend that the Golden Gate Bridge that says there’s some guy constantly painting it. I feel for him. While I am sure the view is wonderful I must believe that the poor guy whose doing it daily from one end to the other must find the wind and the weather quite a challenge.
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Being a white South African can come with complications
Being a white South African reared under Apartheid is no simple matter. It permeated everything for me. While I do not pretend to have been a political activist, I was always cognizant that my privileges, simply a result of being born white, were unmerited, and most unfair especially when enjoyed at the expense of others who were not. I think this unsettling truth (for I took advantage of my station in life) was somewhat of a companion to me from the age of about six or seven.
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Location, location – remembering winter in August
We live very close to our school and church, so close we can hear the school bell from our kitchen and the church bells in my bedroom.
Sometimes we walk to both and we don’t see the car for days.
I like it. I like not having to get in and out of the car. I like not having to negotiate traffic, something as synonymous with life in the USA as Disney, Fast Food, and the Fourth of July.
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Ready to adopt?
If you wait until you are ready to adopt a child you never will because you will never be ready. The baby, and only the baby, will make you ready. Reading the right books will be helpful, but “ready” magically comes upon you when a real baby is sleeping in your arms or crying in the middle of the night. If you are not ready to change diapers – and I always am amused at the big deal about this non-issue – being unprepared will last only as long as a clean diaper.
Life inside the Smith household
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