How To Find A Good Man

Jake Eagle — Sunday, April 24th, 2011

“How To Find A Good Man,” is a continuation from my previous blog, “Why can’t I find a good man,” in which I suggest that many women attempt to force relationships to work with the wrong men. It’s as if these women try too hard. Ironically, if they are successful, they end up in a relationship in which they have to keep working hard.

By the way, everything I’m saying applies equally to men looking for good women, it’s just that in my experience it’s more common to hear women express their concern about the lack of good men than it is to hear men express their concern about the lack of good women.

How to find a good man—or partner—requires three basics:

• Intolerance
• Being the kind of person you want to attract
• Showing up fully and not holding yourself back

Yes, intolerance! Think of it like this, there are three stages to romantic relationships: dating, relating, and mating (mating being the equivalent of marriage). During the first stage—dating—you want to be intolerant of things that don’t work for you. This doesn’t mean you need to be rude or disrespectful, just firm. If your date picks you up late—and that really doesn’t work for you—let him know. If he does it again, tell him that if it happens one more time he’s out. Apply the three strikes and you’re out rule…

What a lot of people do very early on in relationships is negotiate about everything, try to be understanding, and compromising. These efforts may be appropriate once you get to the relating stage, but they are not appropriate in the dating stage. The dating stage should be easy. It’s a time to have fun, explore how your rhythms sync up, and figure out if you’ve got good chemistry—which can be pretty well determined from first base.

The second key to attracting a good man—or partner—is to be the person you want to attract. If you say you want a partner who is mature, reliable, financially stable, and able to communicate well—you need to be that person. Relationships work best when like attracts like. If you find someone to compensate for your limitations, it’s too easy to become dependent on that person. More often than not this leads to problems.

The third key to attracting a good man or partner is to show yourself, don’t hold back, only putting forth your best self. This is a flawed strategy—waiting until you are invested in the relationship before telling him whatever it is that you think he may disapprove of.

I recently worked with a client, a man, whose female partner of two months asked, “Are you in love with me?” The man made himself nervous with the question. Out of fear that she would disapprove of his answer, he sidestepped her question, leaving it unanswered. He missed an opportunity to show up, justifying his actions as a way to “avoid conflict and hurt feelings.” But by not showing up, he missed the chance to clarify their relationship, which from a Green Psychology point of view would have been the kind and respectful thing to do.

Having enjoyed almost twenty years of an easy and delightful marriage, I’m convinced that it is crucial to honestly show up, not hold back, and then the answers to your questions will become obvious. I realize that sometimes we fear the answers, but by avoiding them—which is really avoiding ourselves—we procrastinate living our lives.

You see it doesn’t matter what the answer is. Showing up and being honest allows us to see what’s obvious. When people don’t show up, or they aren’t honest, the relationship drifts into the territory of hallucinations. The result is misunderstandings, power struggles, resentment, and a lack of true intimacy.

You may challenge yourself with my formula for how to find a good man or how to attract a good partner, but it works. If it feels difficult, that’s just because it’s unfamiliar. But ask yourself how well your strategy—the one you’ve relied on for years—works. If it worked well you wouldn’t still be searching for a good partner. So, although my approach may feel difficult at first, if you do this—living, partnering, and relating will be easier.

The other thing you can do, which will help you be more honest with your partner, is learn Perceptual Language by reading Speak Love Not War, an Introduction to Green Psychology. The book is being given away for free on this website, for a limited period of time.

     

Tags: Easy, Intimacy, Love, Marriage, Maturity

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 24th, 2011 at 6:21 pm and is filed under Relationship Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.