PlanJam!From your screen to the scene

One of my close friends is more than a few years older than I am. Because she was happily married for many years and has raised amazing kids, many single women seek her advice. Until recently I wasn't one of them. Let me back up. I never thought her advice applied to me until recently.

A woman was talking to us about her relationship and that it had recently ended badly. "Everything was going perfectly," she said. "He confessed his love to his friends, family then all of a sudden it was over."

Feeling empathy for this woman, we couldn't help but want to dig to the root of the problem and figure out what had led to this breakup. Without giving too much of this persons business away, let's just say that she made a comment (suggestion) on something that was too soon for her to comment on. But that's not what led me to pay attention to my friend's advice.

While my friend was explaining that we don't need to give our opinion on things that we don't have the right to give them on, and that we need to know when to speak and when to keep quiet, something that the woman said made me cringe. "I was just being honest, she said."

Wow! How many times have I've spoken out of turn, given advice, or even made judgments based on things I wasn't even asked to make comments on, all on the belief that I was ‘just being honest.'

When she made that comment I realized that she wasn't being honest, but that she was being like so many of us women try to be—to mold that person into something that we want them to be, trying to enforce our goals and opinions on what we believe they can or should be. Without us really knowing it, we are turning into their mothers and who wants to date their mother?

Sure men might like their women to have some of their mother's traits like cleaning, cooking and maybe other minor things, but there aren't many men who like a woman to tell them how they should think or act.

Many women look at a man and see a "fixer upper" sign, instead of "work in progress" sign. The first sign gets us excited because we are already seeing the potential and possibilities. Immediately, we have made a ‘To-Do" list for him to work on so that they will eventually become our ideal man. The latter we ignore, not appreciating that the man might already know his goals, paths and limitations and feels fine just the way he is.

As woman, it's good to nurture, but with a gentle hand. A man wants a woman who already admires him for what he is and the possibility of what he can become on his own. Eventually if we are not careful, our pushiness may either make them resent us or become they can become so needy of our advice, that they will never be able to make their own decisions without our leading them. Either way, we loose.