Stop! The Heart You Save May Be Your Own.

Posted on March 16, 2014 by dontdestroyrelationship

Stop! The Heart You Save May Be2This is written for those who will do anything to hold on, and do all they can to save a relationship.

I have been there before and let me tell you, once is one time too many.  Don’t do it!  Save yourself!

It does not matter how many years you have been together.  If the relationship keeps hitting a hole and there is no resolve coming from both you and your partner; do not fight for the relationship alone.

If you are fighting for the relationship alone, then you are in the relationship alone.

Self sacrifice in a half on/half off relationship will end in emotional damage that will take you at least a year to heal, and this is if you make a change or two, like a change of residence, maybe even relocating to another city.

Trust me. If you choose the route of self sacrificing, bending, yielding, forsaking and taking all of the pain, the distant attitude, and the back handed remarks, you will only be able to take that for so long.

Then there is the on again.  All seems well— for a minute. Pay attention!  There is no discussion about the problems in the relationship.  When things are going good, you don’t want to be the one who rocks the boat. So you don’t have a discussion about the future or how to avoid the problems.  There is a moment, a day, a week, maybe even a month where it seems that all is going good.

This is false hope.  You are the only one feeling that things will continue to go good.  Then boom. Something happens and you are right back at the crossroad, but you are feeling worst than before, because the hope you had for the relationship is crushed.

You are feeling hopeless.

You are doing everything you possible can.  Saying all the right things.  Doing all the right things. Maybe you are gently trying to talk to your partner, trying to get a two way dialogue, and you just aren’t getting much response.  You are going above what you would normally do. You just want it to work.

Inside of your heart, you are hoping against hope.  In a way you doubt that things will work out, but you so want it to. After all, you have been together for so long or long enough.  A lot has been invested. Time, a house, an apartment, the kids, and the many situations you have been through together.

Your mind is reeling.  There is so much you have given, and so much between you.  How can you let go?  How can your partner even think of not doing everything possible to hold on?  There is so much you have given up; including good people you have rejected who wanted a relationship with you.

A good night of sex happens.  It was pretty good.  Although you don’t feel the intimacy that was there before, you are okay with it, because at least you are sexing.  You are thinking this has to mean something.

You take it a step further, thinking maybe you are expecting too much.  Things do change, and after all, the problem could be you.  The love, and intimacy you had before, you may not really need. Adjusting to your disconnected partner is another change you decide to make.

Now you are beginning to adjust to the “nothingness”.  You are doing okay, not great, but okay, because you have tapered your needs to what your partner is not giving you.  Until…..

You find out that your partner is involved with someone else.

Now you can’t prove it at first.  There are changes of behavior. There is an inner contentment your partner is showing that you know should not be there.  After all, you don’t have it.  Together, you have not been happy for quite some time.

The clues become more evident.  You feel your partner’s disconnection even more.  The time gets later and later before he/she comes home or returns your phone call.  The invitations to go out with friends are coming up more and more. Now, this is not bad generally, because your partner deserves a life; but how can there be all of this activity and the relationship has no activity?  Somehow it feels wrong.

Your partner, from whom you are taking the distance from, is establishing closeness elsewhere?

You start second guessing yourself, because you are feeling very jealous, and you think you are wrong for feeling this way.  How can your partner have a happy life outside of you?

You decide to ask your partner what is going on?  Perhaps there is something you need to know. There is a total disconnection in your partner’s response.  You are told there is nothing going on and nothing you need to know.  The conversation feels disconnected and the responses feels cold.  You feel stupid for asking, because you are made to feel the problem lies with you.

Now it is you who have the problem?  Hell no!

Feeling angry and frustrated you begin to notice more phone calls and texts coming through on your partner’s phone.  When your partner is talking to anyone else, there is the social engaging side that you once experienced, but is not there for you anymore.  The laughter you are hearing is no longer happening in the relationship.  The tone, concern and the support you are hearing when your partner is talking to someone else on a damn phone, you have not seen that side of your partner for quite some time.

The truth is, your partner no longer has the love for you.  Something has been lost.

Track back. When did this all begin?  Did you miss something?  Did you create the distance first? If not, then there is something else.

Distance starts in a relationship when someone is tired of trying; or someone is finding what they need outside of the relationship.

Either way, self sacrifice is not the way.  Save your heart, and you save yourself.

Why your partner is still there could be for financial or residential reasons. If there are children involved it may be the children, but regardless of what you do, how lovingly you do it, how much loveless love you take and how much you give, your partner has checked out of the relationship.

If your partner has checked out, it is wise that you figure out what’s the next move and what is best for you and how what’s next is best for you. The longer you stay checked in when your partner has checked out, will be more damaging to you and your life.

Stop the heart you save may be your own!

Note:  The title of my post was inspired from the song “The Love You Save” by the Jackson Five and the Late and Great Michael Jackson, who is my all time entertainer!

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Can True Love Cross Racial Lines?

Posted on March 12, 2014 by dontdestroyrelationship

Love Race2

Every Wednesday I am on the Female Solution show along with Mark Shahid, a Relationship Coach who hosts workshops in St. Louis.  We help couples by providing guidance and real solutions to problems.

The host, Naimah Latif, presented a young couple; a man who is African, and a woman who is Iranian.  They met while traveling abroad. Both have strong family ties, but deep within the family lines, totally unblurred, is racial hatred for anyone outside of their race.

Naimah explained the couple is in love and wanted advice on how to help their family accept the fact they want to be together.  The family is against such a union, and has gone so far as to threaten to do physical harm to the African brother, if necessary, in order to stop this couple from being together.

I always say in order to fix the problem; we must first understand why the problem is there.

This country has created a fatal, painful and dysfunctional history about race.  It is so deeply embedded, even today, that many who have not taken the time to study their history will ask the question, “Aren’t’ we doing better” when it comes to race.

Evidently we aren’t, and we really have not come that far.

Yes, people are more racially savvy and use social etiquette in ways not to engage in outright prejudice. We may say the right thing, and for the most part deport ourselves in a diplomatic way in fear of being reprimanded or socially labelled, but is this enough to remove the engrained hatred, the stereotyping, bigotry and fear that has shaped generations of different races and cultures for hundreds of years?  Is this enough to remove a system shaped in racism? Does diversity authentically change the system from the inside out?

Two opposing families, both experiencing racism in their own way, being stereotyped and judged in fear, are left to respond with hatred to the point to cause potential harm, in order to end the love this couple desires to lovingly experience, and openly share with family and friends.

I had to ask.  How can any type of love come to the forefront in the midst of racial hatred? How can it authentically happen in an environment where there is nothing but history of racial enslavement, lynchings and wrongful death? How can two people of opposing races, with only one destructive connection in common (racism), have any possible grounds of love between them?

How did this love come forth?  Is it real, or is it a form of self hatred for who they are and what they are trying to escape from, by running to each other?

I asked how does the Iranian sister truly know she is in love.  Allowing Naimah to be her voice, her response was he is very similar to her father in the ways of strength and kindness.  She said he can be a bit controlling, but she can live with that. She also found him to be supportive, smart and kind.

In truth, and in just being human, we all can connect, regardless of where we are from and what we are, but it is a system we are dealing with.  Racial profiling, the “The New Jim Crow” (Michelle Alexander), historical ignorance and the division of a people whose axiology is about being together, is a system.  Many of us do not know the difference between racism and prejudice 

If this couple had to face each other in a racial demonstration and both were holding hatred signs while looking at each other, would they have seen the human characteristics and the similarities in the midst of a racial protest?

Naimah mentioned the movie starring Sidney Poitier, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”. In the movie is a conversation between Sidney’s character (Dr John Prentice) and his father.  His father is trying to explain that dating a white woman is not the right thing to do. Sidney’s character tells his father, “You see yourself as a black man. I see myself as just as man.”

My response to that was they did not lynch you because you were a man. They don’t stereotype you because you are a man. And from what his father had seen and experienced first hand, they didn’t call you “boy” because you were a man.

Mark Shahid made a scientific observation.  We study animals, as they are in many ways similar to how we, as humans, live and behave in a communal, family and social setting, but animals do not mate with other species.

Naimah asked Mark and me the question, can we evolve to become a people who will accept another, regardless of race and love in a world without walls? Are we capable of getting past the issue about race?

Of course, anything is possible and in a few exceptional cases such relationships are successful. But the world “without walls” is nothing but a world of mental, emotional, racial and psychological walls.

The reality is until America owns it, rather than deny its historical and current issues surrounding race there will be a continuum of issues this couple will have to face.

Speaking of the continual embedding about the issue surrounding race, consider Shakespeare’s work of Othello.  Shakespeare is regarded as the greatest writer in the English language.  He wrote in absolute hatred about miscegenation.  How contradictory, if we are trying to evolve away from racial hatred, to make the study of his writings and belief system a scholastic requirement?  How can we really support miscegenation?  As a matter of fact, what does his writings imply that would make us consider we should?

How can we reverse a system of racial hatred when it is deeply embedded in a history, engrained within our educational system, threaded and executed through our justice and social systems?

As Dr Joy Leary, author of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome said on her DVD lecture, “….Africa owned apartheid, but America’s pathology is her denial.”

A couple, who expects to share their love and lives together, cannot remove their history. Whether we want to accept it or not, deny it or not, history is a part of our lives.  The success or failure of our present condition and our future is how we address our past in order to reshape our lives.

A relationship needs commonalities and core essentials like ethics, morals, and spiritual, historical and other belief systems in order to build on.  Otherwise what else is there?  Our past is critical to who we are, why we are and it impacts our future.

If a bi-racial couple is to be authentically successful together the healing has to begin with them.  The reality of what was and how it impacts what is, needs to be recognized and addressed.  The truth of why and how a love merged in such a relationship needs to be discussed, understood, objectively rationalized, and weighed.  This cannot be done on a superficial level.  Trying to deny or ignore what was only creates an illusion of what is.

We have to deal with it to heal with it.

In closing, my response to my Iranian Sister and African Brother was clear.  The answer you seek is not outside of you.  It lies within you.

If your love is profound enough to answer the questions; if it is deep enough to forego the past, if it is transcending enough to surpass a painful history and strong enough to deflect and defend anything in opposition of that love;  and if your love is open enough to talk about the history, accept it, own it and work towards progression, then your love should indeed last.  There is always someone in the family you can talk to, and who remains a neutral party.  Start with that person.

We received an update on the couple’s progress. They have managed to make a small break through with their families.  This is good news. A small break through can be the beginning of a break out.

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