Relationships are tricky. After spending so much time only providing for yourself and only taking your own feelings into consideration when making a decision, suddenly partnering up with a woman and coming to the realization that you can’t be selfish anymore is often a bitter pill to swallow.
With that being said, we often make mistakes in relationships, sometimes without even knowingly doing so. Here’s our relationship advice for men.
You’re too preoccupied with being an “alpha male”.
From childhood, males have the old-fashioned mindset that they must strive to be an “alpha male” drilled into their heads. The “credentials” that are widely recognized as being necessary for a man to be regarded as an alpha male are as follows:
- Wealth. Men should apparently always be the biggest providers of the family, meaning that we should earn more money than our significant others because apparently we suffer with crippling self-esteem issues that mean we want our girlfriends to uniformly have less success than us.
- Fitness. There is absolutely nothing wrong in keeping yourself fit – in fact, if you want to live a healthier life, then it’s a requirement – but the modern definition of what qualifies a man to brand himself an “alpha male” is that fitness isn’t just something you do for your own personal well-being, but also something that you should broadcast to anyone and everyone who will (reluctantly) listen. You’re a human, not a lion, so being physically stronger than everyone else doesn’t automatically make you a better person.
- Arrogance. The most insufferable of all the prerequisites for becoming an “alpha male” is arrogance, which the majority of perceived alpha males wrongly believe is a synonym for confidence. Being the most boisterous and most dominant personality in whichever social circles you float around in doesn’t make you the most powerful: it makes you an intolerable person to be around.
Many men forgo the option of having a loving, equal relationship in order to continue their pursuit of being branded an alpha male, by continuing to live life as if they were a single man and inserting old-fashioned tropes of what a man and woman’s “place” in a relationship should be regardless of the fact that it’s 2014 and they should really know better by now. Don’t be that guy.
You spend too much time together.
It’s lovely that you enjoy spending so much time together and everything, but for f*** sake, go and have a drink with your friends.
Many men instantly drop their social circles when they become involved in a relationship, because now that the thrill of having a night out as a single man has been taken off the table, they come to the conclusion that there is no more joy to be had in venturing outside without being glued to their significant other’s hip. While it’s understandable that you’ll spend less time with your friends as you now have other commitments, cutting them out altogether will only result in you having no one to turn to if your relationship doesn’t work out.
You’re not expressing what you’d like to do in your sex life.
Sex is a huge part of relationships but it’s also a part that, for some reason, is often overlooked. Many people have simply come to accept that the longer they have been with their partner, the more boring the sex will become, but this is because many couples fail to discuss what they’d like to get out of their sex lives with their partners.
Conversing about your sex life shouldn’t devolve into you sitting her down, looking her in the eyes and begging for more blowjobs, but you need to be open about your likes and dislikes, and hers too. While this doesn’t mean that you both draw a road map of each other’s bodies and point out where you like to be touched and for how long, you should more openly discuss the kinds of things that turn you on and vice versa. It doesn’t sound like such an insurmountable task, but you’d be surprised by how many people continue having mundane sex for the sake of ease.
You’re too worried about time.
As the clock keeps ticking, you begin to feel progressively more anxious about where your future is headed. This means that the older you get, the more likely you are to settle down with someone you’re not too interested in just for the sake of not dying alone.
While I can’t imagine dying alone is much of a pleasurable experience, living your life in the company of a significant other whom you’re indifferent to won’t be an easy task, either, because there are only two ways that your relationship will progress.
- Your indifference will eventually morph into resentment and you’ll split up after an unreasonably lengthy period of time. She’ll take the kid(s), you’ll take the dog and go sleep on your parents’ couch for the next three months.
- You’ll stay with each other, neither of you being particularly happy but not giving up on your relationship because you feel there is no alternative.
The longer you remain in an unhappy relationship, the less time you have got to try to find someone who you can be happy with.
Photo: Getty Images
