Men...

We cant live with them but then again we cant live without them. Men!

This is a hard topic to discus because I am not bashing men more so I just don’t understand them. I think their biggest fear is commitment. When something happens in a relationship I feel they are the first to run instead of try to work towards a better solution. I am not saying this about all men. I have met many that work hard, have many goals and inspirations and who are capable of loving unconditionally but there are many out there that just don’t have those characteristics. How are we to know what is to come of a relationship with a man until we see another side to them? Us as women put our feelings out on the table I feel that men are built to mask those feelings. Maybe they learned how to do that through their parents or perhaps it is just how they are made from birth.

When I was dating my son’s dad he had a constant fear of commitment. He broke up with me on many occasions and I noticed it was when his feelings became too deep for me. He wanted to keep that distance between his feelings and what we had together and his excuse was that he was just having fun with me and didn’t want it to go any further. I guess I should have seen the signs before I made the choices I did but I realized over time that his issues weren’t about our relationship or me but stemmed from his childhood and how he was raised. More so who his mother was and what kind of things she implemented on him in regards to relationships.

I feel it is extremely important, especially for a boy to see healthy relationships between his mother and other men even so relationships between his mother and other women. That is why I try my hardest to keep a strong foundation between my son’s father and I. I have always been very determined to form a friendship with him even when things were not right between us and just recently this has started to happen and my son is a very happy 3 year old because of that. I also think that is the reason I haven’t gone out and dated anyone new. I have a fear that men will come and go and Ben will not know what a healthy relationship is all about.  I also fear that I will be heart broken again and Ben will feel the wrath and the pain that I feel which would not be good for the little dude.

I could be wrong but it seems that in this generation most men are lost and have no idea what they want out of a relationship or a woman in general which makes things 10x harder for a single mother to get back out and find the right guy to date and bring around their children.  Perhaps this has something to do with the generation before ours. Perhaps it’s because their mother wasn’t around often enough, or they come from a broken home maybe even a blended one. Could these contributing factors have anything to do with how a man portrays their own relationships? Maybe, but that is just an assumption on my part with nothing to back me up we can never be too sure. I also won't deny the fact that their are many women with these same issues and fears of commitment and I am definitely not eliminating those possibilities nor am I trying to say that it is just men in general because I know for a fact it is not. This is a topic I often debate about and I love the male species I truly do but I wish they came with a hand book and maybe us women can organize our thoughts and feelings accordingly to make a relationship work and last longer.

My hopes and goals while raising a man myself is that he understands what a healthy relationship is and that he will always have respect for women. I feel as though men of this generation lack the respect they once had for women. For example my granddad would do anything and everything for my Nana and there was a certain level of respect between the two. They were married for 64 years and made it work and they were happy. Probably because they didn’t run from a problem they had to face but instead faced the problem together.

What are your thoughts on this topic?

-Staci SMFS