“He’ll Change”, women say about their boyfriend or husband, they all tell me that he promised to change, and even enrolled in a therapy group, but they don’t change — they never do. They never have to find continual accommodation to the spoken and unspoken demands of their “life partner”, although relationships these days seldom run into anywhere like “life”.
Women change readily and rapidly, from lover to lover, adjusting to every whim and mood of a new boyfriend, and they have no problem doing so, but they can’t easily end a relationship.
A woman can learn to serve just about any man, and most women are more than willing to be a Man Pleaser, but as pleasing as you might be, the guy eventually tires of you, generally during the first minute of contact. Man-Pleasing is an easy way to earn a living, and if you can keep it up (joke intended) you can maintain The Nest at least until the kids leave home.
Woman all know that after that first smashing boiling ripping roiling minute of “First Contact”, things roll downhill, entropy sets in, and the relationship goes numb. You have to constantly remind the man that he’s in a relationship, and it’s a constant battle between you and the hundreds of younger women he encounters every day.
If you want to maintain Peace In The Household, you’re going to teach yourself to overlook certain things, like the smell of perfume on his shorts, or the stubborn stain on the fly of his pants.
The only thing keeping most relationships going is the cost of lawyers and the threat of joint custody.
Women change their dramatics so easily that they can’t understand why men are stuck in their non-emotional, totally mental/physical ruts.
“Ruts” is the right word here.
Men just don’t change, because they never need to change. Human males, like all animals on Planet Earth, tend to do as little as possible to get from Point A to Point B, and you are one of those “things” that falls into that category. I say “thing”, because clinically, your partner will, when the mood hits, treat you like an object.
Being treated like an object means dressing right, looking good all the time, being pleasant all the time, mellow all the time, and giving great and thrilling sex every single time, just like his younger girlfriends, except you’re starting to show some signs of age and they aren’t, at least not yet, not so a casual male glance, laced with nearsighted lust, can see.
But he says he’ll change. He promised. He swears to God he’ll change.
He never has. You’ve been through this a thousand times. But the mere PROMISE of change means you continue to believe that you can’t face LIFE WITHOUT THIS CREEP.
Did I say “Creep”???
Oh, pardon me, a thousand pardons, because in spite of his creepiness, everybody else in the world thinks this guy is the greatest husband on the planet. That’s the thing about divorcing a powerful NPD — EVERYONE THINKS HE’S THE GREATEST.
They love him, he’s adorable, cute, funny, witty, charming and altogether delightful to be with, unless you share a bed with him, in which case, it’s no longer a children’s story. You’re a slave to his needs, one of which is to beat you down to a pulp, emotionally and spiritually.
Yet he’s the Most Popular Guy in Town, voted the Ideal Husband and Great Catch.
Spiritual life? Did I say “Spiritual Life”??? That’s another thing. He won’t tolerate your spiritual life, not at all. At first, to get his way, he’ll seemingly go along with it, but then, when the trap is set, he’ll pull the spiritual rug out from under you.
This is especially true if you have the temerity to actually gain some power, some prestige, some authority. This is the most threatening of all, to an NPD or anyone repressive.
Throughout all the turmoil, he’ll glibly promise to change, and might even sob and whimper and beg forgiveness. Don’t forget that this is all a cold-blooded piece of theatre. He knows very well what he’s doing, and he’s playing on your emotional centrum like the Phantom of the Opera plays the organ.
And you, quite predictably, jump when he tells you to jump, and the only thing you ever yell back at him is, “How High???”.
That’s not about him, that’s all about you, in the sense that if you can’t walk away from it, you’ll have to endure it for the rest of your life because as long as he’s dominating you, he’ll never walk away, believe it. Especially if you’re one of the millions of women who are so desperate for a man that they’ll earn the livelihood for both just to keep him on the couch.
Of course, he won’t stay on the couch for long, if the blonde he’s spending the afternoon with while you’re at work is bent over the coffee table, like she promised she would.
Sounds terribly cynical, doesn’t it? But it isn’t. I’m not making it up. That’s how 99% of all the breakups sound, and that’s what happens 99% of the time. Silly but true. Blonde bent over coffee table is a formula for breakup.
Men tend to cause breakups in relationships where they don’t want to take responsibility for the breakup, by being with their wife’s best friend when she comes home early, which was part of his plan, or by just vanishing and showing up elsewhere with someone else.
The victim is, as usual, made wrong for this.
Part of the victimizer’s modus operandi is to make the victim feel guilty for the transgression, whatever form it takes, whether physical, emotional, mental or spiritual attack, but it’s always some form of passive aggression, disguised as love, help or sympathy.
From this you expect change?
As a matter of fact, men can’t change — they’re just not built that way, and they are not capable of doing anything other than what they’re set to do, in the direction they’re facing, period.
Whatever you’ve got now, is what you’ll have in the end. Imagine yourself having spent YOUR ENTIRE ADULT LIFE WITH HIM, then ending up living with each other 24/7/365 without respite — you will be ALONE with your partner MOST OF THE TIME while waiting for death, for anywhere from 10 to 30 more years of intense close company.
When you meet someone new in your quest to give your children a father, because every book you ever read says they have to have one and your family and friends think you’re crazy to separate from such a wonderful and loving and respectful man, and they all pity you for being single, especially since you brought it on yourself by dumping a total “catch”, you have to ask yourself the Core Question: Is this new boyfriend the man with whom I want my children to spend their weekends?
Of course, you’ll spend those weekends doing what all the other single girls and many of the married girls are also doing — looking for a guy who’s different from all the rest.
Want to join the club, little girl?
You can join his club, and he’ll give you candy, but only if you’re willing to exchange the usual sex for membership — which seems like a cheap enough deal if you don’t value your sex very highly.
You’ll notice, if you’re a girl, that a girl can join the boys’ club, but the boys will never join the girls’ club.
But he says he’ll change. He cried, he swore on a Bible, he begged me to forgive him.
Until you realize that YOUR man will never change, not just every man on record in every divorce case ever filed, but YOUR GUY WHO WON’T EVER CHANGE no matter what he says and no matter what you do, no matter how you crawl and abase yourself, you won’t feel moved or pressured to find another solution other than waiting for this miraculous change. There’s always the chance that a miracle might happen.
Okay, so what is it you expect to happen, exactly?
1. He’ll stop lying to me.
2. He’ll stop squashing down every creative effort I make.
3. He’ll let me chat with my friends.
4. He’ll stop putting me down and making me wrong.
5. He’ll stop accusing me of the things he’s doing; he’ll trust me.
6. He’ll let me dress and makeup the way I want to.
7. He’ll go dancing with me and actually dance with ME.
8. He won’t hit me or threaten me or look at me hatefully anymore.
9. He’ll be nicer to the children.
10. He’ll start liking me again.
There are more expectations on the list, but those ten are the top picks; when I stopped laughing at entry #1, I was able to make the list.
I took these entries from actual group sessions with upward of 10,000 women over the past 45 years. I’ve lectured to audiences of anywhere from 30 people to 7,500 in Kansas City and Phoenix. In all, I’ve hosted over 100,000 people in a variety of encounter style groups, and this is the boildown I can provide, along with the standard textbooks on the subject that you’ll find in any socio-psych graduate library.
In addition, I cite volumes of case histories and dissertations on the issue of victims and victimizers, and one thing I can assure you; the victims MUST escape, but nothing drives the victimizer away, not even failure.
My solution is simple. Find the toxic, and in this case, it’s CREATIVITY.
There are two basic ways to handle HOUSEHOLD PESTS, like an NPD husband or wife. The first and most obvious way is to just pick up and split, but if there are kids involved, and men involved, there’s EQUITY involved.
Men can’t let go of equity.
Your old man might hate being with the kids, but he’ll grit it out just to assert his ownership and water rights. Men are men.
Don’t ever forget that this giant-sized hulk that is twice your body weight or more once ran around with a wooden stick “sword” in his diaper, and nobody had to teach him that.
The way Great Nature has it worked out between men and women is very different from the vision of David Lo Pan, the Dark Hero of Big Trouble in Little China.
In nature, women, elderly men and women, young boys and girls and gays live in a staked compound, where they grow a limited amount of edible plants, mostly green onions, and they might also prepare skins and hides, and raise a variety of animals including goats, horses, pigs, cows and dogs.
Cats can take care of themselves.
In the natural setting, men go hunting for meat, berries, fruits, nuts and, of course, women. Women are definitely part of the hunt, and this survives well into the present American culture, although the word “culture” doesn’t fit very well with “American”, does it? I’ll get letters on that one, so “screw you, too”, in advance.
In nature, men run around from compound to compound, within tribal limits, unless they’re out on a raid to get some more women from the neighboring tribes, with whom they’re always at war, whether actively or passively. That’s humans in a nutshell.
Tribal Wars are realized in the form of Corporate Takeovers and such; the Wall Street Bankers recently won their war against the Middle Class by destroying the real estate values with a phony real estate value panic. Works every time. The Middle Class is well-trained to be suckers, born every minute, as predicted by Tex Guinan.
Who?
Never mind, look it up if you’ve got the energy to click a button.
CREATIVITY is the weapon of choice for a woman caught in a trap with a paranoid controlling creep. Of course, if there’s violence involved, all bets are off. In that case, don’t even try to save the mawwiage.
If your husband is NOT VIOLENT, you can try this gentle and not very threatening solution — join the Women’s Creative Workshop and get creative, really, deeply creative, and don’t let him stop you by his constant bitching and crushing commentaries about how stupid, useless and ugly your creations are.
One hint that he’s a nut-case is that everybody else thinks he’s terrific. He always plays to the audience, and is smart enough to never let anyone but you see his Dark Side.
It brings to mind the stunt that St. Mike and I pulled on Hollywood Boulevard in 1967.
One of our friends was clothier/haberdasher Cy Amber. We also knew Cy Devore, on Vine Street, next door to the Broadway on the North side, and Harry Nilsson’s songwriting studio to the South.
Devore was officially The Dresser to the Stars, and was world-famous, and once in a while, when we got good contracts or advances on royalties, a gang of us would go buy some new duds. This happened often enough to fill several closets.
Cy Amber was also a celebrity dresser, and his shop was on Hollywood Boulevard, just a few blocks west of Hollywood & Vine.
Saint Mike and I walked in and asked Cy if we could stand in his window for a few hours, to make a psychological experiment.
“No problem,” he nodded, “go ahead. There’s plenty of room, or move something if it’s in the way.”
Mike and I stood motionless in the window, robot-style, long before the dance craze. We did not move, until a child with parents passed by, then we waved to the kid, and re-froze in our store dummy poses.
The kid would tug on the sleeve of one parent or both, and exclaim. Of course, we could only lip-read what the child was saying, because we were separated by a store window.
When the parents looked away, we’d move again, prompting the kid to again tug on sleeve or sleeves.
We’d go on with this only three times, max, then reveal to the parents, who up to now had been considering a child-psychologist to handle the kid’s hallucinations.
Kids love invisible pets, friends and places. Why not let them have them while they can?
Anyhow, the point I was making here was that an NPD can manifest any way he OR SHE wants to, without regret, without consideration of harm done, without looking back at the trail of damage they leave behind them.
As a result, everyone in town, including the judge at the divorce hearing, will think he’s God’s Give to Women, which corresponds roughly to his own point of view of himself.
What’s happening when he dumps on you about your creativity and newfound certainty and positive authority is that he’s attacking you on the crafts and creativity front instead of hitting you where he really wants to — he’s jealous, envious of your creative projects, because these “new lovers” as he sees them, are taking your attention away from him, and he needs your attention far more than anyone or anything else does.
Your NPD needs YOUR attention, and is so desperate for it that he’ll control you to the ground if he has to, in order to get the amount and type of attention he feels he needs. Anything you do that isn’t about him is a direct threat to his ego, which is fueled and supported by his inflatedly high, but actually low, self-esteem.
As confident as he may seem, as overblown and terrorizing as he may be, he’s actually scared, and his self-esteem is totally riddled down to holes, but he’s learned to project his low self-esteem into others and, through charm and seduction, make them believe it.
Yeah, that’s the primary weapon of the NPD — charm & seduction. Yelling? They don’t yell, unless it suits their purposes. You have to remember that someone without an emotional centrum can create any role and play it to the hilt without remorse, without flinching.
Lies? To a sociopathic personality, it isn’t lying. It’s the truth as the listener can understand it. Everything gets tweaked & twisted to fit the reality of the NPD. Nobody else is real, nothing else is real, it’s all just toys and objects and things to manipulate and make into slaves to serve the needs of the NPD, the Most Valuable Player Ever.
Tired of the bullshit? For this, you had a bikini wax?
Most women aren’t tired of the bullshit, not really. Part of the problem is the addiction that a woman has to having THAT partner, but it’s a more generalized addiction when a woman MUST HAVE a partner, any partner, rather than no partner.
With this in mind, when the next offer to get together or to make up comes along, even though it’s gonna be another one just like the other one, the woman will take the offer rather than risk being an Old Maid, the great horror of the American Dream. Nowhere else does this become an issue, because in other cultures, women have learned to coop in order to survive past the “good looking” stages of life.
Gosh, if you really believe that your relationship is going to be different this time, even though you’ve already waded through dozens of relationships or hundreds of one-night-stands, you’re ready to sign almost anything — how about a contract to support two men, if you’re making extra money???
The problem is that, if you’re like most women, you won’t and can’t believe the clinical fact that men won’t change, they just won’t — because they don’t have to, and that’s a fact, Jack. A man can easily dump a woman who doesn’t appreciate his prowess, but a woman goes through hell while he smiles and wonders what all the fuss is about.
A woman has so much emotional turmoil from a partner switch — unless she’s a heartless NPD, in which case she feels nothing, as usual — that she goes into a total dump-out when she and a partner break up, a period of self-doubt, wondering what she did wrong, how she f*cked it up, but she didn’t, although you could never convince her of that.
For a woman, a breakup is devastating. For a man, it’s either a non-event or the fresh air of freedom. Men always get hooked up with one woman who runs their household and raises his kids, but he’ll never give up his womanizing and sexual adventures for a single day, not even for a single minute, if we’re counting casual blowjobs in the supply room.
Are there exceptions? Sure there are — but they’re rare enough to make headlines, like “Man Returns Wallet Full of Cash”.
So try my CREATIVITY CURE, if you want to save the mawwiage, or if you want to shake the tree a bit, to see just how stuck and repressed you really are.
Either way, Creativity is the answer, for nonviolent households. You need to get your confidence back, and for a woman, there is no better way to raise your self-esteem than through CREATIVITY, lots of it!!! And CREATIVITY is more than good sex and making babies!!!
See You At The Top!!!
LeslieAnn