I woke up this morning, praying and thanking God for how he has Blessed me. It has nothing to do with things, or never having any trials. Because there have been times in my life when I had almost nothing and the trials have been many. What I am thanking HIM for today is Love and being loved and never having too many expectations of anyone other than myself. I have never felt I had to prove my love to anyone by doing anything I didn’t feel was right.
I can recall talking to so many of my girlfriends back in the day who had sex with this one and that one. I asked why to one of them and she told me, ‘Because they say I would if I loved them…’ I can remember asking her, ‘Well if you loved them, did they love you and if they did where are they now?’ Of course, she had no answer, because what they were doing was manipulating her. Playing on the innate desire that people have to be loved. It has worked since the beginning of time.
And that kind of love manipulation doesn’t just play out in the man woman-thing. I see it at play in families. One of the things that used to really bewilder me about some of my family members was if they didn’t like a person, they didn’t want me to like them either. Well, sorry for that, I am a thinking human being and my liking or disliking a person was MY choice.
Then I see it with people telling their grown children who they should love, marry, have children with. I have seen so many relationships with real potential break down and fall apart because of meddling family members.If you see a family full of divorces, dig a bit,you are bound to find busy bodies. People who think they are looking out for their good of their ‘children’ when in fact they are simply trying to exercise their will. I often wonder if people even realize or understand how UGLY that is. I don’t think so, I think we are living in a culture where people are just downright meddlesome and they want things to go their way and they will do any and everything to make it so.
The if you love me you would syndrome…
Well. I will say if you love me you would leave me to make my own decisions, with the understanding that if I mess up, it is my mess up, the same as if I triumph, it is my triumph.
Me and my husband often talk about what has led to our marriage being a success and we count Love and faith, but, we both know that one of the biggest things was that we kept people out of our business and for the formative parts of our marriage we lived away from both sets of family. If we were broke, we were broke, if we argued we argued, if the kids misbehaved, they misbehaved and other than prayer and working together we didn’t discuss it hither and yon, we dealt with it in our home. Because we knew that talking to our families would just force them to take sides and once they did all of their mad feelings, based on what we had told them would rain down on our lives.
What we did was when one of our family members had something, anything, to say against the other, we put them on brakes, told them to mind their business, that it was our marriage and that we would not allow anyone to speak badly of the other.
I recall when I was pregnant with my youngest son, my husband went home to a funeral without me. I was feeling extremely pregnant and some kind of way. So off he went with my eldest son. I stayed in bed all day. When he got back, he told me my mom had confronted him. I was shocked, we had been married seven years by then and she had never done anything like that. I immediately got on the phone and called her, telling her to never meddle in my marriage and that if she had any concerns she should have called me. She apologized and told me she was sorry and that it would never happen again. And it didn’t and from that day forward as before, she treated my husband with respect because I would not allow her to do it any different.
I have said all this to say that if someone is meddling in your business, saying to you, if you loved me you would or disrespecting you or your marriage, only you can stop it…by not talking about it with them, not going to them with your mess, not making them feel they have any say and mostly by not compromising yourself…those who love you, really love you and want what is best for you will behave accordingly…
BE BLESSED!
angelia
