Welcome to Thomistic Womanhood. In today’s video, we’re going to talk about something I touched on in a previous video and I’ll link it up somewhere here. And it was about something I was calling Relationship Calibration, which is examining what you expect out of a relationship. So you can start to kind of reverse engineer why you’re getting the results you’re getting. Stay tuned.

Welcome to Thomistic Womanhood. So in today’s video, we’re going to talk about relationship calibration. And that is a fancy term that I’m making up to describe what we expect out of a relationship and how that’s gonna impact what we get out of our relationship. In another video, I had talked about the soul, which is an ability of us to think and choose. And in the soul, there was a certain part called the cogitative power. So here’s the diagram. And as we can see, if you remember, here’s our chart again. And this is the cogitative power. And the cogitative power is the part that makes those associations, especially when something negative happens, any kind of strong emotion can cause an association to get made, especially when we’re younger, and everything. You know, this is why sometimes, smells will bring back memories, sometimes we can get very traumatized by things that happen. It has to do with that part of our soul that makes these associations and the way it’s making the association is not always it’s not always involving the intellect. Sometimes it can be kind of automatic. This is also known as animal prudence cause there can be an instinctive aspect to it almost seemingly instinctive.

I think this is part of where we get our ideas about relationships, especially if sometimes you have a bad relationship and ever after that you associate certain things about men or certain things about what you’re likely to get in a relationship.

In this video, I would like to kind of discuss a little bit and help you reflect on what you expect out of relationships? And what are you hoping to get, I feel like there are two main things, there could be more, but I’m going to talk about two big ones that have shown up in my life and shown up in the lives of women I know. And that is you’re either there to build a man up and emotionally nurture him or you’re there to receive, he provides for you, he protects for you. And I would make the case that I think a lot of us women, we come to relationships expecting to over nurture men, and it’s normal, we’re women, we’re empathetic, we nurture people. And I think a lot of times we want to give to a man a level of nurturing and care that is only appropriate to children. And then, we end up either attracting these men that are kind of broken, and they don’t want commitment, because they’re not mature enough for it. And it’s because we have this impression that we’re there to give emotional support.

Now, don’t get me wrong. A good healthy relationship should entail an aspect of emotional support. Like, yeah, you should emotionally support your man. There is some nurturing that should be going on there. Absolutely. But I feel like sometimes we women, I think giving a little too much. And sometimes we can end up in a situation where we kind of end up being a guy’s mother, because we have this expectation in our mind, that the height of our relationship, I think this can be summed up in sometimes we think that the height of relationship success or intimacy in a relationship is shown by, us talking about feelings and maybe talking about like our childhood traumas or something. And while that can be important, it’s important to know the life history of someone you’re involved with. I do think we women, we often kind of expect that out of our relationships. And so if we’re not always hearing about our man’s feelings about things, we tend to worry that like, maybe something’s wrong. And then we also overlook something that men do when they love us. And when men love us, they want to do giving, they want to do the giving, they want to be the one protecting us from problems. They want to be providing solutions.

I had one friend; he was a mutual friend. He was dating My friend, and while they were dating, he once told me, he did something for her. I was like, Oh, that was nice of you to do that for her. And we were talking about relationships, because he was kind of he had, he was probably used to being melancholic, and he had a bit of a philosophical bent. And one day he and I were talking about relationships. And (my friend’s name was Stephanie, hi, Stephanie, if you’re watching this,) he said, I want to be useful. I want to be useful to her men, we want to be useful when we love someone. And I thought that was deep, and that was very self-aware of him to say that. Because, you know, I’ve noticed it ever since then, even with other men, even in the workplace, you know, whenever a man feels a certain friendship for you, whether that friendship has progressed to the point where it’s romantic, or not, even if it’s platonic, I noticed that, yeah, men want to be useful. They want to do things that make your life better, they want to make a difference for you. And I think as women, if we have this expectation in our mind, that a relationship is about emotional nurturing, it’s about this feeling, the discussion of feelings, the knowledge of feelings, the healing hurt feelings, I think sometimes as women, we expect that out of the relationship, and we ignore the receiving part that we can do as women, we can accept the useful things that men do for us. And it makes them happy, and it makes them feel close to us. Because then they feel needed, that’s important to men, they want to feel needed, they’re not going to be attracted to women, that they don’t feel like they can have any kind of an impact on, they want to be able to have a positive impact unless he’s like, emotionally twisted, maybe he’s a narcissist like we talked about before.

A healthy normal man wants to have an impact on your life, he wants to have a positive impact. Men want to be useful. That kind of illustrates that second orientation that we can have toward a relationship. We can be receivers, we can be receptive, and we can receive the things that men do in their attempts to be useful to us. And I think if we kind of recalibrate our expectations a little bit, again, I don’t want to say that like, oh, there’s no emotional nurturing, like, there’s never going to be any of that, No, there, there should be that in a relationship. But I think as women, we need to recalibrate a little bit and learn to make us receiving part of the relationship. If you’re not receiving from a man somehow, then I would argue that something’s wrong in the relationship if he’s not doing things to help you, and again, Especially to our 2020, post-feminist revolution ears, you know, it may sound like weird, like, oh, if he’s not helping me, something’s wrong. Like, what am I like, helpless? But again, when a man loves you, he wants to do things to make your life better. And that’s a sign you’re in a relationship with the guy, and he doesn’t ever attempt to do anything for you. That’s a red flag. That’s often how we women get into these situationships because we’re too busy thinking, well, how can I emotionally nurture him? How can I emotionally connect with him? And we’re not even realizing like, Oh, this guy isn’t trying to be useful to me. He’s not trying to provide help to me or protect me. One of the big ways men can protect women is by putting a title around the relationship, Yes, I want you to be my girlfriend or Yes, I’m your boyfriend. Yes, we’re together for us women, that creates a certain psychological safety within the relationship because it’s like, Okay, I know, he cares about me, I know this is reciprocal.

And so a man if he cares about you, one, he’s gonna not want to lose you. So there is an aspect of selfishness to it to put a title on the relationship. He wants to add exclusivity, but there is a reassurance there for women. If he knows you both like each other,  having that clarity of intention, that’s in a way that is a form of protection and providing something for you and I think as women you know, we’ve been taught to be so independent and not need anything from man, that I think it sets us up to get into these situation ships and these relationships where we end up with Narcissist because narcissistic men, they don’t give to anyone. All they do is take and if we have this expectation that we’re here to give, we’re here to take care of a man and be there for him because well, I love him. Okay, that’s fine, you want to be there for a man, but at the same time, you should have some of an orientation toward receiving it’s not selfish, you’re not using him. It’s not wrong, men are happy in a certain sense. Men are happy to be used, you know, Now, again, I mean, that in a very specific sense, you should be looking at the relationship and seeing like, what is this guy doing for me? What has he done for me lately? There’s that freeze.

Food for thought. The other thing about calibrating what you expect in a relationship, is you want to pick happy love, not struggle love. I think another expectation we have about relationships that mess us up, is in our music, in our movies, in our sitcoms, things like that, we kind of glorify what I like to call tortured love, it’s like when a woman has these awful disappointing heart-rending experiences, we turn it into art, we make songs about it, we make movies about it, Sex in the City was a perfect example of this, Carrie and Mr. Big like, that guy kept stringing her along, and she kept getting involved with him and sleeping with him. And it was just this whole drawn-out thing. And it’s like, think about it? Does that make you happy? Would you be happy being in a situation like that? Probably not. Right? I don’t think Kerry was happy. She never really got what she wanted from him. But again, we this tortured love, this heart-rending disappointment, and things, we claim Oh, well, you know, makes me more experienced, and I’m more mature and love and Blah blah, and it’s like, I don’t know, like, be careful of that you don’t want to, you know, we talk about in psychology like secondary gains, people will do really painful things, and they’ll come into a therapist’s office, and they’ll be like, I don’t know why, you know, I don’t know why I keep doing this thing. And it leads to all these other problems. But there’s a secondary gain there. There’s some kind of payoff they’re getting that justifies all the pain. And I think as women, we have, and again, I can’t speak for other cultures, this is, this is America. But we glorify feminine suffering, in the form of heartbreak, we do. And I think that that is not healthy and empowering for women. I don’t think we should do that, in a way. We’re oppressing ourselves. We keep getting involved with these men. And I know, it’s like, no, it’s not my fault. He broke my heart. And it’s like, Okay, fair enough. Yeah, maybe he led you on. Maybe you were naive and inexperienced. And yeah, he broke your heart, and he’s a horrible person that happens. But at the same time, now that it’s happened, as women we need to learn and move on and not glorify this torture and this suffering.

And also, there’s nothing wrong with you. If you’ve had relationships that you know, tended to not be super heart-rending, like things didn’t work out. And then later you got married, like, don’t feel guilty or like you’re somehow not as smart about relationships as the girl that’s gone through like three horrendous breakups, tend to be a weird form of pride about it, almost like a badge of honor like I had my heart broken. And it’s like, does that make you better than the girl who hasn’t gone through that maybe she hasn’t gone through it because she’s doing something right.

l food for thought. I’ve gone through, you know, heartbreaks and stuff. So I’m not saying I’m better than anyone else, but it’s a concept, I think, that we should think about. And I think our media has a lot of responsibility, I think to bear for this, back in, like, you know, the Greek and the Roman times, they would make songs immortalizing great battles, you know, and throughout different cultures. When we made a song about something, we gave it an amount of honor and commemoration. We would make songs about things that we as a culture thought were important and should be remembered. And what are we making songs about nowadays? heartbreak, struggle love, tortured love, you know? What does that say about us as a culture? So yeah, be careful what you listen to, the music you listen to, we can condition ourselves to lead ourselves into these situations that are not good for us. You should make it your aim to have happy love, you should have a man that you’re happy with, you admire him, and he admires you. And he’s good to you, and he treats you well, you know nobody’s perfect. There’s always going to be quirks about a guy, maybe there’s certain I don’t know, maybe it’s how he leaves his socks around the house or something, you know, there’s always going to be if you talk to any happily married couple that’s been married 60 years or some elderly couple, they’re always going to tell you to like, there are annoying things that are always there and that will always be there about their partner.

So it’s not, it’s not ever going to be perfect. But at the same time, yeah, I think we need to be careful what we’re expecting, and how we’re conditioning that expectation. In psychology, there’s a lot of talk about self-talk, the way you talk to yourself can control the kind of results you get in life, because the way you talk to yourself is the way you condition your expectations, and what you’re looking for in the world. But be aware that there is also music talk, when you’re listening to music, or you’re watching movies and stuff, you’re sending messages to yourself, especially with the music, because there’s the emotional aspect to it. Sometimes it can engage this part of our soul. And not just that our intellect can be evolved too. But when we’re listening to music, we are conditioning ourselves to expect things. And if we’re going to constantly listen to music, where the woman gets or heartbroken, she’s discouraged, she’s confused, she’s unhappy, she has a man isn’t doing what she wants in the relationship that she’s happy with, that will condition you every bit as much as self-talk does. So be aware of that. Some of the 60s songs like the little the Motown songs, I’ll link a couple of them in the description. But there are songs where men are talking about how they want to please the woman, how they want her in their life, how they’re excited to know her, how they think she’s wonderful. Try to listen to songs like that, try to listen to songs where men are showing that they want to make you happy, and they like you on a not necessarily in a sexual way. Because our music is full of that. And that can often be a very misleading form of liking you. But you know, where the guy likes you in a somewhat wholesome way trying to listen to music like that, because I think that’s healthier, and it’s going to condition you in a more positive direction.

So anyways, Food for Thought I had touched on this a little bit in one of my previous videos. So I just wanted to talk about it a little more in kind of unpack it. So yeah, there you go food for thought. I hope that was helpful. And yeah, if you like this, Like, share, subscribe, leave a comment. You know, if you have a question or something was unclear, just you can do that.