Merry Christmas everyone!!
First time posting here.
Please I need advice,
I have had so many unsuccessful relationships, my dad is not a good role model with regards to treating women because he treats my Mum badly.
That’s a legitimate explanation for your difficulties, so don’t beat yourself over them. Everybody has his own unique challenges, and some things that come easy to some people are hard or impossible to achieve for others. A greater challenge in just one area does not make you a worse person or a less successful one overall. Don’t give in to any such thoughts.
And the positive thing is that those difficulties are most likely just that, difficulties. Not absolute obstacles. It’s most probably within your power to fight and defeat them.
The moment I enter a relationship with a lady, I automatically predict failure, it never lasts, always ends badly.
You’re on the good path, actually. You already realize the difference between reality and those fears. That those fears often end up being fulfilled is a different matter, one that does not change how fears are not reality. Imagination affects how you function in reality, but imagination is not reality.
It’s quite possible you’re choosing the wrong women or at the wrong time, or alternatively the wrong moves. But, like my grannie used to say, or was it my dad, if you really met a woman who really was into you, hard, then you wouldn’t be able to get rid of her even if you tried to.
In order to maintain a HAPPY and SUCCESSFUL relationship with a lady, what should I do, can someone suggest a detailed article online.
You generally can’t be happy in a relationship that’s part of your life in you’re unhappy in your life in general. First deal with the overall underlying unhappiness in your life, work out the issues that have built up over years due to your parent’s strained relationship, then you’ll be in a better shape for your own relationship with a woman.
Articles can be helpful, but don’t put too much stake in them.
As for success, being successful is overrated.
In terms of Christian marriage, a successful relationship with a woman is one that gets you both into heaven.
(Which doesn’t necessarily mean an easy life on earth. In fact, it involves challenged and trials and temptations.)
For the record, I believe I’m an attractive guy, good self esteem (insecure some days though).
You need to come to terms with that insecurity, accept it, forgive yourself for it (in a way), and learn to be secure in being insecure.
This means, for example, learning to feel reasonably comfortable with the fact that you’re showing some such weakness as confusion or loss of words or trembling hands, or some such ‘weakness’ as attachment to or being awestruck by a woman. Obviously you don’t want to unload all that on her like cannon barrage, notably because she’s not supposed to be your crutch or your golden calf, but a woman who’s your type of girl, who respects you and wishes you well, certainly isn’t going to be put off by it kinda showing that you’re into her, that you think highly of her, that you put her on a pedestal a little, and are a little intimidated by her beauty and other graces. Or awkward as in not knowing what to say.
All of what I’ve just mentioned are handicaps in the usual ‘game’, but they are not a problem in a healthy, mature interaction.
A sensible, good woman will also be capable of getting over you not always being ideally cool and 100% reasonable and 0% ‘creepy’ about everything. In fact, she probably won’t mind at all. It’s when people are just not all that into you that they start fussing. Or you about them.
Speaking of which, don’t yield to pressure to find or keep a girlfriend. Screw that. Just like you would fight on despite being wounded physically (or heck, even crippled, if it even got to that level), you need to learn to fight on despite being wounded emotionally. And do the right thing. Not the impulse thing. Not the knee-jerk thing. By this I don’t mean cold ethical calculation, but rather honour, courage and other proper manly motivations to act.
There is sometimes a woman you don’t want to lose, but most of them are not it, and losing them won’t kill you (in fact it may help you live).
My Dad messed up, I don’t want to go that road, I want to be responsible, I want my lady to be PROUD of me.
You aren’t your dad. Forgive him, pray for him, cheer for him, root for him, pray for him (including perhaps for forgiveness and mending of past mistakes), but don’t identify with him to the point where you lose your identity and become only an extension of him.
And you don’t owe it to women or even that one particular woman to make up for your dad and how badly he treated your lady mother. You aren’t fixing their relationship by replaying it with the women you meet.
And yes, I’ve been there, done that.
EDIT: Oh, and you need to have the courage to reach for the women you really want. Don’t choose them because of making up for your dad or because of seeing an opportunity in the circumstances, like a man who looks for wounded sparrows because he thinks a damsel without distress wouldn’t even look at him. Get rid of that sort of thinking. While your particular damsel may in fact be in distress, look for and at the damsel, not the distress. And in any case courage, courage courage. (And courage is about acting despite fears, not about not feeling fear, which would be stupidity, more like.)
