MarriedandWhatnot

Wifey (aka real wife recognized in a court of law…not ebonic term of endearment) and I were working our business while sharing information we acquired during the day. She had an interesting quote from a book she read, but I will paraphrase and add one point to it; making it officially mine.

There are 3 basic keys to success.

1) What you read

2) Who you know

3) How you spend your time

Of course this blog is predominately about relationships, so I thought about how this list could relate. I have consistently talked about ‘time’ before, so I won’t dive into that again. But I will say that it is a fundamental principle of relationships. You show someone how you truly feel about them by the way you spend your time. Whether that be your spouse, child, or God.

What we read is important in relationships too. In intimate male/female relationships, reading nourishing material will most likely help you sustain a healthy relationship, versus reading nonsense from these magazines with articles like -  “10 Ways to Satisfy Your Man.” You want to satisfy me? Challenge me mentally. It really irritates me seeing women rely on all these magazine articles written by single or divorced women telling you how to keep a man. Aside from their personal relationship status, it just urks me in general that a woman thinks (assumes) she knows what a man wants or how he thinks. These articles are absolute rubbish. Yes, a guy will go through the list and pick out a couple sex acts he likes, but no matter how you recreate reality in your head, none of that stuff will keep a man. It is purely temporary gratification. You really have to be cognizant of what you take in.

I will give you an example. No disrespect to Steve Harvey as a person. I respect his hustle and some of the things he does. But I am an honest, real person. He has a new book out on relationships and he prides himself in telling women that if they need to learn about men they need to come to him. He needs to stick to comedy because from the excerpts I have read, he is endless foolishness and the advice he gives is utter nonsense. How you going to listen to someone telling you about relationships and how to keep a man when he has been through 3 divorces himself? I mean seriously. Why would I go to a hardware store like Home Depot and start asking questions about rebuilding an alternator on a car? Wouldn’t it make more sense to spend time in Autozone…in an environment with specialists with the tools and expertise to get your vehicle operational? Or better yet, would you get your car fixed at a mechanic when you see a car driving out the parking lot and their muffler falls off right after he worked on it? Why would I seek this mechanics assistance when it is apparent he can’t keep stuff together?

I believe that too often people tend to gravitate to those who will give them the answers they want, versus the answers they need. Nobody really wants to be told they are doing wrong, going astray, or falling off the path. Everyone wants to live in the moment and do whatever feels good to them at the time. But the reality is we need to reassess where we get our info/advice, what we read, who we know and hang around, and how we spend our time. These things affect our intimate relationships with significant others, as well as relationships with our children, siblings, family and more importantly God.