Standing By Your (Broken) Man
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Join Date: Apr 2013
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Standing By Your (Broken) Man
Standing By Your (Broken) Man
By Natalie (NML)
Right now, millions of women all over the world are “standing by their men”. Some of these women are standing by a decent man in a decent relationship. They have love, trust, care, and respect in their lives and share the common ground of their relationship. They have their ups and downs because, that’s life, but they’re united and it’s not just her standing by him, but him standing by her. In fact, they’re standing together.
But there are also a hell of a lot of women standing by men that barely deserve the time of day never mind their undying gratitude, loyalty, and love.
These men are loved, albeit in a dysfunctional dynamic.
These men are trusted even though they abuse the trust.
These men are cared about even though they don’t act with due care.
These men are respected even though they not only are undeserving of it but are lacking in respect of the women they are involved with.
Sound familiar?
· Men have to be taught to want a relationship and how to behave in one.
· You won’t find anyone as good as him.
· He’s a great catch!
· Men need to sow their wild oats.
· Men are like children that need a good woman to show them the light.
· A woman’s place is at the side of her man.
· A woman’s place is behind her man keeping her opinions to herself.
· Brush things under the carpet. Turn a blind eye.
· Better to have a man than no man.
· If he’s not being the man you want him to be, it’s because you’re not doing enough for him.
· This is what men do.
· Men cheat.
· Without a man you’re nothing.
· Have a guy, any guy, just don’t be a ‘alone’.
· He’ll come round one day – Give it time.
· He’s a good man, he’s just having a difficult time leaving the wife and kids but he will one day.
· Men cheat on women who don’t give them what they need.
· Men don’t want to be challenged.
· You need a man for security.
· If you stick with him, eventually, he’ll give you the relationship you want.
· All men are afraid of commitment.
All of the rubbish that has been drilled into women about “standing by their men”, are pathetic reasons to excuse poor behavior.
The world seems to work on the premise that when it comes to relationships, it’s to be assumed that the man has the emotional intellect of a child and a lack of control over his actions that need to be overlooked by a forgiving woman who is immovable from his side.
Many of us have been taught that if we stick to our men like Super Glue, at some point, they will suddenly feel remorse about their poor relationship contribution and possible poor behavior towards us, and reward us with the keys to the castle and a ride on the back of their white horse into the sunset.
There is this assumption that it’s the woman that needs to take the emotional risk and fully invest herself in the hope that if she takes the long term (more like long suffering) view, her investment will yield an eventual return on investment.
I know of women who have stayed in poor relationships for anything from a few months to forty years and beyond. I know of long suffering women who have been there through repeatedly being cheated on, mystery kids turning up, mystery women beating down their door, getting hit, getting emotionally abused, being left, being threatened to be left, being returned to, being humiliated, being the Other Woman after being the main woman, and being the Other Woman to the Other Woman after originally being the main woman.
I know of women who have waited for men that they don’t actually have a relationship with. They act like they are the steady girlfriend when they are little more than a booty call. Some of these arrangements have lasted for years.
There are millions of women waiting for their guy to ‘come good’. Many of us assume it’s a woman’s work to take a man and build him from the ground up. We like pet projects, fixing, healing, and helping, and expecting more than they’re capable of delivering. We like standing by with a shovel or a bulldozer, and some plaster to cover up the cracks. One day, they skip off down the road with your repair works to someone else. Or you look at them a realize that despite your efforts, you’re still miserable and they’re not really what you want but you’re too afraid to leave, to make a change, to bet on yourself and deal with your own issues. So you settle.
They may ‘come good’ but there’s a distinct possibility that they won’t and there’s a lot to be said for making a sound investment with solid foundations so that you don’t have to run yourself into the ground to get a payoff because this type of labor yields a broken woman….
It has been ingrained into us over centuries that women must ‘stand by your man….and tell the world you love him…’ and despite feminism, equality, and a shift in our dating and relationship habits, by and large, the world is still catering to this.
In our modern world, the sun still shines out of men’s bums, the sun rises and sets on them, and no matter what we achieve as women, if we don’t have validation from the species with a penis, as a woman, you are nothing.
When I see women marginalizing and losing themselves in the name of men, it is sickening. The panic, fear, terror, disillusionment, loneliness, ambiguity, confusion, paranoia and everything else that many women have to carry is a burden and it is down to us, to chuck off the excess baggage from emotional plane and get wise because whilst we’re standing by our broken men, they’re off living their lives whilst ours are at a standstill or a bit like a half-life. Our lives get filled with pretending to be happier than we feel, or being outright miserable but feeling powerless to change it.
It is society’s shame that many women have low self-esteem and are taught to look for love in all of the wrong places and that if their relationships don’t work out, there is something wrong with them. They must try harder to win the prize of their man.
It’s not to absolve ourselves of our responsibility for our contribution into our relationships, but surrounded by social and media messaging that caters to these long held beliefs, it really is no wonder that assclowns and Mr Unavailable’s get a look in from women.
The difficulty in us being taught to “stand by our man” is that we’ll commit when there is nothing to commit to.
It’s a bit like pick a man, any man, and take up the position.
Some women commit from the moment they feel the stirring of attraction and/or attachment.
“Some of you commit pretty much as soon as you meet the guy. You see so much potential, you’re straight out the gate, into the future. You may not even see that much potential but you’re gagging for companionship and affection. You’re the Fallback Girl that doesn’t like to be alone and thinks every guy she connects with might be the one.
Some of you commit when you realize that he has issues because you feel comfortable around wounded souls, guys who scream hard work, drama, and you feel that you can be the one to make him better. You’re the Fallback Girl that’s a sucker for a sob story and a sucker for baggage.
Some of you commit when you realize that he’s not going to leave his wife or his girlfriend, or make that separation official by becoming divorced, because you think that if you show him how committed you are, that you’ll be rewarded. You’re the Fallback Girl that commits when it becomes clear that he’s definitely not going to commit.
Some of you commit to the cycle of drama. You’re not that sure about him until he starts catering to your pattern of fear of abandonment and making you jump through hoops, and after a while, you’re not really going out with him; you’re going out with the high created by Relationship Crack. You’re the Fallback Girl that commits even though you weren’t really that interested until he started messing you around and got your attention.”
Many women love unconditionally without working out whether the person is an appropriate person to be involved in a relationship with that can commit to them, and of course love them back..
This is the fundamental problem with standing by your (broken) man:
If you find yourself as an adult with low self-esteem who has poor beliefs about herself, love, and relationships, you will gravitate to men and situations that reflect these beliefs. Rather than choosing partners that buck the trend, you’ll end up creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that exacerbates what you already feel. If this continues, you will build up a pattern of being involved in poor relationships and will end up ‘losing yourself’ because in order to accommodate these men and the relationships that do and don’t come with them, you’ll allow your boundaries to be repeatedly crossed, you’ll normalize bad behavior, and you’ll end up so far travelled from the reality of him, the relationship, and yourself, that you won’t know who you are anymore, so will feel even more dependent on the man. In continuing to love unconditionally, you love without conditions, and send a clear message that you are lacking in self-love and respect because every relationship needs conditions because it ensures that there are boundaries.
When you stand by broken men, they are repeatedly taught that there is no consequence to their behavior.
If they don’t fear consequences and know that they will always have that trusty woman to default to or fallback on, there is no impetus to change. Why should they? Change is something that most people struggle with and if there are no consequences, short of having some sort of cataclysmic moment that has them seeing the light, there is no reason to change.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your ongoing presence is a reason to change; it’s not otherwise they’d have done so already.
Remember what I have said about relationship insanity – doing the same thing and expecting a different result from your relationships. Bit like walking into oncoming traffic again and again and wondering why you get run down each time…
As women, we have to stop assuming that because we are in pain, and we don’t like what we’re experiencing, and we would surely recognize our actions and feel remorse, and we would want someone to stand at our side and show our unconditional love, that eventually our men must surely feel the same way.
What you think, do and say, is not what he thinks, does, and says. What you need, want, or expect, is not what he needs, wants, or expects!
Love (or claiming to love someone) doesn’t merge you both.
Standing by your broken man is bit like trying to perform some sort of Jedi mind trick with the sheer power of perseverance and sacrifice.
Standing by your (broken) man is really about putting yourself on standby in the hope that one day they’ll be ready to actually fully commit to the relationship with you. Or at least make you the ‘main woman’…
Think of it is as putting off your happiness and living to a rainy day in the future.
It’s not that I’ve got anything against being loyal and loving to men, or sometimes choosing to stay when they’ve let you down, but I find that women who talk about “standing by their men” often stand by men…who aren’t standing with them. This societal expectation that women should stick like glue…even when there’s nothing to stick to and it’s greatly unappreciated or even unacknowledged, means that we’ve been taught that it’s a woman’s job to commit.
Relationships are the sum of two people. When one person is trying to be the heart and soul of the relationship, it will flounder, because for a relationship to have a decent chance of lasting the distance and you both being happy within it, you need two people with both of their feet in the relationship.
Many women, however, are getting to find out that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink from the fountain of commitment.
This expectation and assumption that we must “stand by men” is incredibly dangerous, because in teaching women to stand by their men, the onus is on us to do the hard work and commit whilst waiting for the men to decide if they’re going to catch up and join us.
This is why red flags will be ignored, boundary crossing is the norm, and women end up losing themselves by laying themselves on the sacrificial alter in the hope that one day they’ll be a big payoff.
A lot of things have changed about relationships in the past ten years even, and technology has really impacted on the ability for us to make connections both on and offline, but also how much of a distance we can keep from relationships – I have written before about the use of technology for lazy communication in relationships.
In the ‘olden days’, before there seemed to be this sudden desire for there to be no boundaries, expectations, or commitment in relationships, if you stood by your man, there was a strong likelihood that one day the (cough) dog would find its way home…
Now, I have come across thousands of women who have stood by men only to be left high and dry when he takes off elsewhere.
Online dating and the modern notion that there are plenty of fish in the sea means that you have even less likelihood of your loyalty being appreciated.
Standing by your (broken) man is a code phrase for ‘kick me’.
It says, ‘I will love you unconditionally even though you may not be in this relationship the way that I am in it, and I will have absolutely no boundaries so that you get to be you and I get to lose myself trying to accommodate your whims’
It says, ‘No matter what you do, I’m going to be there’.
It says ‘I’m afraid to try to do better myself because I don’t even know who the hell I am anymore as everything is built around you’.
“Stand by your man” is a code phrase for settling.
****You don’t hear people who are in healthy relationships having to talk about or explain that they are standing by their man.**** You also don’t hear men going on about standing by their woman. Why? Because they’re not ingrained with the same social messaging as women, but also, certain types of men just assume you will be there anyway, because, like, that’s what women do – note my sarcasm…
I am all for love, loyalty, respect, care, trust, and all that jazz, but as I keep telling you all, we don’t live in an ideal world and we mustn’t keep subscribing to the frickin fairy tale.
In an ideal world, kindness would beget kindness. You’d love someone, they’d love you back. You’d love someone, they’d behave with a modicum of decency.
But deciding that you love someone and want a relationship with them doesn’t come with an IOU for the recipient where they automatically reciprocate in the way that you expect, and it also doesn’t mean that they’ll be committed and behave as someone would in a loving, healthy relationship.
If you stand by a man who is committed to you, loves, trusts, respects, and cares about you, whilst also being respectful of your boundaries, your emotional investment is a good investment.
However throwing love at someone who doesn’t love you back or doesn’t behave like someone who loves, trusts, cares and respects you, even if they talk a good game, is a bit like plowing more emotional money into a bad investment.
If you stand by a man who is not standing by you, you’re alone.
Standing by your man when there is either no relationship to stand by or the relationship has issues that may render it unlikely to get off the ground puts the guy on a pedestal.
If you stand by a man who you have put on a pedestal, the balance is dangerous as he is looking down on you.
The man that gets stood by doesn’t learn about consequences. Instead he learns that you will be there regardless and so unless he has a divine intervention, he actually has no impetus to change. Change is pretty damn difficult for the great majority of us and if there is no genuine motivation to change, we won’t – we take the easy route.
Many women assume that being loved is a reason in itself for the other person to change. But if the person doesn’t recognize or acknowledge it, but more importantly want and value it, why the hell will they feel the desire to change?
If there are own insecurities and fears are bigger than any feelings they have for you, they won’t change.
We may think that in time they’ll see it, but maybe they will…or maybe they won’t. There’s nothing to say that if they do change that it’s your love they’ll want.
Choosing broken men is partly about healing ourselves. They finally do and give us what we want, we feel infinitely better about ourselves. But choosing a man that doesn’t want to stand by you and with you but still standing by him says a lot about him. At some point you have to ask yourself how much of what you’re standing by is an illusion? Either betting on the potential or hoping that he’ll maximize brief qualities that he’s exhibited.
If your relationship has boundaries and there is love, trust, respect, and care, it is a hell of a lot easier to stand by someone through the good times and the bad because you’re together. It’s not about being happy clappers all the time because that’s not real life, but some people don’t want to be fixed, healed, or helped, and the reality is that if you had better self-esteem, some of the behavior that you stand by would be completely unacceptable making the relationship a non-starter.
A reader recently said to me that she separates the behavior from her man, i.e he is not the behavior, but at some point you need to put the sh*tty behavior with the man and put two and two together and make four and realize that with one, you get the other.
We’ve really got to start connecting the dots in our relationships and making choices, even when they are painful because until we believe that we deserve better, we don’t act like we deserve better and back away from poor behavior.
Instead of standing by your broken man, part of your healing is learning to stand by yourself.
By Natalie (NML)
Right now, millions of women all over the world are “standing by their men”. Some of these women are standing by a decent man in a decent relationship. They have love, trust, care, and respect in their lives and share the common ground of their relationship. They have their ups and downs because, that’s life, but they’re united and it’s not just her standing by him, but him standing by her. In fact, they’re standing together.
But there are also a hell of a lot of women standing by men that barely deserve the time of day never mind their undying gratitude, loyalty, and love.
These men are loved, albeit in a dysfunctional dynamic.
These men are trusted even though they abuse the trust.
These men are cared about even though they don’t act with due care.
These men are respected even though they not only are undeserving of it but are lacking in respect of the women they are involved with.
Sound familiar?
· Men have to be taught to want a relationship and how to behave in one.
· You won’t find anyone as good as him.
· He’s a great catch!
· Men need to sow their wild oats.
· Men are like children that need a good woman to show them the light.
· A woman’s place is at the side of her man.
· A woman’s place is behind her man keeping her opinions to herself.
· Brush things under the carpet. Turn a blind eye.
· Better to have a man than no man.
· If he’s not being the man you want him to be, it’s because you’re not doing enough for him.
· This is what men do.
· Men cheat.
· Without a man you’re nothing.
· Have a guy, any guy, just don’t be a ‘alone’.
· He’ll come round one day – Give it time.
· He’s a good man, he’s just having a difficult time leaving the wife and kids but he will one day.
· Men cheat on women who don’t give them what they need.
· Men don’t want to be challenged.
· You need a man for security.
· If you stick with him, eventually, he’ll give you the relationship you want.
· All men are afraid of commitment.
All of the rubbish that has been drilled into women about “standing by their men”, are pathetic reasons to excuse poor behavior.
The world seems to work on the premise that when it comes to relationships, it’s to be assumed that the man has the emotional intellect of a child and a lack of control over his actions that need to be overlooked by a forgiving woman who is immovable from his side.
Many of us have been taught that if we stick to our men like Super Glue, at some point, they will suddenly feel remorse about their poor relationship contribution and possible poor behavior towards us, and reward us with the keys to the castle and a ride on the back of their white horse into the sunset.
There is this assumption that it’s the woman that needs to take the emotional risk and fully invest herself in the hope that if she takes the long term (more like long suffering) view, her investment will yield an eventual return on investment.
I know of women who have stayed in poor relationships for anything from a few months to forty years and beyond. I know of long suffering women who have been there through repeatedly being cheated on, mystery kids turning up, mystery women beating down their door, getting hit, getting emotionally abused, being left, being threatened to be left, being returned to, being humiliated, being the Other Woman after being the main woman, and being the Other Woman to the Other Woman after originally being the main woman.
I know of women who have waited for men that they don’t actually have a relationship with. They act like they are the steady girlfriend when they are little more than a booty call. Some of these arrangements have lasted for years.
There are millions of women waiting for their guy to ‘come good’. Many of us assume it’s a woman’s work to take a man and build him from the ground up. We like pet projects, fixing, healing, and helping, and expecting more than they’re capable of delivering. We like standing by with a shovel or a bulldozer, and some plaster to cover up the cracks. One day, they skip off down the road with your repair works to someone else. Or you look at them a realize that despite your efforts, you’re still miserable and they’re not really what you want but you’re too afraid to leave, to make a change, to bet on yourself and deal with your own issues. So you settle.
They may ‘come good’ but there’s a distinct possibility that they won’t and there’s a lot to be said for making a sound investment with solid foundations so that you don’t have to run yourself into the ground to get a payoff because this type of labor yields a broken woman….
It has been ingrained into us over centuries that women must ‘stand by your man….and tell the world you love him…’ and despite feminism, equality, and a shift in our dating and relationship habits, by and large, the world is still catering to this.
In our modern world, the sun still shines out of men’s bums, the sun rises and sets on them, and no matter what we achieve as women, if we don’t have validation from the species with a penis, as a woman, you are nothing.
When I see women marginalizing and losing themselves in the name of men, it is sickening. The panic, fear, terror, disillusionment, loneliness, ambiguity, confusion, paranoia and everything else that many women have to carry is a burden and it is down to us, to chuck off the excess baggage from emotional plane and get wise because whilst we’re standing by our broken men, they’re off living their lives whilst ours are at a standstill or a bit like a half-life. Our lives get filled with pretending to be happier than we feel, or being outright miserable but feeling powerless to change it.
It is society’s shame that many women have low self-esteem and are taught to look for love in all of the wrong places and that if their relationships don’t work out, there is something wrong with them. They must try harder to win the prize of their man.
It’s not to absolve ourselves of our responsibility for our contribution into our relationships, but surrounded by social and media messaging that caters to these long held beliefs, it really is no wonder that assclowns and Mr Unavailable’s get a look in from women.
The difficulty in us being taught to “stand by our man” is that we’ll commit when there is nothing to commit to.
It’s a bit like pick a man, any man, and take up the position.
Some women commit from the moment they feel the stirring of attraction and/or attachment.
“Some of you commit pretty much as soon as you meet the guy. You see so much potential, you’re straight out the gate, into the future. You may not even see that much potential but you’re gagging for companionship and affection. You’re the Fallback Girl that doesn’t like to be alone and thinks every guy she connects with might be the one.
Some of you commit when you realize that he has issues because you feel comfortable around wounded souls, guys who scream hard work, drama, and you feel that you can be the one to make him better. You’re the Fallback Girl that’s a sucker for a sob story and a sucker for baggage.
Some of you commit when you realize that he’s not going to leave his wife or his girlfriend, or make that separation official by becoming divorced, because you think that if you show him how committed you are, that you’ll be rewarded. You’re the Fallback Girl that commits when it becomes clear that he’s definitely not going to commit.
Some of you commit to the cycle of drama. You’re not that sure about him until he starts catering to your pattern of fear of abandonment and making you jump through hoops, and after a while, you’re not really going out with him; you’re going out with the high created by Relationship Crack. You’re the Fallback Girl that commits even though you weren’t really that interested until he started messing you around and got your attention.”
Many women love unconditionally without working out whether the person is an appropriate person to be involved in a relationship with that can commit to them, and of course love them back..
This is the fundamental problem with standing by your (broken) man:
If you find yourself as an adult with low self-esteem who has poor beliefs about herself, love, and relationships, you will gravitate to men and situations that reflect these beliefs. Rather than choosing partners that buck the trend, you’ll end up creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that exacerbates what you already feel. If this continues, you will build up a pattern of being involved in poor relationships and will end up ‘losing yourself’ because in order to accommodate these men and the relationships that do and don’t come with them, you’ll allow your boundaries to be repeatedly crossed, you’ll normalize bad behavior, and you’ll end up so far travelled from the reality of him, the relationship, and yourself, that you won’t know who you are anymore, so will feel even more dependent on the man. In continuing to love unconditionally, you love without conditions, and send a clear message that you are lacking in self-love and respect because every relationship needs conditions because it ensures that there are boundaries.
When you stand by broken men, they are repeatedly taught that there is no consequence to their behavior.
If they don’t fear consequences and know that they will always have that trusty woman to default to or fallback on, there is no impetus to change. Why should they? Change is something that most people struggle with and if there are no consequences, short of having some sort of cataclysmic moment that has them seeing the light, there is no reason to change.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your ongoing presence is a reason to change; it’s not otherwise they’d have done so already.
Remember what I have said about relationship insanity – doing the same thing and expecting a different result from your relationships. Bit like walking into oncoming traffic again and again and wondering why you get run down each time…
As women, we have to stop assuming that because we are in pain, and we don’t like what we’re experiencing, and we would surely recognize our actions and feel remorse, and we would want someone to stand at our side and show our unconditional love, that eventually our men must surely feel the same way.
What you think, do and say, is not what he thinks, does, and says. What you need, want, or expect, is not what he needs, wants, or expects!
Love (or claiming to love someone) doesn’t merge you both.
Standing by your broken man is bit like trying to perform some sort of Jedi mind trick with the sheer power of perseverance and sacrifice.
Standing by your (broken) man is really about putting yourself on standby in the hope that one day they’ll be ready to actually fully commit to the relationship with you. Or at least make you the ‘main woman’…
Think of it is as putting off your happiness and living to a rainy day in the future.
It’s not that I’ve got anything against being loyal and loving to men, or sometimes choosing to stay when they’ve let you down, but I find that women who talk about “standing by their men” often stand by men…who aren’t standing with them. This societal expectation that women should stick like glue…even when there’s nothing to stick to and it’s greatly unappreciated or even unacknowledged, means that we’ve been taught that it’s a woman’s job to commit.
Relationships are the sum of two people. When one person is trying to be the heart and soul of the relationship, it will flounder, because for a relationship to have a decent chance of lasting the distance and you both being happy within it, you need two people with both of their feet in the relationship.
Many women, however, are getting to find out that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink from the fountain of commitment.
This expectation and assumption that we must “stand by men” is incredibly dangerous, because in teaching women to stand by their men, the onus is on us to do the hard work and commit whilst waiting for the men to decide if they’re going to catch up and join us.
This is why red flags will be ignored, boundary crossing is the norm, and women end up losing themselves by laying themselves on the sacrificial alter in the hope that one day they’ll be a big payoff.
A lot of things have changed about relationships in the past ten years even, and technology has really impacted on the ability for us to make connections both on and offline, but also how much of a distance we can keep from relationships – I have written before about the use of technology for lazy communication in relationships.
In the ‘olden days’, before there seemed to be this sudden desire for there to be no boundaries, expectations, or commitment in relationships, if you stood by your man, there was a strong likelihood that one day the (cough) dog would find its way home…
Now, I have come across thousands of women who have stood by men only to be left high and dry when he takes off elsewhere.
Online dating and the modern notion that there are plenty of fish in the sea means that you have even less likelihood of your loyalty being appreciated.
Standing by your (broken) man is a code phrase for ‘kick me’.
It says, ‘I will love you unconditionally even though you may not be in this relationship the way that I am in it, and I will have absolutely no boundaries so that you get to be you and I get to lose myself trying to accommodate your whims’
It says, ‘No matter what you do, I’m going to be there’.
It says ‘I’m afraid to try to do better myself because I don’t even know who the hell I am anymore as everything is built around you’.
“Stand by your man” is a code phrase for settling.
****You don’t hear people who are in healthy relationships having to talk about or explain that they are standing by their man.**** You also don’t hear men going on about standing by their woman. Why? Because they’re not ingrained with the same social messaging as women, but also, certain types of men just assume you will be there anyway, because, like, that’s what women do – note my sarcasm…
I am all for love, loyalty, respect, care, trust, and all that jazz, but as I keep telling you all, we don’t live in an ideal world and we mustn’t keep subscribing to the frickin fairy tale.
In an ideal world, kindness would beget kindness. You’d love someone, they’d love you back. You’d love someone, they’d behave with a modicum of decency.
But deciding that you love someone and want a relationship with them doesn’t come with an IOU for the recipient where they automatically reciprocate in the way that you expect, and it also doesn’t mean that they’ll be committed and behave as someone would in a loving, healthy relationship.
If you stand by a man who is committed to you, loves, trusts, respects, and cares about you, whilst also being respectful of your boundaries, your emotional investment is a good investment.
However throwing love at someone who doesn’t love you back or doesn’t behave like someone who loves, trusts, cares and respects you, even if they talk a good game, is a bit like plowing more emotional money into a bad investment.
If you stand by a man who is not standing by you, you’re alone.
Standing by your man when there is either no relationship to stand by or the relationship has issues that may render it unlikely to get off the ground puts the guy on a pedestal.
If you stand by a man who you have put on a pedestal, the balance is dangerous as he is looking down on you.
The man that gets stood by doesn’t learn about consequences. Instead he learns that you will be there regardless and so unless he has a divine intervention, he actually has no impetus to change. Change is pretty damn difficult for the great majority of us and if there is no genuine motivation to change, we won’t – we take the easy route.
Many women assume that being loved is a reason in itself for the other person to change. But if the person doesn’t recognize or acknowledge it, but more importantly want and value it, why the hell will they feel the desire to change?
If there are own insecurities and fears are bigger than any feelings they have for you, they won’t change.
We may think that in time they’ll see it, but maybe they will…or maybe they won’t. There’s nothing to say that if they do change that it’s your love they’ll want.
Choosing broken men is partly about healing ourselves. They finally do and give us what we want, we feel infinitely better about ourselves. But choosing a man that doesn’t want to stand by you and with you but still standing by him says a lot about him. At some point you have to ask yourself how much of what you’re standing by is an illusion? Either betting on the potential or hoping that he’ll maximize brief qualities that he’s exhibited.
If your relationship has boundaries and there is love, trust, respect, and care, it is a hell of a lot easier to stand by someone through the good times and the bad because you’re together. It’s not about being happy clappers all the time because that’s not real life, but some people don’t want to be fixed, healed, or helped, and the reality is that if you had better self-esteem, some of the behavior that you stand by would be completely unacceptable making the relationship a non-starter.
A reader recently said to me that she separates the behavior from her man, i.e he is not the behavior, but at some point you need to put the sh*tty behavior with the man and put two and two together and make four and realize that with one, you get the other.
We’ve really got to start connecting the dots in our relationships and making choices, even when they are painful because until we believe that we deserve better, we don’t act like we deserve better and back away from poor behavior.
Instead of standing by your broken man, part of your healing is learning to stand by yourself.
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Join Date: Apr 2013
Posts: 1,405
Originally Posted by cynical one 
****you don’t hear people who are in healthy relationships having to talk about or explain that they are standing by their man****.
It’s always made me itch when I read someone repeatedly say they “stood by the side” of the addict, as if it was a noble, self-sacrificing, virtuous act. While passively-aggressively implying that if someone else chooses not to stay around, that they are giving up, not as strong, or not as noble. I also have written in my blog my thoughts about being on stand-by. There is a lot of comparison here of addiction to cancer or diabetes…yet you never hear loved ones brag about “standing by the side” of someone suffering from either. Only on addiction or prison support boards have I heard this.
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Join Date: Sep 2012
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Originally Posted by cynical one
There is a lot of comparison here of addiction to cancer or diabetes…yet you never hear loved ones brag about “standing by the side” of someone suffering from either.
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Join Date: Feb 2008
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Originally Posted by legna
I've never heard of a loved one being denigrated for standing by the side of someone with cancer or diabetes.
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