Bridging the Communication Gap

We decided the University of Richmond Campus wasn't a large enough bridge.
Showing posts with label Boundaries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Boundaries. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

The Birds: The Art of Treating Women Well

By The Radical

Fellas, please allow me to speak to you about a fine art I have spent a lifetime studying: the elegant, laborious, and crucial art of treating women well. The first thing you need to know about women is that they are not bitches. They may have been bitches, they may one day become bitches, but women are never bitches. That is what makes them women.

How one treats his woman well is an art because while there are genres, rules, styles, trends, etc., there is not an exact science. Theorems about women always fall through when you need them most (in a bar mid-conversation, while writing your wedding vows, during the fight that will make or break you after your six year anniversary, the list goes on). The main feature of this art is what it is not and it certainly is not the craft of training your bitch.

To train your bitch, one must:



  1. Make it so that one’s personal happiness is the focal point of one’s interactions with this bitch.


  2. Secure the position of power. The easiest method of this is to simply care the least about the relationship itself and your continued interactions with this bitch.

  3. Properly demonstrate the extent of one’s sexual prowess infrequently to compel this bitch to stick around, while still putting one’s own needs first.


  4. Fulfill the superficial needs of this bitch. Fact of the matter is bitches be shoppin’ and not just at the Gap.

That, of course, is a small lesson on the dark arts. Those are the critical pillars of that particular school of thought, by no means the totality. Only these four pieces are needed to distinguish this from the fine art of treating women well. To treat one’s woman well you must never act toward her as if she was a bitch. She might occasionally act like one and that time she said something you are pretty sure was a well-disguised jab at your mother you wanted to call her one, but your woman is never a bitch. We have a different word for that: “woman.” Nonsensical? Yes, and that is the point. Ever spent a good amount of time with a woman? Exactly.


There are four basic tenants to treating a woman well:



  1. Be willing to go beyond positioning her happiness as the centerpiece of your relationship; place it alongside yours. When you perceive her wants and needs as important as you do your own you make it so that your happiness coincides with yours. Making her happy makes you happy. This is much more stable and healthy than the complete sacrifice of considerations of your happiness for hers because it is less draining, thus more easily maintained for a long period of time, and the intermingling of what makes you happy as individuals increases the likelihood of knowing what makes you a happy couple.


  2. Remember that power is fluid. Couple this with a passion for your woman that ebbs and flows, but never dissipates. “Never” is one of those present tense feelings, when it becomes a future tense kind of thing she might be wifey material. There will always be a power struggle going on in any relationship (refer to the power struggle article), but this struggle can be more or less full of actual conflict. Again, consider it as an ebb and flow of power.


  3. You are her personal sex slave. She is your personal porn star. However you two make it true is up to you. I can’t tell you what rocks your boat. But for the proper, mind-blowing, multi-orgasmic, leg-quaking, sheets-ruining, neighbor-waking, structural integrity altering treatment of your woman, this should be true.


  4. You must fulfill the needs of your woman, superficial and otherwise. Buying her things is nice and a great distraction from her having caught you staring at the bitch at the register, but there is more than materialism at the core of a woman. Those things we all long for deep down inside (love, respect, caring, hugs, kisses, sympathy, passion, compassion, and things of the like), give her all of those, in abundance.

Yes, you must treat your woman well, but not quite as good as you would treat your wife. The art of treating your woman well is really the practice of wading in the gray area between training your bitch and loving your wife. I had to consult an older head a while ago about the proper way to love one's wife.


The wise man spoke to me of the three Ps: Providing, Protecting, and Proclaiming. The three Ps are for neither women nor bitches. The three Ps are reserved for the wife or wifey material. Wifey material is a potential wife with legitimate and not “blinded by the power of the P” potential (This P is not one of the original three). The power of the P has sent men to their graves, kings to poverty, and ships to sea. The power of the P is a separate article altogether. Let’s stay on topic.


The three Ps are straightforward and need no further defining. What is necessary is a description of their applicability.



  1. Providing – This is the natural male desire to provide that drives the ego of so many, from boys to men. This is why most males will cringe to think that he would be out on a date and she would pay. This same drive has been turned against men. Bitches won’t even consider reaching for their purse at the end of the meal nowadays, knowing that he will do the work for her, questioning his own masculine identity based on his financial abilities.


  2. Protecting – A guard dog barks at the unopened door regardless of the possibility that it’s a friendly face on the other side of the door. That’s all. That’s not meant to be a metaphor. For his wife, a male will constantly be aware of and concerned for her safety. This is easily confused with male territorialism. Territorialism has the male’s ego as its main concern making the defense of his personal property the highest priority. The easiest way to tell the difference is the accompanied marking habits and the placement of a bitch as the visible focal point.


  3. Proclaiming – I wouldn’t walk into a room and scream, “This is my woman!” I also wouldn’t leave the room without the sexiest girls and the guys looking the thirstiest knowing that “this is MY woman.” There is a middle ground, but the level of proclamation needed differs per male, couple, setting, and time of day. The Facebook relationship status is the most well-known (and most disputed) form of proclamation for our age group. It is also the most useless. It does more to have your relationship known when you walk into the club than it does when dude is poking your woman on Facebook.

I remind you that the three Ps are for the wife or wifey material only. These are told to you for one reason: You treat one as less than the other. How do you know what wifey material is? She is everything the average woman is not. So what’s a woman? She is everything a bitch isn’t, which gets kind of complex because bitches ain’t shit. When we discussed a clearer way to simplify this complexity a member of the Birds and the Bees Staff suggested that “a woman is everything.”

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Q&A: Friends After the Fact

You may have noticed that we recently rearranged our schedule. Tuesdays and Thursdays are our regularly scheduled posts. We currently write under three major headers: “The Birds”, “The Bees”, and “Q&A”. “The Birds” is the weekly post every Tuesday rotating between the Birds and the Bees' Staff. Alternating as necessary, “The Bees” and “Q&A” are posted every Thursday. “The Bees” is the opportunity for any of the other three members of the Birds and the Bees Staff that weren't scheduled for the week to respond or simply get a thought off their chest. Kinda like Freestyle Fridays, but the prewriting is always better here with a much smoother delivery. “Q&A” is the same as always. For those of you not hip to the boogie, you send your question to thebirdsandthebees10@gmail.com and we respond. Now you even know when to expect answers.

Without further ado...

Question: So I've been thinking recently, especially after reading the last two posts centered around the FWBs of the world, and also some of my own personal run-ins/encounters of late-- is it ever truly possible to develop and/or maintain a friendship post messing around? I feel like it's always addressed when it comes to friendship post an actual bf/gf relationship, but what about when you're in the FWB zone heavy for a couple of months and it dissipates for whatever reason-- does that mean cut all ties forever or what?

Answers:


The Watcher:
This is a very sticky situation all around. There are so many variables that have to be accounted for that it is difficult to give you a clear yes or no answer. The best thing to do is to treat your former hook up as if they lived half way across the world. Stay in touch from time to time, small talk. Anything beyond this and you run the risk of stirring up old flames which can cause you to go around the "Mulberry Bush" once again.


MD:
Yes, the point was to be able to be friends after it was all said and done, but let’s be honest, when

do things ever go according to plan? It would be nice to have a friendship with the person, but when you begin a future relationship, how are you going to explain your connection with your previous FWB? If you say that you won’t mention that part, realize that your new relationship is built on lies- evasion of the truth is a lie; and, if you do mention it, your current counterpart will always question your friendship in the back of their mind. So yes, it would be nice, but not realistic.

The Radical:
There is a clear distinction between someone you fuck on a consistent basis but aren't dating and a friend with benefits. Someone you are fucking gets cut when you're done fucking. A friend with benefits is in the gray area when the two parties decide to remove the benefits from their relationship. You can try and go back to just being friends. Good luck. This requires the removal of the sexual attraction that was once there. Why? Because you have set a precedent and once that's there it's much harder to come up with good answers to “Why aren't we having sex right now?” It's been done before, but there has to be good reason for you two to not have sex, like a disfiguring car accident or the contraction of some STD... or one of you starts dating someone else. Be wary, that last reason still may not protect you.


Mr. SR...C:
It is possible to maintain a friendship post genital to genital combat as long as both sides are not jealous of the others' future conquests. Honestly, the only reasons to cut all ties from a FWB situation are that one of the parties is too emotionally invested in the other or the ability to watch the other with a new partner drives one crazy. It’s simple, very simple, but most lose sight of that and, in turn, ruin the possibility of a friendship. If you are catching feelings please voice so immediately to avoid complications. We avid proponents of the beauty of FWBs would love a couple weeks notice to ease off of habitually blowing your back out. Just ease off the usage after you realize you have caught feelings and using a mutually understood technique friendship can hopefully still happen. Plus going cold turkey sucks, unless you have a couple of tenderonis on standby.

Hmmmmmm Tenderonis….


Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Q&A: "I Don't See Nothing Wrong..." Unless...

It's Q&A time again. The formula is simple. You email us at Thebirdsandthebees10@gmail.com and we respond. You should ask us deep questions. You should bring controversy to our blog. We will respond just as deeply and be just as provocative… or more so.

Question: I was hoping that The Birds and the Bees team could explore whether the idea of a couple going to parties/clubs together is a good idea or not. Consider things like whether it's acceptable for the couple to go off and dance with other club goers. If they go partying with a group does it make a difference if they dance with mutual friends or someone they used to date? If your stance is that it's okay to dance with others then would it be cool to explore what kind of dancing is appropriate and what's off limits? Would you place two stepping and close contact reggae dancing in the same category?

Answers:

The Radical: I watch her move from across the room like a hawk. Her hips so smooth, her body moving in ways so familiar to me…and she is all mine, even now when she’s dancing with him. We set these boundaries and for a reason. She is not limited to any style or genre; she may do as she pleases. If his hands wander, I’ll cut them off. The ex is an interesting variable in the equation because this is a person that knows her too, if you know what I mean. He should just stay away from her… forever.

MD: My personal opinion on the topic is simple. If you are not able to be yourself around your significant other in any environment or at any time, then that says something about your relationship. That being said, when you acquire a significant other, dancing with other individuals should not resemble any type of intimacy; thus, you should feel free to two-step and Cupid Shuffle, but bodily contact shouldn't take place (i.e. grinding). Life is too short to be in a relationship that does not allow you to enjoy the little things in life, but relationships are too delicate to approach with reckless abandonment.

The Watcher: Communication is the essential piece to answering any question. I suggest you two sit down and figure out how you would feel about your significant other dancing with other people. If you won't lose sleep over it because you know at the end of the day you know they are coming home to you, and then you both should go out and enjoy yourself. However, if you have an issue with your partner dancing with others, explicitly describe what part of it bothers you so you two can be on the same page. Dancing with ex's should never be allowed.

Mr. SR...C: Going to a party\club with your mate only works if you have the same idea of what is acceptable. I am of the opinion as long as she is coming home with me dancing is dancing. You should be able to enjoy those types of environments with your bf/gf if that is what you like to do for fun. If you are confident in your relationship, dancing should not matter unless you turn around and your mate is gone with their dance partner, in a bathroom stall drowning out the music with a couple moans and a few grunts, just saying.

p.s. after that talk about a bathroom stall I think I need to watch Step Brothers....