How To Date A Mama’s Boy

Sarah Elizabeth Malinak — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 01:00:26 +0000

Mama’s boys have been getting a lot of press lately. Everyone wants to know how to avoid them. I’m not giving you that advice because if you avoid mama’s boys, there aren’t many men left over for you to choose from! There are many types of mama’s boys who don’t let you see that trait in them until you’ve reached a certain level of commitment. For some, that commitment is marriage. For others, it is the magical third date.

Are Men That Manipulative?

It makes it seem like they snare you before revealing their true selves, right? Well, they’re not that methodically manipulative! Most men are not proud of their mama’s boy traits. You don’t get to see it until a certain level of commitment is reached because they are waiting to trust you before letting their guard down. There is a trick to dating (and eventually marrying) a mama’s boy that does not include throwing him back.

Mama’s boys come in all shapes and sizes of personality. Some are bullies and overbearing, others are nurturing caretakers, while others are into sports and manly activities. Some have interfering mothers but others have moms that are adorable! Mama’s boys missed out on the opportunity, during puberty, to enter their fathers’ sphere of influence. It’s a complex issue. What they have in common is the need to have their women affirm their masculinity as if the women have it to give.

Now, whether through your own observation, reading about it, or hearing about it, it is common knowledge that men love to have their masculinity affirmed by their women. That is a juicy experience for a man, which means there is a nice pay off for you! However, what we’re talking about here is a desire for affirmation as if that is the only way he can feel like a man; as if you have some power of masculinity to impart to him.

How To Affirm Your Partner’s Masculinity

You know this is what you are dealing with when not giving it to him results in some measure of punishment for you. Whether it is his pouting, disappearing into his cave, demanding affirmation, raising his voice in anger, feeling his bitterness because you are withholding something he requires from you, to verbally or physically abusing you, it is that level of need we are discussing here. A woman can affirm her man’s masculinity but if he isn’t grounded in his own masculine power, she doesn’t have that to give to him.

What a woman can do is discipline herself to maintain her own femininity no matter who she is dating. When a mama’s boy falls for you, he wants to be the man. He wants to be your knight in shining armor. He wants to be that powerful, masculine man for you! For the relationship to be successful, you need to take advantage of that.

When you put attention on grounding yourself in your femininity, in being a receptive yet powerful woman, in having the stature of a woman worthy of love and adoration, your words and behavior will be affected in such a way that the man sitting across the table from you will rise to meet the challenge. When he does this, he will be in the process of winning the battle between his real masculinity and the mama’s boy who would otherwise pull on you or push against you for confirmation.

Let The Real Woman Inside You Out To Play!

If you are like most women in the Western world, this discipline of being The Woman creates a struggle in you as well. Sitting across the table from him, you will be winning the battle between your real femininity and the daddy’s girl who would otherwise believe she needs to take care of him, as if he is a little boy, in order to find fulfillment.

As you practice being the woman, not fixing him, not rescuing him, but being receptive to his attention and creating the space for him to be the man, he will either show up prepared to win his own internal battle, proving himself worthy of you; or, the mama’s boy traits will rush to the surface in an effort to manipulate you. At that point, you know whether or not you want to continue.

If you do want to continue and the two of you fall in love and begin to create a solid relationship, the mama’s boy inside your man will always be there. The daddy’s girl inside you will always be there. These two will clamor for attention in ways that will sometimes seem to sabatoge your relationship. However, there is always the choice for him to be The Man and for you to be The Woman. You cannot call forth his masculine power by demanding it. But you can encourage and seduce it to the forefront as you discipline yourself to be The Woman, giving both of you space to show up as two adults in love, rather than children working out childhood issues.

Being the woman in your romantic relationship is a discipline. It will grow you in ways that make you yummy and irresistible to men, if you let it! And it will attract the type of man you desire as well.

Beware The Hidden Signs Of A Controlling Relationship…

Click by Lavalife, Nick Krewen — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 18:42:10 +0000

When Martin met Marie, he thought he’d died and gone to Heaven.

Out of the dating scene a while, he was surprised to find this sultry brunette catching his eye at the grocery store. She accepted his invitation for lunch, laughed at his jokes and seemed to reciprocate the mutual attraction.

He fell hard and fast but a few weeks into the relationship, Martin began to notice a gradual change in Marie’s behavior. She began making little suggestions — things they should do, restaurants they should visit, meals they should try, that special shirt or belt that he should wear on their dates. And Martin, wanting to please, willingly accommodated her numerous requests.

Changes in behavior

"She’d be sweet as pie about it," Martin recalls. "Even if I disagreed with her, it’d be difficult to broach the topic because she’d do it with a smile."

But even Martin was flabbergasted at Marie’s reaction when he told her, after a month of exclusively spending consecutive weekends together, he was going to take the coming Friday night and kick back a few beers with the boys.

Marie sulked and threw a tantrum, and Martin saw the first signs of what would become a living hell: Life with the Controller.

"She expressed shock and disappointment when I had anything on my social calendar that didn’t include her," he remembers. "And she’d never let me forget it."

Kindness quickly turned to criticism and within a few weeks, "The Lecture" replaced love. Martin felt his self-worth quickly turn to mush.

"I felt horrible, because not only was I apparently not meeting her needs, but since no one had treated me like that before, I blamed myself," he concedes. "I believed that I deserved it, otherwise she wouldn’t have been saying those things. The lectures were frequent and endless."

Martin says the key phrase Marie would often repeat was ‘You need to change.’

"It was never about bad habits," he realizes. "It was an assault on my character. Many things were insidious, particularly her ability to extract me from my friends and family over a relatively short period of time without me realizing what was happening."

Seeing it can be tricky

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