The Story Behind The Picture On The Front Of My Book

 

I have been asked several times “Why that picture on the front of your book?”

It is a hugely significant picture for me personally as I took it in Paris when I was utterly, utterly broken. After an extremely painful break up, two of my wonderful friends took me there on a short photography trip and it was on a chilly Parisian afternoon in 2012 that I captured this shot and it summed up perfectly how I was feeling at the time, exposed, raw and totally off my guard. I had been a semi professional photographer for several years at that point and wondering around with my camera, usually in far less glamorous locations, had kept me grounded throughout many hard times but this latest bump in my road had really knocked me to the kerb. Homeless and jobless, it felt like my camera was the only possession of any value that I did have left and as I wondered around the fields near my mother’s house, where I had fled to in my hour of need, I tried to connect with nature through the lens in the way I had before, it wasn’t really working but I tried. I had mentioned that I was struggling to ‘find my eye’…and everything else for that matter…to my friends. Right! they said, photographers themselves, we need a trip. So off we went to Paris, a place one cannot fail to find something inspiring to photograph!

 The first day, I struggled. The second day, with the warm encouragement of my friends, the pain haze began to lift a little and Paris came into view through the blur. I took a couple of shots that were okayish. On the third day, we walked to photograph the bridges over the Seine, the main river through Paris and particularly the locks that adorn them. Locks can be purchased and messages written on them, messages of love and remembrance and whilst we were there snapping away, men were down on one knee proposing to the cheers of happy, excited on lookers…it was all a bit too much for a broken hearted woman like me so I wondered off to be alone for a few moments and reflect. As I stood on the next bridge, my tears dropping into the flowing river, also full of locks, thrown in in hopefully anticipation of happy futures, I contemplated mine and how I would get from where I was now, to the marriage proposal that I so wanted. It seemed an impossibly enormous mountain to climb in that moment.

And as I mused over how I was going to do this, my eye was caught by a young woman who seemed pretty irritated and uncomfortable. She was wearing a very inappropriate little black dress for the breezy Parisian weather, when the rest of us where bundled up in coats and her hair was giving her all sorts of problems blowing over her red lipsticked face. She did not look like she was enjoying her view of the Eiffel Tower across the river at all! I watched her, realising that she looked a lot like I did back in the days when I was dating bad men, dress way too short, everything in full view and my long black hair wildly trying to attract attention. She was getting looks no doubt about it but they weren’t admiring ones. I felt a little sorry for her, she was trying way too hard to get noticed and it wasn’t making her at all happy. Hmm I knew that feeling. Then I noticed the photographer, she was a model! He was a distance away from her so it wasn’t obvious at first that her posturing and preening was for him but she was trying soo hard to give him what he wanted, despite her physical discomfort and obvious embarrassment that her skirt was blowing up in the wind, as he barked and growled his orders over and over again at her. HA I thought, I know THAT feeling too! You’re all dressed up to the nines, giving it your all, exposing your inner most self, finding yourself humiliated and exhausted and it still isn’t good enough for him!!

 I had to capture this lightbulb moment for me, with my camera, I had to have a reminder of this scene because if I was to go home to England and have the future that I wanted, I never should be preening and posing, compromising and exposing myself to get a man EVER again. I had realised in that moment, standing there alone on a bridge in Paris, that I was going to have to change everything about how I was looking for love. So, I printed this picture out when I got home and framed it and it hung on my wall and all through the next three years of dating disasters, it reminded me to keep on my path to find love and NOT fall back into my previous habit of trying to please the type of men that just weren’t good for me. This picture was my inspiration to find the man and the love that I really deserved and to never be that manipulated and publicly humiliated woman again. This picture that is now on the front of my book “Why Good Women Date Bad Men” was a hugely important part of my happy ever after journey which resulted in a down on one knee proposal from my darling husband and I hope it will be to other women who look at it and use the book to help them find their Good Man.

Healing Journal Writing

My book "Why Good Women Date Bad Men" mentions healing journal writing and it is something I utterly believe is invaluable when you are healing yourself from dating bad men!

Getting your feelings down on paper, for your eyes only, is one of the best ways I recommend to all my ladies of making sense of what can be a totally confusing, self-questioning nightmare. You may make no sense whatsoever when you begin to pour it all out on the page and that is utterly and totally okay because when you are in that raw state, nothing makes sense!! 

Starting to write is the hard part but oh boy once you do start you just won't want to stop. All of that frustration, that confusion, that heart ache will come rushing out of you into the jumbled up, misspelt words and who cares about neat handwriting and paragraphs, just write...and write...and write!!

So how do you start? The picture above is of my heartbreak diaries/journals, back several years ago when I was soul searching and soul pouring into them...3 years worth! I had A LOT to get out so I bought several of the same and I liked the design of clocks because it reminded me to "Give Time Some Time" a saying I had stumbled across that I liked so much, it was one of the first things I wrote down in the journal and I had a ring made by a lovely friend with it stamped on and I wore it on my wedding ring finger. Anyhoo...I'm guessing I took that picture above after only a few months of journal writing because there's a mountain of them in my cupboard now!

So, you can scribble down on a notebook or you can go get yourself a special book for the task, the choice is yours. My journal writing has progressed to stickers and different coloured pens with doodles now because I am in that happy place in my life that those pages in the picture, pages of future dreams are full of but take your time to get to happy scribbles because right now you want to get alllll those befuddled and angry feelings out. So once you have your book to write in, chose a place to write it in. As you can see, I wrote mine on my bed...it was my safe place for a long time. The bed I shared with no-one else, in my bedroom that no-one had been in but me since the day I moved into my on-my-own house. I needed that. Sanctuary.

The reason to have a 'place' to write is because when you take yourself to that place with your journal, your subconscious will go "hey, we're gonna do some writing, some un-loading, yeah I can do that" and you are instantly in that frame of mind, ready to write it out and the more you do it, the quicker each time you will relax when you sit down and be ready to write in your journal. You will begin to see it as treasured time. Speaking of time, some people do it at a certain time of day, allowing 10 minutes or half an hour for being in 'their place' and journal writing, they look forward to it throughout the working day. They teach children and family to respect that time that they need to be alone and write...again that takes a few attempts but bare with it, it will happen. When my children were small, I got up in the morning 15 minutes earlier and sat with my cup of tea and wrote a little...until they came wandering in for sleepy wake-up cuddles. Or you may be someone who takes your journal with you everywhere you go and jots down when things come to mind and that's fine too. There is no right or wrong, whatever works for you. 

But WHAT do you write and why bother? Have you ever had one of those days or weeks where you just can't get out of your own head? Thoughts churn round and around and your emotions are all over the shop. You just can't figure out what's going on with you and you get more and more frustrated and more and more tired. And then it all spills out. Out of your mouth to a friendly ear and without receiving advice or solutions you already feel a million times better...just for getting it out!! That's journaling, getting it out, on paper...the good, the bad and the ugly. But the amazeballs thing about journaling is that you don't have to sensor it at all! You can be self-indulgent, you can be selfish, you can be down right nasty with your words and your journal won't hate you for it!! 

So what about that advice or those solutions that you may get from spilling to a friend? Well here's the magic! Magically you DO get that from journaling. Whether it all falls into place while you write or whether you have some distance from your words, a day, a month and then you re-read them again and the solutions become crystal clear, the answers are all written there in your words. 

 

So, what about that advice or those solutions that you may get from spilling to a friend? Well here's the magic! Magically you DO get that from journaling. Whether it all falls into place while you write or whether you have some distance from your words, a day, a month and then you re-read them again and the solutions become crystal clear, the answers are all written there in your words. Our brains are designed to find solutions, to heal our woes and to plonk us back out there almost good as new. The human race wouldn't have survived if Mrs Caveman had sat in the cave demoralised and disheartened when her latest rabbit catching snare idea had produced no fluffy bunnies. No, she sat and she thought and thought whilst cavey hubster was off chasing lions and she drew little stick diagrams in the sand until her brain figured it out. So get your stick and figure it out. Just write. 

Don't over think, just think about the bad man or the latest dating confusion you have going on and write some words. Doesn't even have to be sentences at first. Think of an event that happened or a feeling that you had. Think of a promise that was never fulfilled or something that has been taken away from you. It's easier to start with negatives because we are designed to look on the dark side of live, again primeval instinct thing (seeing danger so we avoid it) Be as negative as you bloomin well want to be and write a few things down. You may find it irritating or draining but bare with it, put your pen down and try again the next day if it doesn't happen at first. Don't worry, that subconscious will figure it out. You may be so stifled, so anxious, so frozen that it doesn't come easy for you at first. That's okay and not a reason for self-blame, be patient with yourself. 

Slowly you will begin to heal, you will feel progress and you will see it in your words as the language changes, as the things you write about change. I realised after 6 months of diary writing that I hadn't cried that day. I was very, very broken when I started to write so it took that long, it may take you much less. It was a changing moment for me and I wrote it in my diary. "A whole day without tears!"  A few months later when there had been more and more no tear days, I went back to that original entry and wrote at the bottom "several days at a time without tears now - June 27th" and again later "a whole month and nothing to cry about!!" There is a little dancing stick woman drawing next to that scribble because by then, I was brave enough to go dancing again! 

Levels Of Accountability In Dating

 

What does accountability mean in dating?

The dictionary definition of accountability is: the fact of being responsible for what you do and able to give a satisfactory reason for it, or the degree to which this happens

So what does that mean when we are dating and how is it relevant? Well, it's a subject that makes me...quite cross actually! I'll tell you why. There are hundreds of really good women, lovely women who are made to feel guilty during the dating process and yes I know, I harp on about you needing to be aware that your reaction to an outside assumption of you can be controlled by your own reaction to that but come on...

I listen to women who tell me stories of nasty texts, arsey emails, slanderous social media posts and all that they have committed to the person they are dating or considering dating is a little bit of their time. No promises of futures, no arrangements of time to be spent together and no bonding rumbles in the jungle sheets! Both have remained in their own trees, in their own neck of the woods and no-one has swung themselves anywhere and yet, the person they are dating has gone down a tropical beach full of fantasies with palm trees, not oak trees and whilst you are seeing tiny acorns, they are seeing coconuts bouncing down all over the shop!!

Irritating!! 

At the beginning, unless you are dating someone that you have know previously as a friend or work colleague, this person is basically a stranger to you. I'll say it again...a stranger! You owe them nothing. Manners, yes, we all keep our dating manners. We respond to messages, we are open, honest and transparent. If we say we will meet up on a date, we show up, we give them our attention, we leave politely. But what we are NOT is indebted in any way...yet. At this point, aside from a respectful message if you no longer wish to communicate or see that person (and you will find how to deliver that message with kindness in my post "Leaving With Dignity & Kindness") you are not expected to do any more than say goodbye AND you would not expect to receive rudeness, bitterness or nastiness when you do. If you get that, it is not your responsibility to deal with that! 

Only you will know where your true level of accountability lies, dependant on how far you are down the dating path and because you also need to be sensitive to the person that you have had the interaction with. You will have, on some level, realised where this person is on their self-esteem, self-worth and foundation scales and you really do need to keep your behaviours at a safe level so that doesn't impact on those. I'm not being preachy here, I'm just saying that there are speeds to skip along that path to, speeds that keep things at a comfortable level for you both. Rushing headlong into "do we have chemistry together because if we don't I'm wasting my time" territory of first kisses, first fumbles and first sex DOES create a connection and a level of accountability and those may have a different perception of commitment level for each of you. Meeting friends or even family can give underlying messages to people of "I'm moving into your life" and raise expectations of a future together when, in actual fact, that was not your intention of using the spare ticket to go see the band you couldn't get a ticket to see for love nor money...with all his mates. 

If he, in his perception, is way further down the path in his expectation of where you are at in your dating journey, ask yourself, did I give that impression through my actions and if I did then how accountable am I for that? And subsequently if that has happened, you would need to give more of an action in your ending the liaison than simply sending a text message...that simply wouldn't do, you would not be being accountable for your actions. 

Obviously all of this works the other way around as well. Be aware of how quickly a man is moving you into his world because if he decides a little way down the path that you are not for him and sticks a post it note on your computer screen at the office to end things, you are going to feel hugely let down if you have spent your break times rearrange his pencil case in the store room. His level of accountability is pretty crappy if he does that to you. It is all something to bare in mind and my personal advice is don't move too fast too soon and form accountability before you are ready. 

Your Relationship Future

When I ask the question "What does your relationship future look like?" I am often met with befuddled looks and LOTS of err's and um's! 

We get pretty clear on the type of man we want when we are dating but not so much on the type of relationship future being with that man is going to give us. Sure, we may have nailed down the emotions of love and attraction and possibly even outcomes of marriage and children but those, even though they are goals, are vague. What do I mean by that?

Those things are your end goals but to make them attainable there are steps to reaching those goals along the dating path, they don't just come overnight. Have you thought about how YOU are going to get there? What are those steps? Do you have a clear plan or are you just leaving it up to fate?

Errrrr yeah I wouldn't do that! 

How is fate going to know what is going to make you happy and for that matter how is any man you meet going to know, if you don't really know yourself? Makes you think doesn't it!

When I ask the good women on My Dating Plan dating course to dream of their relationship future, I'm not asking them to dream of their white Wedding or dream of walking along a paradise beach with Mr Perfectly Wonderful. I am asking them to dream of their everyday! The normal day-to-day future that they and all of us will have because that is where we are all heading. After the initial falling in love and relationship building, magical romance faze, ANY long term relationship will settle down into 24/7 of being together, living together normality and how do YOU want that to look? How do YOU want it to feel? 

Now we're not talking boring normality here. Being in love, living the life of your dreams with the man of your dreams is never boring, it IS wonderful being with Mr Wonderful!! But and this is a BIG BUT it'll turn sour or at the very least become lessened, if that life you are living isn't aligned with your needs and wants. You NEED to get pretty bloomin clear on those and pretty bloomin clear that the man you have chosen to have your future with is going to be on the same page as you so that YOU have every chance of getting all of those needs and wants met in your future. 

So...back to that everyday. We wake up everyday, we get up and we launch ourselves into our day. Be it a mothering day, a working day, a leisure day, a retirement day...it has lots of different elements to it that have the potential to make us happy or unhappy. And here's the thing...happy or un-happy without any influence from anyone else. Read that again! What does that mean? 

Where do you wake up? What circumstances are you waking up in? What standards? 

If you think of a future relationship, what are going to be the answers to those questions that are going to give you happiness? Where have you and your partner decided to live? What does your home together look like? What standard is it at? 

When you are first dating someone and you KNOW the answers to your future wants and needs questions, you can communicate that to the men that you are dating. "I want to live in the country" or "I want to live in a cottage" and "I'm a neat and tidy person so I like a well ordered, tidy home life" 

If the man who you are dating likes a more buzzing kind of lifestyle with chrome modern interiors and hairy, slobbery dogs you're probably not going to achieve the type of relationship future home life that will fulfil you. Read my blog post Ch Ch Changes if whilst you we're reading that your mind drifted to "I can change him".

When you are launching into that day of yours, what do you want to be doing? Are you wanting to spend a great deal of that day with him...everyday? Do you see yourself running a business with your future partner, spending every working day together building your dream? 

If you have secretly held a desire to run a pub, spending your future as the host and hostess with the mostest, don't just expect that he will magically skip into a landlord future with you because he read your mind and found 'the perfect little pub' for you. You need to define that dream for yourself before you even begin to date so that you know exactly the steps that will need to be taken to achieve that future happiness goal and then you can make sure that 'he' wants to climb that ladder with you. If the man that you are dating tells you that he's always been a lazy arse and he likes to spend his leisure time watching telly then he's probably not going to be up at 6am on a Monday morning ready for the barrel man to arrive and he's probably not still going to be in the bar the following Sunday evening at 11pm cajoling the last stragglers out the door and off to bed. YOU will be doing all of that and it will most definitely not be the relationship future daily working life that YOU want and need. No amount of love will stop the resentment creeping in through the cellar door!

How about your normal day to day evenings? How will they look? How will they feel? 

Will your needs be met cooking together each evening, sharing a bottle of wine, chatting about your days. That happens in the beginning stages of relationships but will that be enjoyable and 'living the relationship dream' for you both a few years down the line? If you like to eat out several times a week but the man you are dating has chosen a career path that will make that a financial strain for your future relationship, it'll cause problems because that need in you will need to be sacrificed. Do you want to make that sacrifice? 

How about weekends and family occasions? When you sit and think about your future, think really hard and get really clear on what your needs are in those areas. The more you can think and get clear of each and every aspect of daily life and each and every want and need you have the more clear you will get on what your relationship future needs to look like in order for you to be happy. If you are both on the same page in those aspects, aside form the romance and compatibility parts, your life, your relationship future will be 10 times the richer for it. 

Here is a list of things to get clear on, it is by no means exhaustive...

Before you say to me, as many women do "But that is so practical! It will all just fall into place won't it?" let me ask you, how much of it do you want to leave up to fate, leave up to chance, leave up to him to decide? 

* Location - where do you both see yourselves living now & in the future, location and circumstance

* Standards - what are your home environment standards - cleanliness, tidiness, decoration

* Standards - do your personal standards align - manners, cleanliness, social  

* Compatibility - do both of your morality standards align

* Compatibility - do both of your outlook standards align

* Commitment - are your ideals of future commitment aligned  

* Family - what are both of your family commitments and choices for family involvement 

* Friends - how do friends feature in both of your lives

* Financials -  are your financial comfort levels aligned 

* Career - are your career paths compatible, current and future

* Leisure - how do you both like to spend your free time

* Future - what are both of your future goals...are they in tune 

After looking at this list are you thinking crikey! I need to have a good think about all of this? You should be because this is how you are going to live the rest of your life...

"My Ex Will Want Your Book!"

 

“My Ex will want to buy your Book!”

It’s really important to stress that the Bad Men we are talking about in my book are a very small minority of the otherwise glorious world of GOOD MEN. There are MILLIONS of good men out there, I’m lucky enough to know loads and loads of wonderfully good men and I am blessed to totally and utterly love and adore one, my Husband.

I have had several male friends say to me “oh heck, I have ex’s who will want your book!” and my response is always but you are NOT one of those types of men. Sure, yes, over all of our dating years and even our relationship years we ALL mess up and I am in no doubt I have several ex’s who will have stories of how I didn’t treat them well…and I probably didn’t! But here’s the thing…we learn. We evolve, we take all of our experiences and we progress and if, yes, we have hurt someone un-intentionally or even intentionally at that time, we SEE the pain it causes, we FEEL the pangs of guilt and we alter ourselves to try our best not to make that mistake again. Sometimes, we make many mistakes, in many different relationship but we learn and we continue to grow. BAD MEN DO NOT DO THIS.  

Bad Men feel no guilt, no regret. They deliberately cause instability in their partner to serve their own ends, through tried and tested methods, on many previous partners. They have no intention of changing anything about their behaviour and some of them even enjoy their Bad Man status!

So, when a woman says to me that all her ex’s were bad men, I make no bones about pointing out that they probably all weren’t. And when good men say to me “there are bad women too you know” I respond with YES there are...

Friends of Friends To Date

 Who do you know? Do they know you are looking for love? 

Who do they know? Do they have friends looking for love too?

My gorgeous friends have been blissfully married for a few years now and met in both of their late 40's. However they had had mutual friends for years, who had never suggested they meet! Sam said to her friend "Did it never occur to you over the years to introduce me to Steve when I was single?!?"

No, obviously not but why not when they were so clearly perfect for each other!!

Back in the day, being set up on a 'blind date' by friends or family was one of the only ways to meet someone new when there was no Internet and we all lived in much smaller communities but it seems to completely have gone out of fashion! That is SUCH a shame because who knows you better than your friends and family??

It is even more of a shame also because now we all know and know of sooo many more people than we ever did back then. People at work (often jobs are more on the road now therefore creating many more interactions or we travel to a different town to work increasing our area circle) people at clubs (we are now attending more clubs, more gyms, more classes, more meetings because of excellent transport and road links than we ever did before) people socially (we are FAR more social creatures now because eating out is cheaper than it used to be and there are far more outlets, there are more events, shows, festivals, concerts) and people virtually (there aren't many of us now who aren't on some form of social media or interact with sites of some form and often times we have 'friends' on our lists that we don't even know) 

I know I have more friends and acquaintances than I used to have because every New Year when I fill in my calendar for the coming year, the 'Birthdays' take up most of the pages! 

So do you see where I am going with this? Your friends, your family, your work colleagues, your virtual friends may know THE PERFECT GUY for you and they just haven't had the lightbulb moment of "hey, you know what, I know someone you might like to connect with, you guys are so alike!" 

And they haven't had that eureka 'blind date' matchmaker vision because we are all so darn bloomin busy and wrapped up in our own plate spinning lives that it's no wonder they haven't joined the dots. You need to join them for them!! And you need to join the dots for as many of your friends, family, colleagues and virtual friends as you can!! Get that message out there...I am looking to meet someone, do you know of any great guys?!?  

Now before you recoil in horror and scream at me, "I CAN'T TELL THEM THAT, I'd be so embarrassed!!!" come on...really...you're an intelligent women, you can come up with subtler ways. Imagine this conversation:

You: " Hi it's lovely to see you, how are you?"

Her: "oh I'm good, just tryin to get thro!"

You: "Yeah, tell me about it, I went on a date for the first time in years the other night, what a disaster"

Her: "oh really? I didn't know you were dating again"

Waiter comes to take the order...

Her: "You know what, I was just thinking, my Husband has this chap he works with, he tells him about his disastrous dating stories too. I've met him once at the works do, he seems really nice...I wonder if you two could connect?"

SEE, it's THAT simple. So come on, you can come up with lot's of subtle ways that you can let EVERYONE you know, know that you are open to meeting someone that they may be connected to...

Time & Punishment - Mr Big B*llocks

I had lunch with a lovely women the other day who told me that her ex partner had admitted to her that whenever things got 'sticky' with a woman he was seeing, he would withdraw communication for two weeks. That was his rule. He would self discipline to not see, ring or message her and 'let her stew' after which point or during the two weeks she would contact him and apologise...even if the argument that had happened was because of something HE had done, which he admitted, it usually was. But he had perfected this 'realise what she's missing' technique over many years and many, many women.  

He knew without a shadow of a doubt that if he waited it out, she would 'come crawling back' and whatever the storm had been, it would all blow over. Minimum emotional discomfort on his part, he would just simply go off on a short trip and wait it out or even indulge in a short fling with another woman until Miss Lucky To Have Him returned, grovel champagne and silk undies in hand. 

He knew full well the emotional devastation, sleepless night and torturous insecurity that she was going through but to him it was all part and parcel of teaching her that she wasn't to rock his boat and complain about the way he behaved and lived his life. He loved his life that way and if she wished to love him she was just bloomin well going to have to learn to live with it. 

In his mind it was her fault that she couldn't and she deserved to be in pain. He was Mr Big B*llocks and if she wanted the honour of being his, she would suffer the two weeks punishment whenever she dared to kick him in them. Many women had kicked and got kicked out over the years and almost all of them had come crawling back...many of them many, many times. This only fuelled his impression of himself as a glorious prize and added more justification to his two week rule...to him. 

So if you are 'being sent to Coventry' (I still need to find out where that saying came from as seen as I now live in the city...) you should ask yourself "Is he playing a mind game?" 

Chances are, he is!