Peter Pan and commitment-phobia

"I am seeing someone...and he's pretty terrific, except I don't see him committing or settling down in my lifetime! He's so much fun to be with but what's in the future for us?"

In my book The Dirty Seven: Ladies Beware, I briefly describe PanMan. The guy with the Peter Pan complex. The guy who never wants to grow up. And he certainly doesn't want to commit. He is not one of the Dirty Seven because they do want to commit--commit to making your life a living hell. No, PanMan is lovable, fun to be with, nice as can be--but will never settle down and be in a committed relationship.

PanMan may even have commitment-phobia. I come across so many who clearly exhibit a fear of commitment. They literally avoid commitment, or sabotage and stall the processes that bring it about. They see commitment the way a phobic sees a snake or spider. It brings them such terror, they'd rather avoid it altogether.

Here is what I wrote about PanMan:

"This guy does not want to grow up. He has what is known as The Peter Pan Complex. Since whole books have been dedicated to this concept, I will not cover it here. Some men exist who do not want to be men. They want to remain boys their whole life. If you are constantly thinking, “Oh, grow up!” when you observe your guy’s actions, he is probably a PanMan.

"He is actually a variation of the YAPpie, except that PanMan is not always young. This variety spans all age groups. He can be quite mature in years and still act immature. He likes to be a kid, with his collection of toys and games. He also likes to watch sports to the extent that his day is ruined if his team loses. He sits on the sidelines watching a game with more enthusiasm than he ever shows for making plans for his life. His game-love always outweighs his love for you.

"While he is playing and watching others play, he neglects the unsavory adult aspects of life, such as taking responsibility and cleaning up the mess he made. He doesn’t want a serious relationship because he might have to make a commitment, which is way too grown up for him to stomach. If he does move in with you, expect to end up taking care of him. He is not capable of looking out for you.

"His lack of relationship skills bleeds into his work-life as well, if he has a job. He does not have a career. That is too adult and far-thinking. He has a series of low-level jobs like a teenager just starting out in the world. When he is on the job he plays around a lot, with games, being a Monday morning quarterback, and playing pranks. He does not spend time thinking about how he could improve anything around him, the job, his financial standing, or your future together."

So what do you do if you are involved with PanMan? You can enjoy him for what he is and not expect him to be what he is not. Though he is not one of the Dirty Seven, in that he won't do you any harm, if you wait around for him to change and commit, you are deluding yourself. It's best to love him for what he is and continue to seek the one who will commit to you with all his heart.

Is it love or just drama and pain?

We choose partners that reflect the things that we believe about ourselves. If you carry negative ideas about yourself, love, and relationships, your partners will mirror these and create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We adjust and accommodate and in some instances even enable our partners to keep doing their painful behavior. If you habitually choose emotionally unavailable people and find regularly find yourself in poor relationships with poor mate material, no matter what you say and believe, you too are emotionally unavailable and you choose people who yield the least likely possibility for a healthy, positive relationship.

Emotionally available people don’t habitually get involved with The Dirty Seven and when they do find themselves involved with them, they back away because it doesn’t feel healthy, comfortable, or right.

We say we want to be committed and we want to be loved, yet we choose people who can barely commit to seeing us the following week and who don’t actually love us.

And this is where some of you will become confused because:

1) You believe that you love them.

2) You believe that they love you but they just don't know it, or they love you but they're too afraid to show it, or they loves you because they tell you that they do even though their actions say different.

3) You believe that you have an amazing connection and this is your destiny because the sex is great/he’s funny with a great sense of humor, no-one’s ever made you feel like this before, etc.

4) You feel that you love them and if you feel this way then surely they should appreciate how much you feel for them and love you back because you have projected how you think and feel on them and you believe that you are the best they've ever had.

5) You believe you can do enough loving for the both of you and that in time, they will realize it and you’ll love happily ever after.

Pain is the opposite of love But pain is not love. It's the opposite of live. It’s just pain. So and don’t mix the two up and think that you’re suffering for your love and that only real, passionate love is painful, because quite frankly, there are many people who would pass on putting themselves through this pain.

Fear and drama
Much of the pain stems from fear and drama and we mistake our feelings of fear and penchant for drama as love, because we have poor relationship habits that have been learned over an extended period of time, often from childhood. This means that our behavior and desires may seem completely normal and even familiar as we can be playing out subconscious patterns.

Patterns What you learn though as you become aware of your relationship habits and harness your pattern is that if we don’t address how we feel about ourselves, love, and relationships we end up with a very skewed idea of what love is.

1) You learn to accept crumbs, feeling grateful for slivers of attention from people who are unworthy of your energy.

2) You convince yourself that what you’re getting is what you deserve or it must be what you want, because surely if you didn’t want this person and this relationship then you could walk away?

3) You believe that the magnitude of pain that you experience is in direct correlation to the amount of love you have, thus the more pain you feel, the more in love you believe yourself to be.

4) You convince yourself that you’re not good enough to expect or get more and that a better relationship will elude you.

5) You believe that because you have such poor experiences and that time is passing that you must ’settle’.

6) You become obsessed with getting attention from these people and aren’t concerned with the quality of attention so you end up with drama, either sought out or thrown in your direction.

7) You become co-dependent. The very person who is on one hand the very source of your pain also appears to be the sole source of your happiness. You can’t seem to function without them and you believe it’s because of your love when in actual fact it’s because of fear.

8) You think that the butterflies in your stomach that you get around these people is excitement and passion when in actual fact, when you have a habit of being with the same poor partners, it’s familiar fear.

9) You expend so much mental energy thinking about them, what you think they feel and do, what you think you do and feel, and betting on potential that you lose sight of the reality of them and become obsessed and infatuated with an illusion.

Fake love and passion Many of the dysfunctional things that happen in poor relationships are easy to tag as ‘love" and "passion" but it is important to remember that reality becomes distorted in poor relationships . If you don’t reconcile who you think you love with the reality of who they are and the relationship you have, you will fail to process that feeling of drama and fear for what they are - fear and drama - and as long as you are doing this, you will continue to fall into a cycle of poor relationships that result in similar experiences.

The drama and the fear
Fear and drama make you dependent on surrounding yourselves in experiences and factors that make it more comfortable for you to believe that this is how things are. Fear causes inaction and we end up being comfortable with the pattern of the very uncomfortable, because it seems far more uncomfortable to make positive changes that will not only make us accountable for our own happiness (or misery), but will throw the spotlight on where we are expending our emotional energy and reveal some uncomfortable truths.

Familiar pain
If you have been involved with the type of people who yield poor experiences on a habitual basis, there will be many familiar things about what you’re experiencing and that’s a sign in itself that not only is something very wrong, but you’re actually gravitating to patterns that you can recreate over and over again, and that’s not love when it ends up causing you so much pain, fear, and drama.

The test of all this is if you develop a healthier relationship with yourself which will result in healthier beliefs about love and relationships, will you still want them? Will you still love them? Or will you finally realize that you haven’t experienced love yet - you’ve just experienced pain.

For more info: See my books, The Dirty Seven: Ladies Beware and Booby Trapped: Men Beware the Dirty Seven Sisters.

Is Snooping OK?

"I found a few sexual texts in my bf’s phone from a girl, he tells me that he’s not doing anything in person with her and isn’t trying to hide anything, but I now don’t trust him. He said they met once before and he didn't like her like that. He admitted to looking in my phone a few weeks ago, but I am not doing anything to hide, like he is. That is why I think he went thru my phone, b/c he’s the guilty one, and he was trying to find something on me. I understand that most men would say it’s harmless, but if he couldn’t tell me what he is doing, then there is something to hide. Please advise," a reader writes.

I am not an advocate of snooping through people's things. Yet so many lovers are compelled to do it. The very insecurity that causes them to want to riffle through their significant other's things can cause them to make possibly wrong assumptions about messages and e-mails.  Why are they snooping anyway? Don't they trust each other? If they don't trust each other, why are they together?

Here's a scenario: You find a text message saying "Great time last night" from a woman on your man's cell. You don't know the whole story--maybe it is his female boss talking about the timing of a project that he just finished. You fret about it and finally are compelled to ask him about that message. Now he knows that you have been snooping around on him. This will make you appear in a bad light. Why are you going through his private stuff? Don't you have any boundaries? Can't a man be left in peace?

What else will she be rummaging through? My drawers? My wallet? My checkbook? What kind of psycho is she?

In the case of obviously sexual text messages cited above, the couple is snooping through each other's phones to see old text messages and possibly to hear their voicemail. She finds explicitly sexual texts. He gives her some lame excuses that are so obvious. If he didn't want to receive these things he would either tell the sender or quickly delete them. He even met the sender and saw that he "didn't like her that way." Obviously the guy is shopping around. But that's not my point.

What drove this reader to snoop around on her boyfriend's phone? She didn't trust him. Furthermore, he didn't trust her. So what is left in this situation? Two people looking for signs in each other that they are not meant to be together. Therefore, if you are snooping around, ask yourself, "Why am I doing this? Do I have any just cause for this (such as grounds for a divorce)? Is it my own insecurity running rampant? Why don't I trust him? Why am I with a person I don't trust?"

If you  have to snoop around to figure out that your lover is playing you, the situation is already out of hand. You might as well move on to someone you won't even feel the need to snoop about.

Can you get STDs from Oral?

Some people think,"I won't catch a disease if we just indulge in oral sex." Sorry, in terms of disease, oral sex is as risky as regular sex.  Even though you're not exchanging bodily fluids through your genitals, your mouth is as just as ready to be an STD sandwich. New research shows it can even cause cancer. Here are some things to consider when you’re going down.

Warts and cancer
Just last year—in addition to gonorrhea, chlamydia, herpes, HIV/AIDS, HIV, trichomoniasis, syphilis, and hepatitis—HPV, aka genital warts, reared its ugly head in throat cancer statistics. Since the ‘70s, cases of the cancer in the ol’ pipes have risen 39 percent, and doctors found HPV, contracted through oral sex, to be the cause. 

Dam it!
One way doctors are recommending to prevent the spread of STDs through oral sex is to use a condom the way a dentist uses a dental dam when you are getting a root canal. Whoah! That doesn't sound too sexy, does it? The instructions are to hold the dental dam over your mouth—not over his johnson or her va-jay-jay—and proceed from there. Honestly, if you have to go through all that, it's better to avoid it altogether,  until you know each other and even have seen medical reports that  you both check out OK for STDs.

Don't let it sit
Stanford University recommends you “swallow or spit, just don’t let it sit.” You’ve got to limit your mucus membrane (mouth, penis, and vag) contact with semen. In the case of females, if he does finish in your mouth, get rid of it fast. Your best bet is to have him make a big splash elsewhere. Ask your partner to give you the head’s up when he’s about blow. Then, offer him a sexy alternative space to show off his finale. 

Know each other
So unless you feel comfortable getting out the rubber-works when it's time to go down, my advice is to only do it with people you know and trust are disease-free. Since Bill Clinton did not think oral sex was technically sex, people have followed suit and think, "I won't have sex with them because that might be risky but I'll do oral with them because it's safe." Not!!

This is one of the reasons I advocate sexual relations in the context of a loving and caring relationship--not just getting your rocks off with a stranger in the heat of the moment. It may be fun for a few minutes and you may pay for it for the rest of your life.

Why women need cuddling

I have hear men complain that they don't understand why women always want to cuddle. One man asks: "What is it with all this cuddling my girlfriend wants to do? I don't understand the whole idea about cuddling." 

Cuddling releases pair-bonding hormone
Lots of men don't understand why women like to cuddle. But they need to understand that the act of cuddling releases a hormone calledoxytocin, sometimes called the "cuddling hormone.” Oxytocin is responsible for pair bonding, which means it makes the cuddling couple feel closer and more intimate. It helps to create a bond between a man and a woman. 

Survival
In survival terms, a woman wants to create this pair bond in order to get the man to commit to her and their offspring. Even if your woman isn’t trying to marry you and start bearing your babies, she is likely still drawn to create an emotional bond with you and this kind of physical intimacy is a good way to do it.

Men's brain chemicals
The reason men don't cuddle that much relates to the hormones men's brains release after sex. As a man has an orgasm, a variety of brain chemicals are released including the hormone prolactin. Prolactin has a strong connection to sleep so its presence is probably responsible for a man’s tendency to roll over and go to sleep after sex. The release of prolactin also indicates the beginning of the “recovery time” that men have to take before having sex again. Women often don’t require any such time-out after having an orgasm.

Feel-good hormones
Oxytocin is released in men's brains, just as it is in the female brain, along with other feel-good hormones that will leave you feeling happy and less stressed. A 2006 study by the Berman Center for Women's Health in Chicago showed that couples who regularly indulge in spontaneous, non-sexual physical affection are more satisfied with their relationships. 

So cuddle if you would like your woman to feel closely connected and peaceful with you. You will see the benefits in terms of increased sexual satisfaction as she appreciates you more for understanding her cuddling needs.