As I’ve written and spoken about a lot lately, many women find it hard to find a man who wants to take care of them. However, they also don’t consciously search for a man who wants to do things for them. If you are single and have always yearned for a man who wants to take care of you and put you first, you need to own this desire and proactively look for men who have this quality. This can be hard if you have low self-esteem and you don’t think you deserve to have any needs. In this post, I’ll tell you how you can find a man who wants to care for you and identify what you’re currently doing that may have stopped you from finding a guy like this in the past.
When you are a girl raised in a home where your mother takes care of everything and your father is more of a passive presence that just does what he is told, or you see your father acting selfishly and your mother in a martyr role, like this, you subconsciously learn that this is how relationships work. You think that the woman’s role is to take care of everything and/or to put up with whatever your partner does. It can be very hard to shake this implicit conception of male-female relationships when you grow up and get into your own romantic relationships.
When you grow up thinking that men don’t take care of women, you will not ask your boyfriends to do anything for you because you never thought of this as a possibility. This will mean that you end up staying in relationships where you are treated poorly or the man just waits for you to do everything, because this is what you expect. Other women may dump these guys, but you don’t know any other dynamic, so you stay with someone that doesn’t really show you any evidence that he can or wants to care for you. Later in life, when you compare your marriage with this man to your friends’ marriages, you will feel sad and wonder why you didn’t end up with someone different, who puts your needs first.
When you have never been taught that your needs should be taken into account, it is hard to figure out what sorts of things are normal to ask for from a boyfriend. Here are some very concrete examples of healthy things to ask for when you’re in the early stages of dating.
- Ask to go out to eat at the place that you like
- Ask to watch what you want on TV at least half the time
- Ask for the man to do different things in bed to get you off
- Ask for help with your chores around your house
- Ask for help with childcare if you are dating with kids. E.g., if you are dating a man who has known your kids for at least a few months and you are planning to get engaged/married, he should be helping them with stuff like homework or driving them places when need be
- Ask for extra help when you are not feeling well.
- Be open with what you hate doing, e.g., cooking, cleaning, hiking, watching sports, oral sex, whatever
This last one brings up a key point. If your modus operandi is to try and impress your boyfriend by what an excellent homemaker/cook/sports watcher or whatever else you are, but you are secretly expending a lot of effort doing this and you know in your heart that you don’t want to act this way forever (but you are assuming he understands that everyone changes after marriage), then you are unintentionally bait-and-switching.
Most women don’t consciously bait-and-switch their boyfriends, but if they look more objectively at their behavior, they may recognize that they in fact are acting a part in the courtship that they don’t want to keep playing during the marriage. This isn’t fair, and if you really hate anything from preparing dinner to giving blowjobs, be clear about it right up front so the man knows who you really are and doesn’t feel like he made a mistake marrying you later on. You would want the same respect from him. (And it is the same unintentional bait and switch when men act more romantic than usual during dating but assume the woman “knows” this isn’t “realistic” after marriage.)
Note that there is no secret way to get the same man if you do and do not have his interests/enjoy sex/whatever. I will use the oral sex example because it’s very common for men to say their wives did this before marriage but not after. If you really know you hate this and don’t want to keep doing it forever, then you will be limiting the men you can marry by selecting on the variable of “men who don’t want oral sex.” HOWEVER, you are much less likely to end up in an unhappy marriage or divorced because you presented yourself as different than you are. It takes a lot of deep introspective work to figure out who you are and to authentically present that to dating partners, but it is deeply worthwhile and means you will end up with someone who knows and loves the true you.
If you believe that asking a man for help or care in the ways I delineate above would turn him off and ensure that he thinks you’re needy, then understand that this is your own cognitive distortion coming from your upbringing. In fact, you would only turn off men who do not want to care for their partners, which is exactly what you are trying to weed out. So many women say their partners don’t help them or protect them but then can never give any examples of when the man helped or protected them in early dating. In this case, how could you expect the person to change? Only if you ask them for help, care, or prioritization and they openly give it during the dating stage can you expect this later on in your marriage.
Only if you believe you are worthy of care will you be able to ask for it, so if this is the bottleneck, therapy can be very useful in allowing you to see that your own experiences in early life are preventing you from seeing that you are someone who deserves care and love from a partner. Once you can own your needs and desires, you can work on communicating them effectively and directly to your partner, and then you can select a partner who shows his desire to please you early and always within a relationship. And till we meet again, I remain, The Blogapist Who Says, This Can Also Be Switched For Men; They Usually Want Care In The Physical Sense Though.