Parking on the side of the road, I was planning on running a quick errand…

As I opened my car door, a jumping spider launched itself onto my dash. While I’m not normally a spider superfan… Jumping spiders are the exception.

They are adorable, cue baby talk as I personify them in cartoonish adorableness.

So as I open my door, and this adorable spider (If you don’t know about jumping spiders look them up, you’ll even find people documenting them as tiny pets).

I open the car door, he jumps from my dash to my door and into the hinges of my car door… which means closing my door would mean certain death….

So here I am on the side of the road with my door extended out open into the road. Thankfully during a break in traffic, and I am talking to my door hinges!  Trying frantically to extract this spider while not endangering myself with my extended door.

The spider kept jumping to unsafe locations that wouldn’t allow me to close the door without committing jumping spider murder.

This jumping spider didn’t understand that even though my actions may have appeared threatening, I actually had the best of intentions for him at heart…

And with that, Jumpy fled my efforts and jumped behind my door paneling, at the edge closest to the door hinge.

While he wouldn’t be squished with this move, he would be trapped with the closing of my door. This would have to do, for the moment. I quickly ran my errand and returned to allow his release, at which point he picked a safer spot and I pulled back onto the road…

However, no sooner had I gotten back on the road and a vulture decided to walk across the road, without looking both ways, it crossed right in front of my car. Luckily, I wasn’t going fast and could stop and wait for him to cross…thankfully no creatures are harmed in this story, as next a dog slowly crossed without looking, distracted by life as a dog and then looked quite surprised that a big yellow SUV was right behind him.  Anyway, this got me thinking about the times we do things, and in that moment we think it’s no big deal, or we are just reacting to our environment or someone else’s actions…but from the outside larger perspective… it may not appear that we have our own best intentions at heart…

Self Sabotague ? 

‘There have been plenty of times where, in the moment, I thought I was being rational, or kind, or responsible, thoughtful, or, or, or….And in retrospect…years later…I realize, wow, the lessons I’ve learned since, why did I?…fill in the blank, ‘put myself in that situation?’, ‘Accept that treatment or behavior?’ Sure, we learn some great life lessons, or how to set solid boundaries…but could we have learned those lessons a bit more gently?

Did I have to go through it soooo intensely?
I suppose it depends how deeply ingrained our response to certain patterns is, and how receptive we are to learning these lessons and changing our behaviors. Do we even know what’s really good for us??

Some ‘fun’ lessons I’ve learned are:

‘We teach others how they can treat us – By what we accept.’

‘You shouldn’t have to look so deeply to find, and uncover ‘the good’ in potential friends or romantic partners’. If you feel like you are on a treasure hunt to discover their potential deep inner goodness that is hidden from the surface…put your flashlight down, and go on about your business.

‘Surround yourself with people who feel like sunshine.’

‘If they want to call, text, see you…they will’…

A movie I saw years ago, really rocked my world. I cried so hard, and so deeply after watching it, it really opened my eyes… and I believe all women should be sat down before dating age and instructed to watch this movie, like a coming of age party. And then they should rewatch anytime they reenter the dating pool as life and experiences can make you forget these valuable lessons.

The movie came out in 2009.  It’s called ‘He’s just not that into you.’  I had been married about 3yrs (together 5yrs) at that point, and I cried hysterically during and after watching it… I realized, after the newness had worn out, my husband, just wasn’t that into me.

Now I realize the movie focuses primarily on people and advice in early dating and not particularly married folk, it’s not the focus, and it was certainly not only this movie that had me thinking this way. I think at that point I wasn’t admitting it to myself as I was always making excuses for why things weren’t quite right at that moment, but maybe, after such and such point, they’d get better. I was always looking ahead, at when it would get better…

I will still always be a believer in ‘anything is possible’. However, it’s also so true, that we ( historically women) get caught up in this space of ‘anything is possible’ and we’ve all heard these fanciful tales that worked out for someone else even though it was a super unlikely scenario. Given that I also grew up on Disney’s romance, that ‘magical thinking’ wasn’t doing me any favors, besides putting effort where it wasn’t shared.

If you haven’t seen this movie, check it out. If you happen to be reading from Poland, it’s on netflix.
If you are unable to stream it and want some key take aways, I believe the messages this movie shares are worth repeating, so if you haven’t seen it and you don’t want movie details spoiled, then it may be best to finish reading after you’ve caught up on the movie.

Otherwise, ‘He’s just not that into you‘….

The movie begins just as so many girls from my generation clearly remember, those first moments of boys behaving badly in our childhood. When they pulled our hair, or pushed us, called us names, stole our shoes and threw them on top of the school roof, kicked us…

We were told… it was because boys liked us, they had a crush. Besides, ‘Boys didn’t mature as quickly as girls, so we should realize they are just this way’. (If that shoe thing was oddly specific that is from my memory vault. As a kid I sometimes had shoes that didn’t fit and were for growing into, and growing up money was always tight so you used what you had…which may mean your shoes fall off, whether they were hand me downs or a gift for someday…anyway, it was a fun thing to do to play keep away with my shoes at recess. I loved climbing on the monkey bars, or walking on the balance beam, but other than that I didn’t like recess because kids were mean)….Anyway, my point, is that this is also when we are taught to justify wrong behavior, not to call it out. We are taught to interpret what they did, to really dive in and think about what it may mean, the beginning of our search for ‘love kernels’ or ‘breadcrumbing’.

We then constantly explain away bad behavior rather than call it out, we try to understand and interpret it, telling stories about a time something like this happened to a friend and it all turned out just fine.  I feel this movie is like a public service announcement, and this is not to shame guys for not being into us…not at all.

Really the idea is to empower women to choose where they put their energy, and if someones not into you, don’t waste your time.

Love Kernels…there is a clip from Crazy ex girlfriend a great show that actually calls out a lot of relationship dynamics and also mental health issues, the video is worth a watch and explains the love kernelling or breadcrumbing… 

Now, her version has a bit of delusion mixed into her interpretation, but the concept is the same.

The first time I heard Jimmy on Relationships. I cried…I felt so seen, and was blown away on how he could pinpoint how I felt in relationship, in my married, having married young (24) it’s a more eliquent version of the ‘he’s just not that into you’ but if you’ve ever struggled with how you deserve to be treated in relationships…. I highly recommend listening to Jimmy. And if you were curious about the break down in my marriage…This explains it better than I could. And it went down hill from here.

Anyway, back to the timeless advice from ‘He’s just not that into you’.

‘If a guy is treating you like he doesn’t give a shit, he genuinely doesn’t give a shit, no exceptions’.

And you are the ‘rule’ not the exception.  If a guy wants to see you, or call you, he will. If he doesn’t, it means he doesn’t want to. Always.

‘We have to stop listening to these stories, because the rule is that most guys who cheat on you don’t care about you much.

‘All of our friends, used to tell these stories about how it MAY work out with these dip shits, because they knew someone who knows someone, who dated a guy like mine and got married and lived happy ever after. But that is the exception, and we are not the exception, we are the rule.’

The movie continues to outline behavior of men behaving badly and women justifying how this one time it worked out to happily ever after…

The movie also shows dynamics where a guy was more into the girl than she was into him, however, it really calls into light the importance of matching energy in relationship, one sided can’t survive.

Or how happily and married don’t always come hand in hand.

 ‘Guys invented the Spark so they could not call, and treat you kinda badly and keep you guessing and convince you that, that anxiety and fear that just develops naturally you feel is just a spark’…

We grew up with fairy tales that taught us to wait for a man to rescue us. That our lives would begin after their kiss, that we lay in waiting or slumber until they show up and then suddenly it’s happily ever after…that we didn’t even need to have our own voice.

However…I want to introduce a revoltionary idea. 

We hold the power. As women, we can choose what we accept, what behavior is unacceptable.  We literally carry the future in our bodies and can choose who repopulates it. Past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior. We can raise our standards, only allowing good humans, good partners and good potential fathers to repopulate.  Imagine if we kept super high standards, guys get lazy about dating because they can, because they can swipe and there is another pretty face, but what if it wasn’t that easy? 

Now, it’s possible that it would go the way of Japan where the population has been declining and the government has interviened by planning mixers and ways to encourage people to meet potential partners… however, more and more men look to younger women who don’t yet realize, haven’t learned the lessons of why they must hold these standards, so we must get the word out early and often. 

What if men that behaved badly realized that no woman would ever put up with their behavior, and it meant a life alone?? Now, I do realize some men will use force and this particular writeup isn’t taking that into account.

What I am saying is that we get super picky with where we put our energy, and with whom… What if the men who were involved in making decisions that took our reproductive rights away from us knew that being involved in that decision meant a woman would never give them the time of day, ever. Unacceptable behavior redefined. We must unite.

We hold the power. We choose. 
Pura Vida,

Cheryl