What Every Girl Should Know
Geplaatst op 08-05-2026
Categorie: Lifestyle
So once I had established a set of guidelines to help me with communication, how did it work out when I started to apply it? Honestly…it was hard as hell.
Let me frame this. I was a nice girl. I was polite, even-tempered, hated confrontation, and wanted everyone to like me. If I ever had quick, responsive feeling of anger or annoyance, I hid it, kept it to myself or didn’t talk about it. And if I was forced to talk about it because of time or need, I would usually be so worked up that I couldn’t do it calmly or rationally. I wouldn’t get bitchy—no, something far worse. I’d start crying. And crying made me feel shame. Crying showed that my emotions were totally out of my control, and I couldn’t stand that. I would rather hide my emotions than cry. (This comes from my father, who viewed tears with great contempt. Nothing would get fixed if there was crying going on. I only saw my mother cry once in front of him, and it wasn’t because of anything he did.)
Obviously, not letting people know when you’re upset is not an effective communication style, and so far hadn’t served me well. I knew I had to change…but I also dreaded having to do it.
The first challenge came in about two weeks after BbMan and I started dating exclusively. We had made plans to have dinner together. I thought these plans were set in stone. He did not, I discovered, after I called him to see when we needed to meet.
He said, “Oh, Jack just called and he wants to see me so I’m going to do dinner with him. I’ll just see you tomorrow.”
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I immediately felt many emotions. First, a real, deep disappointment—like I had been flying in a hot air balloon, and someone had let all the air out of it. I’d been looking forward to seeing him all day…suddenly it wasn’t going to happen. Then, annoyance and anger. Didn’t we have set plans? And he was just going to cancel them last minute like this? Why should we be having an exclusive relationship if he was going to treat this like casual dating? My friends didn’t do this to me. Finally, I felt one overwhelming emotion: panic. My heart started beating really fast, and it was getting hard to breath. I was panicking over having to share my feelings with him. I was afraid he’d get mad, or tell me I was a controlling bitch.
But I had to do it. I had to say something. I waded in with “Oh.”
Then I took a deep breath and went further into the water, “Look, this doesn’t work for me…my idea of exclusive dating is if we have set plans that we give those priority over other offers, and if something changes we discuss them before hand. This…feels more like casual dating to me. Which is totally fine, and we can go back to that if it’s a better fit for you. Would you like to do that?”
My heart was beating out of its chest at this point, but my voice was calm, albeit a bit wobbly. I was crossing my fingers he couldn’t hear that.
He said. “Huh. Okay.” Then he paused and said, “Why don’t we do this: I’ll raincheck Jack, and you and I can meet up for dinner and talk about this some more.”
Which is exactly what we did. And that one incident built the first layer of trust between us.
I knew that if I was upset about something, I could tell BbMan immediately, and he would listen and consider what I’d have to say. He wouldn’t get defensive or reactive, which would have been a Dread reaction and shut me down. And he wouldn’t fall all over himself apologizing and vow to do better, which was a Ped reaction that would have shut him down. Instead, we could just talk about it.
And he knew that if I was upset and had an immediate reaction, I could tell him exactly what was wrong and why in a calm, rational—albeit wobbly— manner. (I still had to learn how to let him know when I was angry after a long burn, but we’d get there eventually.)
And as the months went on, we continued to have these types of conversations and build layer upon layer of trust. For every successful heated discussion we had, we built another layer. By the time we were married, we had a simple foundation. Now, these many years later, we have nearly a two-story house.
It’s a simple but hard strategy: real honesty. It’s served us well, and most of the time it doesn’t have to involve tears—much to my relief.