From IAmBrianJames.com
I had a great weekend in New York, thank you for the love! However, the highlight of the weekend took place when I returned home yesterday.
I love interrogating my hero and best friend, my beautiful mother, about her relationship with my father. Most of the time she is just over flowing with embarrassing anecdotes of my father’s corny pick up lines or his slick back hair cut that almost ruined his first date with my mother, but what she told me this weekend might be the medicine that saves a dying love life.
Painfully sober I asked my mother who has been married 26 years, ” How did you know Dad was the one?,” & boy was I in for a treat. She reassured me of something that I definitely needed to hear and that was that women just want someone who will try. My mother said that my father was “the one” because he continued to “try”. He was persistent with trying to make her laugh, relentless with making her smile and keeping her happy, and most importantly whenever problems arose, he never gave up on trying to make it right. Patience was the carpenter that built their house of love.
“I knew he was the one because he tried. That’s the problem with your generation. Trying is not enough and even if it was, nobody is trying anyway. Look at your love life…,” said my mum (I had to stop her there because I didn’t want to make this depressing).
In theory she has a point though. My peers have shortened how many swings you get at bat from 3 to 1, and whenever problems arise we are searching for any nearby exit. Our stamina in love (not like that) is equivalent to a struggling asthmatic on a track team.
I dissected what mum was saying and went even deeper to understand the reasoning behind our struggles. We struggle with endurance because we have an idea of what perfection means to us and won’t settle for anything less. We idolize these “power” couples, watching them in their good times and want what they have but don’t understand the sweat and fight included to obtaining this marital bliss and we don’t the patience to endure the flight before claiming our reservation in the land of love.
“I knew he was the one because he tried.” = “Trying is perfection.”
Only a mature mind can digest that. Your heroes in life are where they are today because of yesterday’s struggles. They continued to ‘Try’ and underwent a maturation phase that is only fit for the strong, and that phase helped them realize that the key to a ‘perfect’ future was to continue to try and achieve the best they can be.
On the flip side, our blurred conception of perfection can be daunting on any one because you start to feel that you have to be perfect. For someone with lower self esteem, or someone will fall victim to their own mind, that can be dangerous. You’ll never feel like you’re enough, when in actuality you need to be the absolute best you can be and that’s all anyone can ask of you. Ask me how I know about that debacle there.
Personally, that’s why I feel as though I need to be working on myself because I need to digest the ideal that perfection is the result of me being the best me and for someone, somewhere, that will be enough. Not plunging into a cesspool of narcism but, feeling myself enough to know that my best will suffice. I fell victim to pretending to be someone I’m not with hopes of trying to be perfect for someone, and well… You see where that got me right?
To my fellow gentlemen, she doesn’t want perfection. She doesn’t want you to be outside of yourself. She doesn’t want an actor or a representative of you. She wants YOU and she wants a YOU that will never give up. She wants to see that no matter how rough the waves become, or how treacherous the weather, she can count on you to try to make things better. She doesn’t want you to promise her the world, she just wants you to keep the promises that you make and make promises that you can keep. No amount of money in the world, fendi bags, Mac Kits, or whatever else girls like can amount to a man that’s trying. That’s all she wants bro, you don’t even have to be rich or famous.
Woo her with your consistency.
We have developed such a foggy understanding (or lack there of) of what women want but in actuality it’s simple- they want effort.
So my good men, continue to fight the good fight but understand that a fabricated version of yourself should never be considered as perfection and remember that no movie lasts for ever, at some point you will fall out of character. With that being said, know that the best you is all the “perfection” she wants.
By: Brian James
@BrianJamesLive (Twitter) @IAmBrianJames (Instagram)
