Answer: <\/strong>Very good question. In the book, we do tend to focus on our own behavior as it is the thing that we can most control and change as needed. However, there are times when external factors can influence your relationship and it has nothing or very little to do with your own efforts.<\/p>\nPre-existing relationships with family or friends can be one of those external factors. Jobs and relationships with people at work can be another source of external influence.<\/p>\n
For example, family members such as a mother or father can put pressure on your spouse or girlfriend to do something that you don\u2019t want or even to look at you in a negative light. Sometimes people external to your relationship can create extra hurdles and problems for your relationship that wouldn\u2019t exist if they weren\u2019t there.<\/p>\n
For example, my ex-wife\u2019s parents use to exert pressure on my wife to \u201ctake it easy\u201d and \u201cnot work too hard\u201d and \u201ctake vacations\u201d at a time when we were starting a business together.\u00a0 They would invite us to come visit them or they would come visit us. We really couldn\u2019t afford to take any time off from our young start up business, but my ex-wife\u2019s pre-existing relationship with her parents was such that she could never say, \u201cNo\u201d to any of their suggestions.<\/p>\n
As a consequence, every suggestion they made moved my ex-wife and myself a little further apart, because I could see the malice in their intentions, and all she could see was a command that had to be obeyed.<\/p>\n
Can you overcome such external obstacles as these and others when they are happening? Perhaps, but many times it will be near impossible to overcome such influence. The best way to handle this external influence potential is to qualify for it when you first meet a person.<\/p>\n
Look for and spot any negative relationships that your potential mate might have amongst her family, friends, or work cohorts. What is important is that you learn and observe how your potential mate deals with such relationships. It isn\u2019t how \u201cbad\u201d or \u201cmean\u201d the mother-in-law is, for example, it is more, \u201cHow does your potential mate deal with such a person?\u201d<\/p>\n
The kind of relationships and situations that will cause you grief to no end, are those relationships in which your mate can not stand up for themselves \u2013 those relationships where they have to do what the other person says \u201cno matter what\u201d \u2013 those relationships which cause your potential mate to lose their integrity.<\/p>\n
I have had girlfriends with the most abusive parents in the world, yet these situations caused me no grief because these girlfriends had the ability to stand up to their parents and say, \u201cNo\u201d to anything the parents said that was unreasonable.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, the situation in which a wife who couldn\u2019t say, \u201cThat is not a good week to visit, can you come some other time?\u201d to her parents led to all kinds of distress, arguments, and external turmoil.<\/p>\n
Negative external factors are not easy to handle if they are entwined into your relationship. The best time to handle them is before you get too involved with a person. No matter how much you might love a person, no matter how cute or attractive they are, if you see that they cannot handle abusive parents, siblings, friends, other relatives, etc. be very careful about your decision to get involved with that person.<\/p>\n
It is not something we are trained to look at when \u201clooking for love\u201d but if you want a sane and a lasting relationship, it is something that must be confronted and looked at from day one.<\/p>\n
Mr. L. Rx<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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