Chocolate

Most individuals struggle with relationship challenges, which consumes their time and lives. It is highly possible that relationship issues rank in the top 1% of people’s daily concerns, only second to their financial needs. People often diet, seek help from others, compromise their values, sacrifice their dreams, and /or settle for the understudy, all in the name of finding happiness in relationships. Recently a woman in her late 40s told me that she is not leaving this earth without finding true love. She is willing to sacrifice any other dreams and has made finding someone to love her number one priority. Her longing for love is stronger than her desire for success in her career, family, or the spoils of life. Finding happiness through true love is not only exclusive to this particular woman, but in fact it is a worldwide phenomenon.We all seek the warm and cozy feelings that being in a happy relationship and having our basic needs met brings. The basic needs that people subconsciously seek to fulfill include certainty, uncertainty, significance, connection, growth and contribution. Women establish relationships as a way to feel loved and needed in order to fulfill their hunger for certainty. However, in addition to the need for certainty is the need for uncertainty, which creates a paradox. Individuals subconsciously struggle between the two contradictions. Once they have achieved certainty in their relationships, they find themselves going to nauseating extremes to create uncertainty. Examples of creating uncertainty include arguing, infidelity, withholding sex, and being emotionally unavailable to their partner with the hopes it will break up the monotony of certainty.Another human need is significance, which can correlate to validation and approval. For instance, a woman might look for her husband’s approval by asking, “Honey, how do I look in this dress?” Or a mother volunteers to sew 20 costumes for her child’s first school play. We seek connection through the entity of marriage, loving our kids, or belonging to a unique organization. Sometimes good girls go bad by joining a street gang to feel connection and not necessarily to hurt others. The need for growth includes evolving as individuals in the relationship. This need is met by educating ourselves; reading self-help books, watching talk shows, or discovering new points of view through case studies on Dr. Phil. Lastly the basic need to contribute to our relationship. Contribution may be displayed through a girlfriend helping her boyfriend with his career by contributing her money, time, and support. Mothers will patiently help her kids learn to read and spend many years teaching them how to become model citizens.The six basic needs of a relationship are what drive a relationship forward and backwards. Most pursue these needs to only be met with adverse affects because they are not taught as children how to be a relationship. At the fundamental level, girls and boys are taught opposite lessons about each other’s true characteristics. Girls are taught all boys’ want is sex, they are dogs, and they should not be trusted. Boys are taught to coddle females and respect them, even those that may not deserve it.When these girls and boys with opposing values meet as adults in a relationship, conflicts are imminent. If a woman is never taught how to manage her relationship, she will spend her life chasing one need after another. It would have helped if parents and the media taught children the truth about the world series of love - man vs. woman; not the cliché stories of the knight and shining armor or Cinderella as a truth. These stories only trick kids who become adults then seek out their Romeo or Juliet, but to no avail. As adults, they are left with negative feelings toward the opposite sex. When adult men don’t fit into in their childhood fairy tale, women develop the belief that men are pigs, cheaters and commitment phobics. Or she believes that true love, finding the one and soul-mates are for the special chosen few. In either case she is left frustrated and disappointed.If You Like Chocolate Eat Chocolate dispels the adolescent tales and gives the reader an honest account amongst the sexes. It begins at the fundamental level in childhood, between the father and daughter. That relationship establishes your likes and dislikes; either you’ll be attracted to salad or chocolate! Unfortunately, in most all cases she will be most attracted to chocolate. Hence, this book, If You Like Chocolate Eat Chocolate, which encourages women to like who they like are most attracted to, but most importantly how to manage the chocolate they desire without sacrifice.