Emotional Maturity

By Marlon leTerrance

Donna loved Tony the moment she met him. He was tall, handsome, and extremely wealthy. Donna couldn't believe her luck. Tony was the sort of man she had always wanted. He was articulate and always knew what he wanted in life. He was the man of her dreams. Not even a hour into their first date, Donna could already image how envious her girlfriends would be. Tony was showoff material, and Donna couldn't wait to show him off.

The couple managed to date for almost six months before the relationship toured sour. Tony remained the wealthy, articulate, and confident young man he had always been. But Donna soon realized that Tony was also an egotistical, selfish, and irritatingly moody man. It wasn’t long before the man Donna couldn’t wait to show off to her friends became the very same man she couldn’t stand being around.

There are a lot of females like Donna. Many of these women are not anxious to hear that they are fake and hypocritical when it comes to love and relationships, but the truth is fairly clean cut. You can only get out of a potential relationship the things you put into it. When you fill your idea of love and romance with superficial expectations you can only expect superficial results.

Love is not how much money a guy makes. True relationships are not beauty contests. It may feel good to have your friend's and family members tossing you kudos for having such a wonderful man in your life, but that's not a real relationship. That's just a childish, emotional show-and-tell session that never lasts longer than the initial flourish of interests.

In college, Donna wasn’t attracted to men who didn’t fit her physical requirements. If a guy wasn’t at least six feet tall, he was automatically disqualified. Looking back, she now seems to regret her decisions. “I was so shallow back then. I thought I wanted love, but as I think about it now, I realize how emotionally lacking I was. I wanted a status symbol. In the same way that I bought expensive cars, not for their safety records or performance, but for their social status, I somehow expected to select my men in that way as well. I had to learn the hard way—via heartache and tears—that love is more than appearances. It wasn’t easy for me, but eventually I learned to look deeper into a man’s character for qualities that compliment my own.”

Some females are not ready for love. They are still emotionally immature. And much like Donna, they sometimes have to learn, by way of bitter experience, that a true romance doesn’t conform to the shallow expectations of an underdeveloped heart.

When you allow yourself to be attracted to men for all the wrong reasons, your potential relationships will suffer. If the size of a man’s bank account is more important than the depth of his character, then your future relationship is already bankrupt. When you get involved with a man because you hate being alone and not because he has the morals and values that you desire in a soul mate, then you may very well have found an interesting companion for the night, but you will never have love. The success of a romance depends greatly on your emotional maturity. You will forever be incarcerated in a prison of pain and disappointment and heartache when you surround yourself with superficial emotional attachments.

Your heart has the potential to experience true love. You deserve to know what it feels like to be respected and adored by a man you are attracted to. But you have to be willing to shed the blinders that prevent you from appreciating the things that are truly valuable in a relationship. You have to be at a point in your personal development that enables you to appreciate a man for who he is as a person and what he contributes to your emotional well being. This is not an easy process. You have to be comfortable enough with yourself to recognize the reasons why you are sometimes attracted to men who are unhealthy for your emotional and personal growth. It will be difficult to determine why temperamental and possibly even selfish men seems to always be the focus of your attraction, but you have to be willing to search for the answers.

There are several penetrating questions that you have to be willing to ask yourself in order to get a better understanding of your natural choice of men. Did you grow up in an environment where men expressed their love in quiet, distant ways, or were you emotionally spoiled by the men in your family? Have you been taught to equate a man’s insecurities and jealousies as love and affection? Are you under the impression that you are not complete as a woman unless you have a man by your side? Were you led to believe that you have to have a man to take care of you financially in order to be satisfied? Do you have to surround yourself with needy men who expect you to mother them in order for you to feel loved and appreciated?

The answers to these questions are the highways that eventually lead to a better understanding of where you want to go in a relationship. They allow you to glimpse at the blueprint that your mind uses to measure a man’s qualifications. Sometimes it’s easier to correct unhealthy emotional behavior when you are able to pinpoint where they stem from.