Mothers raise sons to be men whom they would never choose as their husbands. Could we stop this?

Have you noticed how the same women who complain about their husbands are the ones who tend to raise their sons in the same way that their mothers in law raised their husbands? Are we somehow meant to be doing this… to help history repeating itself? Are these mothers not at all suspecting that one day they will take one look at their grown up son and see one more man that they would never choose to marry? How do they allow themselves to fall in the trap of multiplying their disappointment by “cloning” their offspring according to a very old fashioned recipe? Isn’t this weird?

Let us think for a moment about how many times we, the women of the world, moan about how the men in our life treat us badly and wonder what happened to the man of our dreams, the “knight in shining armour” whom we had hoped to find and marry, but instead, we ended up with the “frog”…

Has the thought ever crossed our mind…(and please, hear me out here, let’s try this for size… as they say) that maybe it is our fault that no knights, no well behaved men exist in the world? Could it be that we raise our little boys to become men that other women will end up disliking as much as we dislike the men in our life, starting from our own husbands?

I have heard many times from women that at some point in their lives they all had some kind of wish list setting out the top 10 characteristics that they would like their ideal man to have. For argument’s sake, a typical  example of such a list of the “ideal husband” could look something like this:

  1. Good sense of humour
  2. Loving and caring
  3. Attentive and kind
  4. Successful and reliable
  5. Confident and strong
  6. Rich
  7. Independent
  8. Handsome and fit (six pack included!)
  9. Intelligent
  10. Sexy

By no means is this list exhaustive or in the right order of preference, but it serves our purposes here as a good example of an average that pretty much most women could be satisfied with, if and when their husbands-to-be could tick one or more of the above boxes.

What happens in real life, however, is that we end up disappointed and bitter when we realise that it is almost impossible to find a man who possesses the above qualities and of course we end up settling up with much less than our dream list and we live “happily ever after” with the “frog” that we had to compromise with…

Why don’t we start raising little boys to have these qualities? Instead of moaning about how unhappy we are in our marriages, why don’t we use our positive energy, brain power and stamina to make a change for the future generations of women who maybe could get a chance to tick more boxes of their dream list, if only we provided them with better material?

I don’t know about you, but to me, personally, this makes sense! It is in our hands as mothers to stop producing “copy paste frogs” based on the example of the “frog” we married and start influencing a change in the messages we pass to our little boys so they can have a chance to grow into some kind of “prince charming” who could one day make a woman happy!!!

-How hard could it be to let our boys become independent, show them how to be loving and caring, challenge their brain and work on their intelligence?

-Could it really be so difficult to teach them how to eat healthy and stay fit, look after themselves and help them to develop confidence and inner strength that would make their natural beauty shine through?

-How about inspiring them to set high goals of personal success and achievement and supporting them all the way through in order to get the powerful taste of personal achievement and triumph?

-Could it be so tiring or embarrassing to talk to them openly about intimacy and inform them about one of the most essential human needs while teaching them without prejudices to be comfortable in their skin and respect themselves and others?

-Is it so terrifying to point out some possible avenues where through academic performance and personal commitment a better career path with inner pleasure and financial rewards could be on the horizon?

-Does it really take so much of our valuable time to laugh with our sons, to play and have fun, to listen to their jokes, to help them defuse anger and resentment through nurturing a healthy sense of humour?

Quite frankly, I think all of the above is possible and not so hard at all…as long as we stop settling for second best and we never stop dreaming and trying. We, the mothers of boys, have the power to make the changes, to create the “new model of the man of the future” who could treat women far better…

I see this work as our inheritance to the future generations of women or simply as our chance to fulfill one of our long lost dreams…it would have been so nice if the mothers of the past could have done this work for us; we could all have married “our prince”…but hey…wake up, we get a second chance to walk down the aisle with a prince that we have raised all by ourselves and be proud of our creation in the knowledge that we have moved, touched and inspired a change in the lives of another younger couple who will do better than we did. This, I call, unconditional love!

Let’s try it for size…what do you say?

Diana Z.

 

 

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