Dating Juan Oh Juan / the Drama Queen and Recycling Relationships

By Odilia Rivera-Santos

4. You ended the relationship during the last attempt to resuscitate the exhausting monster in person, via email, text message, via Facebook message, tweet, and carrier pigeon. After three weeks, your ex calls to ask THE question in the way only a true drama queen could ask.

"Do you love me? Tell me you don't love me ... And ... I'll NEVER call you again." Shim says in a slow deliberate voice

"I don't love you" you answer quickly cause you have shit to do.

"Ok. If you tell me in person that you don't love me, I will believe you!"

PAUSE: do you answer the drama with a firm 'no' or sarcasm?

The drama queen loves the breakup-makeup model of a relationship and thinks it's exciting to chase but has trouble sitting still and BEING in a relationship. This character has no ideas about how to have fun without the adrenaline rush of stupid pointless arguments and breakups.

There is someone for everyone, so if this isn't your type, let go. Throw this little fish back in the ocean to hook up with a drama queen who will up the ante on wasting time.



Buy my book here: Love When You Say Love

Dating Juan oh Juan / are you dating a heckler? Odilia Rivera-Santos

3. I'm sure you've been at a performance and/or a lecture and listened to a heckler rebuke every aspect of the presentation or provide a negative running commentary.

Are you dating that heckler, naysayer, fearful person? The heckler/lover hopes to make you fearful enough about interchanges with the world and people to share his/her tiny existence. 

Keep these things in mind

- you existed and completed goals prior to meeting shim.

- a person who criticizes all of your goals and ways in which you plan to execute them is fearful about tackling his or her own goals. You provide a distraction from shim's sense of failure, inertia or inability to follow through.

- this person is also very insecure about being in a relationship with a person who appears to be on the road to self-actualization as opposed to just getting through the day.

- the need to control everyone and everything is not an expression of bravado or a sense of superiority; it's fear. Fearful people are very often afraid of people and their actions, so they choose to be in environments over which they can exert control. They don't socialize very much.

Anxiety, a need to control others and a fearful nature often lead to agoraphobic behavior -- refusing to leave the safety of home.

- this personality adds a lover to shim's life as a healthier person might add an end table. Shim wants you to share in the fearful lifestyle. 

If you are seeking a partner with whom you can socialize and travel the world -- outside of a planned tour bus scenario with a guide, this is not the character for you.

This personality is attracted to gutsy people because shim hopes to be more daring, but, most of the time, the heckler is too afraid to change and attempts to whittle the brave down a couple of sizes.

Writing exercise: 

What did I learn from a relationship with a heckler?

What did I have to defend in arguments with the heckler?

Buy my book here: Love When You Say Love

Love When You Say Love by Odilia Rivera-Santos

Coming soon!

Love When You Say Love

Odilia Rivera-Santos

http://www.editorialtrance.com

Photo Credit: Gene Bradford

Buy my book here: Love When You Say Love

Dating Juan oh Juan, the insecure partner

Odilia Rivera-Santos

2. The insecure partner delves deep into your life and psyche to bring you down. This rabid little individual will focus on everything he/she believes you 'should' be doing and act as director in your life. Sometimes, this type plays God as well because as shim explains it, if you follow shim's directives, you will be rich, famous, happy and own a home with gold pipes.

The insecure partner focuses on your potential, your flaws, and your mistakes in order to avoid looking at shim's own potential, flaws, and mistakes.

This person doesn't have much going on and is very fearful. You, the stronger more motivated half of the relationship are the power source. But you have a finite amount of energy and can't afford to have it siphoned off by the insecure partner. Inequity in perceived power to act in the world will not allow anything good to come of the union.

You can renovate and flip houses, but not  people.

The insecure person attempts to raise his/her self-esteem by projecting their fear and lack motivation onto you. 

Let go, grasshoppa... Let go!


Buy my book here: Love When You Say Love

Dating Juan oh Juan by Odilia Rivera-Santos

1. Intellectual match

Do you explain a lot of things to your potential lover/partner/significant other?

Watch: Educating Rita

Key Idea: if the colonizer does a good job educating the colonized, the first thing the colonized will want to do is get the hell away from the colonizer. Ya dig?





Buy my book here: Love When You Say Love

Writing and Meaning, a Writing Workshop taught by me... In Harlem

WRITING WORKSHOP in Harlem, NYC

Starts in April 2014. 

What have I learned from teaching writing for 17 years?

It is better to start with a seed of an idea and slowly add nuances, shade, color and light.

A writer has to take an authoritative stance in order to be a writer.

Humility is not downgrading one's talents or being bashful when asked to share work; humility is a recognition that God has given you the gift and you are a caretaker.

Discipline - putting yourself in contexts in which you will NOT be able to coast on your natural ability. Creating opportunities for your intellect, talent and imagination to be challenged, tested, and pushed beyond your self-imposed limits.

Many writers are averse to reading something different. The classicists, for example, won't read a graphic novel and the Urban Fiction peeps avoid 19th Century European novels. Reading a variety of texts makes for fluidity in creative expression

I will be teaching a Writing Workshop in April in Harlem.
For details, email o.riverasantos at yahoo.com
Run and tell that!
Subject: Writers Write
#OdiliaRiveraSantos


Buy my book here: Love When You Say Love

Love Post #99 Did you fall in love or fall in a vat of him?

Odilia Rivera-Santos

The only way to know who you are in a romantic relationship is to be in a romantic relationship. You won't glean knowledge about how to become a great partner from observing another person's relationship.

Lover as Colonizer

When you use your lover as a reference point in order to compete, compare or attempt to overturn his government of your emotions, you have officially become colonized.

You thought you fell in love, but, in actuality, you fell in a vat of him.

The schedule, friendships and rituals that made you a healthy, sexy, vibrant person falls away as you seek to be one with your lover.

Being one doesn't mean you adopt him as life guru and chuck every aspect of your old life to please/impress/keep him.

Becoming a conjoined twin with your lover brings up all sorts of crazy. And none of the crazy is particularly appealing. Are you teacher/student, parent/child, prospective adopter/dog pound puppy or are you two individuals sharing your lives with one another?

Decolonization within a romantic relationship is not easy and the United Nations has not established a program to set up new boundaries/governments for you -- they only do that for territories.

However, you can slowly peel yourself off of your lover and his ways.

What was your daily wellness (mental/emotional/physical) ritual prior to your romantically codependent life?

Can you admire him without seeking to become him?

Buy my book here: Love When You Say Love