Men who break women down

It's like an epidemic. I can't even tell you how many amazing women let a no good man break their spirits.

It all goes back that bully mentality we learned about from our parents back in grade school. Bullies are miserable and insecure people who find happiness in bringing others down. When you're a kid you think yeah, yeah whatever. It still hurts when you're being cornered on a playground while others shout cruel things at you. There's also the concept that bullies are jeolous in some way of their victims. Who knows?!

Now maybe you don't quite grasp all this as a kid, but surely when you are an adult it would make more sense. That's just not always the case. I have seen countless college educated, independent, and career oriented women fall prey to men. Not just any kind of man, but usually men who are high school drop outs, drug addicts, ex-convict types. Why don't we know any better? I include myself in this group of women by the way.


For me it started with my first boyfriend Joe when I was sixteen years old. He set the precendence for all my future relationships. He was such a romantic: a single red rose every time we had a date, love poems that he mailed to me, serenading me "Brown-eyed Girl". I fell hard. It was a couple months in that he began with the violent outbursts both verbal and physical. Somehow he ingrained in my fragile little mind that I would never be worthy of a love without pain.

For years afterwards I dated men/little boys that used me, verbally and physically abused me, and threw me away once I was no longer any good to them. After each break up I swore to myself that I would never let it happen again. I wanted to hold out for the man who loved and cherished me the way deep down I knew I deserved. But the pattern continued.

It wasn't just me though. How many tear filled conversations with girlfriends of mine going through the same damn thing. We all exchanged the same sage words about how we continued to date beneath us, rushed things before we truly knew the guy, how we deserve someone as equally amazing as we are. Do we know better? Are we so desperate to be in someone's arms that it doesn't completely matter who those arms belong to? Why do we continue to devalue ourselves? Why do we seek a future with men that have such shady pasts?

After yet another break up and yet another failed promise to myself I question how much more my battered heart can take. Is he out there? Or maybe I just have to find the love I've been searching for in others within myself. I am vowing to stay single and abstinate while letting fate take teh reigns.

I have been repeating the following mantra 10 times a day for the past couple of weeks:

I am strong
I am smart
I am beautiful
I am worthy of love


Maybe the key is that we learn how to love and respect ourselves so that other people in our life can do the same.