advice – Confluence Daily

September 24, 2018 Confluence

Want Better Communication? Try This!

Reading Time: 4 minutes I like the written word, so texting or email often feel like a wonderful way to express myself. And yet—I now understand that I’ve got to view them not as a replacement, but simply an addition to face to face, or voice to voice interaction. The depth, the nuance, and the detail simply cannot be replaced by texting or even emailing.

If you are in a long distance romantic relationship, technology can be your friend by providing Jetson’s style video calling. Not only do you get a chance to hear the timbre of your beloved’s voice, you can gaze into their beautiful eyes and remember how much you love them… even if they are physically hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Relate

September 11, 2018 Confluence

Forgive or Get Out

Reading Time: 3 minutes Some things are unforgivable when you’re in it. Sometimes you have to get some time and space between yourself and the pain to get there. I lived in a marriage where my husband cheated. If it had been once, I might have gotten past that. However, it wasn’t one. For a very long time, I had neither courage to forgive or get out. I tried to forgive it. I tried everything. But it wasn’t until years after our divorce that I honestly did. While we were still together I hated him and myself. By the time it was over I had a lot of forgiving myself to do also.

Relate Weekly

September 4, 2018 Confluence

How Do We Talk to Our Teen Daughter About Sex Without Condoning Her Being Sexually Active?

Reading Time: 3 minutes Most kids aren’t ready for the responsibilities that come with having risk-aware partner contact, and many adults never become responsible at all: but it’s never to late or early to learn some good ideas around sexuality.

Relate Weekly

August 29, 2018 Confluence

I’d Like to Explore Erotica and Female Friendly Porn but I Don’t Know Where to Start

Reading Time: 2 minutes Most porn (and media in general) is produced by men and with straight men’s consumption in mind, so it’s not surprising that so much of the stuff you’ll see on Pornhub doesn’t strike you as sensual or with women’s pleasure as a focus.

Relate

August 29, 2018 Confluence

5 Habits of Unhappy Couples and How to Avoid Them

Reading Time: 4 minutes Show me a couple where thank yous don’t flow liberally between them and I’ll show you a couple that has a lot of resentments lurking just under the surface.

Politeness and appreciation are the two things that make the day to day business of sharing a bathroom sink and a closet with someone doable.

Appreciation tends to flow very easily at the beginning of a relationship. However, as the newness starts to wear off, appreciation can drift to other things. The problem is, you get what you focus on. When you quit focusing on appreciation you find fewer and fewer things to appreciate.

Relate

August 28, 2018 Confluence

How to Stay Married

Reading Time: 3 minutes If you are committed to staying married, and you are less happy than you want to be, that’s not normal and it’s not ok. The good news is it’s probably mendable because you can learn the skills it takes to be in a relationship. Sooner is better than later, because sometimes later is too late. Waiting too long might not mean divorce. There is a fate far, far worse than divorce. Waiting too long may mean spending the rest of your life in a soulless, loveless, lifeless marriage, and that is a recipe for slow, early death.

Relate

August 27, 2018 Confluence

What Management Gurus Know About Relationships

Reading Time: 3 minutes We know this stuff. I’m stating the obvious. Focus on what you want more of and you’ll get it. Focus on what you don’t want and you’ll get that too. The key in relationships is to be willing. Are you willing to let go of resentment and irritation to get more of what you want? The easy answer is yes, but in practice, it’s a little more difficult for many people. You think you’ve earned your resentments. You deserve them. People wear resentments like bad relationship merit badges, they collect them.

Evolve

August 21, 2018 Confluence

Escaping the Unwanted Things in Life

Reading Time: 3 minutes When we ignore certain emotions or suppress the negative energies within us and at the same time attempt to use transformation tools in the hopes of making a change, it sets us up to fail. It’s an uphill, unnecessarily difficult path we pave for ourselves. It is no wonder many either don’t have the success with them or aren’t able to hold the progress in their life for too long.

Escaping the unwanted things in life by ignoring them can provide a short temporary relief and sometimes that breather helps. But it cannot be the go-to solution because sooner or later those energies will manifest back into our life and the suppression will stunt our spiritual progress.

Relate Weekly

August 20, 2018 Confluence

Our Pre-teen Daughter Stumbled Upon Our Porn

Reading Time: 2 minutes Tell your child that men and women have sex in the ways that they decide feels good to them, for some people that might mean with their penises, mouths, hands, feet, stomach rolls, armpits : there is no “proper” way to have sex. Secondly, as a kid who was (kind of) caught digging through their parents’ porn, I Do suggest buying her a kid-friendly book such as Sex Is a Funny Word and ask her if she knows what pornography is. Tell your child that porn is something that humans have made for thousands of years, and that one study suggests up to 85% of women in America report having watched it at some point in their lives.

Relate

August 15, 2018 Confluence

3 Totally Unorthodox Ways to Win at Life

Reading Time: 5 minutes Unfortunately, life doesn’t come with a manual, and yet we’re all playing by a set of rules we are programmed with. A lot of the time we aren’t even fully aware of the programming that shapes almost all of our choices, behaviors, and experiences.

We learn most of the rules we live by early in childhood. We accept those things as if they are true whether they are or aren’t. Most of the time we don’t question whether or not they’re even effective.

Because we can rarely see our programming, we spend all of our time playing the same game by the same rules. Doing the same thing over and over again will naturally produce the same result.

If you want different results in your life, you might want to change the game and the rules. The good news is you can. It’s your life. You get to do it however you’d like.