So let’s take a look at the anatomy of a fight.  The first kind of fighting is called “right fighting”.  This is exactly the opposite of fighting right.  In right fighting, one or both of the partners is only concerned with being right, getting his or her way, and controlling the situation.  You know you are right-fighting when you are doing any of the following ….

• Planning only what you are going to say next when he is talking
• Trying to force him to agree with you or do what it is you want
• When you care only about being right and getting justice for what you believe to be an injustice
• Denying his feelings as valid

Looking at these things, perhaps both of you are fighting this way, or only one of you, but when fighting is based on controlling the outcome, it’s not ever going to be a productive, positive experience for your relationship.

Rori Raye has a mantra in her Have the Relationship You Want eBook (p 138) that gives a lot of insight to the reader about how to handle MANY situations as a positive, energetic and mature woman.  Her mantra goes like this…

I trust my boundaries – I trust myself: I know I will not knowingly toss my pearls before swine, throw myself into the path of destruction, hide from the truth, go along with or tolerate something that is damaging to me. Now I can move to my feelings.

I follow my feelings – I follow my emotions around my body and into my heart because they are my compass in the world. I love my feelings and know that I must go where I am, be where I am, feel what I feel, and go through the feeling if I want to feel better. Now I can speak.

I choose my words – I am committed to clear, direct, feeling based communication. I honor my feelings by expressing them from my heart without trying to influence or attack my man. If I choose,  now I can let go of the result.

I allow every moment to be a surprise – I don’t have to know every outcome, I don’t have to manage every situation, I don’t have to make sure everything goes the way I want, and I absolutely don’t have to know what my man is going to say or do next.

 Because I know what I will not tolerate, because I can feel what I feel, because I’ve stated clearly what I feel and don’t want, I can let go of control.

How does the Rori Raye Mantra help a woman know HOW to fight?  It helps us to direct our feelings into the proper energy – in other words, expressing your FEELINGS, your WANTS and NEEDS as positive and appropriate words, and not as demands or aggressive instructions.  It helps you to let go of the need to control the outcome and step into the need to direct your own feelings into expression, where your man can come to a deeper understanding and appreciation of you because you have SHARED yourself with him.  Its relationship help at its best.

Doing this can be a little scary, especially the “letting go of the control” part.   But think of this as not letting go of yourself or relinquishing anything, instead, think of it as Rori Raye says, like opening yourself and giving yourself to the relationship, to love, to the man you want to be with.

Rori writes, “Taking the leap to speaking about our feelings when we’ve spent our whole lives working very hard to do just the opposite – whether we’re afraid of what someone will think or do, or whether we simply want to be more highly conscious people and have more refined emotions – takes courage and commitment to the process.” (Have the Relationship You Want, p 145).

What do you do, then, if you are doing all this RIGHT, and yet your partner is still “right fighting”?  Be consistent.  Use your “I feel” words.  Express what YOU feel and ask him what he feels in the heat of the moment.  Try using Rori Raye’s expressions like “ I don’t want to go there, listen to this, be there, be here,  stand here, tolerate this, have this, worry about this, think about this, take charge of this, plan this –what do you think? “ – using the “what do you think?” at the end of your expression lets him know that you are showing your feelings and also concerned about his and that you value his opinion.

My reader asked me…

I have a question for you here it is I am in a relationship with my boyfriend for about 2 1/2 years now and I am living with him. We are both in our 40s. Often he ask me after we make love if I am satisfied & if his penis is big enough, and also often he asks me if I am happy being with him.  Is it normal for a man to ask that question often on how he is performing in bed and if I am happy to be with him?  I told him yes I am happy if I wasn’t I wouldn’t be with him.

I am questioning myself if I am giving off negative vibes or is he insecure with himself?  I don’t mind that he ask once in a wild but he’s been asking often?

I am confused? I don’t know what to think?

Excellent, excellent question!  Insecurity, of course, is not limited to women.  Men can be very insecure as well.  Let’s think about this for a minute.  For women, according to Rori Raye, attraction is based in feeling and basically, in the brain.  I have heard it said that the brain is the largest sex organ for a woman.   But men, on the other hand, are visual creatures.  Much of their attraction is based on visual stimulus, and on the response they receive from women about their own actions, confidence, stamina, etc.  So, as man who may have his confidence based in these things, its not hard to understand that if they feel they are lacking in size in that area, that they think YOU think that as well.

I have learned a lot recently about sex by reading Alex Allman’s Revolutionary Sex.  It’s a fascinating read.  And according to Alex, the average male organ size is 5-6 inches give or take a little bit.  Now, that is NOT what you see in the erotic movies by any means.  (Of course, the women, as well, are not the average size 16 female either!).  In addition, many men “present” in different ways, they are either a shower or a grower (love those terms).  This means that men, when they are limp, will either be nearly as long when they are aroused, OR, they will be substantially SMALLER when flaccid and their organ will grow quite a bit when they are aroused.  Now – most men don’t know this.  So, perhaps your man is a “grower”, and does not show his true size when in the locker room with other men, or what have you, and maybe he sees quite a few “showers” in there, that look substantially larger than he is, giving him a false sense of inadequacy.

Rori Raye does not address sexual intimacy specifically in her book, but we can glean a lot of information from there about things that may help our man to feel more positive about himself – not only in the bedroom, but in life as well.  One of these things is allowing yourself to fully understand your reactions to him.  Perhaps you are not “vocal” in the intimate moments, or perhaps you may have trouble reaching orgasm.  Many of us do – believe me.  Maybe HE feels that if he has to work harder to bring you fulfillment that it is because of the size of his…tool.  J  So perhaps you should take a look at your interactions and actions with him in the bedroom.  Are you expressing, DURING the act, how he makes you feel?  Are you tense, nervous, or feeling pressure to come to orgasm in order to please him?  Or perhaps he is a “minute man” and feels that he does not bring you pleasure because the time is too short.  There are many factors that could be at work here.

So my advice to you is this – do as Rori Raye suggests in her Have the Relationship You Want eBook, and sit back and take a look at how you respond to him in different situations.  This does not, by any means, mean that you are to BLAME for his lack of confidence.  But if you are able to adjust your responses to him in a manner that will allow him to begin to understand how happy he makes you, then perhaps this will ease his mind and heighten his own self-confidence.

I remember spending my precious brainpower and precious energy – not to mention precious LOVE on men who may have been any of the above or none of the above.  But one thing’s for sure, they weren’t doing ME any good.  They may have been handsome, smart, artistic, poetic, funny, rich, talented, powerful and good fathers.  They may have been exactly what I wanted.  But they were, to borrow a line from a movie trailer I just saw – Great looking shoes – just in the wrong size for ME.

So – what makes a great looking shoe in the RIGHT SIZE?  Let’s look at this hot/cold thing that men do.  Have you ever noticed that he’s hot when you’re cold and cold when you’re hot?  I’ll bet you’ve tried doing all kinds of “strategies,” like playing “hard to get” and “I don’t care” and he all of a sudden got hot as you PRETENDED to get cold.  But then, the second you warmed up, off he went again into the freezer.

And, if you’re anything like I was, you thought it had something to do with you, and got all down about yourself, and then you thought it had to do with him, and got angry at him, and then you got scared and went right back to being totally confused.  I remember practically living there, in that place where I was always bouncing between beating myself up, getting angry at him, and then feeling guilty and scared.  It was as though I slept and ate in the land of “I’m confused about men and I’m really confused about this relationship.”  And the really rotten thing about it is that so many men love to play this game with us.  And about 100% of men don’t even know they’re playing it!

They just do it sort of automatically.

Here’s a letter from “Chasing Him”:

Rori, You have me pegged…I have been chasing “Don” for 4 years. We were together through our respective divorces, then he decided he needed to be with another woman; that lasted 1 1/2 years, now we’re dating again.  He tells me he’s not ready for commitment but might be “someday.”  I want commitment and romance. Sex used to be great. It no longer is.

We enjoy each other’s company; we have interests and community in common. He calls almost every night and we see each other at church and date 2 or 3 times a month. Should I give him more time or let him go? Thank you, “Chasing Him”.

***Chasing Him’s situation is so incredibly painful, and so many of us find ourselves there – wanting and waiting for a commitment.

Where the man is acting “sort of into the relationship” but says he’s not.  And then, the confusion and frustration we’re feeling make the quality of the relationship – sex, romance, affection, attention – go downhill.  I don’t know a single woman who hasn’t been through this “I’m waiting around for commitment, what should I do?” problem.

It’s a mistake we’ve all made, and perhaps you’re making it too, right now.

Have you ever found yourself going through this, or are now, and it just feels like a horrible “either/or” choice you have to make?  Where you have to decide either to give him more time or let him go?  But it doesn’t have to be that way.

There’s another way, my Rori Raye Third Way, which uses all my Tools to feel stronger on the inside and inspire a man to move the relationship forward on the outside.  First, I’d like to lay the groundwork for a whole new way of looking at “dating” and “relationships” that will help you tremendously.

Do you find yourself wondering what a man means by what he says, or what he’s feeling at any given moment?  Well, a “Relationship” looks, feels and moves very differently for a man than it does for us women.  And that’s why we’re so confused by a man’s behavior, and why we spend so much time and energy trying to figure him out.  If I’d known then what I know now, I could have skipped all the hours and days and heartache I spent focusing on a man and forgetting about myself.

I’d like to save you the trial-and-error I slogged through and get you right to the good stuff.  Let’s start with what dating you looks like in a man’s mind.  Let’s say you’ve been seeing each other for a few months, with or without sex:  So…he says (in his mind), “Here’s this girl (you), and she’s pretty, and sexy, and she likes me, and I like her well enough, and we get along great, and she’s willing to kiss me and cuddle with me, and maybe have sex with me, and cook me dinner and even pay for things sometimes – what could possibly be wrong?”

In other words, he takes what he can get, and doesn’t think anything of it.  When a man says, “I’m just not ready for a relationship now.  But maybe ‘someday’ and maybe ‘you,’ and I don’t want to hurt you,” we think he means he’s just confused and that he’ll come around and see we’re meant for each other very soon.  But mostly, what he’s saying is that he doesn’t want to get serious with us.

Perhaps he truly doesn’t want to be serious with any woman, but for sure, he doesn’t want to be serious with us, not right now.  And he doesn’t even THINK about why he doesn’t want to get serious.  He’s just following his gut feelings.  We women might call this (I know it’s indelicate, but it’s true) “following his dick.”  But I’ll call it “following his heart,” because, really, it is.  For a man, sex and love can be (unlike most of us women) completely separate.  When he tells us he doesn’t want to get serious, for whatever reason,  it DOESN’T mean he wants to stop seeing us, or sleeping with us, or having fun with us (as long as he thinks we’re fun).

He’s just telling us not to get our hopes up.  But he’s instinctively doing it in a way that keeps us hoping.  So he gets exactly what he wants.  He gets US, with no strings attached!  And he can always, if things get sticky, refer back to the conversation in which he said “I don’t want to hurt you.”  The thing is – he’s not doing it on purpose to hurt us.

He doesn’t want to hurt us, but he figures if he tells us that, and we still stick around, then it’s OUR decision, and so that lets him off the hook.  In other words, he takes us at face value.  If we’re still there after his “I don’t want to get serious, maybe someday, and I don’t want to hurt you” speech, then we’re agreeing with him that the “relationship” is now on his terms.  And then later on, if we continue to expect that the relationship is moving forward, he feels almost offended.

We women, on the other hand, are completely different about not wanting to hurt anyone else.  We REALLY don’t want to do that.  We don’t want to hurt anyone else.  And we’re very sensitive about what it means to hurt someone else.  We REALLY stop seeing a man after a pleasant, but not marriage-bound (as far as we’re concerned) date because we don’t want to hurt his feelings somewhere down the line.

We don’t want to lead a man on.  But for a man, it’s different.  For a man, EVERYTHING up until the engagement ring is “just dating” – or, even worse, “just friends.”  The whole concept of “leading us on” doesn’t even exist for them.  (We’re talking about a decent, regular guy here, not a “player.” I’ll deal with the Red Flags about players in another eLetter.)

MEN FIGURE WE KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON.  Really, they do.  They expect us – just because we’re women – to understand relationships better than they do.  They ASSUME that if we’re dating them, we know we’re “just dating” them – and, of course, most of the time we don’t.

I know I never did.  To me, a goodnight kiss (if I wanted to kiss him again) was a “Relationship.”  A man, on the other hand, can not only kiss us goodnight and want to kiss us again, he can have sex with us and want to have sex with us again – and still not see it as a “Relationship.”

So, with all this difference in perception between us – as to what kind of relationship we are or aren’t in – how can we possibly hope to get a man to commit to us?  If he doesn’t even see himself in a “relationship,” how can he think of us in the long-term?

***This all has to do with what I call THE RELATIONSHIP TIMELINE.

It’s the difference between “just dating” and “just friends” and a REAL Relationship.  It’s the difference between an IMAGINARY RELATIONSHIP and a Real Relationship.  It’s the difference between where you and I feel we are in the Relationship Timeline and where HE thinks we are.  And most of the time, we’re way ahead of him.

We’re looking at banquet halls for the wedding when he’s just thinking of us as a “great girl.”  We’re making ourselves exclusive to one man who thinks he’s “just dating” us.  We cut out our options, and keep our feelings hidden.  Does this sound familiar to you?  If you’re finding yourself spending your time, energy and love in the confusion and heartache that is an Imaginary Relationship, you don’t have to live in that place anymore.

There’s so much you can do for yourself, and I know my Tools will help you.  And as you practice the Tools, feel stronger and better about yourself, and start communicating with a man from your heart (like he does – in his own way and as best he can), you’ll see things change.  You’ll start to see the relationship you’re only Imagining now becoming more Real.

*****So, how can we  make a man like this, who (like most men) is just going along, having fun and stepping forward if he’s having fun, and pulling away if he thinks he’s not having fun, want to commit to us?

What flips the switch from an Imaginary Relationship into a Real Relationship along the Relationship Timeline.  For now, let’s look at two reasons a man will commit to you:

One, he doesn’t want to lose you, and knows he will if he doesn’t commit; and Two, he wants to be with you non-stop and just feels compelled to commit to you and get you to commit to him.

One is something he’s afraid of and wants to avoid because it will cause him pain, the other is something he just flat-out wants because he wants it.  And different men, just like us, are motivated differently  Some of us focus on moving AWAY from things we don’t like, and some of us focus on moving TOWARD things we do like.

So, what’s the smart thing to do that will actually work?  You’ll cover all your bases.

You’ll do the Rori Raye Mantra.  First, you’ll let him know that he’ll lose you if he doesn’t move the relationship forward.  This is Trusting Your Boundaries.  That means that you TRUST YOURSELF – that you will not hang around with a man who doesn’t want what you want – which is commitment – which might be marriage, or walking off into the sunset together.  This isn’t an ultimatum.  This is simply not becoming exclusive (in any way but sexually), with any man until he’s sure of what he wants, and you want it, too!

Then, Second, you’ll open your heart to him.

This is Following Your Feelings and Choosing Your Words.  You’ll be inviting him into your heart, and staying warm and focused on yourself and your own feelings.  This way, once he touches your warm and open heart with his own heart (but still gets from your “vibe” that he’ll lose you if he doesn’t step up to the plate), he’ll want to be around you, and with you,  always.  You can do it!  If I did it, you can.

Love,

Rori Raye

We have all heard it from the mouths of other women – you hear some woman, or a friend (or maybe even yourself) making snide remarks to another woman, a friend or a relative about something that your boyfriend or husband did to just frost your cookies. In your anger or disgust, you may say something like, “He is so insensitive” or “He is so stupid sometimes!”. On the other hand, you may hear him referring to you as “the old lady” or the “ball and chain”.

Either way, comments like these are derogatory and breed contempt. And not only do they breed contempt – but they actually help you to create a negative view of your boyfriend or husband. If you are trying to have the relationship you want to have instead of the relationship that you DO have, comments and feelings like these MUST be removed from your repertoire.

Rori Raye, in the Have the Relationship You Want ebook says when you find yourself making comments like these – STOP. Simply STOP before you actually get it all out of your mouth. First of all, imagine how he would feel if he were standing behind you and heard you say what you were about to say. Secondly, it makes YOU look bad as a person to whomever you are commenting to. Negative comments reflect the SAYER more than they reflect on the person who is being condemned. Negativity has a way of coming back around on you and manifesting in your life when you promote it by speaking and thinking bad things.

Instead, Rori Raye encourages us to stop what we were ABOUT to say and replace it with something you genuinely LIKE about him. And yes, you may sound goofy to whomever you were speaking to, but, this positive manifestation is going to help your relationship and your personal outlook. Being positive fills you with love and light, not darkness and anger like negativity does.

So if you are trying to change your relationship, one important piece of relationship advice that I can give you direct from Rori Raye is to quit the negative talk, and replace that talk with positive talk. This will quickly become habit, and it is something that you can ask him to do as well. This will promote mutual respect and communication within your relationship and in the end, make it much stronger and bring it toward that ultimate relationship that you want to have.

I am sure that you have heard the catch phrase saying that men and women are two sides of the same coin or men are from Mars and Women are from Venus – or whatever it is you would like to say. Most people agree (including Christian carter) that men and women communicate in essentially different ways, though, no matter how you say it (I guess that is a bad pun!).

What most WOMEN need to realize, though, is that it is OK to NOT know, or even understand, what your man is thinking. Christian Carter stresses this in Catch Him and Keep Him, and says that this kind of rift is to be expected – after all – even Edward Cullen can’t read Bella’s mind!

One of the key mistakes that women make in relationships, though, stems from this urge to always know or understand what their man is thinking – we try to get HIM to VALIDATE what WE are thinking or feeling, because we feel it is essential to the understanding that we crave as women. (Christian Carter goes into this in depth in the Catch Him and Keep Him eBook, beginning on page 19).

So let’s take a minute to think about what Christian Carter is saying here …

1) Guys and gals think and react differently to almost every situation
2) Therefore – being unable (and UNEQUIPPED) to understand each other all the time is par for the course
3) If, then, we can expect to not understand men all the time, nor they us, how is it that we expect them to be ABLE to validate our feelings
4) If men are UNABLE to validate our feelings, why do we ask it of them, providing them with frustration for something they cannot do?

In other words, when you try to make a man validate your feelings – when you try to CONVINCE him to understand what you are feeling, saying or trying to do – you are, in essence, forcing him to conform to your ideas. Another way to say it is that you are trying to get him to tell you that what you are feeling is ok – like if he goes out with his friends for a night out and you get mad – perhaps you try to “talk” to him and MAKE him see how what he did it detrimental to your relationship – you are trying to get him to validate your feelings.

For men, Christian Carter says, this feels like needy behavior and many times they will agree with you just to make you stop. Not good. Mind you – Christian Carter is not saying it IS necessarily needy behavior, but he is saying it is how it is usually viewed by men.

As a woman, then, what should we DO about this validation problem?

The very simple answer to that is STOP. SCREW VALIDATION. You feel what you feel, and you are entitled to feel what you feel. You don’t have to have permission from your man to feel the way you do, and in truth, he does not have to understand it. So give YOURSELF permission to experience your own emotions and to have your own feelings. THEN, give everyone else permission not to agree with them. It does not matter if they agree or not. The feelings are YOURS. Christian Carter says that the confidence alone that comes from knowing you need no one else’s validation is a HUGE attraction boost, and will help you to Catch him and Keep Him.

Click here for more information on Christian Carter and Catch and Keep Him, and his philosophies that have changed womens’ lives.

Here is Rori’s story about her own relationship and how she healed her relationship by doing exactly the opposite of what she had been doing for a very long time.

Have you ever felt like your relationship is just drifting away from you?  And your heart feels like it’s taken a direct hit?  Where you feel absolutely wounded?

I remember feeling so NEGLECTED by my husband.  There was so much frustration and sadness in the space between him and me, on top of all the sleepless, miserable nights I spent alone – curled up on the rug, crying, or just walking the house while he slept.  What I wanted, what I NEEDED, was HEALING.  I needed someone to wave a magic wand over me and heal my relationship, and then heal my heart.

I tried therapists and healers of all kinds, and the hole in my heart just got deeper and deeper, and the distance between my husband and I just got bigger and bigger.   What I didn’t know then was that not only could I heal myself, and fast, but that I could heal my relationship, too.

I spent so much time trying to figure my husband out, and figure out why things were going wrong, and figuring out how to GET HIM TO DO what I wanted him to do and ACT how I wanted him to ACT.  But every time I opened my mouth, it was like he was telling me with the look on his face and the coldness of his body language that I’d once again “put my foot in it.”

Every time I tried to “talk” about what was going on with us, it backfired.   Things just got worse and worse, to where I was afraid to even speak.  And remember, I was a fairly successful person in every other part of my life – I was outgoing, smart, a working actress. I’d even learned how to put a business together on my own.  But here I was – afraid to SPEAK to my husband.

So there I was, walking on eggshells during the day and staying up all night trying to figure things out.  And everything I was doing was more damaging than if I’d done nothing.  Walking on eggshells was destroying trust in my marriage.  He stopped trying to communicate with me.  And I, so frustrated by not being able to have things the way I wanted, started doing even MORE of it MYSELF.

I was carrying my household, my life, and my marriage all in my own arms – all by myself.  If this sounds familiar, know that you can turn this around like I did, using the Tools I created for myself.  I was doing so much “figuring out,” it was taking up all my time and energy.

Until I finally “figured out” how to undo all the damage my “figuring out” had done, how to truly CONNECT with my husband again, and how to HEAL my relationship – all in ONE MOMENT!  And that was the moment I STOPPED trying to Figure Things Out.

I’d been so tense and overworked and anxious, I’d just kept going, no matter what.  I’d been jumping over obstacles I’d created for myself, I’d worked hard to fix things, and I’d worked hard at being cheerful and positive.  I could have exploded.  I could have blown a fuse or gotten really sick.

Instead, in a moment of utter frustration, I just STOPPED.  I sat down on the floor and didn’t have dinner ready.   I stayed on the floor, watching my daughter play with a toy, and I didn’t get up to welcome my husband home.  I could hear the coldness in his voice and even though I felt the fear in my body screaming at me that I would lose everything if I didn’t jump up and make everything “better,” I stayed put.

I didn’t try to make everything “better.”   Instead, I watched our daughter play on the floor right in front of me.  I watched my husband go straight to her, hug and cuddle and kiss her and practically IGNORE ME, and then cuddle and kiss our cat and IGNORE ME, and I sat there, feeling like I was dying without his attention, affection and love.

And then, in two completely surprising minutes, it all changed.  As he walked away from our daughter and our cat and went to take his work clothes off, I could feel my mind running, spinning, going a mile a minute trying to figure out HIS mind.  I thought and tried to “figure things out” through every second of those two very long  minutes.

I MADE myself stay on the floor and not run after him to ask how his day went and be a “good” wife even though I worked, too.   And then the Magic Wand appeared.  It was like a moment of light and quiet in my dark and busy mind.   Just as I’d simply NOT gotten off the floor, I stopped thinking.

I focused on my daughter, looked at her face, looked at the paintings on the walls, looked at my own clothes and started thinking about how fun it would be to go shopping for MYSELF instead of the HOUSEHOLD, and before I knew it an amazing thing happened.

He walked over to me.  He sat down next to me.  I thought he was there for our daughter, but he was there for ME.  He looked at me.  I smiled at him.  And in that one moment, we CONNECTED.

If you had told me then that just NOT doing what I always did (and it might be different things for you that you always do and can stop doing) would make so much difference in my relationship, I would have rolled my eyes.  I never would have believed you.

From there, I started feeling stronger.  I stopped doing more and more, and to my never- ending surprise, the less I did, the more space I allowed between us, the CLOSER he wanted to come to me!

And then, even more amazingly, as I started practicing this early version of my LeanBack Tool, I started to feel different inside.   I got my confidence back.  I started to FEEL more powerful.  I saw that my husband craved closeness as much as I did, he just didn’t know how to do it.  He couldn’t put his finger on what was pushing him away from me.

He wanted to cuddle.  He wanted to initiate sex.  Actually, he wanted to Make Love to me.  He started looking FORWARD to bedtime and cuddling up and kissing. He could never have given me the advice I needed to inspire him like this, because he didn’t understand it himself.  (I still don’t talk about any of this to him, not because I want to keep secrets, but because it’s not about HIM!)  And this is where the HEALING happens.   By staying put on the floor, I was paying attention to ME.  By not jumping up and all of a sudden making him the focus of my life, I was focusing on MYSELF and what felt good to ME at the moment, which was sitting and watching my daughter.

(And by the way, you may have done these kinds of things before – pulling away, not doing what you may have done for him before, but out of ANGER and RESENTMENT.   And the key to the whole thing working is that as soon as my man DID come over and sit beside me – I SMILED.  I was warm, I welcomed him.  If I had been angry or resentful, he likely would have felt it and not come over and sat down at all, or he would have gotten up quickly, or turned his full attention to our daughter instead of to me.

If I’d been UNWELCOMING, I might have gotten totally involved in playing with our daughter and hardly even LOOKED at him.  I might have deliberately, or unconsciously SHUT HIM OUT.  I would have been cold.   And that made all the difference.

And that’s how I healed my relationship.  Practically overnight.  And now you can do it, too.