The Miseducation of Me
I had to do it in honor of the great Lauryn Hill and her 34th Birthday. Eleven years ago she changed my life and so many others with her album the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, but now its time to talk a little but about my own miseducation:
To miseducate is to improperly educate.
My miseducation takes rare form when it comes to relationships because of the belief that I had the power to change a man. I thought I knew something only to learn that I knew nothing at all. I thought I held the power only to find out I was the weakest. It was a hard pill to swallow, and it actually still feels lodged in my throat.
I thought I could change a man but I could not have been more wrong. I liked him. He liked me. There were things that I didn't like but it was like my 80/20. He had 80% of the qualities that I wanted but I was still seeking that 20%. I thought I could mold him and make him into what I wanted to be. I was so caught up in the things that he was not that I missed all the wonderful things that he was. I wanted a bad boy so I provoked him and started fights. I said he was too nice so I pushed him away. I played with his emotions only to fulfill my own peaty desires for drama. I broke up with him because I felt I was missing out on life, and I left him to his own devices.
But that's not the worse part. Once I realized I left my 80 trying to get that 20, I wanted him back. I went to work. I finally opened up told him, I really felt, and prayed that he would take me back. I thought with all of my scheming and plotting ways I could snap and he would coming running back, but reality is a bitch. He didn't come running back. I drove miles and miles expecting for everything to be like it was with a bat of my eyelash and I was wrong.
He changed. He became more like the 20 and less like the 80 I was in love with. It was my fault. Random indiscretions. Random girls all the time. And that left me with random insecurities. Where he is? Who he's with? How does he feel about me? He embraced the role I threw him into, and all the changes that thought I wanted pushed us further and further apart, and we were both shells of the wonderful people we used to be.
My friend was also taught this same crazy lesson. She believed she could take a man, a D-I college athlete whose sole focus was to build his body count and make him faithful. Though she tried, hoped, and believed something about her would make him change. Long story short...It didn't. He had sex with the half the female population while she waited and waited for a change that would never come.
This lesson has to be relearned, taught again, and figured out. Somewhere along the relationship road women are learning that they can shape and mold a man into whatever they want him to be, but this is the furthest thing from the truth. A man is who he is and he's gonna be who he wants to be. No matter who you are, what you wear, how fly your weave, or how good you put it on him, he will still be the man that he has been raised to be. The man HE WANTS to be. The sooner we realize this the better off we will be. We won't drive ourselves crazy because things aren't turning out according to plan. Instead we will grow, live, and learn to appreciate those in our lives for all the beautiful things that they are instead of lingering on all the things that they are not. When we can do this changing that man won't matter because we will realize that true love is not the loving the perfect person but its loving the imperfect person, perfectly.
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