Power Balance

What defines a successful relationship? Aside from open communication, mutual respect, and honesty?

In life, there is always a power struggle between 2 individuals (or more) in maintaining a relationship. It can range from financial, mental, physical, and more importantly, emotional.

More traditional (or rather, chivalrous) men feel the need to take care of the woman, or women in general. Some may actually get offended if a woman paid for anything! I love being treated well, but I have always had a difficult time in letting anyone (man or woman) pay for things for me. As much as I love having that bill disappear before I even see it, I don't want anyone to think that I "expect" it (as many women actually do).

Having grown up in a traditional eastern culture, where my father took care of everything financial - my mother had to quit her career once they got married; he got upset when she started a part-time job once we were all in school (even with full-time nannies, maids, all sorts of help at hand); he gave her an 'allowance' of the sort in an envelope every week (this was before the debit card days, clearly), I had vowed to myself to be independent - financially or otherwise. However, I still appreciate being treated, and now am able to return the favour but not simply to prove that I can do it on my own - something of an insecurity at one point, for some time.

A more intricate power balance, however, involves the matter of the heart. In a love relationship, more than likely one person has stronger feelings than the other. Depending on someone's psyche, most of us wonder how we always end up with the "same type of guy/gal over and over again". As psychiatrists say, we had indirectly learned from our parents' relationship - the first relationship we had ever been exposed to and unknowingly imprinted into our beings for our own future relationships. Unconsciously, we seek out the exact same relationship dynamics as adults. Fortunately some of us do learn by trials and errors - how to break a bad cycle, to find what is right and feels right for ourselves.

But what is right?

A wise (male) friend of mine once said to me quite frankly, that the best relationship is one in which the guy is so in love with the girl, that he would do anything for her and to make her happy; that a guy who is in control of a relationship makes a dangerous relationship.

Well said, Steven, refreshingly coming from a guy.

I'm going to have to remind myself this in my continued search for "the right one": a delectably diverse, yet luminously flawed human being who would respect me for my opinions, thoughts, and who I am; a surreptitious charmer of sorts who wants to win the heart, approval or forgiveness of no one else's but mine; an imperfect perfect gentleman, who would pick up the tab yet let me buy him a thing or two every once in a while...

This may not be what "is" right or even necessarily "feels" right for everyone, but as another (female) friend so eloquently put it: "Thank God for our pussy-whipped husbands..."