Divorce Attorney Reveals SHOCKING Reasons That DESTROY Relationships And Cause Bad BREAKUPS – via ‘Women of Impact’
I’m not even half way done with this video yet (linked to and embedded below in this post), but this lady in the video is giving some great insights and advice. (I’ve just finished listening to the entire video, and it is worth the entire watch.)
The lady in the video mentions she didn’t get married until around (or a bit after?) age 40.
The divorce attorney (who later became a judge, if I understand correctly) said up until that point, she did get a lot of questions from people asking her why she wasn’t married yet.
(I also had to put up with that, or with other nasty assumptions, from others, when I was still single into my 30s. I was raised in a conservative Christian church, and a lot of Christians wrongly assume if you’re a woman who has not married by the age of 30 or 35, it’s because you are a man-hating feminist or that that you were too “career focused.” It’s a very victim-blaming, sexist world view.)
Some of the points this lady, Faith Jenkins, addressed in the video includes but is not limited to (these are also points I’ve learned along the way with life experience, and just mulling things over):
- You have to know who you are and figure out who you are before you get married.
- It’s far more healthy to learn to be single before you get married.
- Don’t wait to get married to start living and enjoying your life – she says, “being single is not a rest stop. [At the time I was single I concluded that] it’s time for me to really live.”
- Don’t look to someone outside of yourself to make you happy.
(Note from me, the blog owner: this is a big one.
If you go through life making your sense of self worth, happiness, or opinion about yourself contingent upon external circumstances or on how others treat you, you will never, ever achieve stable, consistent, or lasting healthy self esteem or happiness
– and along the way, if you keep making your self worth contingent on how others treat you or their opinions of you, you will tend to attract selfish people, abusers, and very emotionally needy people who will want all your time and attention, leaving you drained
– I’ve learned the hard way that many of the people who will want to use you as a sounding board, a “rock” they lean on, will not return that courtesy to you – they won’t allow you to talk to them about your problems)
- She says you should know who you are before you marry – I think this is also a good idea prior to dating.
If you know who you are prior to dating or marriage (you know your identity and your likes, your dislikes, and your values), you won’t change to please someone else (a lot of abusive or controlling people will either badger you, pressure you, threaten, or demand that you make changes to yourself or your life to please them), and it makes it easier to weed out incompatible or potentially abusive partners.
- She discourages you from trying to clean up, fix, rescue another person, what she refers to as “rebuilding” another person.
I agree with her on that – you ultimately cannot change another person, and you will only exhaust yourself trying. I think a lot of women who do this are people pleasers or codependents, and it’s a huge waste of time.
- She mentions that out of all the people she’s talked to who later divorced their spouse that none of them ever said, “I wish we had moved faster!” She says while you are dating someone (with the goal of marriage) to take it slow. Make sure you take the time to get to know the person.
(This advice also turns up quite a lot, by the way, from psychologists who specialize in the area of Narcissism.
A lot of people on the narcissism spectrum will initially “love bomb” you the first few dates or months you’re getting to know them, but once the relationship has dragged on, or once you marry, their “nice guy” mask slips, that love bombing grinds to a halt, and they will verbally abuse you in private, or totally neglect you (depending on the type of narcissist you married. This is why it’s so very important to take things slowly, as you might be able to catch any red flags.)
- She says if the guy you’re dating has some weird, nasty, horrible or awful habits or tendencies, that they will not magically vanish and go away after you marry the person.
The guy standing at the church altar in a tuxedo next to you while you’re in a wedding dress will not magically erase his weird, annoying or bad tendencies – he’s still going to have them after you marry.
- Beginning around the .38 minute mark, Judge Jenkins discusses how for so long so many around her kept asking her why she was still single – as though being single past a certain age is wrong, and she explains how this can lead you to marrying the wrong person.
She says if you’re not careful, you can begin to internalize that notion, start to feel embarrassed about being single – this shaming or guilt tripping from friends and family over your singleness can lead you to make some poor decisions (like marry the wrong person, marry too quickly, just pick someone – anyone – and get married already).
The video below is around 52 minutes long.
The divorce attorney / judge wrote a book called, “Sis Don’t Settle: How to Stay Smart in Matters of the Heart.”
(Link to You Tube video): Divorce Attorney Reveals SHOCKING Reasons That DESTROY Relationships And Cause Bad BREAKUPS
Excerpt (from description below the video):
SHOW NOTES: Relationship Disaster | How loving relationships turn into divorce or worst [0:37]
Power to be Happy | Why your personal foundation is a must for healthy relationships [3:05]
Lessons of Single Life | Faith reveals what single life is teaching and preparing you for [7:10]
Accept, Reject, or Build | 3 options you have when taking relationship to next level [8:39]
…Are you choosing the history of a bad relationship, when times were good, over the pain of leaving an unhealthy relationship now? Often we make relationships about what the other person is or isn’t doing and we have the tendency to focus on our reactive emotions. What feels good and what doesn’t.
The problem with this kind of relationship habit is that we give our power away.
Judge Faith Jenkins has been a prosecuting attorney, a judge on Divorce Court TV, and is now hosting and producing an Oxygen True Crimes show, Killer Relationships.
She is revealing the success we can have in healthy relationships when we realize our power to be happy comes from within.
If you are single, Faith is highlighting all the lessons and opportunities available for you to properly prepare, learn, and plan for a successful marriage or relationship that you choose to be in.
Taking some time to journal after this episode may be a great way to get started on having a better relationship now.
by Janelle Bombalier
November 26, 2021
in Entertainment
During a recent interview with Essence, Divorce Court Judge Faith Jenkins spoke about the significant lessons she’s learned about love throughout her life and how she manifested her husband, Kenny Lattimore.
One of the most important messages from her first book, “Sis, Don’t Settle: How to Stay Smart in Matters of the Heart,” was that “pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.”
Jenkins said that she was inspired to write the book based on her personal and professional life experiences.
“It started with family court in New York and then on my show Judge Faith and now on Divorce Court,” she told the outlet. “I just became acutely aware of where so many women make mistakes when it comes to a lot of the choices that we make when we’re on this path to attracting the love that we really want.”
Jenkins said that the biggest problem in dysfunctional relationships that she has seen in her career is that people want to marry their potential instead of their reality.
“People who want to marry potential while dating somebody’s reality. That’s what I see all the time,” she said. “They come in and say, ‘I love this person, but I want them to change.’ You can’t change someone who doesn’t see an issue with their actions.”
In her book, Jenkins talks about her personal dating life, including things that she wishes she would have known when she was dating, communication dos and don’ts, dealing with breakups, the importance of forgiving and moving on, and many other love-related topics.
The judge also talks about dealing with the pressure of fans who would inquire why she was still single, which would sometimes urge her to get into relationships with the wrong men.
…She added, “I wasn’t going to let anyone make me feel like because I wasn’t married by a certain age that there was something wrong with me or that I was off on some timeline of life.”
Jenkins told the outlet that instead of forcing herself to date and rushing into relationships, she decided to manifest what she wanted out of her future.
“I sat down, I got clear, I wrote down what I wanted and decided that how I was going to think and how I was going to believe would change,” she said.
— end excerpts —
Here is the video embedded – it’s around 52 minutes long:
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