Love and respect make for good relationships

NO LOVE AND RESPECT, NO GOOD MAN-WOMAN RELATIONSHIP

Ozodi Osuji

This essay is going to state the obvious; it says nothing new. But make sure that you understand the obvious that it rehashed, and practice it, if you desire good human relationships, that is.
If you have lived past age thirty-five (when youth ends, and adult knowledge begins) you must have learned a few things about human beings. In case you have not, let me refresh your mind.
One learns that one’s body is a bag of flesh. The human being lives in flesh. That flesh will live for one hundred years and die.
The human flesh is composed of the elements they teach you in chemistry classes. There are about 120 elements but only 64 of them are found in the human body; the key elements with which the human body is made are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, magnesium, potassium, phosphor, sodium, zinc, copper, iron and so on. These elements are combined in molecules. The molecules are held together by chemical bonds (in chemical mixtures the outer electrons of elements combine to form molecules).
The elements held together by chemical bonds are each composed of electrons, protons, and neutrons. Those subatomic particles are composed of quarks and quarks were formed by light.
The human body, although seen and experienced as flesh, is really made of light energy, heat energy, mechanical energy, electrical energy, sound energy and chemical energy, but all of them can be reduced to light energy.
13.8 billion years ago, during the Big Bang, a point of light came out of nowhere, split into photons, particles of light and those combined to form quarks and quarks formed protons and neutrons (electrons formed directly from light) and those combined to form nuclei of atoms.
Nuclei captured electrons and atoms are formed; atoms differentiated into the 120 elements in chemistry’s periodic table. For our present purposes, our bodies are made of flesh, flesh is formed from elements, elements were formed from light; flesh lives for about 120 years and dies.
People, animals, plants are made of the same chemical elements (organic chemistry studies those elements, especially how they combine to form biological life). There are elements not found in organic life; those are studied in inorganic or physical chemistry.
The mystery of life is that whereas consciousness is found in human beings, to the best of our knowledge, it does not seem to exist in inorganic matter, nor does it really exist to a great extent in plants and animals (it may exist in animals, but we do not know for certain).
What we do know is that in human beings, the combined elements of matter have consciousness. Human beings are conscious of themselves as human beings.
Each of us is conscious of himself as a self, an I, self-separated from other people and from animals, plants and nature in general. Each person has consciousness of self; nobody has explained the origin and nature of this self-awareness (I will leave religion and spirituality out because those are speculative and not amenable to the scientific method; they cannot be observed, verified, and falsified).

HYPOTHESIS: PEOPLE DESIRE TO BE LOVED AND RESPECTED BY OTHER PEOPLE

Each human being has a need to be loved by other people; each human being also has a need to be respected by other human beings. Man, woman, child and adult have need to be loved and respected by other human beings.
From the moment a child is aware of himself as a person he has a need to be loved and respected by those around him.
If you doubt it do not love your child, and do not respect your child, treat him or her as not loveable and respectable. Do so and the moment the child is able to live independently he will leave your presence. Many teenagers leave their parents’ houses because they perceive their parents not to love and respect them.
Love and respect are the oxygen on which people live.
In the adult world, you must have learned, if you are an adult, above age eighteen, that you desire love and respect from you and from other people and that you tend to feel angry at other human beings who do not love and respect you and you have also learned that other adults are like you in their desire for love, respect and worth and significance.
Try not respecting other adults and see what happens to you. If the adult has positive self-esteem and knows that he does not need you to live, that he can live independently, and you disrespect him he is out of your environment in a moment.
Let me personalize this essay; if you disrespect me, I will leave you. It is as simple as that; I do not hang around where I am not loved and respected, and the same is true for all people with good self-esteem.
People with low self-esteem may tolerate you not loving and respecting them because they think that they are not good enough and that you are doing them a favor by loving and respecting them.
Many dyads are of the sadomasochistic type where one partner does not love and respect the other, inflicts pain on him or her and he or she tolerates it. Such relationships always end in tragedy because if somewhere a man learns that his woman friend does not respect him the devil in human beings come out, he will flip out into tremendous rage and may kill her in his fit of rage.
Yes, people do kill those who do not respect them!
(I am writing this essay because yesterday, I read a post at Facebook by a neurotically proud Nigerian woman; it was obvious that she has total contempt for men; she employed the most horrible put down names for men; apparently, she does not believe that men deserve respect and resents any man who tries to behave as if he has respect; she sees it as her duty to disrespect him…the deluded woman has been reading a lot of the more childish aspects of feminism that has destroyed the western family; society cannot exist without the family.)
Human civilization began when people learned to love and respect themselves. In nature people were predatory animals, like lions and tigers and lived alone. They did not see themselves as connected to other people.
In the state of nature, Thomas Hobbes, in his 1651 seminal book on political philosophy, Leviathan, said that each of us lived alone and cared only for his self-interests. I looked after what is good for me and you did the same. The strong took more than their fair share of everything and the weak combined and killed the strong and took his property. Life in the state of nature was nasty, brutish, and short. Folks seldom lived to be forty (before the twentieth century).
In the mythical state of nature, people lived in enormous insecurity and decided to reduce their insecurity by organizing themselves into society. They established governments and gave them the power and authority to make laws that protected all of them and gave them the ability to punish those who trespassed their interests.
Thus, the commonwealth was formed, and kings were given the ability to try and punish lawbreakers. Some kings became dictatorial, so people made other arrangements, such as the limited government of the USA; here, the government is given limited powers to punish people but not the absolute powers of the earlier societies of people. (See John Locke, Second Treaty on Government, 1687.)
If people live in a society where they respect and love each other they live in peace and harmony; on the other hand, if they choose to not love and respect each other they live in social conflicts and wars.
If you are an adult, you must have observed that every human being can kill you. Any person who so desires it can point a gun at you, pull the trigger and kill you; you can do the same to other people.
We live at each other’s mercy.
This cannot be changed. Because we can harm and or kill each other, society trains people to have value for their lives and for their fellow human beings’ lives. I want you to see me as worthwhile, important, and significant in your estimation and you expect the same from me. Both of us know that our social worth is dependent on each other’s decision to do so.
I want to see me as having worth and importance and significance; you also do the same. I also know that regardless of my desire for worth that you can kill me and that regardless of your desire for worth that if I desire it, I can kill you. This is the human condition.
We desire worth but know that we can only have it if other people grant it to us and we grant it to them. We desire respect and know that other people can choose to respect or not respect us, we cannot compel them to respect us.
What most people, if they are psychologically healthy, do is if they relate to you and perceive that you do not respect them, they feel angry and since the best way to manage one’s anger is to walk away from the anger making source, they leave you. As noted, if you, a human being, even once treat me as worthless and disrespectfully I am out of your sight. I will not offer you the opportunity to treat me disrespectfully, not more than once, once is more than enough for me. Also, as noted, there are folks whose self-esteem is low so that they hang around in environments where other people disrespect them until they explode in anger; often their rage is fatal to those who disrespected them.

So far, I have established that people seek worth and respect from each other. This is an axiom of being human beings. I will not get into the philosophy and psychology of why they do so because that will take me much afield. Let me just say that Alfred Adler, one of the four who founded the field of Psychology (the other three were Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Emil Kraepelin), said that the exigencies of the human condition makes people feel as if they are not special; nature destroys us as it destroys trees and animals, and as a result we feel inferior vis a vis nature and compensate with desire for false, neurotic superiority and power. That is, we have existential sense of worthlessness, and that sense of worthlessness disposes us to seek worth and specialness. Enough of psychoanalysis, let us move on.

THE BREAKDOWN OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN FAMILY, AN ATTEMPT AT CAUSAL ANALYSIS

In the USA, where I have lived since secondary school, white folks do not respect black folks. Black folks were slaves and when slavery ended, they were socially marginalized and treated as second class citizens. Up to now, white folks discriminate against black folks. Black folks are always the last hired and first fired (they are seldom hired for good jobs; they are seen as mostly good for menial jobs). Because of racism and discrimination most black Americans are poor.
On the average, the typical black man makes 40% the income of the typical white person. Simply stated, black folks are poor (of course some have chomp change, but we are taking about averages).

In the extant world, most men realize that they need money to support their families. Nothing destroys a man’s self-esteem as not having money to support his wife and children. But in the USA most black men make so little income that they cannot support their families.
Black women learned that black men are socially marginalized and poor. Many of them developed the habit of not respecting their black men.
White men, beginning during slave times, had black women available to them as sex toys and the same practice exists today. Thus, black women tend to have better chances in the workplace; they are tolerated where white men do not tolerate black men.
If a black woman went to college (university) the chances are that she will have a job whereas black men with even doctoral degrees are not hired by white universities or by any one for that matter.
Because contemporary black women tend to do well economically, some of them disrespect their men. As a result, the black family is in shambles.
As of today, in the USA, many black men do not even bother marrying their women. Since they need sex, they get their women pregnant and varnish.
Thus, it happened that over 70% of black American families are headed by women, which means that 70% of black children are raised by their mothers only; many of these children do not even know who their fathers are!

Girls tend to identify with their mothers hence respect their single parent mothers; they go to school and graduate and obtain jobs.
If you are a boy, you know that beginning around age 14 you want to be around other boys, your peer group, cohorts, and do not find women’s company suitable to you.
Black teenage boys thus ignore their mothers and hang out with their hood friends. Their mothers ask them to come home and study and they ignore them. Before you know it, they drop out of school, and some get into trouble with the law.
Black Americans are ten percent of the US population but constitute over fifty percent of the inmates of American jails and prisons.
One out of four black males between age 14 and 24 is either in jail, prison or is supervised by probation and parole officers. They have felony records. And are not ever likely going to obtain good jobs in society or run for political offices. Think about that reality.

Racism, discrimination and poverty and other factors contribute to the breakdown of the black American family.
Feminism also contributes to the breakdown of the American family (today 40% of white families are headed by white women). Feminism has useful aspects such as demanding equal treatment of men and women and for women who are qualified to be given any job they compete for.
Unfortunately, aspects of feminism teach women that they do not have to respect men; they are told to go to schools, have degrees and get jobs and live without men.
The moment that you do not respect a man you have asked him to leave you and he will leave, and since he thinks that he still has need for sex, he will see women sex objects, and have sex with them but do not respect them.

An interesting thing has happened in the Nigerian diasporan community. Nigerian women come to the USA. They quickly learn that domestic violence is severely punished. If their men dared raise their voice at them, and God forgive the men if they hit them (under no circumstances should a man hit a woman, only cowardly men beat their women, courageous men protect their women), well, when Nigerian women want to be powerful, as they fancy feminists are, they frivolously call cops and tell them that their men verbally, emotionally, physically and sexually abused them.
The police officers, too willing to incarcerate black men, pick the men up and take them to jail. After a few days in jail, the men see a judge who mandatorily sentence them to one year of domestic, batterers anger management treatment in the community.
Many Nigerian men are these days taking these anger management courses.
Once you have sent your man to prison his pride kicks in. He leaves you. Yes, these days many Nigerian men leave their women.
The women then use the law to get them to pay them stiff child support and, in some states, spousal support…they are now in heaven because the feminist movement have enabled them to destroy and enslave their men! These women are now in cahoots with the oppressor in oppressing black men.
Of course, no woman should tolerate abuse. Where abuse occurred, the woman must leave but seek marriage, family, and other therapies, if only to help both parties to become more mature adults.

When Nigerian men leave their wives in the USA their male children behave exactly like black American young men, as teenagers, they tune out their mothers and some drop out of school and get into trouble with the law.
Go to US big cities like Los Angeles, California, and visit the jails and you will find many young Nigerians in them. That is correct, with the socially engineered breakdown of Nigerian families in the USA, the children join black Americans as the habitual inmates of jails and prisons.
Of course, this is not what the neurotically power drunk women have in mind when they destroy their men.

Nigeria is transitioning from traditional society to modern society. Folks left their villages to go live in emergent urban areas. Many of them do not have the skillset to obtain good paying jobs. Thus, most Nigerian men are poor. They do not have the money to support their families.
Their Nigerian women learn that their men are poor and start disrespecting them. They make themselves available to men who have money. When the men find out what is going on they leave. Thus, children are increasingly being raised only by their Nigerian mothers in Nigeria.
Disrespect men and destroy man-woman relationships and the children become collateral damage and suffer.

No one is asking anyone to tolerate abuse. If your man is abusive leave him and ask for marriage counseling so that he is taught to respect women and children and you yourself learn to respect men. If you don’t, well, join the sisters and live as single women and enjoy your independence and have many boyfriends, and if a lesbian, have many lady sex friends.
These folks’ live lives of quiet desperation; many of them are depressed; they harm and kill themselves at alarming rate; police pick up their dead bodies.
Destroy the family and religion and endanger our lives, yours included, this is because it is the family that socializes children to respect all people’s lives.

When men abandon their families, women do not have to raise their children. The women can also abandon their children. In which case, the political system takes over and gives the children to foster parents to raise.
Talk to children who were at foster parents and listen to their stories of abuse, especially sex abuse, they tell you. There is really no ideal alternative to raising children in healthy man-woman families.

DISCUSSION

Relationships are predicated on love and respect. If you do not love and respect folks, they will leave you and you must accept living alone. You can resign yourself to living alone. There is nothing wrong with that choice. But if you want to live with people, have man and woman relationships you must love and respect your partners.
I go to Facebook and read the claptrap written by Nigerian folks. Many of them talk about wanting polygamy and or having side chicks.
Listen, polygamy is wrong. Having side chicks is wrong. If you decide you can remain single but if you choose to marry have one wife and no more than two or three children (most people do not have the kind of income to train all their children through universities so having more than two children is stupid).
Monogamy is the most rational man and woman relationships. I will not draft a dissertation justifying monogamy here; I merely assert it as the best form of marriage organization.
If you are a man, you must love and respect your woman if you want the relationship to succeed. If you are a woman, you must love and respect your man if you want a positive marriage.
Please forget the rubbish written by angry, men-hating feminists; here is the deal, if you disrespect your men, you have asked them to leave you and they will leave you.
And do not see it as your function to tell men to not have self-respect. If a man does not have self-respect, why should he live, why should he go work, make a living to support his life? I see many braindead Nigerian women embarking on a mission to teach Nigerian men to have diminished self-respect and outrightly attack those who have good self-esteem, as the personality disordered woman, she has histrionic and or borderline personality disorder, which led me to author this essay, did yesterday.
I cannot imagine a man with a positive self-esteem tolerating that woman for more than five minutes; I would order her out of my presence if she said what she posted at Facebook in my physical presence; no one gave her the existential right to destroy men’s self-esteem.
These neurotic women are out to emasculate black men; we are in the process of rehabilitating the slavery and racism destroyed black men’s self-esteem and these man hating women launch their attacks on black male esteem.

CONCLUSION

This essay is mostly written from the male perspective. It is about time that men spoke out for men. For too long, folks spoke out for women and allowed them to now believe that they have a right to disrespect men. No, they do not have the right to disrespect men.
Men stay only where they are respected and if you disrespect them, they will leave you. Men are not masochists for women to disrespect and they tolerate it. And why would men tolerate disrespect from women?
What do they bring to the table, what do they give to men? Sex? If a man lives alone and wants sex, he can always buy sex from the merchants of sex. This is not recommended. A man should find a woman who loves and respects him, and he loves and respects her, and both agree to go through life as equal partners.
Life is better where people live in loving and respecting situations, not some dominant-submissive situations, not where some deluded women who instead of seeking therapy for their personality and or mental disorders project their self-hatred to hating men, and vice versa for men who do so to women.
The family is the basis of society. I doubt that society can exist without the family; sick families produce our present sick societies. We cannot go back to the old family structure where men dominated women and their children, we are all working for a new kind of family where all treat all as equals.
A healthy family is a place where all members not only work for their mutual good but love and respect all members, no psychologically sick feminist play at undermining male self-esteem is tolerated.
If the Nigerian family breaks down, as is the case of the African American family, Nigerian men will really become criminals, big time. Already, they tend to some criminality; just imagine what would happen if their fathers were absent as they grow up. Nigeria will become a criminals’ haven. All will return to living in the state of nature and live extremely insecure lives. Therefore, folks must make sure that they do not destroy the Nigerian family by undermining men’s self-respect.

Ozodi Osuji
May 23, 2023

You can reach Dr Osuji at:
ozodiosuji@gmail.com
(907) 310-8176.
(458) 245-7979

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