The Six Passions of the Red-Hot Lover

By Wendy Brown, Clinical Member, Ontario Society of Psychotherapists

Even more questionable dating advice

By Wendy Brown March 18, 2015 Advice No Comments

If you don’t love yourself, don’t expect a man to love you. The thinking here probably is: Women who have love relationships must love themselves. You’ll be better off with more positive self-esteem than you have right now. Who wouldn’t be? Being self-critical allows you to get into a relationship wherein the man is hard on you and you don’t stop him; it could appear as though he doesn’t love you. You’re walking around feeling ‘I’m just not good enough.’ Men are picking up this message and agreeing with you; that’s why you’re not being asked out. If you don’t end up with a man who loves you, it’s your own fault; you failed at loving yourself to a sufficient extent. You’re being criticized for being self-critical. The potential fallout from following this advice is: You develop a flawed view of women who are in love relationships; perceiving all of…

Questionable Dating Advice

By Wendy Brown March 2, 2015 Advice No Comments

I am a psychotherapist who has a lot of experience dealing with love relationships. Over the years, I’ve seen people upset because they’ve accepted dating advice from their family and friends that hasn’t served them very well. Having love-life difficulties and feeling at least a little desperate for a solution, they were perhaps too eager to have advice; any advice. Then, things went wrong. Sometimes the dating advice caused them to solve one problem and create another, or it worked fairly well but had a hidden downside that showed up later. That is why I’ve decided to write a series of blog posts to point out: The thinking that goes along with the dating advice What tends to be the fallout of implementing the advice By the way, I think it’s generalizing too much to say some dating advice is good and some is bad. Every person is different and…

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“Wendy’s years of experience, combined with her powerful intuition and genuine concern for people, give her deep insight into our feelings about love. Why Love Succeeds or Fails goes further than the ‘getting what you want’ approach, and enables us to face our fears, and challenge our long-held assumptions about love and relationships. This book is a great tool whether you’re looking for love, or trying to get past problems in your relationships that seem to come up again and again.”

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