HOW TO TURN YOUR PIG INTO A PRINCE

How often have men been referred to as pigs? I’m sure you have done it and I know I have too, and I’m a man. You see, the problem is that pigs are the ones that give us men a bad name. Not all men are made alike yet the connotations stay and stay strong because we human beings have the amazing ability to remember the bad and forget the good. Then the good gets colored by the bad and it almost always shines with the stain of stink. Stink can make you double think and sometimes it can cause you to forget you really are not as bad off as you have previously thought.

Many women find themselves in this unfortunate predicament: they fell in love with prince charming but soon after the marriage and the honeymoon phase their prince quickly morphes into a pig-like creature replete with pig-like characteristics and I know you have complained about them. How disappointing, right? I know you though he was one way and then suddenly he became the quintessence of what you didn’t want: an out of shape, slovenly, slob who once home plops himself on a couch to do that attractive early evening routine. He sits there beeping the remote, burping up a few chips, imbibing a beer, and growing that wonderful piece of anatomy called a beer belly.

There is nothing attractive about a man who acts like that and there is more. He doesn’t like to take the garbage out although he says he’ll do it when you ask him. He forgets all his underwear all over the house. His socks appear to have the amazing ability to crawl down stairs and find themselves in the living room. He forgot what it means to look good just for you, he takes you out once in a while and stares at the restaurant television to catch the latest score just this once, he really loves to have boy’s night out, and suddenly you feel alone, rejected, unappreciated, and you wonder where the romance has gone. Then the trouble starts.

You find yourself complaining to your girlfriends, some married and some not, and suddenly prince charming has graduated from being a prince into a pig with all the related degrees and characteristics. You wonder what you are doing being married to such a creature, you begin resenting him, your eye gets caught by some young man who looks like he just crawled out of a Northern Italian village, and you begin to wonder what life would be like without your former prince now relegated to the ovine category of animal life on this planet earth. You begin to complain at him every time you see him (and you have good reasons), you forget to tell him how much you love him even though you are trying to find a ray of that love that once caused you to think of him twenty four hours a day (remember?), and if you’re not careful, you’ll end up either wishing for another relationship with all the related fantasies or you’ll end up committing the unthinkable affair which is never good. By the way, remember this: the reason the grass is always greener on the other side is because there is more manure there.

So what do you do when you find yourself attached to a transformed prince who longer woos you and makes you swoon when you see him coming home? What do you do when you actually dread hanging out with the man to whom you promised your undying love forever? What do you do when you no longer feel that tingle you used to experience every time he even entered the room? There are some amazing simple suggestions that actually produce results. There are two key areas to deal with: your attitude and your creature (husband). Remember this: your anxiety and misery is in direct relationship to the areas of your life you can’t control. To the degree you can exert control over any area of your life, you will find yourself feeling at peace and at least with much less stress than the areas where you actually have no ability to control them. So identify the areas you can control, exert that control, and then be proactive and disciplined to continue on your plan. Know this: you can always control your attitude because it has to do with how you think about things and you are the only person to own and control your mind.

So let’s think about your attitude about your husband at this point and for argument’s sake, let’s assume your husband has made the unfortunate personal journey from prince to pig. It’s disappointing, you’re sad about it, and you’re most likely even mad about it. And it’s understandable. Nobody should have to live with such a perversion of manhood but nobody can really make anybody change. The changes have to be initiated on a personal level so attitude is the only area you can really control in order to deal with your challenge. Furthermore, and this is good news, you can act in such a way as to shock your pig back into his proper and original condition as the prince you married a while ago in romance land. How do you change your attitude? It’s all about the way you think.

Let me also tell you, by the way, that everything I say here is based on the Bible because I am writer who is a Christian and I am committed to the Lord Jesus Christ. This is no pop psychology, it is not some worldly wisdom, this is truth as expressed in the Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. Follow these instructions and you will be safe. Follow these instructions without following the Lord Jesus and you’ll still have a better life than those who show up on those talk shows where everybody talks at once and where everybody has slept with everybody and now they’re trying to figure out who is whose father or uncle or cousin. I know you have seen those all too close to home talk shows and programs. So sad our world has been reduced to that, right?

So how do you change your attitude? Here are three simple keys: Identify areas of control, decide on a course of action, implement your course of action. It’s that simple. So let’s say your prince has become a pig and you don’t like it. Here is an example of what you could say to yourself every time you start to feel badly about what your dream marriage has been reduced to: “I used to think of my husband all day and loved everything about him. I ignored his bad traits (which were always there, you just didn’t see the because you were in love), I excused his messes, I chose to close an eye to the things that bothered me, and I thought of nothing else to talk to him about but how much I liked him and enjoyed staying with him. I used to greet him with a smile, I used to run up to him and give him a great big hug, and then I would tell him I would do whatever he wanted to do as long as we could hang out together.” Remember those days? They are still possible. Unfortunately, often part of the problem with the prince to pig degeneration is the lack of attention a man gets from his wife so he starts to slip as well. I am not blaming women for men who turn into pigs, but often that is part of the explanation for the slovenly behavior and conduct.

Changing the way you think by remembering how wonderful things used to be and what you used to do will go a long way toward getting you to feel in control of your attitude. Remember to focus only on the positives and to ignore the negatives, at least in the initial restructuring of your man. Once things are back to normal, he’ll most likely want to change and do things to please you which in the end will cause him to change his condition automatically. In terms of your actions, just do the things you used to do before and right after you got married. In terms of sexual intimacy, do you remember the days when you couldn’t get your hands off of each other? Do some of that again. If he’s not affectionate, you make the first move. There are no losers here. There are only participants. If you are feeling frisky, let him know you are going to take a shower and invite him in. Pigs usually don’t smell so good, right? There are many more areas of attitude adjustment you can identify and address. This was just one of them.

In terms of actual things you can do to help and assist your pig into going back to being a prince, and you’ll have to do this covertly, that is without apparent premeditation, I suggest you treat him like a prince and watch him transform into the prince he actually is. Communication is vital as long as it is not heated. Remember, he slipped into pighood unawares just like those followers of Ulysses who got stuck on that island with the witch that turned all newcomers into pigs. No self-respecting man wants to be a pig, but without the proper education and stimulus he can easily turn into one and being a pig is not only relegated to the home. Many men engage in ovine antics that involve lusting after other women, but that’s an entirely different topic and challenge. We’re just talking right now about a man who has just lost all his sense of style and manners so he no longer is attractive to you.

Try these tips for a few weeks and watch things begin to change. Call up your husband during the day and tell him you would like to go for a thirty minute randevou somewhere with him after work. It can be to a bar, to a restaurant, to a boardwalk if you live where there is nice weather, or anywhere else where just the two of you can hang out together and make believe you were dating. At first he might think you have lost your mind, but once out together he’ll remember you as he did back when as a prince on the proverbial white horse he couldn’t keep you out of his mind. Make sure you dress to kill, and only dress to kill for him. We men never forget a good looking lady and if actually go through all the trials and tribulations of dating you, courting you, buying you a ring, and saying “I DO” in front of a lot of people and before God, trust me when I tell you, we think you are hot. It’s nice to think our wives our hot, so be hot for your man. Don’t worry if he’s not correspondingly hot yet. Once he goes out with you twice a week like this, and you are looking better than some movie starlet, he’ll start to change.

Practice the ten minute kiss. Just do this: once a day grab your husband and kiss him for ten seconds. You can even tell him you’re going to do this for a week, and I’m not talking about the peck. No peck for a week unless you have already had a ten second kiss. This works like magic.

Last but not least, say at least five great things to him about him without complaining at all for an entire week. Unfortunately it’s somewhat inherent in women to complain to their men about a lot of things. Trust me, we men have our own challenges and problems that we must understand in order to treat you women properly and with respect. By nature we are task oriented hence we do one thing, forget about it, and then go do another. It’s just the way men and women are made. To the degree that we begin to understand these differences, we get along a lot better. So just covenant between you and yourself that for one week you’ll tell your pig/husband only positive things and you won’t complain, not even once. As a matter of fact, when you are around some of his pig like behaviors, find good things to say at those times. He will be won over by your love and approbation.

Pigs are only cute on television or at the petting zoo. If you married a prince who turned into a pig you have a double challenge because you have disappointment plus disgust toward the man to whom you pledged your undying love. If your pig appears not to be interested in changing at all, you might even feel desperate and you might end up doing something really stupid. Please take into consideration these suggestions, practice them for one week starting right now, stay faithful to your man, honor your vows (for better or for worse), be true to your word, and watch your pig transform before your very eyes. If you are a woman of faith, bathe all these activities in prayer and submit to the Lord Jesus. He will give you peace, rest, and a resolution of such an apparently difficult and almost impossible problem. If you are not a woman of faith, dig deep, keep your marriage, practice these principles, and you will have a much greater chance at experiencing the joy, the happiness, the fun, the adventures to be had as you and your prince gallop together into the sunset of life.

Pullicinella