Free Act like a lady, think like a man by Steve Harvey Page B

title: his mother refuses to cut the umbilical cord and let him be a man; his mother doesn’t think there’s a woman alive good enough for him; his mother has something against his significant other; he doesn’t want to grow up; he jumps through hoops for his mother because she spoils him rotten and takes care of his every need. We’ve heard them all.
    To “Did I Marry a Man or a Boy?” and all the other women in relationships with mama’s boys, I say: stop coming up with excuses, and recognize that he’s a mama’s boy because you let him be one.
    Yes, I said it: It’s. Your. Fault.
    Let me tell you why a man will get up out of a warm bed with a beautiful naked woman in it, pull on his clothes, grab his keys, and get in his car at 10:42 P.M., with his children and woman in the house alone, to drive all the way across town to bake cakes doggone near the middle of the night for his mother’s bake sale: because his mother has set requirements and standards for that man, and his woman has not.
    Look, I already told you how this works: a man who loves you will be the man you need him to be if you have requirements—standards you set to make the relationship work the way you want it to. A real man is happy and eager to live by your rules, as long as he knows what the rules are and he’s sure that abiding by those rules will help keep the woman he loves happy. The only thing you have to do is establish the rules, say them out loud early in the relationship, and make sure he sticks to them.
    But if you don’t have any standards or requirements, guess whose rules he’s going to follow? That’s right, his mother’s. She was the first woman to tell him what she would and would not accept; if she told him to wash his hands before he sat at the dinner table, be back in the house before the streetlights came on, go to Sunday school on Sundays, protect his sister when the two of them were out, and always—always—listen to and trust his mother, guess what this boy was going to do? He was going to follow those rules to the letter (mostly), because he did not want to deal with the consequences that came if he didn’t listen to and respect his mother. He also followed those rules because he loved his mother, and her rules (mostly) never changed; oh, they adapted to his age and circumstances, but a mother always keeps some rules front and center for the men in her life, no matter her son’s station in life, including respecting her, loving her unconditionally, and protecting and providing for the woman who gave him life. She never relinquishes those standards and requirements, and her son, if he’s a responsible, thoughtful, loving son, doesn’t really ever break away from them.
    Until, that is, he finds a woman he loves and who loves him back and has sense enough to set some ground rules and requirements for the relationship, chief among them the following:
    You need to respect me.
    You must put me and our kids after God and above all others.
    Be clear to everyone involved in our lives that they will respect your relationship—and me.
    Now, if you’ve never set those rules up, and his mother’s never relinquished hers, is it a wonder that he’s going to leave you in the bed naked while he goes to bake cakes? It’s not that she has a hold on this man; it’s that you never bothered to take the reins. Think about what “Did I Marry a Man or a Boy?”
    said: she’s been in a relationship with her husband for ten and a half years, and not once did she step forward and express her displeasure when her man’s mother called the house to put him to work. “All these years I have kept my thoughts about this to myself . . .” she wrote. So if she never told her man she doesn’t like it when he leaves her and the kids to run over to his mother’s house, and she doesn’t like it when he allows his mother to yell at him like a child, and she doesn’t want him cooking, painting, driving, and doing laundry for his mother