Source: Instagram

Apparently, Bow Wow has had some time to think these past couple days, and that thinking must have led him down the path of relationships past and present. Yesterday, the rapper and 106 and Park host posted this picture of he and ex girlfriend Angela Simmons with this caption:

I woke up and she was the first person i thought of… Next to my momma she the best woman i encountered!

Awww. Am I the only one who feels kinda sorry for the brotha? Normally I’m not thinking about Bow Wow. I’ve been done with him several times over; and once he started listing the names of women he’d smashed, I had washed my hands of him.  But this little photo share, though potentially embarrassing for Angela, seems pretty honest to me. Perhaps because it’s so reflective of the mistakes men make when they had a “good woman” back in the day. How many times have we watched our brothers, nephews, cousins, sons, friends etc lament the loss of “the one that got away” just because they weren’t ready to handle her at the time? Shoot, how many times have you been the woman he wasn’t ready for? It’s all a crying shame.

In case you need a late pass, while Angela and Bow Wow were together, the two went through a few breakups and makeups before ultimately deciding to split, most likely allegedly due to Bow Wow’s infidelity. Ain’t that the way it goes?

But what’s even more sad about their relationship drama is that Rev Run, Angela’s father, actually approved of the young man and had this to say about he and Angela’s relationship in his book “Take Your Family Back,” released in 2009:

“I should also add that I shared my views on relationships with Bow Wow, because beyond his relationship with Angela, I wanted to make sure that he was on the right path, too. I didn’t want my daughter dating a rapper who I perceived as a ladies’ man, but the truth is I also love Bow Wow…Which is why before they broke up, I decided to have a little talk with him…

“Now, you know in this house, we don’t believe in premarital sex. So if you’re truly serious about Angela, and she’s truly serious about you, then we have very high expectations for how you two are going to act…So if you’re serious about Angela, then ask her to marry you and do this the right way. And if you’re not, then you two can go your separate ways and still be friends.”

Whew! Daddy Run is no joke. Abstaining can be extremely difficult for anyone, man or woman, but especially a young man, with Bow Wow’s experience and maturity level. It’s not hard to see why he couldn’t handle all of that responsibility and accountability. Maybe I’m alone in this but I really liked these two together. And I wouldn’t be terribly upset if they decided to give it one more try. But that’s just me.

What do you think about Bow Wow’s Instagram confession? Do you think he and Angela will ever get back together, should they?

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It took me 17  months to get over “him.” I know because I counted the number of months between the first emotion-laden piece I’d written about him (when I suspected he may be trouble) and the last (long after I discovered that “trouble” was a gross understatement).

He was the worst thing to ever happen to me and, in the words of The Decemberists, I wrote pages upon pages trying to rid him from my bones.

In the recap of that disastrous relationship, I don’t paint myself as blameless because I wasn’t. However, isn’t it true that “we all righteously recreate our self-image, diminishing our moral lapses and shabbier behaviors, in order to live with ourselves”?

I know that I made mistakes with him, the chiefest of which was falling for him in the first place, but through my writing I was able to analyze every aspect, question every moment, reimagine happier endings, finally accept the inevitable and ultimately gain closure – all without seeing him for months.

But what if I had never spent all of that time writing about him? Would I have been able to get over him sooner? A new study says yes.

According to The Atlantic, researchers at the University of Arizona hypothesized that focusing creative word vomit into narrative form could help patients with the highest tendency to ruminate about the past to pull themselves together and move on following divorce.

Instead, what they found was that scrawling out one’s feelings post-breakup can actually cause greater emotional distress months down the road, especially for people who already tend to overthink their relationships.

Once they got over their surprise, the researchers were able to go back and see how their findings actually make a lot of sense (or at least, they were able to spin it that way). “If you’re someone who tends to be totally in your head and go over and over what happened and why it happened, you need to get out of your head and just start thinking about how you’re going to put your life back together and organize your time.”

Darn. I was doing it wrong!

There were times that I suspected that my constant cryptic Facebook statuses, heavyhearted Facebook notes, heartsick poetry and the entire secret blogsite (55 despondent entries in total!) that I wrote about him weren’t as therapeutic as they were reinforcing negative feelings, but it definitely felt cathartic at the time.

What I find especially ironic is that though writing about him didn’t necessarily help me get over him, it did help me become a better writer. In fact, when I finally stopped writing about my pain – because I didn’t feel that pain anymore – I found it difficult to find inspiration.

As Adele, Keyshia Cole, Mariah Carey, Candace Bushnell and the fictional Carrie Bradshaw illuminate, sadness sells books, blogs and records. Heck, even Rihanna found mainstream fame after her highly-publicized incident with Chris Brown.

However, if you’re not interested in profiting from your pain, not encouraged by the knowledge that you’ve written something some other miserable girl can relate to, nor have any desire to prolong your suffering, then there is a tried-and-true way for even the most over-analyzing and obsessive woman to get over a guy.

Pretend he doesn’t exist.

It seems so basic, but it truly works. If you’re serious about letting this guy go, now is not the time to text him feigning interest in how his cousin’s neighbor’s dog is doing. Shut him out of your life. Stop wondering where he is, what he’s doing or who he’s with. Stop checking his Facebook page, hide his updates on your newsfeed and quit reading his Twitter timeline/mentions (unfollow or mute anyone who retweets him into your timeline!). Stop following him on Instagram, stop checking his location on FourSquare and remove him from your Gchat list. Stop asking about him. Stop listening to music that makes you think about him or watching movies that make you miss him. Tell your friends not to speak his name to you. Notice whenever you’re unnecessarily and obsessively thinking about him (whether out of anger or sadness) and immediately will yourself to stop. Oh, and quit writing about him.

How will you know when you’ve succeeded? When you look up one day and realize you’ve created a happy life for yourself that doesn’t include a single thought of — or word written about — “him”.

What do you think? Are you surprised that researchers found writing about a breakup doesn’t help you move past it? Do you think pretending a guy doesn’t exist is the best way to get over him?

 Follow Alissa on Twitter @AlissaInPink or check out her blog This Cannot Be My Life

 Photo courtesy of Shutterstock 

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The most you can ask for from a breakup is that no restraining orders are filed for and that everybody walks away feeling respected.  But different situations and different people call for different breakup tactics. The “I just want to be friends line” might appease one guy, and make another send you twenty nasty text messages. So here’s how to break up the right way in seven different situations.

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Sometimes you can’t quite put your finger on what is wrong with your relationship, and for that reason you decide there is nothing wrong. Not necessarily true. Here are 15 strange, subtle and seemingly unrelated signs that your man is toxic for your life.

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He spoils you

Every woman deserves to be spoiled occasionally. But if your man constantly showers you with gifts, begins inappropriately early (like after date #2) and spends tons of money on said gifts, he is probably in great fear of losing you. And that’s a lot of pressure to put on a woman. We easily succumb to guilt and we can feel when a man would be devastated by us leaving him, so we often stay in relationships we don’t want to be in.

Sometimes you are more than willing to turn an ex loose. You snap the weight of that relationship from around you like you snap that constricting bra off at the end of the day. You’re giddy, joyful like a slave who has just received her freedom papers and a one-way train ticket North.

Then, there are the relationships that leave you curled up in the fetal position, watching The Notebook on replay, ugly-crying Kim Kardashian style into the same three balled up tissues you’ve been using for the past four hours. Nothing matters in the world. Not food. Not your job. Not even your hygiene. You’ve drank ONE glass of OJ all day, called out of work and haven’t shaved your legs. You simply can’t rest for wondering, crying, hoping and praying over the desperate, pitiful remains of your love, feelings and broken emotions.

Yeah, it’s that intense sometimes.

I’ve experienced the former and the latter. While the latter is obviously the most difficult to push through, it’s also the most rewarding to push through. I cried my fair share of tears but at the end of the day, I had to get tough with myself. I fixed my face (and LORD, did that take some fixing), took a shower, shaved my legs, hid The Notebook DVD and laid out some serious honesty for myself. My ex had not changed. In over six years of on-again-off-again contact with him, he had not changed. At 26 he is the same game-playing, insecure, lazy little boy that he was at 18. Am I bashing him? Absolutely not. I can attest to his good qualities as well. The only trouble is that while he may be a good-hearted person, all the ‘good-heartedness’ in the world just AIN’T ENOUGH.

I took inventory. Had I grown? If the answer was ‘Yes’ (which it unequivocally was) then the choice to completely and wholeheartedly walk away from him would be clear, yes? Yes. It should be easy, yes? No.

Sometimes women, as the more nurturing of the two sexes, feel the need to coax, coddle and coerce boys into being men. Wrong. All wrong. If he is not engaging his own free will to become better, there is little you can do or say to persuade him to. I had to stop and realize that my support is and will only EVER be supplemental to my ex’s determination to mature. If he lacked that determination, all the support in the world would do him no good and would drain me in the process.

I looked in the mirror one fateful day and true to the form of any endearing chick flick, gave myself the illest, most girl power-esque pep talk possible: “Girl, you have come too far. You have learned too much. You know what you deserve and it’s not him. You did all you could do to show him how much you loved him. He didn’t get it and that’s not your problem anymore. Something so much better is in store for you.”

I fed myself smaller gems in the same vein as that pep talk whenever I felt weak or lonely. I got busy working, getting involved in the women’s empowerment ventures I had become so passionate about, mentoring young ladies, writing, traveling, spending more time with friends and family. Things were happening. Life was drawing back its curtain and showing to me all the glorious inner workings of its full production. I was falling in love with living, instead of existing. And sure enough a week, a month, a year and a half sauntered on past me. I looked up and thought about him for the first time in ages and felt ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

When I got busy working on ME, that’s when the real healing process started happening. It was like a chemical reaction. Getting to the crux of who I am, what I enjoy, what I’m passionate about is what made all the difference for me. I had no time to bemoan the ruins of a failed relationship when I was out exploring, meeting, seeing, doing, loving and living. But I had all the time in the world for growing.

While I wish him well, I have slowly but surely moved forward by knowing and fully UNDERSTANDING my immense worth. You’ll never get what you deserve if you never understand and fully believe in who you are. People can tell you until they are blue in the face but until it all penetrates your brain matter, it will just be words and you’ll still settle for less than everything you’re worth.

I may have held the blue ribbon for “World’s Ugliest Ugly Crier” back then but please believe holding the title of “The One That Got Away” feels so freakin’ fabulous now.

La Truly is a late-blooming Aries whose writing is powered by a lifetime of anecdotal proof that awkward can transform to awesome and fear can cast its crown before courage. Armed with the ability to purposefully poke fun at herself and a passion for young women’s empowerment, La seeks to encourage thought, discussion and change. Her blog: www.hersoulinc.com and her Twitter: @AshleyLaTruly.  

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Everyone who comes into your life is either a blessing or a lesson. I’ve had my share of both, and in essence, everyone was a blessing since the lesson is the blessing. I never regret a relationship. I do sometimes regret my own actions that may have hurt another person, but in any relationship that goes sour, if nothing else, it has taught me what I don’t want in a mate.

I’ve learned a bunch of lessons that when applied make me much happier and at peace in my interactions, yet one of the most simple, and least followed pieces of advice I’ve heard is this.

Things that leave you feeling bad, do less of. Things that leave you feeling good, do more of.

Many of us live in the moment. We convince ourselves that even though the relationship has brought us more bad than good, Mr. or Mrs. Right Now will suffice for the night, or the month, or the year.  And when we do end the dreaded fiasco, we find ourselves back in his or her life one Friday night when we had nothing better to do.  We convince ourselves that although nothing good has ever happened after 2am, tonight will be different and so instead of going home to bed, we have one more drink, locate the number that should have long ago been deleted, and send that text.

I’m guilty of falling victim to past loves like a drug addiction I just can’t shake.  But any recovering addict will tell you, the greatest struggle is in the mind.  In order to get over an old habit, you have to replace it with an equally satisfying good habit.

It’s not enough to simply learn a lesson. We have to find practical ways to apply it if we really want to see change in our behaviors.  My last love affair ended because I didn’t see a long term future in the works for us. Let’s call him Omar. I enjoyed him in the present, but I knew the present was all we would ever have. My problem was that when the weekend rolled around, as much as I wanted to be the woman who had plans since Tuesday, I simply wasn’t, and boredom often got the best of me. I would call Omar, spend the evening with him and wind up feeling drained and let down after it was all said and done. “What? I did this again?” was a recurring question I asked myself.  Whether the question referred to dinner, a movie, or sex, I scolded myself for allowing him to linger in my life.

So like a good parent, I took away my own privileges.  I call when I’m vulnerable, lonely, or bored, so the quick and easy way to eliminate that possibility was to delete his number. Done.

Secondly, I decided to make a list of the bad qualities in Omar and all of the reasons I decided to end my relationship with him as a reminder to not go back. I tucked that list under my pillow and read it every night before I went to bed. After time, the bad things were all I could remember and those feelings of desire subsided.

Lastly, I made plans for myself to fill my downtime doing things I loved and was interested in doing.  I signed up for a free class to hone my creative side. I found fun events to attend in the city, even solo.  I made time to reconnect with old friends and family who really had my best interests at heart.

I’m not an member of the independent woman, “I don’t need a man” club. I enjoy men. I prefer to have one in my life, if it’s a relationship that edifies me.  But one last great piece of advice I heard from TD Jakes is this: When the man of your dreams does find you, let him find you …busy.

Herina Ayot is a freelance writer living in Jersey City by way of New York.  She tweets @ReeExperience.

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So you’ve just gone through a breakup and you want to be sure you keep your cool. You don’t want to do anything that makes you look (and feel) desperate or like you’re falling apart. Some acts are obvious to stay away from. Others are a bit subtler until suddenly you feel like you’re spiraling out of control right after doing them. Avoid that “Oh my god…I’m a crazy ex!” moment and don’t do these things.

Source: Shutterstock.com

Stop wasting time regretting what you did a year ago. Start doing what you have to do now, so that in a year’s time you won’t regret what you did today. – Stephen Covey. 

I was mired in regret for nearly a year after a certain relationship. I wanted so bad for things to work out with this guy, and I did everything I could think of to make that happen. Looking back, I’m almost embarrassed at some of my antics that I now recognize as hopelessly desperate. Way after any sane person would have, I gathered up what little self-respect I had left and walked away. More accurately, I allowed him to fade away.

In the weeks and months that followed, I analyzed that relationship in my mind even more than I did when we were still involved. I would sit and think about what I could have said or done differently to increase my chances of a desirable outcome. In hindsight, so many things are maddeningly clear and I would be devastated thinking of the mistakes I made regarding that relationship. Why hadn’t I been more unavailable?, I’d think. Why had I been so nice about that? Why wasn’t I kinder to him about this? Why did I ignore that phone call? Why didn’t I know they were more than friends? Why did I respond to that text? Why did I believe that lie? Why didn’t I wait just a little bit longer for him to come around? Why was I so terrible at this game?

The regret weighed on me for months. I would come across some piece of advice and think about how it applied to that relationship and how I wished I had heard it sooner. I would watch movies about a dating couple and see similarities (that were probably not even there) and imagine we could have had our happily ever after too. I would hope that I could somehow get a second chance to start over with him just so I could do things right from the beginning.

I regretted and regretted some more, going over and over in my mind every little word, action and event between us. I’d all but absolved him completely of any culpability in what went wrong. Somehow, I’d determined that I was totally at fault for the negative outcome because he would have treated me better if only I would have acted differently. I would think about what I could have said here or what I could have done there. I obsessed thinking : “if only”.

The odd thing was, even when I had moved on to another relationship, I was still obsessing about that past one. I wasn’t hoping for another chance to do things right with him, but older and wiser, I was upset that I didn’t know better back then. I was upset that I’d wasted so much time on the futile task of trying to get that man to love me. I was upset that I didn’t see the signs. I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid about him.

Then one day, talking to a friend about my regret, she got me thinking when she said “What’s the point of still mulling over the situation? You learned the lesson. Now, forgive yourself and let it go.”

She was right. Sure, I made some mistakes, but he was the one who had been a jerk to me. I had found it in my heart to forgive him, so when was I going to find it in my heart to forgive me? How long was I going to beat myself up for not knowing better and not doing better? My dad used to always say, “make the best decision with the information you have at the time”. That’s all any of us can do right? Sometimes the decision we make will prove to be a great one and sometimes it will prove to be an awful one, but oftentimes in the grand scheme of our life, it falls somewhere in the middle.

The only thing we can do with the past is move on from it. Spending time being sad about a situation I couldn’t change was emotionally draining and when I decided to stop doing that, I began to feel better. It’s hard to feel good about yourself when you’re beating yourself up all the time. Acknowledging mistakes is one thing, wallowing in self-pity and and being upset at yourself about old stuff is quite another. Even in the most ridiculous situations, there’s always something positive to give yourself credit for. At the very least, I don’t regret having an open heart and being so willing to love because now that I have better judgment I am able to love a man who truly deserves it. Had I shut down my emotions like I so desperately wanted to back then, who knows what I’d be dealing with now?

Though I’m certain there were some things in life I could have done without, if given the chance, I probably wouldn’t change a thing. Going back and changing anything would mean going back and changing me and possibly changing the good things right along with the bad. I hate talking about lessons learned in a relationship, but we really do learn from every failed (and successful) relationship, right? And after we’ve learned whatever lesson we’ve gleaned from an old relationship, the only thing to do is to let it go and focus on living and loving now in such a way that won’t leave us with a lot of regrets later.

What do you think? Have you ever struggled from regret about a past relationship?

Follow Alissa on Twitter @AlissaInPink or check out her blog This Cannot Be My Life

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

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When you bring two people together, each with their own separate stresses, needs, wants and expectations, you’re bound to experience bouts of feeling unsatisfied in your relationship. You can’t possibly anticipate somebody else’s needs all of the time, and your partner cannot possibly always anticipate yours. That’s why the saying goes that relationships are complicated. It’s really not as simple as, “If I feel happy I’ll stay, and if I feel unhappy I’ll break up with him.” If it were, you wouldn’t have opened this article now would you?

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Every woman that I’ve ever known has done the emotional tango with one lover or another. They’ve gotten caught up in the folly of breaking up and re-engaging, particularly with significant others who don’t treat them as well as they ought to be treated. They change their numbers, simply to hand the guy the new digits two weeks later.  And they change the locks to their doors, only to welcome him in when he comes knocking. My personal philosophy toward the matter is, “never step in the same ish twice,” (essentially meaning that an ex is an ex for a reason) but most people can’t help but to stumble backward into the muck.

The onset of this pattern is sometimes due to a fear of loneliness, reluctance to move forward, and whiffs of nostalgia. Also, the idea that they’ll simply stay with him until something better comes along, or that they’ll never find anyone better, are two possible contributing factors. All of those notions are detrimental, however, and compete with the idea of finding someone more suitable. If they remain tangled up in their past relationships, trying to find the “good” in a heap of bad, then it’ll be impossible to recover from the “quicksand” relationship, and for them to find their footing.

That said, it’s easy to rationalize why a woman would stay with someone when she’s afraid of being alone. After all, it is difficult to meet new people, and it’s difficult to establish trust within new relationships when a woman feels that she’s been robbed of trust in the past. The hard part about remaining tied to a tumultuous relationship is that a woman will always feel that she will have to explain their relationship to her family and friends, or there’s a chance she won’t be very honest about the trouble in their relationship because she fears the impending “I told you so” because of the hurt that he may have caused in the past.

The decision to recover from a chaotic, unstable situation and pursue healthier relationships is not an easy task. The most painless way to break out of the “break up and make up” cycle is to figure out why the relationship hasn’t worked, and why it won’t ever work. Also, to take each step of the break up one day at a time, and utilize positive relationships available (friends and family). This time, more than any other, is the best time to lean on friends, take time for organizing, change up routines, purge home of relationship triggers, and take up new hobbies. It’s also just important to take time for personal reflection, taking into account, both, negative and positive aspects of the relationship –and understanding why that relationship, or any relationship of its kind, will never be satisfying enough.

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