
"Respect her like your mother. Protect her like a daughter. Love her like a wife. These are the thoughts of a good man who is lucky to have a good woman of equal measure.
For over forty years in the counselling game of listening, learning, giving guidance and offering advice I have experienced the full range of almost every feeling and emotion known to mankind. I have loved and hated some of the things I've heard done to and for people. I have both despaired and rejoiced at the heartache and happiness I have shared. While good and bad things are done to and by both men and women, I have invariably found my own sex to be wanting when the scales of justice are set up to weigh both rights and wrongs perpetrated by mankind.
I don't know why it should be so, but far more often in my experience I have heard of males treating females badly as opposed to the other way around. One might think that given that the sexes are broadly equal in number, so would be the injustices one sex perpetrates against the other, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I sometimes feel that with a few exceptions, there is a propensity in man to do more wrong than in a woman and I have seen too often how some men can only feel 'good' by making a woman feel 'bad.'
And yet there is an inherent strength in all women that no man can ever know. Who but a woman would carry around a burden for nine months of her life that she transforms into a treasure at its birth and grows to love more every time she looks at its innocent face? Whereas the mother is prepared to break the umbilical cord minutes after her child's birth, this close connection between the two will never be broken. Both she and her child will invariably form a closeness of bond that no father and child can ever experience in equal measure. It is no mere coincidence that girls eventually grow into their mothers and that men look for their mother's qualities when choosing a wife and lifelong partner.
There have been times when I have delighted in a woman's moments of pleasure and on other occasions I have been dismayed and disgusted in the pain they have been made to sometimes endure at the hands of men. Yet, for all my learning and breadth of experience, I know nothing compared to the true understanding of the anonymous person who coined the thought embraced in the image above about the way a woman deserves to be treated by any man who cares for her.
So many times in my life have I seen the strength of feeling and depth of emotion which can be forged from nothing more fundimental than the power of love, the arms of protection and the river of respect that runs so deeply for one's soul mate. It is a sight worthy of its wait to see in fullest flower; especially when east meets west, black joins with white and man unites with woman." William Forde: May 14th, 2014.