3 Dating Lessons from “I Love a Mama’s Boy” on TLC | TiaTruthteller

I just watched the finale of TLC’s “I Love a Mama’s Boy”, the show that follows four couples with mother-son ties so tight they strangle romantic relationships. These guys had routines with their moms that ranged from sweet (bringing home cooked meals over) to cringey (mom and son holding hands during a couples’ massage at the spa) and part of the fun was deciding which was which.

As a dating book author what was certainly not fun was seeing one of these young women being disrespected and humiliated by her boyfriend’s mom repeatedly. And poor Emily took it all because she loved Shekeb.

A quick background: Shekeb’s mom Laila wants him to marry an Afghan Muslim woman and Emily’s heritage is Korean. Shekeb has already been married to such a woman in the past but it ended in divorce. Now he says he’s done pleasing his mom in matters of the heart.

Watching these couples inspired me to get to typing and share 3 Dating Lessons from “I Love a Mama’s Boy”. They’ll ring true if you’ve ever dated a guy who’s unusually tight with his mom-and maybe even if you haven’t.

1. Living together won’t solve your problems

I know it had to be uncomfortable for Emily to visit Shekeb at home (he lives with his parents) and get the cold shoulder from Laila. Hence her idea for them to move into their very own place. She seemed to think of it as a demonstration of his good faith and pinned their chance at a joint future on this.

What Emily probably knows now the show has aired is that there’s no love nest these Mamas can’t penetrate. Ask Jason and Justine or Mike and Stephanie, two of the other couples on the show. They live together and we saw how Jason’s mom is bent on planning the wedding of her dreams and Mike’s mom lets herself in their home to police their food choices and tidy after her son who’s “picking up bad habits from Stephanie”.

Relationships provide little decision points along the way where you get to determine if you want to upshift to the next level or downshift when your needs aren’t being met.

From an intentional dating point of view, upshifting when things aren’t going well only locks you in past your relationship’s sell-by date. Living together doesn’t make your problems better, it just makes it breaking up harder, wasting more of your prime dating years.

Living together doesn’t make your problems better, it just makes it breaking up harder, wasting more of your prime dating years.

2. Don’t take his test for him

Later, an exasperated Emily tells him to break the news to Laila that they’re moving in together, and says if he won’t, she will.

I wish she could’ve seen me shaking my head, NO! through the tv screen.

You know how we women always want to know where we stand with guys? Falling back and observing if he stands up for you and your relationship is how you find out. This was Shekeb’s test, not hers.

When he chickened out later under Laila’s cold gaze and told Emily to “say it, say it”, to Laila, he failed the test. He exposed his inability (for the 100th time) to be the man she needed him to be.

Emily ended up finishing the announcement herself (Boo!), but by the time they left the restaurant she broke up with him (Yay!). She recognized that having failed the test, he wasn’t worthy of her time, love or affection. She didn’t like it, but she accepted the information for what it was, and that made me feel good about her and her future. My husband even said, “I think she must’ve read your book!”

3. You can’t make it with a Mama’s boy if he can’t put his foot down sometimes.

Shekeb tells us he wants a future with Emily but he allows Laila’s deliberate nastiness to Emily to go unchecked, scared to offend his mom. We see Emily showing up at Laila’s birthday with a gift. Laila wants nothing to do with Emily or her gift and tells her to get out, calling her a pig. Emily didn’t quite catch that (as she’s being hustled down the stairs by Shekeb) so he helpfully pipes up, “She called you a pig.”

What? That’s when I knew Shekeb was trash. Well, maybe not total trash, but it’s clear his feelings for Emily weren’t strong enough to wake up his testosterone and get him to act like a real man.

It’s also what gave me a good feeling about Mike. He took the lead in the conversation where he explained to his devastated mom he would be moving out of state with his girlfriend Stephanie. He did the heavy lifting, as he should, when talking to his mom.

Speaking of men-where are the dads in all this?

“I Love a Mama’s Boy” gave me food for thought concerning the yin and yang between mother and father when raising sons. The dads all confessed they felt the relationship between their wife and son was weird, but they seemed resigned to it, possibly because it kept these overbearing women off their chests.

For their parts, the moms seemed to treat their sons like surrogate husbands even though they had real life ones. Eeeew. Once the finale was over, I switched off my tv praying to be a strong mother without emasculating my sons.

Have you caught any episodes of “ I Love a Mama’s Boy” yet? What did you think?

Ciao,

Originally published at https://www.tiatruthteller.com on December 15, 2020.