Welcome to the Grown Zone at JetMag.com. We look forward to providing tools, advice and a reliable framework to help you to achieve honor, esteem, respect, prosperity, health (mental, physical and emotional), good relationships and self-loving behaviors for your life.
In the Grown Zone we emphasize healthy relationships over personal desperation and societal pressures to get a mate—any mate. It’s just not smart to start a relationship because you don’t want to feel lonely or your internal clock is ticking, or you’re tired of penis surfing and (in the blunt words of Zara’s father Sam Green, Sr.) want the convenience of a readily available “wet and warm hole.” (Veterans of the Grown Zone are familiar with Mr. Green’s straight-no-chaser Sam Greenisms.)
Healthy relationships are the result of self-love and preparation, but too many people take shortcuts to relationships and then try to force a quality union. A prime and common example of this is the Makeover Artist, men and women who enter relationships as if they were reclamation projects and treat relationship candidates as “fixer uppers.” You recognize Makeover Artists because they talk about trying to find someone with “potential,” talk about their relationship as an “investment,” and take pride in providing things for their love interest that the object of their affection has never provided for him or herself.
One of the biggest misconceptions in relationships is that money can buy happiness and stability; that you can acquire and develop another human being as if he or she were a piece of real estate. Just because you are financially stable, and able to provide for others in addition to yourself, does not mean that you are ready for a healthy relationship. We’ve seen countless situations where people have the good job, good credit, big house with the picket fence, the two-car garage, and even the dog—and are convinced that all they lack is a mate to complete the picture.
Are you a Makeover Artist? Would you know one if you met one? While both men and women can be guilty of trying to make someone over, the most recognizable example is the woman who decides she’s going to find a man with “potential” (demonstrated or not) and invest in him. This is the woman who is determined, to the point of obsession, to get herself a man. She’s got ideas about how much better her life will be, what this relationship will be to her, how great their lives will be together—all she needs is a man to cast in the role. And on the hunt she goes. On all fronts she seems to have it all—except a regular man, that is. And nothing is wrong with that if she’s not longing for one (there’s a difference between being open for a loving healthy relationship and being desperate for a man). The danger is in prematurely casting the role of “mate” with the wrong person in order to meet objectives that have no correlation to healthy relationship standards.
Anyway, our Makeover Artist finds a man—one with potential who is willing to allow her to woo and sex him (because that’s what she’s been taught will lock him down). She invites him to the mall with her and before long they are in the men’s department and he’s got bags of gear that she bought. She then brings him home with her and makes room for him in her closet—clears drawers for him; makes her man comfy! Now she wants to talk about his dreams—help him make good on his potential. Satisfied with his potential (with little or no demonstrated performance), she presses for—and often gets—co-habitation, marriage and/or children. After all, she believes in “going for what she wants.” In fact, she invests all the things she absolutely shouldn’t in an effort to lock this man down: her money, body, home and heart. After all, she believes, this is her man—and she has the receipts to prove it!
There’s the obvious external makeover, changing the way he dresses, grooming him, even capping those teeth with veneers so that he looks like the perfect man. She can dress him up, put him in a luxury car, put credit cards in his pocket as an authorized user, and he can roll like a baller on her dime, but that will not make him appreciate any of those things in the way he would if he had to earn them, or if she knew to just work on herself and remain open for love, rather than trying to take shortcuts. And then she begins to see his character flaws, but does she bail? Probably not, because she’s believes she’s invested too much into him. So now she’s left with trying to do a character makeover—sometimes spending years and even decades before learning that nobody in the history of man (despite what those romantic movies and songs have been telling you) has ever been successfully “loved” into becoming a different person.
This foolery happens every day! Just because the “mate space” is available doesn’t mean that you are ready to fill it. If you are not healthy and whole all by yourself, to invite another person into your life in any way—home, money, body or heart—is to invite drama. Just because moving them in or marrying seems like the next logical step doesn’t mean you should cast a joker in that role and begin your makeover. Any two fools can move in together or get married (and they often do) but it takes two Grown people to build a healthy relationship. A quality mate (a Grown person ready, willing and able, i.e. qualified for a healthy relationship) never needs a makeover. Too many decide that if they can’t find a suitable mate, they’ll just create one. Living in the Grown Zone means remembering the lesson of Frankenstein—try to create your very own human being—no matter how good your intentions—and you’ll end up with a monster.
We invite you to Enter and Live In The Grown Zone.
For a FREE copy of, 9 Keys To Living In The Grown Zone, click here.
About GrownZone
Zara Green and Alfred Edmond Jr. are co-principals of A2Z Personal Growth Enterprises, producer of The Grown Zone. Zara is a speaker/trainer & author. Alfred is an award-winning journalist and expert on business and personal finance. The couple, both “Do-Better Fanatics”, lead sessions on personal growth, self-love and resiliency, healthy relationships and “grown” decision-making at live events across the country.
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