The Friend Zone

Of course we have all heard that before. Sometimes, someone is saying it as a joke or some guy (or girl) is telling a painful story about how some girl (or guy) after a whole lot of love and affection and stress, decided to put him (or her) in the dreaded monster island ruled by a half human half dragon creature called the friend zone.

I totally understand that when a man likes a woman romantically but for some reason, the woman doesn't feel the same way but feels they could be friends; it can't be easy for the man and he may want to move on and not be friends with the lady. In fact, I think that is the best for both parties.


What is baffling and completely crazy is this: When a woman tells a man from the beginning that she can't have a romantic relationship with him probably for a good reason like she is dating or engaged or she doesn't think it would work out between them and he decided to ...well, stay friends with her. Then all of a sudden, he starts complaining to the world that she put him in the friend zone and because it is such a crazy place that only 'weak' men allow themselves to be in, he becomes a totally hateful creature to the lady.

It isn't right if it was the woman that led the man on and on and made him believe that he had a chance with her and after raising the man's hopes, tell him she can only be friends with him. Yes, that should do a lot to anyone's ego. If that's the case, the man can safely write a book on the subject and we would all buy. But feeling this way when you were expressly told from the beginning and you lingered believing that he/she would change her mind about you and it didn't happen? Honey, it is nobody's fault.

Everything does depend on individuals. Some people have good relationships with people they had thought would be their lovers. For some people, the friend zone doesn't exist. If you like a person a lot to want to be in a romantic relationship with him/her, what is wrong with being friends? Might be a tad hard for some of us though.
Friendship is indeed a beautiful thing and I am one of the people that believe that your spouse/partner should be your friend. No matter how it comes, why not open your hearts to all the beautiful things that could come out of it?

Have a wonderful week!

Lily Johnson

Featured!: Salon Task.

If you are a salon owner, then you need to check out this beautiful application Salon Task that helps you organize everything from appointments to schedules in your salon. Many salon owners would readily tell you that managing a salon isn't all about the glam; it is a tedious job. Laurel White, my guest blogger wrote a piece about Salon Task and some of the things it offers salon owners.

Salon Task
Who is stronger than an empowered woman? No one. The number of women owning businesses are growing and we hope that it does not stop any time soon! Salon Task, a scheduling application for the beauty industry hopes to encourage this growth by providing them with a simple, attractive and user friendly tool to increase the efficiency and organization within their office.

With Salon Task you can enjoy advanced CRM capabilities such as email reminders, notes, attachments and public scheduling. All of your customer and appointment information is stored in detail within the application and it is all organized in a manner that makes it easily accessible.

Schedule appointments for your team members or just for yourself with the easy drag and drop calendar feature. Salon Task also has marketing capabilities, allowing you to create a hosted web page designed to your taste in order to display your most recent work, services and contact information. Salon Task is 100% web based so you may access this on any device with an internet connection. It comes with a mobile application for yourself as well as for your employees when they need to quickly access their calendar. All employee access is customizable per your preferences.

Finally, Salon Task integrates with Quick Books so that your customers appointments and information can be linked to your finances!

To learn more about this application and if you have any questions, you can email Laurel White at lwhite@salontask.com. Also visit www.salontask.com

Stay empowered!

Lily Johnson

Salon Task website

What men really want...

So I wanted to do a post on the above subject and thought I should get a man to write a short and very personal piece about what a man wants or what he wants. I didn’t want the whole ‘step by step’ thing that makes you feel like you are in a classroom. I wanted something that flowed freely and still very sincere.
I got my very good friend Steve to write a piece off the top of his head and fast. How else would you get a very sincere piece?

Steve is a senior social work practitioner in the UK.


What men really want
Okay folks, I admit this might be from a rather narrow and biased perspective ;mine and that of some of my male friends. But this is what I have to say...

So I woke up this morning with my gorgeous baby cuddled up to me, looking amazing even as she sleeps; the peaceful serenity of her face.

I stroked her hair gently and she smiled as she always did, she leaned over and kissed me gently on the lips. Hmmm. I said ‘good morning gorgeous’ and she responded 'good morning handsome'.

Source

Yes she meant me.

Dear woman: Your man wants you to seduce him like right now.

When you wear a beautiful dress or lingerie or a nice new perfume and your man looks at you and smiles, pays you a compliment or kisses you or the three mentioned [Imagine the bliss of having all three], what does that tell you? He liked what he saw and probably would like to see more of that. He would like to be ‘treated’ to that more often. Now you might have worn the dress out of necessity or bought that lingerie because you wanted to give yourself a treat which means you didn’t even mean to get his attention. But you did. Imagine if you did that just to please him and doing it for him from time to time. In our busy schedules as wives and partners, we just let everything work like clockwork. If it aint broken don’t fix it yeah? But women tend to jump to say their men just stopped being romantic. Just the way you want to be ‘wooed’, the way you want him to know what you want and do it the way you want it, your man wants to be seduced. Maybe he has told you this, maybe he hasn’t, maybe he thinks he has but really hasn’t or maybe he believes you would figure that out yourself.

Imagine this: You were at your vanity table applying your night cream and thinking about a whole lot of things [as we normally do] Junior needed a new school bag, your hair needed to deep conditioned, the client you were meeting the next morning is a tough cookie, you just had to cook a big pot of soup to save cost, why on earth wouldn’t pimples just go back to hell where they came from? And your man who was on the bed looking at you the whole time just says ‘Baby, come right here and seduce me’

You might be thinking [and laughing] right now saying ‘No, that can’t happen to me. What!? Or you might just start laughing at the crazy randomness of the whole thing and say to him ‘You can’t be serious’ or well, you could be shocked. One thing is that you would really wonder how you are supposed to seduce him that is if you are not one of those women that have no problem with that issue.

Dear woman: Have you heard about Royal Jelly?

Some of us may have heard about Royal Jelly and used it. However, there are some people who haven’t. Royal jelly is a milky-white secretion produced by glands of worker honeybees to induce the superior growth and development of the queen bee. Royal jelly is the principal food of the honeybee queen. This substance is believed to be the reason the queen bee lives a long life and is so fertile it lays over 2000 eggs per day.

Royal Jelly is also believed to be of benefit to humans especially women. Listed below are some of them.

• Aids in cell regeneration, has great benefits for the skin and reduces the effects of ageing.
• Improves the skin texture and clarity.
• Boosts the immune system.
• Useful in the prevention and the management of liver and kidney disease.
• Very vital for fertility.
• A mild aphrodisiac.
• Helps to combat stress and its effects.
• It contains Vitamin A, B complex, C, D and E.
• Enhances metabolism and eliminates fatigue.
• Useful in breast health. 
• Especially useful to menopausal women

It does sound too good to be true but people who have been on Royal Jelly for months would tell you that most if not all of it is really true. It contains all the eight essential amino acids and ten secondary amino acids which is why it is dubbed ‘the complete food’.

Remember, to look good, you have to take care of the ‘inside’ just as you take care of the ‘outside’. If you go through the list of benefits again, you would see why every woman should think about having it in her cabinet.

Read more about Royal Jelly here

Keep looking beautiful and have a fabulous weekend.

Lily Johnson

**There would be a seminar on Makeup application, Facials, Weight loss tips, Cancer prevention and much more tomorrow Sunday 23^rd September by 2:30pm at Eagle hall 21/23 Aromire Avenue off Allen Junction, Ikeja, Lagos.

Another ‘Rockefeller’ guy

The world is crawling with people with different personalities. You get to meet people you can’t help but love, appreciate and care about and people you keep wondering what on earth happened to them and made them became who they are.

When I watched the movie Who is Clarke Rockefeller? which was based on a true story, I wondered how anyone alive would not only be that disillusioned but also deceive a highly intelligent woman into believing all his lies about being a Rockefeller and married her. Racking up bills on the woman’s account to pay for a lifestyle that he couldn’t afford. A lifestyle, I believe had always been his dream.

People, Rockefeller guys are still very much in existence and on the prowl. Someone I know got scammed by one. Okay, maybe he didn’t say he was a Rockefeller, but he did appear to be a well to do guy who was highly connected; who had people in high places. He had ‘family members’ who were big names in the society. He deceived a number of people and collected money from them and was living really large. He lived in hotels and ate in choice restaurants with the money of these people. Just like the guy in the movie, he is charming and could talk his way into and out of anything. He made you trust him and believe him because his stories appeared real. If he said he would get you a visa, you would believe him because he probably had people there. If he told you he would get you on any international record label, you would probably believe that too because of the connections he ‘had’. 

Adieu Cynthia Osokogu....

Please if you know nothing about beautiful Cynthia who was reported missing in July and was found dead and in a morgue in Lagos, read about it here.

I just want to advise ladies to be extremely careful and prayerful. Before you leave home, tell someone where you are going and who you are meeting so that if by any chance, you get missing or anything, people would know where to start from. Young girls, please meet up with people you don’t really know i.e people you met on Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger in public places. No precaution is too small. There are ritualists, robbers and really bad people masked as ‘cool guys’ who are on these platforms looking for people to kill, rob, rape, and other bad things. 

I am disheartened by this and it does remind me of something personal. It is indeed a crazy world. I wish her loving family the fortitude to bear the loss. 

RIP Cynthia. Rest in the bossom of the Lord.

May God help us all.

Lily Johnson

Pictures from here.

When should a woman stop fighting for her man?

While some women might be well aware of their husbands’ opinions concerning polygamy maybe because they are Muslims or traditionalists or just a person who believes it’s only natural for a man to have more than one wife, some are not until it hits them square in the face. 

I have watched two women I know go through the terrible ordeal of finding out, fighting to keep their men, and then sadly living with the fact that their husbands are married to other [younger] women.

Woman A: Martha’s husband was her college sweetheart. He found it difficult to pay school fees at the time because his father had three wives and his mum was the first wife. The man who was just a farmer couldn’t take care of his children. Martha’s parents were doing well so she began to support Ahmed. She helped him with school fees, feeding and buying books. He promised her he would never marry two wives even though he was a Muslim because he didn’t want his children to ever go through what he went through plus of course, he wouldn’t betray her in that manner. Martha believed him because her father was a Muslim and her mother a Christian and he didn’t marry another wife.

After 15 years of marriage that produced 2 boys and a girl, Ahmed who was now doing very well, decided to take another wife; a girl in the vicinity who was in her early twenties. Martha nearly went mad. As I narrate this, she isn’t still very stable mentally. There was nothing she didn’t do. She confronted the girl and her family, fought for her man for several months and of course took the matter to their families. Ahmed’s family of course told her it wasn’t wrong according to their faith. After 5years of marriage, that produced two kids, the girl just left the man. He went back to Martha who forgave him. Less than two years later, he married again, this time to a divorcee. I don’t know how she’s getting by right now.

Woman B: Laura married this police man [before he became the head of a district] when she was 20years old. When she had a first child through C section, the husband’s family was outraged. They told their son that she had bad luck and wouldn’t have more than one child. This woman risked her life, went against doctor’s orders and had 3 more kids. This shocked the family of her husband and they were forced to accept her. Everything was going very well until the policeman all of a sudden rented an apartment for another woman. When Laura found out, she took the woman’s phone number from her husband’s phone and began to call her every minute to threaten, beg sometimes and curse her.