Do your friends and family continually offer you advice about women and dating? How about casual acquaintances or even total strangers?

It doesn't matter if you are married, dating someone, dating several someones or dating no one, does it? It seems like everyone has an opinion.

But have you ever wondered what state of mind those opinions are coming from?

If you take a moment to consider what might be driving the desire on others' part to give you advice, you may be surprised by what you discover.

Let's face it, there are vast numbers of people out there who are not happy with how their relationships have gone in the past and/or are going now.

Yet, if your experience is anything like mine, it's amazing how consistently it's those sort of folks who are the ones most eager to give us advice.

Why is this?

Here's what I think. Psychological experiments have shown (which you can find a host of references to easily through Google) that people can have either a "poverty mentality" or an "abundance mentality".

An "abundance mentality" is a productive and healthy mindset that believes there is more than enough success and prosperity in the universe to go around.

Someone with this field of vision is confident that he or she will succeed and hopes that you will also. What's more, such a person actively pursues goals and encourages others.

Conversely, a "poverty mentality" is frame of mind in which a person believes there's a finite amount of success that can be achieved.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the accompanying belief is that if any success is to be claimed, it has to be at the expense of someone else.

The weird part is that those who suffer from a "poverty mentality" often look around them in despair, supposing that all the success has largely been claimed already.

With that comes a sense that any chance of personal success is largely hopeless, and typically everyone else is to blame for this state of affairs (especially "greedy people").

You can imagine how this results in a pattern of intensely jealous feelings, schadenfreude and even animosity towards those who are successful, particularly in areas where the "poverty"-driven person feels things are hopeless for him or her.

These negative feelings can either be overt or covert in how they are manifested.

So what does this all add up to?

You got it: Not everyone who is giving you advice has your best intentions at heart.

In fact, the opinions others express regarding how you should or shouldn't conduct your relationships (or any other personal matter, actually) must nearly always be filtered through which mindset the one proffering the "advice" is coming from.

Next time I'll give you some objective examples of what to look for and guard yourself against. Stay tuned.

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments below!