+1
But “divorced women” is kind of a skewed sample. I mean, there’s a reason they divorced.
I can’t imagine raising my son without his father. Of course, Papa is the stay-at-home, so perhaps I am the one that makes everything harder.
Thank you for asking. Let’s go back to what you originally said, which is what many people are challenging you about.
So, let’s pretend that this random woman I found on the net is the person’s wife.
If find a statement necklace is a matter of science, then there should be a way to plug in some calculations to find one which has a pleasing shape.
Common, it’s definable by science. Show us the science which the guy can use to measure the shape and determine if it is good or not.
That would have to be Picking Jewelry By Science 101 Level. A senior level class would be to take the shape of the person’s face and see how those lines interact.
Graduate level courses involve understanding the harmonic wavelength relationship between the person’s skin color and the color of the stone, but we’ll assume that you don’t have the math for that one.
Anyway, where’re the equations for determining which basic shape is “good”?
I’ve got a friend who is divorced and she had the same point.
Of course, most of my male friends who are divorced have bad things to say about their ex-wives as well. You may be onto something with the skewed sample.
It could also be that people are more comfortable talking about their feelings on that other board, but they don’t feel comfortable being so honest here.
I mean, this board is totally non-forgiving towards people who play the martyr, and martyrdom is what the OP is talking about. Self-pity is not tolerated here at all. You’ll notice that the few posters who posted about their feelings regarding crappy/ nonexistent presents went to great lengths to beat themselves up preemptively. We can be a little harsh when it comes to emotional confessions, and people around here really like to argue. Even over something as basic as feelings (or lack of).
But I don’t think this is the case elsewhere on the web. I know I used to participate on another board where people were all “gooey” with emotion. There was a virtual puddle of tears and snot everywhere there. I had to get the fuck out because it’s just not my thing. But that’s why the internet is amazing. People who want to feel free to kvetch and cry and bitch have “their” safe spot. And so do the people who just don’t swing that way. Seems to me the OP needs to figure out if her radar is in tune with the mindset of that other board. Maybe it’s not a good fit for her.
I’m willing to bet there are lurkers here who do feel some butthurt during Christmas because they give and give and don’t get anything in return. But they just won’t say it out loud because it is a hard truth to confront.
There is one major difference between divorced men and divorced women. You can tell a man, “I’d have/want/love to hear your ex’s side of the story.” Try telling that to a divorced woman. Trust me, you will NEVER say that ever again.
You love these over-generalizations about women, don’t you.
I’m sorry you had a crummy mom. Not all women are like her. Not all men are getting the shortend of things and not all women are irrational.
That statement about divorced women was NOT a generalization. It’s the truth.
And I know that most women aren’t like my mother in this regard. But there are enough who are that I felt the issue needed to be addressed.
Saying the main difference between men and women is that is not an overgeneralization, but is the actual truth?
Wow.
If you are trying to say something is always true, it will be trivially easy to prove it.
If you are instead trying to say that something is true in your experience, then saying it’s always true is a generalization.
Figure out what you know and how you know it, then think about how to convince others of these things. “Trust me” is not one of those convincing ways.
(my bolding)
What issue?
You really seem to have some bee in your bonnet about women in general, divorce, single mums and the like nearwildheaven, not just in this thread but others as well. And you make some pretty radical claims about The Truth, citing other messageboards where you supposedly hang out. Dropping wild bombs, with the entreaty to just ‘believe you’ doesn’t cut it around here: you need evidence babe. I reckon you’ve been hanging around for long enough now to get the ethos of this board…if it doesn’t work for you, maybe you should mosey back to the other boards.
I just read an opinion piece in the Washington Post about this thread’s topic. It has really good information on how women are selectively influenced to feel December holiday is their month to work to make everyone else’s holiday happy - and/or evidence that this is, in fact, something that a fairly large proportion of women (in the Post’s audience demo at least) feel like and do.
She hits on something in there - “making a family” - a lot of the pressure women feel is in maintaining and creating traditions. Most of us have family traditions - “my family would go out the weekend before Christmas and chop down our own tree” “We would always have cutouts and peanut butter kiss cookies.” “We’d open ONE gift and go to Midnight Mass.” “Grandma would play Christmas carols on the piano and Grandpa would drink too much egg nog.” Some of these traditions and rituals are generations old - some of them tied to our roots as immigrants. And so our spouses see that we are doing it “for us” but it isn’t for us - its for those that have gone before us and those that will come after. Its to create memories that our kids will treasure when they leave the house, and when we are gone. And I don’t think of my grandmother often, but I do when I pull out her cookie recipe. And when we marry and create a family, we try and incorporate our husbands family traditions based off his memories (I never liked peanut butter kiss cookies, but that is what my husband associates with Christmas, so that is one of the cookies added to what I make - although I got lucky with my husband, his father was a grinch, and his mother changed things up - and therefore he has few Christmas traditions to incorporate. At the same time, its created a spoiler for mine - Christmas carols - I think the grinch stopped those in his house and he doesn’t like them.).
When my parents first married, the “thing” was for “Blue Christmas” - so my parents went out on their limited funds and bought blue bulbs, blue light, and blue garland and decorated the tree. After kids came and there was even less money and my mother HATED that damn blue Christmas tree in time. But each of us kids has a box of very faded, forty (almost fifty now) Walgreens quality blue glass bulbs. And each of us kids puts one of them on the tree (usually in the back - they aren’t good looking) because it commemorates our parents first Christmas. And my parents are getting old and I’ll lose them, and I want my kids to remember them when they are gone - and one way to do that is that damn blue Christmas ornament.
IMO, the traditions that last and have the most sentimental value are the ones that aren’t forced. No one plans for it to be a tradition. No one has to be guilted into participating because it has value for everyone involved. It’s the “family’s” thing, not just one person’s. Perhaps only in retrospect is it recognized as a “thing”. Those are the best kinds of traditions, IMHO.
The notion that women are the managers of family traditions does exist, though. And I see it as both a good and bad thing. It’s good that someone is the keeper of sentimentality. Sentimentality has its place in a family. But it’s bad when “tradition” is yet another source of anxiety, guilt, and insecurity, and yet another trivial thing that people give more importance to than is warranted.
But if it isn’t done and repeated, because the kids are too little to participate and or your husband is a grinch, then you lose the tradition. You don’t get the intergenerational traditions. And while some traditions are worth losing (like Grandpa drinking too much egg nog) and some can’t be maintained (really,no one plays as well as Grandma did), others really don’t take much effort - but its effort SOMEONE has to make. And with kids, there are a number of years where you have to do it for them, followed by a number of years where they are teenagers and don’t care to help, followed by the phone call from a 22 year old looking for grandma’s julekake recipe. And in another five or ten years, she is making julekake and her husband is wondering why she bothers, and her kids are too young to help - then too old to care, and twenty more years pass and she gets a phone call from her daughter - “do you have that julekake recipe? It just isn’t Christmas without julekake”
Right. I think this is one of those things where those traditions that seem “natural” actually involve some degree of conscious effort on someone’s part. Otherwise, they pretty much all peter out after a few years.
I don’t remember being forced do traditions as a kid, so maybe that’s why I don’t get what you’re talking about. Every tradition that my family does during Christmastime is stuff that isn’t embedded with any other meaning besides “This is fun!” Being a religious family, we kids were constantly being dragged into doing rituals that were pointless and meaningless to us. But Christmas was the one time of the year where this wasn’t the case. The stuff that we adopted as “tradition” were kinds of things no one stressed over “keeping” or had to be very intentional about. They seemed to happen organically, spontaneously or accidentally, with no one announcing, “This is going to be our tradition, okay?” Seems to me by even thinking this, one jinxes the process.
We didn’t have transgenerational traditions to maintain because my parents weren’t about that kind of thing. The grandparents lived hundreds of miles away, and we were lucky if we saw them once a year. They had their thing. We always had ours. It is possible my parents inherited certain rituals from their parents. If they did, they didn’t make a big deal about it.
Of course, it also helps that my father is even more into Christmas than my mother is. I’d say it’s my father who takes more control over traditions, since she is way too busy with shopping and cleaning and cooking. It’s my father who spearheads the Christmas cookie-baking and the tree trimming and the decorations. He’s the one who plays the Temptations on Christmas Eve. If my father wasn’t a fan of this stuff, maybe it wouldn’t get done. If so, I don’t think the family would suffer from it. I hope we’d all realize it’s really just “window dressing” to what family is all about.
I’m sure after my parents are gone, my older sister (who is into family-making) will feel the tug to maintain some of their traditions. I won’t, though. It’s not that I’m a grinch. It’s just that I lack sentimentality. The Temptations and Nate King Cole are great, but Donna Hathaway and Jackson 5 are also awesome. I love Christmas cookies, but I’m down for jukelake or whatever, and I’m not going to throw a fit if we can’t have both. Some people just aren’t fixated on tradition, but it doesn’t mean they don’t care about festiveness or being a part of things.
Sending 250 Christmas cards and baking umpteen dozen cookies aren’t traditions, they’re self-imposed, keeping up with the Joneses, want to be seen as #1 Mommy madness. The real traditions take little time or are done as a family.
Agreed 100%.
Traditions of value don’t have to be easy. The work just has to be worth it. And it’s ok for it to be stressful at times, if the sum total brings happiness. I disagree hat the only traditions worth doing are easy ones and that anything beyond that is competitiveness or not worth doing.