Oh it’s obvious to them. I don’t think they care.
And that’s pretty misandrous.
I seek consensus. My new wife is a Siamese cat that could care less whether we have consensus. Asking her what she thinks is unwelcome. Attempting to divine what she thinks is more unwelcome. How to make that work is a mystery to me. IMO we’re supposed to be a team of best friends.
Well, there are laws against marrying animals, for this very reason.
It’s a mystery to me why you married this person.
Not to be one of those posts that just link to YT, but here’s Soft White Underbelly’s interview with a divorce lawyer
So as not to be “watch this vid, it covers everything,” the interview boils it down to: if you knew that there was a 50% chance of getting hit on the head with a bowling ball when you walked out your door, would you ever leave the house?
Some other thoughts I have: let’s turn the OP around and look at it from that side: are humans in general relationship-whatever’s the antonym-of-adverse? (Antonym Adverse. 1936, Frederick March) I don’t want to get into the war of the sexes here: that the male 50% of the human race doesn’t deserve the female 50%, or that women these days only value men for 48 free oysters. . That’s bitterness, and bitterness is the telltale flavor of the fruit of ignorance.
Chimps live in male-dominated societies regulated with violence. Bonobos live in matriarchies regulated with sex*. Humans haven’t figured out what works best for them, and as much as I personally value the two-by-two life, I can’t make the argument that everyone should or can take to it like second nature. The best relationship advice I ever received was from a friend who herself has remained single into her seventies when I and my then SO were going through a bad time: “you two can work it out if you want to.” Well, does anybody want to anymore?
*Really. It works for them like this: every male gets not just sex, but bobobo emotional love, unless he steps out of line. Humans have tried that: at the Onida commune. The women there in one instance had to set their limits: the male in question didn’t commit any particular offense, but he was just too weird and they didn’t want to have sex with him. Dejected, he left the commune and shot President Garfield.
You see that’s the thing. I care.
In spite of the best efforts of many of the women I’ve known to turn me into a misogynist, I absolutely refuse to become one.
Now, if pointing out that some men have had traumatic experiences with several women and wondering whether there are attributes that many women share that could be harmful is misogynistic, then we do not have the same definition of the word
There are. Obviously discussing them becomes very politically charged. But generally they are viewed as a cluster of sexually or emotionally manipulative behaviors intended to punish or control someone.
It’s a bit different from what is typically characterized as “toxic masculinity” as those tend to be behaviors associated with men’s superior physical strength or institutionalized power.
Well, a relationship where you give oblique hints for what you need done and then talk down to your husband like a child when he doesn’t get them doesn’t sound like a recipe for a healthy relationship to me.
But one thing I’m pretty sure of is no relationship is perfect. But on some level both parties have to understand and believe the concept of “I am not always right”. I think maybe a lot of young people don’t get that these days. They spend a lot of time online in echo chambers reinforcing their existing beliefs and otherwise living in a world where they are never challenged (or at least they don’t learn how to deal with dissenting views). That leads to a bit of a narcissistic view where they can’t tolerate being with someone else.
Going on 44 years now. I also think you misinterpreted my post. My husband has a rather extreme version of one masculine communication style. Women are much better at subtlety and subtext than men, in my experience. They often have an unconscious fear of being direct, to the point of paralysis. Asking straight out for what one needs is trained out of us.
Through negotiating with my husband, I learned to change my communication style for men in general, because the oblique method rarely works for them the way it does for women. It also applies to other classes of people, including children, and others lacking the social cue pick-ups that women usually have; such as people who have hearing loss, Aspergers, the very old.
I grew up in a family with very few male people in it, and for other reasons, did not acquire much in the way of social skills until I was an adult. So what is unconscious behavior in most people ended up being decidedly conscious in me.
This is a fact.
Not modding, just pointing out as the OP – it’s been about 50 posts since anyone has said anything related to the OP. But carry on.
Well, if I were a young single reading this thread, I’d probably be nervous about getting into a relationship also.
There was an OpEd in the Times today from a woman basically saying women don’t want to get married because (most) men suck. It’s basically not happily ever after, it is she gets pregnant and he leaves.
The issue for me is that there’s what seems to me to be a strong implication in several posts that the problem is that most women behave entirely unreasonably in relationships, while the men are generally behaving just fine.
There are of course individual relationships in which one partner behaves entirely unreasonably while the other is doing their very best to do everything right. There may be gendered patterns to the type of unreasonableness in any given society. But the leap to ‘relationships in general are like this and it’s because women do X’ I really do think is problematic.
I’ll add that I think it can also be problematic for the lives of the people thinking that way – if they think that’s the only way they can have a relationship with their preferred gender, that women (or for that matter men) all or almost all are unreasonable about relationships and impossible to please – then I suspect they’re a lot more likely to marry/cohabit/have extended relationships with such people. Those who think they’ve just run into an unpleasable individual, or even several of them in succession, are more likely going to go look for somebody else once the negative pattern of behavior becomes clear.
I complained about a couple of exes but it would be perverse to think that their issues were because they are women or represent all women. I hope that I didn’t give that impression.
I think there are a lot of people who just want to do what they want to do without having to worry about what someone else thinks about their behavior.
No, I don’t think you did. You proceeded, after that complaint about two people, to say in the same post, in effect, that now you watch out for people who behave like that and you’ve since found women to spend time with who behave differently.
ETA:
I think that’s certainly true. But if one’s going to live with other people – then one’s behavior is going to affect them, and it becomes necessary to consider what they think about that.
If what they think about it is that one’s behavior’s not acceptable: there are various possibilities. Sometimes the solution is to change one’s behavior; sometimes the solution is to talk things out and see whether there’s a way to change the impact of the behavior, or whether if the other person better understands the behavior they won’t mind it or will change their own behavior; sometimes the solution is to not live with that particular person(s).
Another possibility of course is to continue living with them, the two (or more) of you continuing to make each other miserable. I don’t think that’s usually a great solution; though some people only have, or only think they have, choices that are even worse.
I think a lot of the answer to your question lies in the last 50 posts. A lot of young people don’t really want to deal with all that. And for the first time in history, they don’t have to.
One thing I want to add is the reality of the childbearing experience for women and how, even in the most egalitarian relationship, there is a fundamental inequality. The experience of being pregnant and giving birth varies from woman to woman, but I think in most cases, at a minimum, it results in lost productivity both at home and on the job. For me, I was so fatigued, not only could I not work a full day, but I couldn’t even hold a conversation with my husband or do anything fun, so life basically had no meaning.
Childbirth can be traumatic. It can result in severe depression or major surgery. It can take months to recover, or you could never recover physically in some respects (e.g. stress incontinence for life.)
If you work and you want to breastfeed, you have to pump. As someone who attempted to both breastfeed and pump I can tell you it was sheer hell for me. It is an hour of your time every three hours 24/7/365 with no break. (With severe depression, I didn’t last long.) The discomfort of communicating that you need space at work to pump sucks for many women, who often are penalized for having a child in the first place.
All of this is a burden borne exclusively by women if they want to conceive a child.
Men can and often do step up to take on their share of childcare - my husband is phenomenal in this regard - but they 100% can opt out of whatever parts of the experience they don’t want, whereas this is biologically impossible for a woman who wants to conceive.
I think in recent times we’ve become more open about what this experience is like, so many younger women have decided they don’t want any part of it, certainly not while they are young and trying to build their career.
I don’t necessarily think young people are opting out of long-term relationships entirely, but perhaps tabling them for a more convenient time. Women need time to prove themselves worthy employees before they can take a chance on something as risky as childbearing. People of any gender need more time these days to build financial stability to have a child. More young people are asking themselves perhaps for the first time whether they are ready to have a child instead of just doing it by default. Or whether they even want a child at all.
People always talk about pregnancy and taking care of a baby, but one thing they often don’t mention is that you also have to raise the kids for the next 18+ years. Dealing with the logistics of that alone can be daunting. Getting them to school and sports and whatever other activities they have. Trying to balance your careers, which now takes on more significance as they must now finance a family and not just personal hobbies. Then you have to deal with the personalities of your kids as they grow.
The most accurate description I’ve heard of raising a family is a quote by Paul Rudd’s character in “Knocked Up” where he describes every day as an “unfunny episode of ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ where everybody is stressed out all the time.”
I think maybe for a lot of people, particularly young people starting out in their careers, the idea of settling into a relationship as an eventual path to marriage and family no longer is viewed as a path to long-term fulfilment. It’s viewed as a high risk burden with significant financial ramifications.
I certainly don’t think that I’ve always behaved just fine.
I’ve just turned 49, and I’ve been thinking a lot about why I find myself single again after a fair number of relationships. Undeniably, the thing that they all have in common is me.
I know perfectly well the type of behaviour that I want to avoid: inflated sense of entitlement, emotional cruelty, manipulative damsel-in-distress syndrome, and a very… flexible relationship with the thruth. This is something that I’ve found in many of my exes, but too late. They were very good at masking for the few months it took until I was really in love with them.
I still refuse to believe all women are like that. It is very possible that I’m unconsciously picking up cues that end up making me feel attracted to this kind of women. On the other hand it’s also possible that the issues I’ve listed are shared by many, not all, women. It’s a heavily loaded discussion, but one that is worth having, I think.
In the meantime, I’m giving the old dating thing a try, with much less enthusiasm and a lot more circumspection.
But I still care. I still want women to feel safe, happy and respected with me.
Something really fascinating for me is that in general, Japanese society requires much more subtlety and subtext, and Japanese businessmen are masters of this。
Yet at home, it’s often similar to Western culture of the man not understanding the woman’s needs. Obviously something is going on.
I’ve had a couple of friends just like that. One was a woman who would pick one abusive loser after another after another. Charming at first, but manipulative as all hell. All her close friend would just see red flags right away, but she would continue to fall in love with these guys. Sad.
Although all the guys she picked were abusive, I don’t think that describes most guys.
Another friend was my best friend for a number of years. We would joke that he could walk into a room with 99 women with perfect personalities and one vicious, emotionally cruel woman (VECW) and he would pick the evil one every single time. After supporting him through his unhappy marriage to VECW I, ugly divorce, quick romance with VECW II, ugly breakup, then another quick romance with VECW III, it was enough.
We had a conversation after ugly breakup with VECW II and he asked if I saw the red flags. Yup, and I had hinted at them. He told me to tell him straight up if I saw him with another VECW, which I did of course and naturally, he went off and told his fiancée. You can imagine how well that went.
I don’t know you, I don’t know if the same things that were happening to my friends are happening to you, but the phenomenon you describe is well known.