See? This is what you get when women are able to act the way men do.
Before this thread heads too far down any particular path, a comment. Everyone is, of course, entitled to an opinion about the topic. But please try to limit your commentary in this thread to either addressing the topic or what you perceive the flaws to be with the proposition. Comments that are intended to insult another poster should be taken to the Pit.
Thanks.
What kind of place do you work in? Sounds like a real zoo. If you’ve really got a large contingent of people discussing their sex lives and recreational drug habits with co-workers on company time, I think you’re focused on fixing the wrong problem.
To throw my answer to the OP onto the heap: you can’t change people. That’s a universal maxim that holds for everyone, forever 'n ever, amen again.
I have worked with a lot of women in my career. A LOT of women. The only thing I’ve ever learned about them was their name and their position title. Occasionally, when killing time before a meeting, where they’ve just been on vacation and if they enjoyed the trip.
In what sort of workplace do people share intimate details of their personal lives so openly thinking that’s perfectly normal?
Another way to say this is that these women’s husbands may have the same approach to life, which is why they ended up married to these women. In fact, if you look at the OP, he explicitly states that one characteristic these women share is “a proliferation of ex-husbands, all POS quality”.
In general, most people marry other people from the same station as them and who have the same approach to life as they do. So what you end up is “broken women” hitched up to “broken men”, which reinforces their “brokenness”.
Are you an old black blues guitarist? Try chaining her to a radiator.
I’ve made good friends of both genders on many jobs. It’s pretty common to socialize with co-workers and discuss personal lives. There are boundaries to be sure, and people choose to set them in different places, but to know nothing about your co-workers except their names and job responsibilities seems absurdly odd to me.
Actually on thinking about it further, it’s possible there’s a reason some people see “broken women” where they don’t see “broken men”. Because women are not as segregated and easily identifiable by class.
Meaning, in the case of men, you have a lot of blue collar guys, who are easily identified as such. And while there are any number of very fine upstanding and honorable blue collar guys, if you do see one who is an uncouth beer-guzzling Trump supporter it’s not like it’s some sort of shock. You just put it down to his class. By contrast, the men who are successful and disciplined guys are also identifiable. They’ll be white collar guys, highly educated and having well-paying professional jobs.
When it comes to women it’s not as delineated. On the one hand, very few women work in true blue collar jobs, and even among the lower classes many work in some sort of clerical type white collar jobs. And at the same time, there are a lot of wealthier upper class women, married to high-earning spouses, who take these same types of jobs. (E.g. one administrative assistant in my office is married to some wealthy executive type - or possibly a doctor, now that I think about it. She comes out of her secretarial job and drives home in her Lexus SUV.)
So that you can see the same type of self-destructive behavior in a man from this background and it won’t really register all that much, because you’d be subconsciously writing it off as due to his class and socio-economic standing, while when you see it in a woman who you’ve always thought of as being parallel to yourself it strikes you as being something about this women specifically.
Just a thought, FWIW. FTR, I myself have never noticed this “broken woman” phenomenon to begin with. But if there are other people who have the same impression as the OP in this regard, it’s possible that what I’m describing here might be in play.
Setting Gender aside. Broken people often stay that way. It’s not just the drug and alcohol addictions. Its the underlying psychological trauma that they are self-medicating to cover up. Its why so many eventually relapse after rehab. Sometimes years later.
I had one episode trying to help a friend’s kid. (gender doesn’t matter). I chipped in part of the money for rehab and drove them 75 miles to a 21 day partially state sponsored rehab. Afterward the kid went to a half-way house until getting kicked out for threatening a counselor. It didn’t end well at all. The kid was miserable and deeply depressed after getting off drugs. AFAIK the kid is on the streets again. I want nothing to do with that situation again. I found out later that family had remortgaged their house trying to get that kid straight. The kid rewarded them by stealing stuff from the home. A lot of hope and money expended for nothing.
I suppose I should have said that that’s generally all I want to know about people I work with. I hear things. People over-share. But I’m a consultant. I’m there for 3 months to a year or two and I move on to the next gig. I’m not there to get too personal or integrated into the culture.
I make exceptions with people I like. For example, I know my current director has a sister who was recently being treated for a serious illness. I like the guy and he’s been good to me so I’m happy to know that things turned out well. But things like number of sexual partners or addiction to substances are never part of any conversation I’ve ever had in any workplace. Not that I’ve not met a number or drunks. We just didn’t discuss it.
My co-workers–more women than men–do discuss their personal lives. Mostly their children, sometimes other relatives. Other topics include: where’s a good place to eat & what’s streaming on Netflix. Like minded folks discuss religion or politics–discreetly. I know when to debate the relative loathsomeness of Ted Cruz & The Donald–and when the weather is a safer topic.
Sex lives & drugs? (Except prescription drugs for ailments.) Nope.
I took the light rail to work for several years before I inherited my parking spot from a retiree at my workplace. It absolutely astounded me what people would openly discuss - and in loud voices to overshout the train noise - of a very personal nature. Sexual preferences and acts, voluminous details of illnesses or injuries, affairs, bowel trouble, arrests and court appearances, etc. And these weren’t homeless street people. These were folks crammed into a commuter train heading for work. I’m a fairly private person and the very notion of shouting out intimate details of my life appalls me. But clearly other people don’t have those sensitivities.
What I’m getting at in a roundabout way is that these people you think are ‘broken’ are probably behaving in a way that’s perfectly acceptable in their stratum of society. You or I might be appalled by their behavior, but that doesn’t make them bad or wrong or in need of fixing.
You can disapprove of how someone lives without being a misogynist. It isn’t particularly flattering to the women the OP works with or people like them, but that doesn’t make the OP sexist. It means he has a genuine question about whether people whose lifestyles he disagrees with can change. He talks about matchmaking and I’m assuming the OP is straight, hence the restriction of the question to women only. I think it’s a stretch to call that sexist, though it’s certainly a good idea to expand the thread to include “broken” men, and whether a woman (or other sexual relationship partner) can “fix” them.
In most cases, the answer is “no”. Even if they get off drugs and start living healthier, they will never be someone whose lifestyle you approve of. So don’t try and “fix” them, especially not for the purposes of a long term relationship. That’s not going to end well for you or them.
I sort of agree with this. Like attracts like, and women with these kinds of problems usually have them from the outset. They don’t suddenly change.
We see this behavior from some of our best educated, most accomplished women. It’s not just trailer park gals or hood chicks.
Lisa Nowak was about as intelligent, educated, and capable as a person can be. She still wrecked her distinguished career, and marriage, over a bad boy former fighter pilot who was seeing another woman on the side in addition to his wife. (The woman Nowak intended to kidnap or kill.) Lisa Nowak - Wikipedia
Paula Broadwell, West Point grad, author, scholar, married to a doctor. Still wrecked her marriage and damaged her professional reputation by having an affair with one of the top generals in recent military history.
Then there’s a small army of married school teachers who’ve been caught poaching their underaged students, wrecking their marriages and careers in the process, not to mention the felony convictions and prison time. And those are just the ones that got caught.
Well, there’s a big excluded middle there. I’m friendly with our office admin person. I know about her youngest just having a Kindergarten open house and that she moved recently and what her husband does for a living and where they went for vacation a few months ago. I don’t know the last time she got laid or who with. I’m okay with that sort of delineation.
Of course. But it’s a lot more common among the latter group. (And the same goes for men.)
Apparently all the men he works with are “unbroken.” All virgins?
Reminds me of Sherlock, Season 3 Episode 3, where Watson is shocked and dismayed by all the dangerous sociopaths in his life and both Sherlock and Mary point out “Because it’s what you want”.
If everyone you go out with is a piece of shit, it is pretty much because a> you are too, and b> that’s what you like.
Change yourself, change your world.
The OP wrote this in the context of entering into a relationship to “fix” these people. If the OP is a straight man, it makes sense that he restricted it to women. Straight guys don’t want to “fix” other straight guys, not like that.
Maybe that’s part of the issue, I hear all the time about how you shouldn’t enter a relationship with the goal of “fixing” or changing someone, but to accept them as the are or don’t date them to begin with. People give out that advice because so often we want the opposite to be true. That hot women (or men) who we would otherwise want to be in a relationship with but are “broken” or “too hard to handle” just “need a little work”, or “just need the right partner”. We hear a lot about women wanting a “bad boy” they can “fix”. It’s a common trope, but maybe you aren’t familiar with it.
And they only mentioned “making a match” in the last sentence of the OP, so it’s easy to miss. But I took his meaning as being one about relationships, from his POV. Not a general rant about women.