? It sounds like you’re using “vulnerable” here to mean “dissatisfied” or “depressed” or “fragile” or “unhappy”. Whereas ISTM that AHunter3 is using it more in the sense of “trusting” or “unprotected” or “open”.
There’s a big difference, IMHO. You are right that people in general over time become less tolerant of persistent unhappiness or dissatisfaction in a relationship partner, because it tends to go with lower emotional resilience and require more emotional labor (and less reciprocity) to comfort and support them.
But the vulnerability that AHunter3 was talking about tends to indicate greater emotional resilience, as he said. It’s not so much “I’m unhappy, life isn’t going well for me, I need you to sympathize and comfort me, I have to lean on you in order to be able to carry on.” Rather, it’s more “Here’s a thing that sometimes makes me very unhappy/angry/scared/whatever, I’m okay with telling you that because I have the strength and self-esteem to be able to accept it and to trust you with the information; I can carry on just fine without having to hide this aspect of me.”
IME, I have seen more men staying with ill partners more than women staying with men. Now, I don’t believe there is a difference, just my exposure to it. I have a difficult time believing women are more likely to stay by ill men than vice versa…though if there are cold hard facts to be seen stating so I would be persuaded.
People are people and they tend to be selfish…ahh the misanthropy! {glares at Ulfreida}
Or they’re assholes who register their unhappiness in an abusive fashion. Which can be completely genderless. And their partners often respond by doubling down on commitment or internalizing that their partner is right, their complaints and insults are right.
??? I’m not disputing that behavior such as you describe occurs in some relationships, but I’m baffled as to what you think it has to do with what AHunter3 was saying about “vulnerability”.
However, and maybe I should think on this before replying…but what the heck…I think that even the alternate Ahunter definition will still cause problems. I have seen many complaints and experiences in my own life having women fall out of love with me or seeing other peoples’ relationships fall apart because I/they share too much. I think it can become overwhelming. You share too much over too long about what makes you unhappy/angry/scared/whatever and the same thing is likely to happen. It’s just less corrosive poison…but poison nonetheless.
The female attraction to “strength” and “manliness” in a male has also been observed in other species. I’m guessing it’s encoded in our DNA, and there’s nothing that can (or should) be done to change it.
In that quote I was more focused on the expression of unhappiness.
Abusive partners likely aren’t projecting vulnerability, they’re projecting vulnerability onto their partner. They’re sending the message that the partner is the problem. Which tends to result in vicious cycles. But yes, I would agree that abuse is an expression of unhappiness but not vulnerability.
Well, yes, because we are all raised in and steeped in patriarchy and it is difficult to separate yourself from something so normalized to you to see it for the horrific mess it is. This is why women care about dismantling the patriarchy, because it saves women from this inculcated drive to enforce the patriarchal norms and removes the expectation that they will sacrifice their children on the altar of toxic masculinity. This also has the side benefit of saving grown ass men from their own toxic masculinity by giving them a different way to be that doesn’t suck, but the primary reason women want to get rid of this shit is that we’re tired of it. If it benefits men, that’s cool and all but we’re not doing it specifically FOR men.
I mean, it’s definitely true that almost everybody, regardless of gender, wants emotional resilience in a partner.* Anybody who comes across as “always complaining” or persistently unhappy or needing constant reassurance and encouragement just to be able to function is likely going to seem emotionally burdensome in the long run.
But I don’t think that that’s the sort of behavior that AHunter3 was talking about. However, I’ll stop second-guessing his meaning now and let him clarify further, if he wishes.
*- There are exceptions, as always, generally having to do with those societal gender norms again. There are men who really do want a “little girl” wife who constantly needs them to be the big strong provider and defender, and women who really do want a “little boy” husband who constantly needs them to be the motherly guardian angel and/or “power behind the throne”.
Conclusion-jumping again. We see behavior in other species indicating female preference for physical strength in males (because reproductive fitness and all). And we see trends in our own species of female preference (developed over years of influence from social conditioning, of course) for male behavior that we have socially defined as correlated with “strength” and “maleness”, such as not weeping when one is angry or upset.
And so we jump to the conclusion that women wanting men not to cry because it’s insufficiently “masculine” must be “encoded in our DNA”. But that deductive reasoning sequence has more holes than swiss cheese.
Now, that doesn’t automatically imply that the conclusion must be false, but it does mean that all the claims for “scientific evidence” supporting it are vastly overblown.
Ahhhh. Something I have direct experience in with primary research. One of my favorite clients This was the same client that had one of my favorite studies in my 30 years…where they came to us with problems marketing in China where they didn’t in Japan and Indonesia and it turned out China’s definition of terms was radically different from the rest of the world (and Asia) but the results ended up being the same after compensating. Things like ‘shiny’ and ‘bright’ had different meanings. I designed the study and received praise…ohhhh…memories…
Anyway! This was a client heavily in the makeup and modeling field and they did a couple of studies that I analyzed dealing with what women prefer physically. Unexpectedly, women prefer (in general, not specific) height, then weight then appearance of physical fitness. After that, the results surprised the client. Turns out women have a preference for what they called ‘female’ traits. I think it is misnamed because the guys in the study looked like guys to me. Women tend to prefer these ‘female’ traits like geeky/intellectual over rugged, thinner body form like a fit swimmer over someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger, even glasses over no glasses. Things like that. This didn’t surprise me because I have 2 daughters Again, these men were still fit just less muscle-y. This surprised them because they were still relying on a study they did something like half a century ago where this was not true.
Maybe women/people can change quickly (over evolution timelines) and it isn’t all DNA.
We’ve got a lot of cave-person still in our behaviors, as much as we don’t like to admit it. People like a whole set of characteristics in the opposite sex that have absolutely nothing to do with rational thought or even anything they’ve learned; big shoulders, round asses, etc…are attractive because we evolved that way, not because someone saw their mom ogling men with big shoulders or whatever.
There’s nothing wrong with still having “a lot of cave-person” in us. What there’s something wrong with is the kind of “Just-So Story” rationalization that invents evolutionary explanations that may or may not be true for behaviors which may or may not be culturally determined, and which there’s no way to reliably test.
Look at how fashions in beauty change from one culture or even from one era to another. Remember back when it was considered a key point of male beauty for a man to have small delicate feet? No, you probably don’t, because that was in the 19th century and even earlier. But there have been no significant evolutionary differences in humans from the 19th century to now.
Sure, humans are naturally and almost without exception attracted to physical characteristics that are considered to correlate with youth and health. But since there’s a huge variation in young healthy body types, beauty fashions can vary tremendously as well. One culture or generation may like muscular “big shoulders” in men, while another prefers men with slender build and sloping shoulders. The hot chicks of some “exotic” land are dismissed by letter-writing colonizers with the passing remark that “their women are very ugly”. And so on and so forth.
So don’t kid yourself that specific beauty ideals of your particular cultural moment are necessarily hard-wired and universal, even if you can make up nifty stories about what you imagine cave-people “would have wanted” in order to justify them.
Yeah, this. As a femme male I don’t feel any less connected to my primordial ancestors than anyone else. There’s a whole lot of “Flinstoneification” of anthropology, where we retro-project current understandings of gender relationships onto our forebears and assume it was that way for them and hence it is inevitable and DNA-hardwired for now and evermore.
Yup, while simultaneously ignoring actual data on anthropological findings and primate behaviors and so on that don’t conform to our current understandings of such relationships.
Many “evopsychos” will talk all day long about how chimpanzees and gorillas and roosters etc. in the wild have “harems”, so that means it’s naturally hardwired in humans for males to have lots of sex partners and for females to seek out male dominance and protection.
But mention matriarchal social structures and collaborative female regulation of male behavior among bonobos, or the many bird species where a female in a breeding pair also mates with other males and her mate helps care for the other males’ offspring, and suddenly there’s a lot of silence.
Well, this is interesting. In opposition to patriarchy we set up misandry.
The former is an organized system of power and the latter is just a feeling.
Radically asymmetric. It just goes to show.
I agree. If you’re drawing the Venn diagram, you have a circle for misandry (hatred for men) and a circle for misogyny (hatred for women). And the overlap is misanthropy (hatred for humans). There’s no area in the diagram people liking what they like.
It used to be worse. An ancient Tamil poem tells of an old woman searching a battlefield for her son’s body. She’s terrified she won’t find him dead, because that would mean he ran away. When she finds his dead body, she gets so happy that her breasts start to flow with milk again after many years dry.
The past is a different country? No, it’s a different planet. Civilization V included a Greek tech quote from Homer about bronze: “It is entirely seemly for the young man killed in battle to lie mangled with the bronze spear. In his death all things are fair.” WTF? That really weirded me out. These people’s values are not ours.
This was the same client that had one of my favorite studies in my 30 years…where they came to us with problems marketing in China where they didn’t in Japan and Indonesia and it turned out China’s definition of terms was radically different from the rest of the world (and Asia) but the results ended up being the same after compensating. Things like ‘shiny’ and ‘bright’ had different meanings. I designed the study and received praise…ohhhh…memories…