This thread, and the related stories in it made me wonder if “the crazy” is equally distributed among men and women, or if one gender has more of it.
I’m not sure how we could determine that though. We can’t just take the personal experiences of most people, since most people date people of the same gender all the time, so their observations are biased.
Maybe the groups of people who are qualified to have an opinion about this are (a) bisexuals, (b) people with siblings of both genders, so they can observe the dating experiences of both genders (c) other?
If you belong to either group (a) or (b), or if you feel that you are otherwise qualified, can you let us know what you think about the question in this OP: Is “the crazy” equally distributed among men and women, or does one gender have more of it?
Group (b) person here; My bro has ‘dated’ over 200 women, and found some crazy. My sis has been married for years and years, but I think she found a little crazy before she was married.
IMHO it’s the women who are more likely to be crazy but I’ve only dated women so I’m not a good witness.
One thing to keep in mind is that “crazy” is likely to, on average, manifest itself differently among men and women. For example, borderline personality disorder is more common among women than men whereas anti-social personality disorder is more common among men than women.
For example, one person in the thread linked to said that men are more likely to stick with unhealthy relationships with crazy women. Perhaps. But I’m not sure the person who said that remembered that there are plenty of women who stay in unhealthy relationships with crazy men because they’re emotionally dependent on men who abuse them physically and/or psychologically. Men who chronically abuse their spouse physically and/or psychologically ought to also count as crazy.
It’s an issue of terminology. If it’s a woman, she’s got the crazy. If it’s a man, he’s creepy. There’s plenty of crazy girl stories, and there’s plenty of creepy guy stories. It seems to me that men are more often prepared to overlook the crazy and try to have a relationship anyway, so you get more crazy girlfriend stories vs creepy guy I met stories.
Borderline personality disorder is more often diagnosed in young women, and one of the hallmarks of the disorder involves chaotic personal relationships. A lot of the stories that people tell of “the crazy” sound like borderline personality disorder type antics to my ear, and I think that is part of why the perception is that young women are crazier.
Guys definitely can be crazy in other ways though!
I could easily imagine that a woman with the Crazy could more easily get a man than a man with the Crazy could get a woman. So even with equal numbers, the women might cause more collateral damage.
That was me, and I’m aware. I was personally referencing more the light-hearted term of ‘crazy’ rather than an actual diagnosis.
And in that SAME vein, I’ve known far more crazy women than men. My dating pool as a lesbian would be miniscule, I’ve gotta say, but I freely acknowledge that I am more likely able to handle man-crazy than woman-crazy, and probably overlook a few things in a man that might drive me nuts in a woman. Probably because I’m not trying to boink the latter.
Eh. There are plenty of women out there with really low self-esteem, so crazy men don’t lack for victims either. Crazy men are just more likely to beat the crap out of their SOs for imaginary slights than boil their pets.
Men with classify as “The crazy” are more likely to be in jail, so they might explain why there doesn’t seem to be as many of them in circulation. “The crazy” women often slip by the criminal justice radar because they act out in ways that don’t necessarily defy the law.
A guy who I’m not interested in, but who is demonstrating interest in me, is not, ipso facto, creepy. What would make him creepy would be if he never got the hint.
And, actually, a simple lack of hint-getting still wouldn’t necessarily make a guy creepy. It would make him awkward, uncomfortable to be around, and maybe irritating, but not necessarily creepy.
What really would make him creepy would be if he got the hint but simply ignored it and kept on pushing. Men who do this can be truly dangerous.
The thing is, it’s sometimes hard to tell if a guy’s just clueless, or genuinely creepy. So we women have this instinct to err on the side of caution. After all, the potential consequences (for us, anyway) of labeling a merely clueless guy as creepy are much less severe than the potential consequences of labeling a genuinely creepy guy as merely clueless.
But, back to the main topic of this thread–
There are plenty of men with the crazy. Granted, I’ve never dated women, so I don’t know much about female crazitude (other than from guys’ accounts), but I can tell you that the proportion of men infected with the crazy may be pretty high.
I figure I count as group c), since I’ve always had close friends of both sexes. In my experience, the crazy is evenly split between the sexes, but the way it manifests is different.
A guy who has the crazy tends to keep that cloud more focused, so that only the person he’s involved with really sees the full extent of it - close friends (or ‘friends’) get a medium dose, but to anyone outside the inner circle he could seem like a perfectly normal guy. A woman with the crazy is more likely to go for the scattergun approach: everyone who knows her - everyone who spends one evening in the same pub as her - knows that WHOA this is the crazy.
ETA: So it looks like more women have the crazy, because you know about the ones you encounter casually as well as the ones you actually go out with, whereas you don’t necessarily know about the guys you’ve only spent a couple of evenings hanbging out with.
