Women & Emotionally Mature, Self-sufficient Men

In My Humble Opinion
1

[elaborated explanation below]

What do you think of men, in terms of their maturity and self-sufficiency on the emotional and “being a grown up” front? Which of the following comes closest?

Are women the mature, emotionally self-sufficient ones in a relationship? And what does it mean?

a) Naah. Women did not have social equality for eons and it has probably been sort of a compensation to think of males as immature even to the point of being contempt- and condescension-worthy, but men are usually as grown up as we are, by and large.

b) Oh Totally. 9/10ths of serious dating is about finding a guy who is not only OK in the sack and can pay his own bills but also is not someone I’m gonna be carrying on my back as a nonequal partner in terms of maturity.

c) Au Contraire. Men are the serious ones. Men’s heads are full of thoughts and concerns and I like to listen to them. Other women strike me as sort of mindless in comparison and I see none of this vaunted maturity.

d) But of Course. A woman’s way of going forward in her life is to have a relationship. Women have the relationships, men are just in them. The woman is the controlling partner is most of what matters and we take that for granted, and it is how we like it and how it should be. Men are good at other things but they need a woman to run the relationship partnership and make use of his talents and do the long range planning. This is part of what being a woman is about. We don’t talk about it all the time because we don’t need to, but we run households and husbands and all that, of course we do.

e) Freaking hell no. This is very hostile and very “other”-ish like men are from Mars and we’re from Venus and all that bullshit and I’m not buying all that stuff. Most relationships are pretty equitable (exceptions exist), men and women aren’t very different and people make too big a deal of the differences that do exist. Sorry, this is all bullshit.

f) I would dearly totally love to meet a male who was my equal but they’re all looking for someone to manage their lives. It’s not a power trip for me, it’s more like drudgery, and having to hold my temper and hide my desire to laugh or roll my eyes and pretend like the guy is participating on an equal plane (got forbid I should bruise his fragile male ego) but in reality he just isn’t, usually.

g) I do not tend to get involved with males who are my equal in such things. It sounds delightful but mostly has not been how things have been and in all honesty I think it is possible I have a sense of self as a woman that I am supposed to be more emotionally mature and “together” which might be threatened with a guy who did not need that from me.

h) You’re batshit. Sorry, but as far as I can tell from your description I’ve never even heard of any of this and I haven’t the vaguest idea what you’re talking about.

i) [Add your own, in your own words, etc]
Elaborated Explanation:

From my vantage point as a guy, I see two interesting themes recurrently cropping up in how women tend to view men and our emotional maturity / mental maturity / emotional and etc self-sufficiency, and I want to ask about women’s sense of their own “ideal” and “fantasy” guys and also your most honest appraisals of everyday sexual “realpolitik” and how you see your own interests to lie as far as such things go…

a) There is this persistent image of the male as always sort of a boy, a not-really-adult. Sometimes it takes the form of women perceiving us as unwilling to let go of “expensive” notions or causes, or ego-driven senses of entitlement or old grudges or putting ridiculously high values on trivial little “toys and games” types of accomplishments or possessions, always with the implicit or explicit comparison that the women in these guys’ lives are too ADULT and MATURE to care about such silly shit but that they sort of go :rolleyes: and take on a sort of maternal role, sort of like “It’s up to me to make sure sufficient maturity is manifest in this relationship despite sillyboy’s childishness”.

b) In a lot of women’s romantic fiction, the male who is an object of desire for the female main character is quite often portrayed with exact opposite characteristics: world-hardened, emotionally restrained but not choked off, very self-sufficient, more often than not portrayed as accustomed to coping with stuff on his own and in particular is neither seeking nor already has any relationship with a woman in which the woman takes care of anything except his sexual needs. Usually, she spends several chapters demonstrating that she’s not a burden and can at least take care of herself, then manages to prove that she has capacities and capabilities that would be of use to him and he comes to rely on her. But it never goes as far as her coming to think of herself taking care of him with him as sort of a little boy who needs a woman to look after him.

I’m just tossing those two out as sort of cultural archetypes or some such.

2

Relationship-wise, men are romantics pretending to be practical; women are hard-headed but pretend to be romantic. Yeah it’s a generalization, but it fits my observations as well as single statement can.

3

I’d say as individuals we’re all on a sliding scale between the two extremes. Both men and women.

We’re all just people. The ones we ‘click’ with seem to be those who fill in what we lack.

(IMHO)

4

b and f for me. I would dearly love to find a guy who is self-sufficient and who does not immediately forget how to take care of himself when we get serious and start spending time at each others homes.

Frankly, I’ve given up hope.

5

Men and women as individuals bring a lifetime of different skills and expectations to the table in relationships. There are mature and immature men and women in roughly (IMO) equal proportions in all relationships, and often men and women can be both mature and immature about various aspects of a relationship at the same time. Occasionally you have scenarios where one person is definitively the “baby”, and one is the “adult”, but most often it’s a complex mix of skills and attitudes. In the best scenarios these personality differences both reinforce and mitigate behaviors and attitudes as necessary to maximize the effectiveness of the couple as a “team”. In the worst it sets people at each others throats and causes massive contempt to fester.

It could be generally stated that women, for fairly obvious biological reasons, are typically (but not always) wired to be more commitment oriented in selecting men for relationships than men are in selecting women, but even this changes over time, and when a man is ready to get serious about starting a household and potentially raising children the total package of a woman’s life skills beyond her charm and physical assets is often going to be part of the consideration. In some circumstances this consideration is accidentally (or occasionally deliberately) short circuited when the woman becomes pregnant and abortion is not considered as an option.

As a general rule women are also (usually) considerably more involved than men in keeping lines of social communication and contact active with peers, relatives and acquaintances, especially those at a distance.

6

i. Men are just as likely as women to lack emotional maturity. They’re also just as likely as women to have it, too.

Seriously, for ever man I’ve ever met that turns into a mewling babied manchild when allowed to be, I’ve met his flighty self-centered female counterpart who wants a man to take care of her.

7

i) Depends on the relationship. There’s relationships where both are mature, relationships where both are immature… IME, they tend to last better when both sides are more or less on the same page. Often, couples tend to think that “their” relationship is “the” right one, so you get people that look completely dysfunctional to the rest of the world (you two had breakfast together, will have lunch together, and call each other every half-hour to say ‘I miss you honeybunnysweetcheeks’ so long as neither one has a meeting? really? at age 41, after 20 years of marriage and three daughters, two of which are already in college and the other one can’t wait?) but who wonder what is wrong… with the rest of the world.

I do consider that a relationship where one acts like a baby and the other one like a babysitter is a relationship between two immature people. Wanting to play savior/knight in shiny armor/Mommy/Pygmalion means that you are looking for a “save me/mommy me/sculpt me” partner, you can’t complain that you found it!

8

What **astro ** & Nava said.

Another issue which arises here on the boards is there are many people who can’t (won’t) account for their own biases. So they see every relationship thread here through a set of goggles like the OP’s d, e, or f. And they comment according to their bias, not according to whatever dynamic is really happening in the relationship under discussion.

That effect can lend a more categorical feel to the overall soup of opinions. I think people’s actual behaviors are much more the continuum **astro **posits. But here the commentary tends to degrade into 3 or 4 stereotypical POVs. And it’d be easy to confuse those stereotypes for a random & representative sample. It isn’t.

[hijack / tangent]
Here’s an odd but related-to-thhe-OP effect I’ve noticed here on the SDMB.

Most posters have gender-ambiguous screen names, and I find it refreshing and interesting that often I can deal with someone here for many months before discovering their gender. That’s potentially very liberating for both genders. It demonstrates how much we are alike, and how minor the differences really are.

But in a thread about a relationship, the two genders form the traditional teams and it’s almost impossible to mistake the gender of a poster.

Odd that.

9

I have known a handful of women in my life who really did seem to seek out incompetent men–they “liked being needed” and wanted to be the one in control all the time, so they find laid-back boy-men and train them to never do anything by belittling everything they do (“Bob tried to load the dishwasher last night! You should have seen it! Bowls on the bottom rack! I don’t know what he’d do without me”). Virtually everyone of those marriages (and it hasn’t been that many that I’ve seen, but the pattern is striking) have gone seriously south later on, usually after the kids come along–suddenly an incompetent husband is a burden, not a pleasure, and the wives feel let down.

I think this is a gender-specific manifestation of a need for control: many girls are raised to believe that feminine control is maternal control. The only way they know to be “in charge” is to be mom–any other sort of assertiveness isn’t appropriate.

You also see this more often in relationships that started when people were in high school, IME. Kids who live at home sometimes express romantic love using the signals of parental love: control and regulation.

10

Can’t think of anything to add to that.

11

Oops. Actually, I can - *two *things, even.

  1. This doesn’t mean that all relationships are going to be equitable - some will be equally immature, some will be equally mature, some will be highly unbalanced, some will be slightly unbalanced, and so on. I think the ones that are closer to balanced (whether mature or im-) are considerably more common.

  2. I don’t think emotional maturity is a constant across all life experiences. One person might handle day-to-day interpersonal relationships really well, but will flip out if there’s some kind of crisis. Another might have mastered navigating the business world, but can’t figure out how to have friends. So a relationship that’s equal on average might look very unbalanced at times, and vice versa.

12

When I was in my 20s, I thought that a LOT of women were needy and a lot of the guys I went out with dumped me for women who were needy (and immature). I figured dudes wanted to be needed because it made them feel good. Unfortunately, I could not make myself be needy enough. I think I saw this in my friends who were dating - you know, the guy who gets a call every 10 minutes from his girlfriend because she needs him, or the girl who can’t hang out because her boyfriend needs to be taken to get his hair cut.

Now I’m in my 30s and most of my friends are married. For the most part, everyone seems to have really great equal relationships. They aren’t co-dependents, they are independents and are very happy as part of their little team. They appreciate each other but don’t NEED each other (well, in that stupid needy way).

But, I do find in the DATING world as a 30-something that the dudes still left on the block are dudes that still have a little growing up to do. Guys who haven’t found a decent place to live that they can afford, guys who are still trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up (and possibly still in college!), guys who would still rather hang out with their other single guy friends instead of cultivating a relationship with a woman (banging is just fine tho).

I don’t mind if a guy plays video games or collects figurines. I find it cute. But you can do all that and still have a job and a mature relationship. I have plenty of guy friends who do that and have wives and kids.

I have run my own successful business for 10 years now and owned my own home for 5, so I might be on the snobbish end of things. And I do cut guys a lot of slack, thinking that I may be on too high of a horse. But being with a guy who can’t and won’t get his shit together is pretty draining after a while.

I AM willing to share my “wealth” and stability with a boy who is at least emotionally mature. I could give a fuck about how much money he makes at this point (I’ve got some to spare). But, from my current situation, it seems that the boys worth taking a chance on (hooking them up with a nicer lifestyle) are the ones who are too ashamed to live in such a situation. If that makes sense.

My brother makes a ton less than his wife, and doesn’t bring much to the table financially, but the wife does ok financially and is willing to bring home the bacon because emotionally my brother is her rock. She’s head-over-heels for him. I’m totally willing to live like that, I just need to find the right guy who’s willing to go in on the plan.

13

Dude[tte], your user name is freaking me out. Is that an homage or a coincidence?

It’s seemed to me since adolescence that people tend to privilege their own current emotional state over all others. Teenagers think adults are cowardly conformists; adults tend to think teenagers are risky rapscallions. Men tend to think women are flighty flakes; women tend to think men are immature imps. (Okay, maybe I shoulda stopped the alliteration when I had a chance). Note that I’m stereotyping people for how they stereotype people, and I’m aware of the irony therein; these tendencies I’ve observed hold only among those members of the group who engage in stereotyping.

There may well be differences in the emotional status of men and women. We’re every one of us really complicated bags of chemicals, when it comes down to it, and hormones are a pretty powerful set of chemicals. Surely testosterone and estrogen have some sort of effect on our emotional states–to deny this would be pretty anti-science. However, to characterize these differences in terms of “maturity” is to privilege one status above the other. Is the emotional state that’s encouraged by high levels of testosterone what we should consider “mature”? Is the emotional state that’s encouraged by high levels of estrogen what we should consider “mature”?

When you come down to it, I don’t see why “maturity” should be the desired state, anyway. Youth often are willing to accept a much greater level of risk than adults are (due, perhaps, to an unrealistic assessment of risk); youth therefore often accomplish things that adults would never accomplish.

In a relationship, of course, a younger person may value youthful traits such as high levels of passion more than an older person, who values a willingness to do dull but important tasks. An adult may value the willingness to do the dull-but-necessary things more.

Is that what we mean by emotional maturity, then? What exactly do we mean with that term?