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Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Communication Between Men and Women

On the forum she said: All I have to say is we women ask a man or our hubby a question (like does this dress look good?) we need to be mature enough to handle the answer OR DON'T ASK!

Which produced this interesting and introspective reply from Nekosohana, one of the forum's male members. I have made some very minor edits, primarily for spelling or punctuation:

Most of those questions are socially expressed contracts that we have with our partners. Women know the answer to the question, but it's not a real question. In reality, society programs women to say that because society programs men to not express the "L" word.

Don't believe me? Look at little boys and little girls. My friends laughed at me for liking a girl. It's not socially acceptable at that age to like girls and when we get older, our masculinity is not defined by self image (which it should be), but by the images of ourselves we get off of others.

If you are to look in a bathroom miror, you will (not?) see the true you. Agreed? You will see only the image of yourself that your own mind allows. As people expand their knowledge of self, that image will change. Both physically and mentally (but we are sticking to mentally for the moment).

But the problem lies in a simple truth that we don't seem to get. Our baseline is taken from a biological version of the funhouse mirror, our parents. We learn through our youth that our parents define us (which is why women inevitably become their mothers - or exact opposites) - because the base patterns we use for self evaluation are not born inside us (like they are with others of the animal race), they are received from our parents.

As we get older and become more self aware, we make a decision in our very early youth to accept these patterns or reject them. This seems to happen in the teenage years (hence the rebellious phases).

My ex-wife accepted her mother's patterns, which included 4 divorces (or 3?), and 6 children from 4 different men. So is it any surprise that when the work came, my wife wasn't willing to take the extra step? No, because she repeated her mother, to the "T'.

So back to your statement. We men are contracted early with patterns as well that say machismo = manly. In that same contract there is a clause that says, expression of feelings is unacceptable because that is not machismo. And machismo = manly. Most men accept this as law. Agree? That's why we have songs about men who would rather fish than spend time with their women. As you can tell, I rejected the clause.

So, to wrap this up it goes like this. Men have a set pattern of not being able to express feelings, because they don't understand that expression does not equal weakness (or the non-machismo fault). Women invariably understand this, why? Because most had fathers to a certain degree, or father figures. If they didn't, well I haven't thought far enough to argue that point yet. So they also play to the contract with something that goes like this:

Instead of saying: "Do you love me" or "Am I still beautiful to you?" (and all people desire to be craved, even men) because the above contract rules tell then they will not get an answer, or will degrade their men somehow, they ask: "Do I look fat?" or "Does this dress look good?" with the implied expectation that since they met with his contract he will meet with theirs. And he often does, because in this case, we all know the rules, whether we admit it or not.

In reality, I feel that honesty is the best policy. But I learned in my marriage, that sometimes it can be good to play along, that the end to happiness is not always in the stark truth (and I am all for stark truth), but in the understanding that, like sarcasm, the "dishonest" answer is not always a lie.

Regardless of whether you agree with everything he has written, I think this is an interesting and introspective opinion.

Take care of yourself.

From Pat Gaudette,
Your Guide to Divorce Support.

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