Sure. Sincerity. Women will often and almost categorically create a problem to gauge response, especially early in a relationship. It’s a manipulative tool used to see how the man will react when there is conflict.
Men don’t do this.
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Adding to what I posted yesterday, I think some of us have a negative reaction to being lead around by wives is caused from being raised with domineering mothers who either had no choice but to run the show because of incompetent, beaten-down-by-life, unmotivated, physically and mentally lazy husbands, including stepfathers or were just inclined to do that because they were bullies to their husbands.
I don’t like sharing too much, but I indulge here and there. I’m also not seeking sympathy; we’re just talking household dynamics and parenting here. So I think personal examples are pertinent here and there. Imagine seeing some incapable, unmotivated, mentally-ill do-nothing with a mother/wife who has to run the show 100% or else the household will be doomed. Then another man comes along and he too falls short. The most repeated lines I remember being barked at them are “Move!,” “Can you move?!,” “Put this here/there!,” “Get the hell out of here!,” and “Get out of my way!” in that tiny garden apartment. It was maddening to hear and see.
I remember a chunk of boomer dads simply reclined in the same position for hours in front of the tube after work, as if they were devastated from working non-physical jobs. Of course that’s only my observation of lower-middle-cass garden-apartment living. My tradesman father-in-law doesn’t even act like that after work at 60-plus years after fixing and building all day.
The town I grew up in is now nearly all higher-earning Asian families with highly-involved fathers, as I observe when I visit the place, though of course the shoebox apartments stayed the same size obviously.
I personally have a diplomatic relationship with my wife and we’ve often lovingly said “we are a team”. I do think most of raising of a boy becomes a father’s task a he gets into the pre-teen years and I am fine with that. We’re on the same page with raising our kids.
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If somebody would do this to me in early states of relationship I would break up. No games. I’ll play with open cards or don’t play at all.
In my humble opinion: this is the best foundation for relationships. Specially when you have kids and other responsibilities.
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Good luck. I think men often want women to be men… but women. They’re going to feel you out.
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I’m lucky to have a wife who is very womenly, except that she does not test me or seek drama.
We do argue at times, but our communication is extremely open.
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Maybe my head is stuck in the 90s and 2000s. Thanks for the mention of the article again @EmilyQ in the other thread.
From the article: “I only met men who were emotionally immature, wanted [someone] to take care of them or had major addictions to drugs, alcohol, gambling, video gaming and porn. Most guys were just looking for a woman to sleep with, not grow with.”
It used to be the above described men got an inordinate amount of women, as opposed to this:
“The most frequently listed qualities women said they were looking for in a partner were kindness and emotional intelligence, mental and physical health, shared values, ambition and being “hardworking”, financial stability, masculinity and maturity, and a willingness to commit to an equal, monogamous relationship as well as, in many cases, having a family.”
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@EmilyQ I am interested in your opinion on this, if you have one and care to share. What I see from the above is perhaps a self-correction. Sexual revolution opened up access to sex without men proving their worth and many women got burned by flying too close to the sun–that is, although their lust was satisfied by taking tizzy tours with thrilling, dangerous, and uncaring men who just wanted to screw them, they have now realized that marrying or being with such men at all isn’t fun and games. And as I’ve said numerous times, such “freedom” put young women in harm’s way.
What do you think? Because although I was half joking above, I think perhaps many women have learned for the better.
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I’m starting a session in a sec, but take a look at the thing I just posted in the Psychology thread. I think you’ll like it.
Back later to answer in here.
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Change one word and that would be my list as well.
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The context was early in a relationship. As a test. A shit test, specifically. I don’t believe this didn’t occur, but maybe. Or you passed obliviously. I’m honestly a little surprised to see this is new information for so many. It’s a thing everyone is aware of. Even women. And they’ll acknowledge it after getting comfortable, lol
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Apparently not.
I asked has she ever done this, or does she know women doing this. Se replied that some might do in unconsciously, but doing it on purpose sounds fucked up.
Might be cultural thing, or I understood it wrongly somehow.
Are you referring to the list as describing you or what you seek in a partner?
Seek in a partner.
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Coming back to all of this… I could not agree more with @SepCalla, and I’m reminded of @BrickHead’s frequently asked question, which is why women marry some of the dirtbags they do. Which reminds me of the early days of my relationship with my kids’ dad (23 year marriage, so I consider it a success if sheer determination to make it work is the measure of that). Anyway, he had quite a temper! Very explosive and profane. “God fucking damnit!” at top volume was a favorite of his, and he would run it regularly. He never accidentally amputated any of his limbs or dropped his wedding ring into the ocean, so this was in response to things like a spilled drink or dropped phone call. There were also indicators of impulsivity and externalization of blame. Cue mention of all sorts of good things here: scholarship’d college athlete, multilingual, hard worker. So there was that. In retrospect I view these less-optimal qualities of his as red flags, which I should absolutely have seen and heeded. We were not right for each other. Ultimately, he was not right for anyone. He had a failed marriage before me (I believed him when he said the financial issues he was dealing with were her fault, and shouldn’t have) and never had anything last more than 6 months after me. Anyway, I digress. My point is that if we look at his early behavior as “shit tests,” I passed with flying colors. He could SO TRUST ME, because any little grudging apology mollified me, and after all, he’d had a rough time of it - I knew because he told me. It’s just silly to think of things like this as tests. They’re not tests, they’re character.
I have NEVER set up a test of anyone’s fitness. I don’t think there were subconscious ones, either. My current husband and I didn’t have our first argument until we moved in together on December 5th AND our kids were coming home for Christmas and the house wasn’t ready for them and I fell apart.
What I remember in those first weeks and months dating, and which I probably talked about in the Let’s Process Our Feelings thread here, for those of you who participated (thank you for that), is hearing him say “don’t worry about me.” The first time he said it we were scheduled to meet halfway for a date, but there was a heavy snow. He lived “over the mountain” from me and I was uneasy about driving. He offered to come get me. I responded that that was a long way in a storm, and he said “don’t worry about me.” The second time, he invited me to his daughter’s baby shower because the entire family would be there (“meet my family”). I noted that we were very early in (just under two months, so maybe 5-6 dates), and who knew whether we’d make it long term…was he sure he wanted to have his peeps involved? And he said “Don’t worry about me; I’ll be just fine.” These were green flags.
There were tears on my side eventually, of course (that Christmas with a house that needed a lot of work) and moods and disappointments (grape jelly!) but none of them were manufactured or designed to collect info re: his reaction.
Over time my husband and I have each behaved in ways that left the other blinking in confusion. That’s because both of us are people who have difficult days or thoughts or physical issues and sometimes behave uncharacteristically poorly, unfortunately.
I can remember @angry_chicken talking about setting his cell phone up somehow to see if his dates or prospective girlfriends or whatever messed with it. THAT, my friends, is a shit test.
They probably still do. A lot of the women I deal with at work are older now and can’t figure out what to do about the dud they had kids with. The men met women who matched them somehow, or who were codependent (which means I feel loved when someone needs me) and over time the women changed and grew and the men didn’t. Children usually change people - mature and deepen them. Unfortunately not everyone, though, and I think men can more easily remain emotionally immature, as women will pick up the slack for the kids’ sake.
No, I think what’s changed is that there’s a lot of attention to the “men acting like children issue.” Women are crying out - again. First, in my mother’s time, we got access to financial independence, which was needed because many men are/were abusive and/or irresponsible, and less desirable women (ugly or butch or whatever) had no avenue to a decent life, which is unacceptable. (There were also other forces at play, of course.) With independence women should have been happy, and many were/are because they found men as described above (the good guy description), but not all. So now many men can follow their hearts in terms of work as the entire burden isn’t on them, families may have boats and cool vacations because of dual income, and so on. I think when I was a kid it wasn’t unusual for men to work 2-3 jobs to make ends meet. That’s changed. So positives came to both sexes. But the housework disparity remains a problem.
I think we see things where we’re looking. You’ve got a lot of anecdotal evidence to support the first characterization of dirtbag men getting plentiful women, and so do I. But I also chose a different path, and can offer similarly compelling stories of girls like myself who avoided those men. A long-standing joke on these boards and in my real life is that I wear minimizing bras. I love my body and I have honed it throughout my adulthood because it carries power along with joy, but that power has been tightly harnessed by me in terms of sexualizing myself because I didn’t want to draw the type of man that pulls. I am not alone in this by any means. You just aren’t looking in that direction. I, on the other hand, draw into my circle people like myself.
As you know, I was a feral kid. I occasionally run into other women like myself, who were at-risk teens and are now adult professionals. I share referrals with a psych nurse practitioner who dropped out of high school, as I did, was wild, as I was, and then wound up at Yale. Do you think she was drawn to “thrilling, dangerous, and uncaring men”? I highly doubt it. She’s recently had a baby with a man who is anything but those things, and I think she’s maybe 34 now. Same thing with clients. The girls without parental support might have made early mistakes in their choice of partners, but most feral girls who share other traits with me have been serial monogamists. Their early mistakes would be more like mine - finding men who were very suitable on the face of it, but had problematic flaws.
I might even go so far as to say that at a certain level of functioning, it’s just a crap shoot. Because who knows if the guy will outgrow the flaws, or take action to fix them? I had a new client tell me that her husband went to therapy and “he’s so much better now.” I asked her who his therapist was because I’m always looking for people to refer to, and she said “You!”
My closest friends all seem to be in marriages that started in their teens, with kids now mostly grown (although my best friend divorced her drinking, cheating husband for several years and is now back with him) (he doesn’t do those things now, and they were very attached through the divorce years) (when I got divorced I leaned on him, too, because he owned a garage and did auto sales and I had teens driving and needed help keeping their car safe and a place to store tires and such…he asked her once “How did I wind up with two ex-wives?”). I don’t see anything magical about them in comparison to me. My father loved my ex-husband. But my dad wasn’t there when he called me a bitch and a cunt at a party because he was drunk and the women beat the men in Trivia and he couldn’t handle that.
I also know or knew, when I was young, the boys and girls you describe. I was a major cockblock when I worked with teenagers, because I taught the girls about a clear NO and what to look for/expect. When I look in the direction of the girls I’ve been close to as a therapist, I see good choices. I once slightly broke confidentiality when a 17yo girl mentioned a 17yo boy I’d worked with when they were 14-15, and said they’d been “hanging out.” I said “No.” She was like, “huh?” “No.” “No…Joe Smith?” “Correct. No Joe Smith. No.” A couple of years ago she told me he’d OD’d and is dead, which is very sad. They were actually a good couple on the surface - both bright and funny, both good looking, both from utterly fucked up families. But he was the dangerous, uncaring man you described, and she was and is a good kid. Books did for me what I did for her. Gave me a different expectation.
When she first told me about her now-husband, she led with “he’s got a library card - and he uses it!” (My heart!)
Anyway, I don’t think things have changed much. I think your perspective has broadened.
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I think the trope of the girl going for the bad boy, while not inaccurate or wholly without merit, is often overblown.
that type of thing happens in almost every facet of life, politics being a good example. The fringiest, loudest examples seem like they are 80% but are really the 20%
So yeah… do some girls have an attraction to womanizing, abusive alcoholics with nothing but bad intentions? Sure. But it’s not a universal. But it’s such an eye catching dynamic (especially if the woman is attractive) that it stands out SO much it’s likely over represented in the zeitgeist of dating and mate selection.
WHY the ones that do go for that could probably be a whole thread itself, but to simplify it’s probably some combo of nature and nurture “crossing the wires” and making a should-be undesirable trait attractive.
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It’s propably this. People love simplified points which make world easier to grasp.
Often the real answer is ”it depends”. Like with behaviour of men and women.
It’s a quite well supported claim that women and men are generally different in many ways. But saying that men act x and women act y is something that’s not so easy to back up. Like the trope of women loving dangerous men.
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Again, shit test is a casual description of how women will scope out men early in relationships by manipulating scenarios to see response. Not overall response to a long relationship filled with abuse. Although I’m sure they will shit test later.
Most women are self-aware of the phenomenon, but I’m sure some have experienced things in a way that reaction supersedes it in poor relationship dynamics. It’s not an attack. Just something women do. I don’t even remember the original context discussed now.
And to address Sepcella, I would imagine he’s right about culture. I can’t remember if he’s Asian or Muslim but both expect women to be submissive, to the point of subversion anyways. Especially Muslims. Different dynamic for sure.
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As a broad generalization about this particular dynamic (girls and crap boys/men), I would say that lost girls are looking for love and assume the boys are looking for same, or think they can wish it into being and the is just sex is part of the whole. The boys are in it for sex/thrills/bragging rights and are not yet mature enough to recognize that the girls are people, not just things, and so she will be hurt by the boy’s feigned emotional interest (if I’ve been unfair to boys and very young men here, everyone should please feel free to correct me). The boys grow up and realize they should be good to women because they LIKE women - maybe this happens when they meet THE girl, maybe when they have a daughter. Maybe they just realize it (you guys tell me when/why). Some men never do. They’re still in opposition to females and trying to “win.” Women, too. They’re low key angry at men for whatever history and are comfortable taking. She doesn’t like sex with him, doesn’t like his kids, but isn’t leaving because “he makes good money.” I had a woman actually say that to me about a guy during an intake…coincidentally she lodged a complaint against me with the state licensing board, the only one I’ve ever had. (It was determined in my favor, of course.)
Disclaimer: Many boys are very kind to everyone all along. Sad that these would be called cucks rather than well-raised kids.
Many girls know exactly what real caring looks like and find boys who are capable of that.
Boys and girls who are not well-raised can be these latter types. Some kids raise themselves, either through books (maybe movies/media?) or a mentor, whether teacher or counselor.
You and I are going to have to once again agree to disagree. Mark it in our shared ledger, where I am sure I lead in wins and points well made.
I don’t remember the original context, either, but I’m pretty sure @BrickHead started it. lol
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The shit test isn’t always super intense or dramatic.
Sometimes it’s like “take me out to dinner,” but all the places you suggest get vetoed.
Then you just say “we’re goin’ to Hooters” decisively.
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