The stories I hate to hear the worst are – stories of women who are so determined to hold on to a guy (and sometimes any guy) that they turn themselves into pretzels. They twist themselves into unrecognizable positions, deny their own deepest beliefs, undazzle their own brilliant selves so the guy can feel smarter.
Ugh. Just ugh. And usually the guy just treats all this shutting up and treading on eggshells as merely his due, since he is a male and that is how he expects to be treated. This is obviously not good for guys – and is definitely destructive to women.
Why do we do this? Give up our own best selves, our own lives, to assist a second or third rate non imaginative human in having the life we think he should have.
If he doesn’t want it enough to work for it, to learn and change and grow for it, to run smack dab into reality whether he wants to see that it is there or not – then he’ll never be really fit for it anyway.
Why do we want to stop folk (our friends, family, co-workers, etc) from having what their behavior shows us they really want? If they want to be drunk or high or cruel – why is it our job to fix that?
Most of this is the teaching this culture wants us to have. But just looking around demonstrates that it does not work. In the face of that, why do we persist? Astonishing.