I’m a little bored with Mike’s efforts to justify clinging to bad relationship after bad relationship (and after reading my email this evening, I think some of you are, too), so I’m going to circle back and address something he mentioned a while back that got lost in the shuffle: the idea that women “should” think dating and relationships will make their lives easier and more enjoyable rather than as a burden.
A word of warning up front: something unpleasant happens to my brain when people start making suggestions about how someone “should” feel. Don’t get me wrong–I’m not really a “to each his own type”. I think there are definite shoulds when it comes to our actions, and particularly to the way we treat other people. But how we “should” feel? What we “should” want? That’s just silly.
It’s a little like telling me I really should love asparagus. It might be good for me, and it might make sense to tell me I should eat it, but telling me I should LIKE it is just a waste of breath, isn’t it? Or worse, maybe it’s more like telling me I should prefer chocolate ice cream to vanilla, not even because it’s good for me but because that’s your preference so it must be the right one.
So Mike thinks, apparently, that busy women “should” want to date and start romantic relationships because those relationships “should” enhance their lives rather than creating an additional burden. This is a particular hot button with me, because there was a time when I was working full time, commuting 3+ hours a day, raising a child alone and trying to help my mother after major surgery, all while contending with health problems of my own, and a lot of my friends hounded me continually about how I should get out and “relax”. Some of them probably were well-intentioned and others just wanted me to go out with them and tried to couch it in terms of what was good for me because it would have sounded too selfish and immature to say “I think you should give up the few hours of sleep you’re getting or blow off the tiny and already inadequate number of waking hours you have with your daughter to entertain me.”
In both cases, they were dead wrong. I was pushing hard to be able to spend any time at all with my daughter and still squeeze in five hours of sleep a night. I was so tired all the time that I fell asleep on the train every single day and often awoke startled and disappointed at Union Station because I’d been dreaming that I was on my way home. On the rare occasion that I squeezed in time to socialize, it didn’t relax me at all…it just exhausted me because it either put me further behind or meant that I had to cut back to three hours of sleep. And that was with old friends–people I didn’t have to put on make-up for or make any effort at all to be lively or interesting. I’d rather have shot myself in the head than had to go through the time and effort involved in a date at that time.
Now, it seems to me that it empirically makes no sense to add something new to a schedule that already has you stretched too thin. In fact, it seems to me outrageous that anyone would consider it. But in a sense, it doesn’t even matter whether I’m objectively right or not. During that time, I experienced socializing as a heavy drain on my time and energy, and dating would have been even worse. Should I have gone ahead and done it anyway, at great personal cost, just because guys like Mike think I’m wrong to find them tiring? The idea that a man can decide for a woman that she should want to date, fantasize that she’s complaining to her friends that she can’t find a good man (something I’ve never, ever, ever complained to a girlfriend about in my entire life, and which I can recall having heard from female friends approximately twice in the roughly thirty years since I started dating), and then fault her for not being eager to date him because he’s decided spending time with him would be fun for her and not a burden strikes me as patently ridiculous.
News flash, guys: the fact that a woman is not interested in you does not mean there’s something wrong with her judgment.
I agree with the last paragraph. And I think it applies to both sexes.
Is it possible that you are arguing separate points? It seems to me that you’re not even talking about the same issue and then you (yes, both of you) make vast leaps in judgment about the other person’s position.
Is this a blog about dating or War of the Roses? (as in, the movie, not the wars in England–no wait, maybe those too.)
[...] Comments « Is There a “Right” Thing to Want? [...]
hmmmm…Interesting argument. I can empathize with not having time at specific intervals of your life to be able to introduce new people into your already stretched thin circle. On the other hand, a bit defensive on issues dealing with friends and dating. An utter avoidance of society is, in my opinion not healthy. One should be able to explore and expand their life at their own pace, but for the sake of enjoyment they shouldn’t shun the idea of practicing ‘living’, provided that they possess the time…..