The past few months have been excruciating, exhausting, numbing, life changing. Yet, I am attempting to move beyond the events that have forever changed me. I am listening to my girlfriend's advice and taking each day slow. I am listening to my soul. I am healing. Very, very slowly, I am healing.
One of the most important decisions I have made is to not date. I am going out with my guy friends, but I am making it clear that there are boundaries around this. This is for their own good, as well as mine, since they deserve a mentally and emotionally well person and I need to make sure I am making decisions based on sound principles and not on infatuation.
What I just don't get is why my guy friends cannot be honest with me when I am being honest with them.
One man who showed interest in dating me just lied to me completely when I told him I wasn't ready to date. He just completely stopped all the text messages, the phone calls and emails--cold turkey. When I called him out on this, instead of being honest, he denied it. When I said we could hang out as friends and take things slow, he agreed to this, but the event we had previously set up, he canceled on me and I haven't heard from him since. Why couldn't he just be honest with me, especially when I called him on it, asked him for honesty? Why couldn't he just come out and say he was only interested in fucking me and not interested in anything else?
Another friend said he was also getting over a relationship and wasn't ready to date and wanted to pick up a friendship where we had left off over a year ago, so the two of us hanging out and keeping things platonic for now meshed very well.
What happened? Who the hell knows. I haven't heard from him in over a week. I've sent him an email and a text message. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero.
Do these men seriously think they are doing us women a favor by lying to us this way? By not communicating with us? We know it's them with the problem. By this time in our lives, we don't take it personal. They are the one's not in touch with their feelings. Yet, it still leaves us out in the dark, with no good explanation. Cold, unfeeling, drained, alone, blank.
A few years ago, I was dating a man. It was serious. Then, over a weekend, his mood changed. I could tell he was pulling away from me, but I didn't know why. Then two days later he calls me and says he considers me his best friend but doesn't want a romantic relationship. I was devastated. I knew there was more to the story, but he wouldn't communicate with me. A week later, I run into him in a bar with his arm around a woman that I knew he had a crush on but she had been in a relationship with someone else but had recently come back on the market. Why couldn't he just tell me the truth? That he had started dating her? Didn't he know the truth would have been easier on me? It was easier on him to lie to me.
Maybe the men my age have been taught their entire lives to be so disconnected from their feelings that I am asking too much for them to now connect with their feelings.
I love this article on Sex and Men
There is a wonderful book called Iron John
In this book the author tells us that there are five steps of becoming a man.
1. Connection with then clean break with your mother
2. Connection with then clean break with your father
3. Being mentored by another
4. Apprenticeship to some hurricane energy
5. Marriage with the holy woman over the queen
Discussion on book, Iron John
Here is an article on how to maintain friendships: Friendships
I have to wonder, 'Have the men between the ages 30 and 60 been so damaged with the way they were raised, not capable of making emotional connections with women? Are they incapable of emotional honesty?
I have to wonder.
4 comments:
Men experience much of what you've endured at the hands of their own mothers. Men are conditioned not to express emotion by mothers and men and society. Both my mother and step-mother told me to stuff it emotionally. "Be a man!" and other such bull. I didn't get to grow up as a man. I got to grow up as a male dominated by the expectations of moms that wanted sons that treated girls "right" rather than a person who understood himself emotionally and was able to communicate and connect in healthy fashions to men and women.
Another thing that is likely influencing this behavior that men give you: the idea women are fragile. I grow so tired of that idea. Women are strong and capable of handling things. Men are too. We just have to get passed the emotional constipation that we've got built up thanks to poor upbringing.
Marshall,
I totally agree...Mothers/women are very responsible for a lot of this conditioning.
Do you think its possible to change this conditioning? To turn it around? I so want to, I'm concerned that it may not be possible...
Yes, I do believe men can. I am. I've been more emotional vulnerable than ever in my life. I know of other men that are doing this type of healing and shedding the patriarchal ideals of what masculinity is vs what it really is. Innately men are protective and a healthy man will allow him shelter in his mate, as he allows her shelter in him. I'm heart-sad that you have had such a brutal run with men.
I know I have changed. I see men like you who have changed, so I believe in the capacity to change.
I so wish for some love and luck in my life. I hope for it.
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