Chasing Butterflies While the Elephants Get Away
Whatever would we do without the commentary on virtually all the online forums and chat rooms focused on relations between men and women? It’s so refreshing to read all the complaints I’ve heard since I was old enough to know that men and women were different, “down there.”
I might have been eight or nine, when my mother and her second husband were engaged in what became the first gender/sex-related “debate” I had witnessed. At some point in argument, my mother broke into song:
“Rueben, Rueben, I’ve been thinking what a grand world it would be,
if all the men were transported far beyond the northern sea.”
To which Hank, (her husband at the time) refrained:
“Rachel, Rachel, I’ve been thinking what a grand world it would be,
If all the girls were transported far beyond the northern sea.”
It would be years before I would learn there was an 1871 song from which their lines were excerpted. And on they both misremembered, at that. But the larger truth wasn’t lost on me. There was a “tension” between the sexes—one which at the time, didn’t matter to me. At the age of nine, I had other things on my mind. What “girls” thought of me was not in the top ten worry list.
Fast-Forward to Today...
Now, sixty-plus years later, we still have men and women complaining about each other’s shortcomings (real and imagined) everywhere the topic is likely to come up. And doing so like they’d just discovered the time-immemorial problem of gender differences.
“Men know they are undatable,” one author on a platform I frequent tells us, “So why should women settle?” “Women aren’t too picky,” another author writes, “men are just mediocre.”
Guys, we don’t get off scot-free, either. “Women are gold-diggers,” one (male) author tells us. “Or women have unrealistic standards,” another writes. True. some are or do. Is that really a headline? “Women have it easier dating today,” others opine. Really? As someone privy to the dating adventures of my daughter, I’m going to have to disagree. Or at least observe that it’s a bit more nuanced than that. And that leads me to my pivotal point. What’s missing in all the foregoing statements is men or women trying to make each other wrong for their differences—and doing so in ways that are devoid of nuance or empathy.
Nobody asked me, but…
How much better off would we be if we stopped venting and took a more empathetic and patient spin on each other? I remember dating in “the way back when,” and learning a lot of lessons the hard way.
Was I undatable, back then? Almost, I confess. In my defense, I was young and unsupervised. Eventually, I learned and after repeated tours overseas and coming back, I had to re-learn. So, if you’re a woman looking for a datable man, (or vice versa) maybe you’re fishing in the wrong waters…or using the wrong bait?
Likewise, if you’re a man and the women you’re dating are either blowing you off, maybe it’s you and not them? Maybe you need to work a little more on you. Or if the women you’re dating are treating you as a subsidy for their food and entertainment budget, maybe you’d do well to take the advice I gave women, above. If you’re coming across as so creepy or weird that women won’t give you the time of day, maybe work on that. If you’re being treated like a human ATM, what message are you sending? Please tell me you aren’t one of those $35K millionaires who leases a BMW, contorting yourself trying to impress her with what you have, rather than who you are.
Instead of generalizing from your own experiences and assuming the whole dating pool is toxic, maybe consider we should consider our standards and reflect on whether they really reflect us, or whether we’ve unconsciously bought into a “norm” that are out of sync with our values. And if after reflection, you find you’ve validated your tastes, then maybe you need to consider fishing somewhere else using a different bait.
We could debate whether vituperating against half the entire Earth’s population is either fair or intellectually balanced and probably wind up having to agree to disagree. But far more problematic, in my opinion, is how the exercise of dwelling on the negative effects on our own spirits. There’s nothing wrong with “taking a break” from dating if you need to.
Or for that matter, with you deciding you want to render that “break” permanent. You may decide that for you, the reward is not worth the price. In every generation, there are men and women who arrive at that conclusion. Sometimes it’s reflection on their limited options. Other times it’s a reflection on them. Which isn’t to say either is wrong.
Perhaps they were in the wrong place, the wrong time—or maybe they just gave up too soon. Perhaps there’s more work some of us still need to do on ourselves. Or maybe, we’re just happier solo. What I would encourage all to do, however, is to ty empathizing with each other and to resist the temptation to trade uncertain possibilities for the opium of comfortable certainty.
