Men Who Want Love From The Women They Hate

Looking back on my heterosexual romantic life, I can’t remember the last time I entered into a relationship in which someone willingly and freely proposed to treat me with respect, and as an equal. Recently, I’ve noticed that packed into even the most seemingly innocuous of flirtations are deeply ingrained ideological practices, which seek to undervalue and devalue women in the name of love. Accordingly, the working title for this series is “Men Who Want Love From The Women They Hate.”

Yesterday, a man who thought he was a potential suitor asked me if I’d like to hang out sometime. He was particularly interested in debating the ideas I share on platforms such as this, because clearly, my feeble woman brain—what with the four degrees my intellectual labor has earned, a decade-and-a-half of higher education, and eleven years of professional experience on the subject matter which I write—is totally wrong about all of it. He intimated how exciting such a prospect would be. I told him that I wasn’t interested; but—since I am a woman—clearly my opinion on the matter was irrelevant, because he relentlessly repeated how a debate was what he wanted, so of course we had to meet up for this to become actualized. He also hit on me after I made clear that I’m fresh out of a relationship and too depressed for that sort of stuff, but again, no matter to him! Ah, yes, ignoring the person you wish to debate—a clear sign of advanced rhetorical skills. How did I not see that I was putty in his hands? 

I reiterated what I had already said, and all I asked was that he please listen to me. That’s it. I even said “thanks,” too. I wasn’t nasty. I didn’t go for low blows, and I easily could have. I gave him the respect and direct honesty that I would ask in return, nothing more or less. His response was predictable, so it didn’t hurt: “I understand now why your marriage broke up.” Then he blocked me. What a nice guy.

And he’s exactly right. That is why my marriage broke up. When I look back at my wedding vows, I cringe—and not because I hate my ex-husband. He’s a decent guy, a kind friend, and a phenomenal chef. I don’t regret being married to a person like that. I cringe because of what I said about myself. My wedding vows carried statements like, “I’m too crazy for anyone to love me,” and “Thank you for putting up with me.” I entered my marriage believing that I wasn’t worth much, that I was a burden. So, yes, in a way, setting boundaries, asking to be heard, and loving myself enough to set high relationship expectations are preciselythe reasons why my marriage didn’t work out (even though, obviously, the asshole on social media wasn’t implying as much). They’re also the reason why I have no time for guys like that delusional suitor now.

At worst, heterosexual men hate women. At best, they both consciously and unwittingly devalue us on a regular basis—and these behaviors are taught, are learned. Unfortunately, however, they’re not just learned by men. I can’t count high enough the number of women who’ve told me that I’m bold, or strong, or otherwise aberrant for asking for simple things like mutual respect. The reason is, we’re taught since childhood that: you don’t tell a man “no” when he thinks having a desire for something trumps your lack of desire for the same thing; you smile and act lobotomized when you hear ridiculousness and straight-up untruth come out of a man’s mouth; and you definitely do not expect to be listened to, because that shit? That ain’t happening. Or, if you’re really tough, you ignore him. That’s the solution. Make yourself invisible; that’ll really teach him a lesson. Unfortunately, it’s the same lesson he’s already learned—that women might as well not even exist, especially when it’s time to hold men accountable.

We carry these ingrained ideological practices into our adult lives—and when we challenge them, we are punished. I think about the last guy I dated. The same night I let him in on my secret heart, so to speak, he said I was fat to a room full of people. And I still pursued him! When he continued to treat me with that same level of negligence and disrespect throughout our relationship, I was initially confused. Then, I snapped out of it. I ultimately resolved to treat his feelings as indifferently as he had, for months, treated mine. And guess how long it took him to utterly vanish, only after expecting me to grovel for my insouciance? Less than a week, folks. Something similar happened when I left my marriage. The subtext at the end of both relationships was: how dare I treat these men in kind when conflict arose?

That’s why I think, when I now calmly, respectfully, and patiently articulate that I deserve respect—from people whose behavior hasn’t even earned it—they are flabbergasted. They can’t believe that this woman, who should be eating dirt out of gratitude for having even been acknowledged as slightly human, would demand such a thing as equal treatment. What a massive cunt I must be. But at least I’ll be a massive cunt alone, spending time cultivating the one relationship I should have all along—the one with myself.

Tera

“This is Sean.”

Tera introduced me to the owner (or renter?) of the house we were visiting in the Balboa Peninsula. Sean looked bloated in his black t-shirt and jeans. He had dyed-black hair, with a peaking bald spot that looked like a flesh yarmulke. Sean claimed to write award-winning rap songs, the reason for such fancy digs. He talked with an Irish brogue. Later, after the seizure, he would find me on the roof of this house, and he’d show me—unsolicited—thirty or so Polaroids, all of different women bending over to prominently display their assholes, each with her face hidden. Sean was 41. He was fucking Tera, who was 19.

“Here.” He handed me a pipe filled with cocaine and weed. I smoked it. I was relieved I didn’t have to snort it, since doing so lately had caused my nose to bleed incessantly. I sat down, and grabbed my cocktail.

“Dude, it was so fucked.” Tera laughed as she spoke, the way a 19-year-old would laugh about a gag sequence from a comedic horror movie she’d recently seen. “So I’m on top of him, right? And then out of nowhere, I guess I started shaking and my eyes roll back and my mouth starts foaming. So Sean pushes me off him, and just pours cold water on my face, and then I come to. Then we just went back at it. Haha.” She was a more traditionally attractive and less fashionable version of me—with her textured red hair, glassy eyes, better nose, and horrid boots. She didn’t have a baseball-sized bruise on her calf like I did, even though she was just as malnourished from a diet of a half-a-bag-of-chips-and-a-soda-water-per-day as I was. I loved her and, being two years older, I functioned as a sort of surrogate matriarch to guide this Tempe-raised naïve little girl through my Orange County scammer life. 

I wasn’t sure if Sean was one of those poseur trust fund babies who come from foreign countries (or worse, the Midwest) and settle in Southern California to try and live out some boring Michael Bay fantasy, or if he was actually an industry guy. Maybe a combination of both. I still thought he looked like a dad who hadn’t paid child support in a long time, and I tried to steer clear of him.

Tera and Sean prattled on. I explored the house, eventually finding my way to the roof where I could be alone with my thoughts. Unfortunately, he still ended up finding me, and presented me the Polaroids as proudly as he would a new watch. I just nodded my head, and hoped he would soon leave. Fortunately, eventually, he did.

We sat on the curb, waiting for Tera’s mom to arrive. Tera looked like a drowned albino raccoon. Her makeup was about three days worn, and she smelled like she’d gotten fucked in about just as long without showering after. Her skin was translucent. She wouldn’t stop crying, and I kept making jokes to try and lighten the mood. 

“Well, maybe Tempe has a clinic with some sexy dude nurses who don’t mind bending the rules a little. You can always come back to the salon when you clean up. Shit, maybe I’ll clean up out here and we can go back together.” I knew I wouldn’t see her again, but a lie seemed more soothing in the moment.

“Haha. That’s why you’re not coming with me. I don’t want you banging all my rehab stable, you fat skank.” This was her way of telling me she loved me, and that she’d miss me.

Her mom’s car pulled up, and I felt an overwhelming rush of nothing envelop me. As she crouched into the back of the sedan, she looked up at me, and in between tears, she laughed.

“Yeah, it’s pretty fucked. And Tempe is going to be so fucking boring. But at least my life isn’t as shit as yours, Katie.” I hugged her goodbye, and laughed, and told her she was right. 

Today's question: What are the thoughts I'm trying to drown out in this moment? This week? This life?  It's time to listen to (what I can of) them.

Also, here's some Yeats:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Pantheon

January 17, 2019

The tiniest snowfall began as I was walking back to the place I’m staying on Marcy Avenue, and Mary Oliver died tonight. My first thought was, “I’ll try and find her best poem to pretend-share with him,” which really meant I was sharing it with myself. But why try to fit someone else’s thoughts to my own feelings? It’s like wearing someone’s used shoes.

So the snow goaded me to write. It was too lovely to say no. It’s all been lovely—the snow, the skyscrapers, Asilia, the cafes, the wine, the conversations. Even the subway, which smells like cotton candy and urine all the time. It’s all, very, lovely. 

But this nagging. This shadow. This human-sized, invisible space that has sat in my brain the whole time, too big, like when I was eleven and didn’t fit into my cardboard-box forts anymore, and I realized that the fantasy world I’d played in was gone, just like that. Time for reality.

You should have been here with me, but I wonder: would you have fit? Would we? You’ve been taking up so much space inside me, constant, not on my lips but right behind my eyes. Lodged down my throat, maybe.

And just like the shoes and the forts and New York, nothing ever fits. I tried to put you on too soon. I tried to force you on, the needling and the bargaining. I flew into a rage and ripped you.

I still can’t tell if I was too much, or not enough. Or maybe I was just right. Either way, I never let you slide around comfortably into me, and now you’re gone and everything is too big, feels so heavy.

You once asked me whom I had loved most in my past; I told you, and the story made you sad. Well, time and my heart-clobbering have shifted you into that position. You are it. You are it it it it it. You finally fit somewhere. You are the centerpiece—a vibrant, gilded portrait in my pantheon of regrets.

Men Comparing Women

I went on a Tinder date the other day. It was nothing earth-shattering, just an anodyne lunch meetup. The following day, my date texted me; he immediately informed me that he’d gone on a similar date with another woman, but reassured me that I was “much cooler.”

Roxane Gay has said that a feminist is just a woman who is tired of being treated like shit. I thought about this sentiment as I mulled over such otherwise irrelevant—even inappropriate—information to tell a recent first date. While this guy’s comment could be interpreted as the harmless data-sharing of his life’s minutiae, it’s also a possibility that he was pulling the all-too-common trick of trying to build me up by breaking down another woman. It got me to thinking about a flood of memories, in which the men I have considered as (actual or potential) mates pitted me against other women for emotional or psychological gain. This also led me to reconsider how these actions made me feel, and how the feelings that were teased out of me served these men’s specific aims.

Now, before a bevy of fragile, cishet dudes and their obedient, cishet, Stockholm Syndrome-suffering female supporters start flooding my inbox with, “HASHTAG NOT ALL MEN!” or “You’re just bitter and need to get over it,” I’d like to make some things clear. This is my experience in romantic relationships. It may not be the same for others. I understand that my family upbringing and cultural conditioning have provided messages—both subtly, and in crashingly overt ways—that hurting, even torturing, women is an acceptable commonplace, and that women should simply put up with it (or risk a variety of social, psychological, and economic punishments if they do not). Finally, I tend to write with the hope that sharing my stories will help someone who needs help. When writing, I tend to care less about how I can protect and appease the sensibilities of abusers, and their supporters who are generally unwilling to listen to me.

Coming back to my memories, a flood of examples of insecure men pitting women against one another emerge. There were the countless two-timers, who for months in our relationships—even years—would seek out other women, and forge halfhearted attempts to conceal their philandering. I can’t feign total innocence here. I’ve cheated, too, but my infidelities always grew out of revenge responses to my partners’ indiscretions, or as a means of leaving people who had all but made me an invisible servant in our relationships. I usually kept my cheating under wraps; never did I stray so as to send the message that greener pastures lay elsewhere. It was typically a covert way of fulfilling some deep-seated longing in me that the relationships did not. My partners, on the other hand, always found ways to remind me that I was inadequate. The women they chose were more traditionally physically attractive, more sexually forthcoming, more maternal, more complacent, quiet and obedient, less scathingly humorous, less intelligent. In other words, they found women who possessed all of the socially desirable feminine traits that I lacked, and boy, did they make me aware of the contrast. As I mentioned, at best, they were halfhearted in their methods of hiding such conquests. At worst, they cavalierly flaunted their affairs. Either way, they made quite clear that: 1) I was to compete with these women for their affections, 2) whatever I was, was undesirable, and 3) that, if only I could be more like my counterparts, I could be successful in the relationship. How do I know this? Well, when these men would eventually circle back (and they always did), they would ultimately profess all the ways in whichthese women were lacking, traits that I conveniently possessed in spades. When they came back, I was funnier, I was sexier, I understood the men better than these contenders ever could. How could my partners—or I—have ever thought otherwise?

Of course, the cheating done on me is too obvious a transgression to sit on its own. There was my ex-husband, who never strayed during the relationship, but (during the divorce) moved straight from our home into an apartment with a woman for whom the kindest words he reserved throughout our six-year marriage ran along the lines of, “She is a trashy, alcoholic wannabe.” There was what I liked to call the “Living, Breathing, Walking, Cliché of a Relationship”: the guy who was first “going through a divorce,” which became “in the process of leaving his wife,” which became “We’re still living together for the kids,” which became him psychologically abusing—and regularly fucking—both of us, which became (of course) him going back to her. That one, thankfully, inspired me to get back into therapy. There was the coworker I dated, who ghosted me after a year and a half of friendship-then-dating, and who after two weeks showed up to the next work meeting slobbering all over a woman who was thinner, nicer, and traditionally more his physical type than I could ever be, all in my field of vision. There was the boyfriend who wished I could be more like his quiet, nonconfrontational ex, and less like his “crazy” one who held him accountable for his fuckboyery. There was the guy with the texts he shouldn’t have gotten, who handed me his phone to use while said texts were incoming. There was the guy who hung out with a woman thirteen years his junior (with whom he was having an emotional affair) and lied about it, all while I was going through the painful decision to end our unexpected pregnancy. There were the exes who said, “We should hang out sometime,” and never mentioned their long-term girlfriends. There were the countless acquaintances, with their “totally harmless flirting” comments like, “I wish my girlfriend were as [insert arbitrary personality trait here] as you.” There were the coworkers who would offer me a terse “hello” because I was much more outspoken than the female coworkers they were quick to praise, the ones who listened to all their blowhardery and blew endless smoke rings up their asses. 

Oh, am I being “too extra,” fragile cishet bros for whom this is all hitting a bit too close to home? My apologies. History has simply taught me that I must provide a Bible’s length of examples, lest you otherwise accuse me of overexaggerating isolated incidents (as so many of you are wont to do). 

My point is threefold. One, these incidents have made me feel awful, inadequate, insecure, strange, crazy, lacking, unwomanly, and so many other terrible feelings. Two, they’ve taught me that, in order to navigate the world in a way that ensures survival—let alone success!—women have to cater to heterosexual men’s insecurities by complying with a game in which we are pitted against other women in a variety of ways. Yes, these men are deeply flawed, but they possess cultural cachet and cultural capital that allow them the privilege to get away with such behavior. Finally, it makes me realize the great extent to which women have to disentangle ourselves from these ingrained, toxic, cultural practices. We need to stop agreeing to compete with one another, and instead critique the ways in which cishet men perpetuate and are served by these practices. I’ll start: To all the women with whom I have desperately competed for men’s approval over my lifetime—I am sorry. Even though I was locked in a toxic paradigm in which I couldn’t see my behavior for what it was, you did not deserve that. I hope we may heal. You and I, sister, deserve better. Let’s work together to get it.