Apparently Men Are Allowed In Here

I suppose I should start by saying I'm a man. Well there goes half the audience.

I've been... lurking around here reading some of the things women write about their lives and experiences, and sometimes I find myself thinking about how differently men and women can experience the same world. I'm not going to pretend I understand what it's like to be a woman. I don't. I can listen though. I can observe. I can compare what I hear with what I've experienced myself and sometimes come to a conclusion, sometimes remain unsure, and sometimes realize I was wrong.

Which is probably a dangerous activity for a man in a women's community. Apparently I'm supposed to say something about skincare now.

I won't. But coconut oil bro... Wow

When I was a kid, I didn't think about any of this.

Girls were just people. I could walk up to one, talk to her, become friends with her and go about my day. There wasn't some complicated strategy involved. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood that changed.

Now there are all these little things you apparently have to think about. Where you're standing. How you're standing. Whether she's interested. When you should approach. Whether she's going to interpret something you do one way or another.

Apparently nobody thought to give us the adult version of the instruction manual.

What I don't do is chase. If I have to work hard just to get her attention, I'm gone. I'm not offended, nor am I going to complain about women. I'm just going to go about my day. I've been rejected plenty of times. I'm a man. That's part of the deal.

What interests me more is the other side of it. I've had women show interest in me who I wasn't interested in, and I've had situations where someone's behavior made me question whether I would actually want to be involved with her. Sometimes it's the loudness while other times it's the constant little tests, teasing me or making assumptions just to see how I'll react. Sometimes it's lying. Boy, do women lie a lot. And no, I don't mean every woman. I'm talking about the women I've encountered. I pay attention to that stuff because behavior tells me things. It doesn't give me a complete biography of someone's past, but it gives me information. Enough information sometimes to think, yeah, probably not my type.

Being attractive creates its own weird problems too. You'd think being attractive would make relationships easier. Maybe it does for some people. I haven't found it particularly useful for getting somebody to see who I actually am. Sometimes I get the impression that a woman sees an attractive man and immediately fills in the rest of the character herself. Maybe he's untrustworthy. Maybe he's got too many options. Maybe he's going to be arrogant. Maybe he's got his shit together so much that he won't tolerate her bullshit. Maybe she's right. Maybe she's wrong.

I don't know. I'm not inside her head and can't be. What I do know is what kind of woman I want. I've learned that the hard way.

At this point I'm probably supposed to be removed from Ladies of Hyenas. Good thing this isn't that community.

I hope...

I want a woman who can take the hard part. I don't mean she needs to spend her life fighting or pretending she's some kind of indestructible badass. I mean when life gets ugly, she doesn't suddenly disappear because the relationship stopped being fun. My ex-wife left me when things got hard. I was facing what could have been a life sentence over charges I considered bogus. Everything had been fine until I had something serious to deal with, and then she was gone. That changed something in me. I don't need somebody who is only there while everything is comfortable. If I'm away working, handling something personal, or dealing with something that could potentially put me behind bars while I'm fighting for my freedumbs, I want to know that the woman beside me is still beside me. I don't want her going off to clubs and pretending everything is fine because I'm temporarily inconvenient. I'd wait for her too.

That's the part I don't think people understand about what I mean by a warrior woman. She's not somebody standing behind me waiting for me to protect her while she does nothing. She's in the tribe with me. Sometimes I'm the one carrying the weight and sometimes she's carrying it.

I've got no problem being the provider. I actually like it. If I'm going to bring home the bread, provide protection, work, solve problems and carry the team when she's down, that's part of how I express love, but I'm going to expect something from her too.

I want to come home to a clean house. I want dinner cooked. I want lunch made for work sometimes. I want affection. I want kindness. I want attention. I want sex to be a normal part of the relationship. I don't want to constantly hear "I'm tired" or "I have a headache" every time intimacy comes up, snd before somebody misunderstands me, I'm not saying she loses the ability to say no because she's my wife. It's still her choice. I'm talking about the overall relationship and whether there is genuine reciprocity in it.

If I'm expected to give everything I have to the woman I love because that's what I voluntarily chose to do, then I expect her to give herself to the relationship too without keeping score. If she's sick, I'm going to take care of her. If she's exhausted, I'm going to carry more. If she needs nursing, I'm going to nurse her. If she needs healthcare, I'm going to help her get it. If she needs a vacation because she's been carrying too much shit for too long, then we're going on vacation.

I don't have a strong instinct to ask people for help when I need it. That's something I've noticed about myself. So having a woman notice that I'm worn out and just give me a massage without me asking would probably mean more to me than some grand romantic gesture.

Rub my smelly feet or something. I don't know.

My female cousins have actually done little things like that kind of care for me, and I've experienced some of it from my ex-wife too. It's just something I haven't had consistently from a woman I've built a life with.

That's what I mean when I say appreciated. I'm not asking to be worshipped and obeyed unreasonably without consent, unless were in the bed being intimate, I just want to be noticed. I want her to notice what I do for her and I want to notice what she does for me. She should be able to be vulnerable around me, disagree with me. She should have ambitions that have nothing to do with me and be able to have a terrible day and not worry that I'm going to stop loving her, because she's not performing the role of happy girlfriend today. I'd expect the same freedom for myself and not hear complaints because I enjoy burning shit in peace with the wood stove.

This is where I've come to think that the whole "independent woman" (Wait don't hit the down vote button yet) thing has been misunderstood. (Wait). I don't need my woman to prove that she doesn't need me. Why would I? I don't want a woman who is incapable of standing on her own. I want a woman who is capable of standing on her own and still chooses to stand beside me.

I've thought about this a lot because I don't really believe people are as independent as they like to pretend. We all depend on other people. Every single one of us is standing on top of the work of people who came before us and people who are still doing the work around us.

You can depend on someone without being owned by them. I can depend on my woman and she can depend on me. That doesn't automatically make either of us less autonomous. Actually, I think choosing who you depend on is one of the most important choices you can make.

I think women should be in the middle of the tribe. Protected by the horses of the tribe from the outside world. I'm not saying that because I think women are weak. Quite the opposite. You protect what you value. Men have historically carried a tremendous amount of the physical danger required to create and maintain the societies we live in. Men have died building things, fighting wars, working dangerous jobs, exploring places they had no business being in, and doing all kinds of shit that eventually became so normal that the people benefiting from it stopped thinking about where it came from.

A woman wakes up and turns on the lights. She drives on a road. She goes to a hospital. She buys food. She uses a phone. She walks down a street at night with some expectation that she won't be murdered. Most of that world is just there. She didn't create it by herself. Neither did I.

That's something I think both men and women forget. I don't think women necessarily understand themselves in relation to the society around them. They are beneficiaries of an enormous amount of work and sacrifice that happened before they were born, much of it by men, and then men have their own blind spots. That's why I don't think this has to become some stupid men-versus-women argument.

I can recognize that women have experiences I will never have. I can listen to them honestly. I can believe that something hurt without automatically agreeing with every conclusion drawn from that hurt. I expect the same in return. I don't need a woman to agree with everything I say. I want her to actually know me well enough to disagree with me honestly.

Maybe that's the thing I was missing when I was a kid. Back then, I could just make friends with a girl. Now I'm trying to figure out what kind of woman I could actually build a life with. I don't think I need her to be perfect. I need her to be there when it matters.

I need to be the same man for her.

No woman was oppressed during the making of this post. Your cookies are safe still. Did you know dogs can't look up?