These days I was listening to my niece talk on the phone with a girl. Her friend was worried and depressed because the guy she likes hasn't called her. My niece was giving him absurd excuses to try to lift his spirits.
This led me to think that it's amazing how we're programmed as children.
Older people teach us that if a boy treats you badly, pulls your hair or picks on you, it's because he likes you.
And so we grow up, with misconceptions and putting up with men's crap.
When we reach adolescence, we're taught that if a boy doesn't take you into account, it's because he's in love with you, but he's behaving like that to get you interested.
If he doesn't call us when he promised to, we keep making excuses:
"Ah..., that's because he's busy!"
"He's waiting for you to break the ice and take the first step and call him."
When we finally got up the courage to write to him and read our message, but he didn't respond at all, "Ah, he's going to answer you, he's probably out of battery!"
They also teach us to wait for the imminent call, filling us with absurd hopes and justifications.
"He probably called you and you didn't get the message, or maybe he lost your phone number... Or he had to leave on a trip, or his grandmother died, or he's sick...!"
And so we spend our lives misinterpreting "the signs".
Then we move on to playing the " hard girl" when he's not even taking us into account.
Our mothers and friends program us to think that if a man acts like an idiot, it's because he likes us.
I remember the landlines in our homes that had an answering machine and that answering machine may or may not have a message from the guy.
It was frustrating because there was hardly ever any. Today we need to go to all the social networks or applications on our mobile phones, to be rejected in several different technologies. It's exhausting. And the worst part is what it does to our self-esteem.
We always had that friend who told us stories about an other girl who went out with an idiot boy, who took weeks and even months to call her and in the end did everything right and today they are happy. But that's just an exception.
The reality is...
That if a man acts like he doesn't care about you, it's because he doesn't really care about you.
He didn't call you because he doesn't want to see you again, for him it was just a moment he shared with someone and that was it.
A man who wants a relationship to work will move mountains to keep the woman he cares about.
I think the great and interesting teaching of all this is that the happy ending does not include a wonderful guy. Because the end, maybe it's you, alone, understanding that things are just as we're seeing them, that you're going to have to pick up the pieces of your self-esteem and that you'll have to start all over again. Learning that there are no signs to understand, that it's all about wanting and not wanting.
Or maybe the happy ending is knowing that despite all the calls you didn't receive, despite all the misinterpreted signs, despite the pain and shame, you never, ever lost hope of keeping going.
Always remember this: Whoever wants to, finds a way.
He who does not want to, finds an excuse.
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