From: antipope@rachel.ibmpcug.co.uk (charless@scol.sco.com)
Newsgroups: alt.peeves
Subject: Re: Take up a hobby, instead
Date: 19 Nov 92 10:08:24 GMT
Organization: The IBM PC User Group, UK.

dmunroe@vcd.hp.com (Dave Munroe) writes:
> Elaine Richards writes:
> 
> >Women care a lot more about how their partners behave than men do.
> >Men don't want to think about it, as long as they "get some".
> 
> Are you saying that a woman cares more about how a man treats her in a
> relationship than a man would care how he's being treated as long as he
> is getting sex?  That would be a pretty shallow guy - in fact, I'd classify
> him as one of the above jerks.  The whole purpose of the book that Bill
> mentioned was precisely that: men care how they're treated.  This stuff
> about men just concerned about getting sex is poodlesnot.  Hell, on my
> list of concerns, my concern about "getting some" ranks even below my
> concern about why Geoff Miller voted for Clinton.

Dead right.

For once the normally perceptive Booter gets it wrong. Probably not
in the case of a sex-starved teen-ager; but there comes a point in
life -- for those males who are within a couple of standard 
deviations of the norm physically and who are not total BDI's -- 
when they realise that rubbing mucous membranes together, while fun, 
is not enough on its own to sustain a relationship.  This usually 
happens  (curiously enough) about the time they discover that one-night
stands aren't worth the candle-grease. Indeed, it can be said that
this realisation -- not growing fluff on the chin or being 
licensed to vote -- is the true checkpoint for maturity among
human males.

Sadly, men tend to mature later than women in this respect. I put it
down to the kind of emotional constipation that's rigidly imposed 
on boy children in this culture. ``Real men'' don't cry, express
emotion, or pay any attention to that sort of stuff, or so we're
taught. Which is a pisser, because it ain't true at all: show me
a man who fits that stereotype and I'll show you a sociopath.

This kind of bullshit is insidious, and responsible for more human 
misery than any war -- I'm not exaggerating. The fact that 
people can make money by explaining that men aren't androids
who feel no emotional involvement with their environment is a 
symptom of a pathological condition in society. Indeed, the 
fact that anyone could be misled by the stereotype in the first
place is frightening. Sadly, all too many men are taken in by
this false image of what-it-is-to-be-a-man, and never quite
figure out why nobody likes them.

My experience -- based on observation of the people around me, 
and some personal involvement -- suggests that there are as many
ways for relationships to go down the pan as there are people to
have the relationships; but two shit-kickers are particularly
common. Type #1 is where one partner invests a lot of their 
self-respect in their status within the relationship. When the
relationship changes, everything falls apart; and it usually _will_
change, because their partner is almost certainly going to change
over time. As an example, take the conventionally-minded hetero-
sexual couple who get married early and have kids; husband works, 
wife breeds. Then the husband gets made redundant, or the wife slowly
realises that she's sacrificed ten years to bring up a bunch of
ungrateful brats and what has _she_ gotten out of it. (Discovering
that you've wasted several years of your life is a salutatory
experience; I'd recomment it to everyone ... just once.) Under 
this kind of stress, people change; and relationships built
on the assumption that the other component of the relationship is
unchanging -- either passive, maternal, emotionally or economically
dependant: or strong, impassive, economically productive -- are
about as solid as the tissue of lying stereotypes they're based
on.

Then there's bum relationship type #2. One or the other partner is 
immature insofar as they haven't figured out what they want out of life.
Men who want to get their end away, women brainwashed into
defining their self-worth in terms of children; that kind of
nonsense. Such relationships go to hell in a handbasket as soon as one 
partner or the other grows up; the only way they survive is if 
_both_ partners grow up at the same time ... which is rare.

Finally there's bum relationship type #3: when you get along
wonderfully, then after a few years they go and die on you. Sadly,
this is inevitable -- ``nobody gets out of here alive.'' 

All of which leads me to hypothesize that maybe, just maybe, all
those Nice Guys out there have got their heads screwed on the
right way round, and they're staying single deliberately.

Then again, maybe not ...

>>> Charlie

-- 
Antipope -- HE gives you Bull, I give you the Straight ... er ....