Why You're Still Single by Evan Marc Katz & Linda Holmes

Why You're Still Single by Evan Marc Katz & Linda Holmes

Author:Evan Marc Katz & Linda Holmes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-06-28T00:00:00+00:00


Linda

There are two different things going on in Evan’s example. The futility of trying to alter a person’s essence is a different issue than being overly picky about foot care.

As to why women try for the big changes, the reasons are fairly obvious when you’ve watched enough chick flicks. The cultural obsession with romantic love revolves in large part around the mostly false notion that it will make you someone else: the poor become rich, the ugly become beautiful, princesses literally rise from the fireplace ashes, and a frog is only a frog because he doesn’t get enough smooches. There’s a pretty powerful drive to be on either side of that myth—to find yourself miraculously transformed or to transform someone else.

In most cases, though, romantic ideas have a rather mundane flip side. Here, it’s inertia. Giving up parts of your routine is always painful. People resist giving up relationships just like they do jobs and apartments. They stay too long when it’s not working, and then they have so much sunk into it that they can’t leave without feeling like they’ve lost whatever they invested. It’s less wrenching to try to mold the person you have into the person you want than it is to throw yourself into being single again. So you get into an endless cycle of hunting for fixes that don’t work because they can’t work, and that’s not fun for anybody.

To the degree that there’s a sociological or psychological explanation for “men as projects,” my sense is that this is an issue mostly for women who don’t like themselves very much. They don’t think anybody good is coming for them, and they certainly would never approach anyone good for fear of being cut off at the knees. But they don’t want to be alone, either. So they pick a guy who’s kind of a jackass and try to “bring him around” with the hope of winding up with someone good without having to upset the order of things too much. They believe that they will have, in a sense, beaten the system. It may be simplistic, but that has been my experience with the women I know. And, of course, have been.

So those are the big changes. What about the little nitpicks? I always suspect those things are ways of taking the temperature of the relationship. The objective isn’t really to change the behavior, which, after all, doesn’t matter. The objective, at least at some level, is to find out whether the guy will knock it off if you ask, essentially just because you ask. (Note that the associated stereotypically male behavior is nailing his feet to the floor about a perfectly reasonable and largely meaningless issue just to prove that you are not the boss of him.) These are tests, really, and tests are not a good idea.

Temptation lies in the fact that, every once in a while, people do change. In some cases, they change a lot. The problem is that they don’t change for other people.



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