Girls get a lot of heat for doing what they feel is right, and I'm currently sympathizing with two of my girl friends who are boy-crazy at the moment. One was brutally ignored after a heavenly time in the bedroom with a charming young man, and the other has been working her butt off in the relationship whilst the guy is doing diddly squat. Because of this, I realized that girls have a lot of rules to live by, and none of the rules make sense. We still live in a highly patriarchal society where the girls have little control over romantic situations, and it's pretty tiring.
Let's get to it:
Girls walk on a tightrope in the beginning of the relationship. At least, that's the case for girls my age. They are rarely ever in charge of how a relationship unravels. They become the receiver, not an instigator, and I think that's a harmful way of thinking. Our actions are based on the other party. What we do or say is rarely what we feel, but it is all for the sake of being answered and liked in return. We watch what we say to the point where we don't say anything worth hearing. We have become prisoners to the opinion of men. We need to constantly prove to them that we are not 'crazy'.
Case in point, after listening to the woes of my friend about a guy who didn't return her texts after a night spent together, I realized that we are not the ones who make decisions. If we text him more than the acceptable number of times, then we are labeled as clingy and a pester. If we don't text him at all then we'll be seen as a slut who throw away men like tissue paper. We need to find a middle ground, and that's pretty difficult. If we attempt to establish or initiate a relationship, we'll be seen as desperate, so we wait for the phone call that never comes.
I'm generalizing here, but from my experience and from hearing the stories of many girls, I have discovered that women have no power during the initial relationship. We have been taught not to text first, not to ask him out, to leave some mystery, to do this and that. There's a whole list of things we should and shouldn't do in the beginning of a relationship, and it's ridiculous that we have to abide by the standards set by men.
Like my friends, I too, am guilty of following the rules of Girl World. I rarely attempt or initiate anything romantic because I have been conditioned to believe that it is not my place. I am the damsel in distress and he is the knight. I have to wait to be saved, not to look for him in the woods. My romantic decisions have hitherto been dependent on the men. Whatever I do or say will have the connotation of, "how will this make me seem?" I have become obsessed with how the world sees me instead of projecting my true self.
We wait for the text message. We wait for the invitation to meet again. We wait for him. Silence would mean a plethora of things; did I do something wrong? Am I not good enough? I shouldn't have said that to him. We begin to blame ourselves for the man's unknown reasons as to why he did not initiate a second meeting. We look at ourselves when we are rejected instead of looking at the rejector.
Men peg us women as crazy, needy bitches so much to the point where we cannot express our innermost emotions in fear that we would be cast away into the Crazy Zone. We create a persona about ourselves that would appeal to men to prove that we do not fit into the stereotypical female figure they have conjured up. Due to this charade that we play, we feel clamped and restricted. We cannot freely do or say what we want because no matter how reasonable we are, we will still be seen as the crazy one.
"What men mean when they talk about their “crazy” ex-girlfriend is often that she was someone who cried a lot, or texted too often, or had an eating disorder, or wanted too much/too little sex, or generally felt anything beyond the realm of emotionally undemanding agreement. That does not make these women crazy. That makes those women human beings, who have flaws, and emotional weak spots. However, deciding that any behavior that he does not like must be insane– well, that does make a man a jerk.
And when men do this on a regular basis, remember that, if you are a woman, you are not the exception. You are not so cool and fabulous and levelheaded that they will totally get where you are coming from when you show emotions other than “pleasant agreement.”
When men say “most women are crazy, but not you, you’re so cool” the subtext is not, “I love you, be the mother to my children.” The subtext is “do not step out of line, here.” If you get close enough to the men who say things like this, eventually, you will do something that they do not find pleasant. They will decide you are crazy, because this is something they have already decided about women in general."
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