Heterosexual Relationships - Tumblr Posts

How to love a boy:

A friend of mine asked me recently how to compliment a boy. She was worried about making him feel too feminine in her compliments, and it spurred a whole train of thought I wasn’t expecting to arise.

I’ve been dating both men and women for a few years now, and I tend to treat them both pretty equally in my partnerships with them. When I am dating a man and I do something/say something that is more common to do/say for a woman, they seem to be surprised by it. I’ve been told that they never received that sort of kindness before, and it shocks me every time. From this experience as a context, here is what advice I’d give to any girl out there who wants to date/is dating a boy. No matter how long you’ve been together or how old you are, it feels important to me.

Men want to be given the same kindness they’re expected to give women. Excluding the guys who suck and are fuck boys, guys who want relationships and want to be in love are taught to be chivalrous (in a modern sense now). This means making the first move most of the time, holding the door for her, texting her first, buying the food for her, showering her with compliments, etc. Men rarely feel this chivalry is reciprocated, as lots of heterosexual relationships are built on very one-sided gender roles. The man does this, the woman does that. I recommend that you take the initiate to counter those roles, show your man you want him. Show your man you appreciate him. Text him first, take him on dates, buy him a coffee every once in awhile, be the big spoon, play with his hair, kiss him first, make the first move sometimes. It can be scary at first, especially if you aren’t used to this dynamic, but it’s worth it.

There are exceptions of course, but I believe generally that men and women are the same in their desire to love and to be loved. We can have different perceptions of what that means, but we all want to know we are cared for. It’s human nature.

“Societal Stockholm Syndrome theory explains women’s love of men as a form of bonding to an abuser, made possible in part by the mental-emotional operation of splitting. Because women’s terror of male violence is so great and male kindnesses are so small by comparison, women engage in the psychic defense of splitting. Splitting means that one cannot simultaneously see both the good and the bad in another person or persons. Applied to male-female relations, splitting means that women see men as either all good or all bad, or that we see men as good and women as bad. As used here, splitting also refers to women’s denial of men’s violence and to our exaggerated perceptions of men’s kindnesses. Splitting thus works to keep women’s perceptions of the terrorizing side of men from overwhelming our perceptions of men’s kind side and destroying women’s hope for survival. A result of this splitting is that women separate men into two classes, the predators (rapists, wife beaters, incest perpetrators) and the protectors. This compartmentalizing leaves women unable to recognize the ways in which all men are kind to women (in some ways) while also promoting and benefiting from their aggression against women. All women seem to engage in such splitting to one extent or another. Regarding antifeminists, Rowland (1984) comments: “There are … two groups of men: decent, loving husbands and fathers, and those unmarried, childless and irresponsible men.” The husband who rapes and batters his wife and the father who sexually abuses his children are not recognized; nor is the kind, responsible bachelor. Any husband or father is, by definition, regarded as good; any bachelor as untrustworthy. While Rowland (1986) found feminists to “loathe … the violence and cruelty of men, … antifeminists seem either to ignore this [violence and cruelty], or [to] believe it only exists in the ‘odd’ case.” Having split apart the terrorizing and kind sides of men so that the hope created by male kindness is not overwhelmed by fear, and having denied the terrorizing side of men, women bond to the kind side of men. After all, why wouldn’t a person bond to another person whom she saw as kind and whose threats of violence and actual violence she had denied? The result is that women “fall in love” with our oppressors even as we fear them. For instance, antifeminist women report that men are untrustworthy and are users of women, but they say they like men and find their husbands “wonderful” and “loving” (Rowland 1984). Women may “fall in love” with men because of our need to believe that the terror will end, that we can “tame” or “control” our terrorizers so that they will protect and nurture us (e.g., see Schlafly 1977). Splitting is manifested on a cultural level through societal demands that women love men no matter what they do to us and that women devalue women no matter how good we are. Dr. Edna Rawlings and I have asked students in our classes to describe characteristics of people whom they’ve heard called “man-haters” and “woman-haters.” A man hater is a woman who speaks her own mind, a feminist, or a lesbian: in other words, a woman who has her own voice and doesn’t put men first is a man-hater. By contrast, students are unable to recall any situations in which they have heard someone being called a woman-hater. We ask, “Are rapists and wife batterers woman-haters?” They answer, “Just because a man rapes or batters women doesn’t mean he hates women.” The differential definitions ascribed to terms that should have equivalent meanings suggest an enormous collective need both to deny male hatred of women and to derogate independent female action (which might be used to expose expressions of that male hatred).”

— Loving to Survive by Dee L.R. Graham