I dated this girl once, we were together through high school, college, and a while after. We were close, and she is the most direct person I've ever met.
I try to avoid sexual stereotypes, but here's a stereotype about men, we're fighters.
Any time she said to me 'I'm not ok', my immediate response was an extreme and incessant need to fix and/or destroy whatever the problem was. The problem could be something unrelated to me, or even something I had done myself. When she said she wasn't ok, I responded with alacrity. I became focused on whatever the problem was, whether my fault or another's. Those three words caused me to focus like a laser on whatever the issue was.
Many people try to avoid confrontation, it's a natural instinct. But an intricacy of the male mind is that we're pack animals, we always fight to protect our pack. I have no idea how women feel about directness, but men respond to it. We protect the pack, even if the pack is just the two of us.
7 comments:
Very true. And it's very rare that they want you to fix it which makes it worse.
like. just like.
Matt: I think they want us to make it right, I just think think they don't always want us to fix it the way we want to fix it.
All I'm saying is, when she said she wasn't ok, it brought my mind to bare on the issue at hand.
Let me know when you figure this out because I gave up long ago.
Hm. I've never seen this characteristic, and I'm being serious here. The men I've known well seem to want to avoid or ignore problems, not try to fix them.
I think we just all have different experience with this type of thing and that it's probably not worth generalizing about, lest we make ourselves and each other crazy.
Glad to see you have blogged some since I last checked though :)
Anything's possible. I'd be the first to agree that healthy communication is a minefield.
Of course, to be fair, Jill, my female roommate always remarks that I think more like a woman than a man whenever we're discussing either one of her relationships, or one of mine. So maybe I should'a titled this post "How I think. Vol 1" :)
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