Are Women Masochists?

“Along the path of discovery, you will learn to suffer less and seek the blessings that lie hidden in disappointment.” — from Angel Blessings. Chapter: Uriel, ministration.

Based on personal experience I can assert that what cements relationships between women the strongest is the boy-talk. Just as the HBO television series Sex and the City has so colourfully exposed, the driving force behind women’s get-togethers is a need to purge unsatisfactory relationship-experiences over coffee

Generally, in a tête à tête it works like this. One party begins with a list of detailed complaints about her love life, while the other party actively listens. After a full run-down of the situation has been exposed, the problem is workshopped until both parties are satisfied that some real insights and perspective have been achieved. Next, it’s the other party’s turn to do the same.

Over time I’ve come to view this as a highly narcissistic process. Such a pattern is not the blueprint of a democratic friendship, but a symbiosis between needy and self-obsessed individuals in search of self-affirmation. The dynamic is such that each party agrees to digest the other’s stories, in exchange for their turn at obsessing over paranoias.

I don’t believe it’s true that women talk about relationships more than men do because they nurture relationships more. To the contrary. As the years go by, I become increasingly appreciative of men’s ways as opposed to women’s habit to dissect situations into infinitely minute fragments until it becomes impossible to discern the purpose of such an exercise. It’s infuriating to watch grown women disperse their energies in such a way, as it only leads them to neurosis and insecurity. If women didn’t constantly succumb to the need to hyper-analyse every single human interaction, they might see the bigger picture and at last discover the pleasure of just being alive. This is something men are much better at than we, just living the moment and being content. Without neurotically searching for deeper meaning. In terms of personal fulfilment, if women simply stopped asking for permission over the things they feel they deserve, and just started taking what is theirs like men do, they might discover the fast track to personal satisfaction. But women always need approval.

Why are women so insecure? Men love us in spite of our imperfections and annoying habits. Isn’t that enough? They don’t try and change us, but if a man isn’t happy in a relationship, he reserves the right to leave. Women aren’t like that. They embark in relationships as if it were some personal holy grail. Like renovating a house in order to increase its market value, women often will try and improve the man they are going out with. This is a hopeless task. If you want a guy with good manners you should go out with a man that has good manners. If you want to spend evenings in highbrow conversations, choose a guy that’s educated. If you want a companion in sports, don’t fall in love with a couch potato. Instead women embark on hopeless quests by picking the wrong guy.

The higher the chances that the relationship might fail, the more time and energy the woman invests in trying to fix it. And she’ll keep going because her ego wont’ allow her to admit defeat. She’s poured so much of herself into working it out that it’s now a matter of pride. Unfortunately, it’s this very inability to face failure that compels most women into the: ‘If only I try harder, be more supportive, give him more time…’ syndrome. Meanwhile the years go by and the woman continues to whine to her girlfriends about how all men are flawed, instead of admitting that if she’d picked a different guy he might have made her happy. In a way, women are masochists that have and ingrained penchant for martyrdom. I just ask myself how long it will take women to realize that no prizes have ever been handed out for playing the martyr in a relationship. Has it never occurred to any of these women that it might be more relevant to change herself and her beliefs rather than waste time trying to change a man?

I spent the first half of my life in two long-term relationships with two dominant, self-centred men. I admired their self-confidence, their strength made me feel secure, until I realized that I both these relationships were stifling. In both cases, I was stuck in the same kind of situation: I constantly had to ask to be taken into consideration and resented my partners’ unlimited freedom. Eventually I realized that since I lacked the courage to spread my wings and try new things on my own, I was expressing these repressed desires through my domineering boyfriends. I had picked two strong-minded, arrogant men who put their needs and desires before mine, but while I resented them, secretly, I envied their personal freedom. Once I realized that I was wasting years in relationships that left me feeling second best, this very pattern became redundant.

It’s astounding how even intelligent women seem to be short-sighted when it comes to their own, self-inflicted misery. Looking at my single girlfriends what do I see? They all have a distinct pattern of their own.

Marion, 45, falls for men who are unfaithful. She moved in with a well-known playboy and devoted three years of her life to rehabilitating the man, only to discover that while she was abroad for work, he was canoodling with a former lover. Instead of dumping him, she quit her job in order to keep a closer eye on him.

Wilhelmina, 35, is a commitment phobic who pines for men who are elusive. When her long-distance boyfriend proposed marriage, she freaked out. She waited until the week preceding the wedding to call the whole thing off. During the five years that followed the aborted wedding plans she was riddled by guilt and second-thoughts, while having a series of relationships, which she invariably broke off when they became too heated, with the excuse that she was still in love with her ex fiancé.

Sondra, 30, is only interested in married men. She has spent the last four years of her life trying to convince two married men to abandon their wives and to move in with her instead.

Veronica, 37, gets drunk then has one-night stands with strangers. She craves love and attention so desperately; she cannot face the risk of rejection and disappointment. So she plays it safe by indiscriminately dragging home any guy who’ll follow her.

Bettina, 33, chooses abusive men. This is a physically strong, tall woman who plays the role of the vulnerable damsel in distress. She chooses rough macho men because they are masculine and make her feel feminine.

Claudia, 41, picks pessimistic men with low self-esteem issues. This is because these partners don’t constitute much of a challenge for her but they make her feel more competent. Unfortunately, what inevitably happens is that the men end up projecting their insecurities on to her, eventually gnawing away at her own confidence and joye de vivre.

Merissa, 27, is hopelessly insecure and suffers from a negative body image. She hides her awkwardness by flirting indiscriminately with any man in the room. When she sleeps with a guy, she get up early the following morning to put her make up on be fore he wakes up.

Gabrielle, 33, is addicted to cocaine because she feels sexually inadequate. Essentially a night creature, she roams the club scene looking for her next hit. After trying plastic surgery, pornography, and being in gay, S&M relationships, she has settled down with a brute that physically abuses her.

Doria, 44, is a jet setter. A society lady in the true sense of the word, she’s only ever seen wearing designer clothes and accessories. On a whim, she’ll fly off to Rio, New York, London or Madrid for a shopping spree and to catch up with friends. Truth is, she’s the eternal single as no man ever seems to be handsome enough, polite enough and rich enough.

With these kinds of patterns deeply engrained, women can ensure years of inexhaustible discussions about failed relationships and flawed men to their heart’s content. But persistent negative talk can be destructive. If the negative boyfriend talk becomes all-pervasive it eventually overpowers all other common interests between the women. Over time, all that is left between them are the words used to describe failed or unhappy relationships. In the case of my friend Sharon, I learned this lesson the hard way.

One afternoon, many years ago, sitting on the back steps of her home as I had done countless times before, I was engrossed in a long, detailed complaint about my partner’s shortcomings. Sharon listened intently but when I was finally quiet, expecting her to console me and then commence to relate what was wrong with her boyfriend in turn, she remained silent. She slowly unfolded a white plastic bag and commenced filling it with large lemons that she was picking from the lemon tree in the back yard. When the bag was full she haded it to me and said that she didn’t think that we ought to see each other any more. She said our relationship had become too co-dependent and depressing, that all it did was remind her of her failures. She’d given the matter some thought and decided that unless we had something positive to talk about, we were through. This is the only time a woman has ever broken up with me. I remember feeling mortified, for I could recognize that she was right, but I also felt that somehow she was being unfair. She’d changed the rules of the game without giving me a chance. I sat on the moss-covered steps of her house, clutching the bag of lemons, staring at the lemon tree, and felt like a fool.

At the time I thought that her attempt to coerce our relationship into a more sophisticated friendship, made Sharon more mature than me. But a few weeks later, her ex boyfriend had a restraining order issued against her. After he’d moved in with another woman, Sharon had commenced stalking their house. She’d never mentioned this to me, but apparently she was stuffing his letterbox with hate-mail, ringing the front door bell incessantly at all hours and calling his phone in the middle of the night, leaving blood-thirsty, threatening messages on the answering machine. I did hear a message in which she promised to rub the other woman’s face in broken glass. One night Sharon ran into the new couple in a nightclub. She gave the other woman a violent shove and pushed her down a flight of stairs. But her adversary was not easily overpowered. She retaliated, attacking Sharon and pinning her to the beer-stained carpet, clobbering her with a wooden clog. Two bouncers pulled the scratching, screaming, bleeding women apart. Later that night, Sharon threw a large potted cactus through the windshield of her ex’s Kingswood. It was raining. The next morning when he found his car, the rain was pouring onto the dashboard and the carpet through a gaping hole in the glass. Surrounded by a mound of soggy dirt, a large cactus and a cracked terracotta vase were strewn across front seat.

The last time I ever saw and spoke to Sharon was the morning after this incident. Her phone call, asking me to meet for brunch, immediately followed the phone call from her ex, informing our entire circle of friends that a restraining order had been filed against her at the local police station that very morning. When I saw Sharon, with whom I’d shared a decade of complicity, camping trips, cooking tips, make up, countless parties and gigs, music, books and even pets, I felt a chill run down my spine. Instead of the distraught person I’d expected, the woman facing me in the café was cool and poised. She held a frothy cappuccino up to her impeccably groomed lips and complimented me on my outfit. I was expecting a confession, a cry for help even. But she didn’t mention anything. Instead, she flatly declared to be over her ex. She said she was feeling relieved about the end of their affair and was taking it as a sign to move on. At the time I was terrified by what I could only describe as schizophrenia. But today, I see a desperate attempt by a woman out of control trying to save face. After all, denial is another female speciality.

During the golden years of our friendship, when Sharon and I frequented the club-scene together, she used to have a favourite saying. According to her, men fell into either of two categories: Breeders – the ones you wanted to have sex with and Providers – the ones you wanted to marry. Interestingly, her preference always landed on softhearted, uneducated musicians with a drinking problem.

Why do women choose the wrong guy? I’ve listened to many a male friend wondering in disbelief why most women want to date a bastard. And in fact, who doesn’t know (or has dated) a nice guy that’s been dumped for an utter asshole? Why do we do this? Obviously we derive some perverse pleasure in being able to declare that all men are bastards. That’s so unfair! I know plenty of men who are simply adorable. Another cliché women like to use is that all the good men are taken. Well that’s just an excuse. The reason that the good men are taken is that, luckily for them, there are enough women out there without issues, who feel they deserve a nice guy, and are able to recognize one when they cross his paths and know how to hold on to him.

Perhaps women who date the wrong men are simply perpetuating a family practice. In my case, my puberty years are filled with memories of my mother sitting at the kitchen table, sharing cigarettes and coffee with her best friend while they engaged in interminable descriptions of their husband’s faults. The slander was justified, as both husbands were adulterous misogynists and the women’s daily coffee meetings served both as therapy and a form of revenge. But if mothers are married to a bastard – therefore exposing their daughters to a bad male model – what hope does the next generation have?

Many girls are born, grow up and develop into women within the bosom of a dysfunctional family absorbing all the toxic values those relationships exude. Wether articulated of subliminal, the messages about communication, trust, love or the lack of, attach themselves inexorably to the identity of the young woman. From these domestic dynamics the young woman assimilates knowledge about the amount of power that she might yield in the world, and this will in turn affect her feelings of self-worth, her self-image and what kind of relationship she may hope for.

It is difficult to break the hold of engrained, destructive, co-dependent behaviour inherited from families. But as daunting as this task may seem, an effort has to be made. Even if it requires professional help. Or else, we’ll never truly develop into complete adult women. We might go through life allowing our wounded childhood to stay in charge and never become truly free to make objective decisions, in charge of our destiny. We are responsible for the making of our own happiness and this begins with healing the past in order to be able of letting go of all those negative experiences that have marked us in youth.

Women who cannot complete this process will continue to experience self-fulfilling prophecies about love and relationship. Never realizing that they are subconsciously setting themselves up for failure. A good example of this dynamic is seen in women who engage in one night stands or sex on the first date, then spend the following days waiting by the phone and feeling miserable about themselves. Of course the one-night stand man never calls (and why should he?) The self-fulfilling prophecy is that all men are bastards. It never ceases to amaze me how single women everywhere continuously plunge themselves into hopeless, no-win romantic situations and then blame the men for it. But as my male friends have proven to me many times: there are men who go for the one nightstand and men who’d never dream of having sex with a stranger.

First, why have a one night stand, which by definition cannot promise anything lasting and only conjures up feelings of insecurity, need and loneliness the day after? Besides, sex on the first night with a stranger is hardly ever truly satisfying. Instead women are willing to go through with it just for the ego gratification that they get from being able to drag a guy home. But considering that hetero men out there all want the same thing, taking a guy home can hardly qualify as an achievement! Instead of feeling grateful that he chooses us, we ought to realize that in fact women are giving men out for casual sex a grand service. And what’s worse, free of charge and with no strings attached! With women prepared to give it all away for free, Friday nights must be like everyman’s Christmas. But clearly, this is not the correct technique to attract a good man.

Secondly, if it’s only casual sex women are after, as they claim, then why on earth should they care about ever seeing him again? If we really want casual sex, then it’s time we started to have sex like the men and happily move on to the next conquest.

Thirdly, it’s about time women were more honest and admitted that engaging in casual intercourse is only a way to mask their longing for relationship. Because of their fear of sounding desperate and therefore be less competitive in the sexual market, women will pretend to be open and free, based on the belief that one night sex is better than nothing. But this is a compromise that will always see women as losers, because it will never bring them the satisfying interaction they really crave. Until they become clear about this dynamic, women will continue to trade physical relationship for the meeting of heart and mind with a lasting partner. Once again, all they are doing is catering for men’s needs while sublimating her own.

Love and relationship are areas of our lives that are too valuable to be traded. You cannot bargain for a high quality relationship. You either have one or you don’t. You’re either ready for one or you’re not. You are either prepared to consciously work towards manifesting one or you don’t.

Instead, all I hear is women moaning or getting all worked up about some toad they dragged home one night and hoping that by a pure miracle, he’ll turn out to be Prince Charming. Oh, really, what are the chances of that happening? These are all intelligent, educated women I’m talking about, my single friends, yet they’re all on the same merry-go-round, wondering what went wrong! Has it ever crossed their minds that it is not a lover’s task to be a catalyst for self-realization and resolving women’s issues of relationship? Because we are supposed to resolve all the emotional baggage first, in order to make room for true love to come into our life.

I for one, would refuse to embark on any emotional relationship that was based on resolving a partner’s issues; knowing perfectly well that this will not pave the way for an equality-based, healthy, long-lasting relationship. The dynamic at play there would be like parent-child. Therefore not exactly a mature relationship, based on equality between two consenting adults. But even assuming that a woman met a partner that was willing and able to take on such a responsibility, you’d immediately have to be suspicious about his ulterior motives (need for control?) But even assuming this were a feasible relationship, once the healing occurred the relationship would be completely exhausted. There could even be resentment. In any case, there would be no space, no mystery left between the partners, they’d both be forced to move on.

Looking outside oneself for the answers and the love we deserve is not the answer. There are no knights in shining armour out there, no heroes. But if we’re lucky, and if we’re prepared to work hard on paving the way, and if we believe, out of just a bunch of honest, kind-hearted men out there, we’ll find the one that is right for us. Because a happy relationship is not simply based on finding the right partner. A lasting, satisfying relationship first starts existing in our own hearts, the moment we realise that we are ready to embrace such an experience.

Sure, he may be just as flawed as the rest of us, but what sets the partner apart form the riff-raff is that he’ll stick with you through the ages, because he wants you, and in spite of the fact that he can truly see who you are and still loves you just the same, even when all your guards are down. And he’ll stand up for you and honour your name instead of playing childish games. And when he leaves the morning after, he’ll thank you, and asks when he can see you again.

As I said before, we cannot expect this healing to come from the outside. It’s like weight loss. You can spend a fortune on beauty products, buy all the self-help books on the market and go to the dietician every day and lecture your friends about nutrition, but it is not without commitment, sacrifice, perseverance and patience that real, long-term progress can be achieved! I guess everyone must find her own way. But actively seeking solutions to life’s problems is an ongoing process. It doesn’t necessarily get easier, but at least, over time we gain confidence in our instincts and accumulate some successes. Overcoming hurt and cynicism is a challenge that requires great courage because it has to be done alone. Some pain never really goes away, but it’s important to learn to co-exist with it. Because as long as we let it rule our lives, we’ll always make choices that are based in fear. Then our freedom will be stifled.

We are fortunate to live in a world that is full of resources that are easily accessible to us. Help is out there: wether in books or self-help groups, workshops or community work, therapy or yoga and meditation; there are such a many varied ways that an individual can explore. I think this inner search is an exciting journey that always brings its own rewards and is never short of gifts.