His Friends Say He’s Acting Like a Jerk
by Mike Pilinski on Feb.03, 2010, under General Thoughts
The following Q&A is from today’s “Tell Me About It” syndicated column by Carolyn Hax (dated Feb. 3, 2010). She writes mostly general relationship advice for the newspaper, but this particular one caught my eye — so I clipped it out, scanned it and I’ve added in my 2 cents at the end:
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Dear Carolyn,
I am 29 and single. I have a very strong mother who raised me to treat women with respect. I was taught that women are strong, intelligent and independent. And that women don’t need any special treatment.
When I go on dates I treat women that way. I respect them, but I don’t offer to hold their door open, or always take my car. I ask if they want to drive. And I always split the check rather than pay for them. I think it’s insulting to assume that women are fragile.
As you can imagine, I don’t get very many second dates. And most of my female friends say I act like a jerk. Am I a jerk? Should I change my way of thinking, or stay strong to my beliefs … and remain single?
~ B from Maine
Your mother instilled in you some valuable beliefs, but either she or you fashioned them into a needlessly blunt instrument.
Dates have nothing to do with scoring political points. If you ask someone to dinner, you pay. Not because your dinner companion is financially dependent upon you, but because you are the host and the pleasure of someone’s company is more than worth paying the tab.
If you get to a door first, you hold it for the next person. Not because that person is too frail to handle the door, but because it’s the courteous thing to do.
If you are amenable to giving your companion a ride, then you offer a ride.
Note that none of these actions are gender specific. Each is simply one person showing kindness to another… and people of all varieties appreciate kindness. Even the strong, intelligent and independent ones.
You have female friends, so presumably you enjoy their company. Dating women needn’t be any more complicated than your friendships. Try being kind, not right. See if that helps.
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My Comments:
Well it looks like good ol’ “B from Maine’s” flinty cool New England sensibilities aren’t serving him very well in his dating life!
I actually get a lot of mail from guys like this who claim they do absolutely nothing wrong when they take women out, are perfect gentlemen to them, etc. etc. — and yet they can’t seem to get second dates most of the time. I’m not there watching what they’re doing (but boy would I love to!) so it puzzles me as to what these men could be doing so deadly wrong. It’s tough to guess when you’re only hearing one side of the story.
So it occurred to me while reading this piece in the paper today that some of these guys might have screwed-up internal “rules of personal conduct” which handcuff them to the point where they are genuinely unable to get a sense of how their behaviors are viewed by others. Let’s remember that the act of Dating itself is mainly about determining what sort of personality you’re dealing with, to see if that person’s initial attractiveness will hold up after a few hours of hanging out with them. Yes, it’s all just a big test (and BTW, it’s a test for her too!)
I’m sure it’s probably obvious to many of you how and why this guy comes off like ‘a jerk’. But here’s his One Big Mistake in a nutshell: he’s refusing to play the game of courtship — and consequently the women red flag him as a stiff, uptight, BORING and possibly difficult personality as a result… and who the hell wants to get involved with someone like that?
Carolyn’s opening remark is profound in her observation that he’s taken a (possibly) well-meaning respect for women, taught to him by his mom, and turned it into a “blunt instrument”. (As an aside: I often wonder what twisted motivations serve as a base for the things that our parents teach us. Why was his “very strong mother” so intent on teaching her son to respect women at all costs anyway? Maybe because good old dad (or the previous men in her life) routinely treated her with little or none at all? Just wondering…) Therein lies the roots of shame transfer, but that’s more grist for a future post.
What I’m thinking in this case is that there’s an aspect of underlying anger or rage present here that’s expressing itself in this very passive-aggressive way. Some of this could actually be anger at the controlling Mom herself, which the women that ‘B’ dates are only acting as stand-ins for… but that’s getting into speculative psychology. I’m just trying to point out that everything in human nature is Cause-and-Effect. None of us grows up in a vacuum. That’s why it’s important to become self-aware and dig into your underlying motives for acting in the ways that you do. By pulling these things out into the sunlight they will sometimes just burn up in the heat of logic and reason and go away — and then you’ve taken a significant first step in changing in your life.
Anyway, I’m sure you can see how adherence to such particular guidelines of strict personal behavior are throwing up an emotionless, distant wall between ‘B’ and his dates — when instead he should be trying to create some sort of emotional connection with them. But that would mean having to play the courtship game of deference and charm and to act in a much different way than he describes.
Note that I said ACT… as in “being on your best behavior” — which simply means that you present yourself in a way that’s better than ordinary for the purpose of making a good impression on someone. You would no more act your usual nasty old self on a date than you would on a job interview, right? Unless of course you secretly wanted to sabotage the interview and NOT get the job (or the second date for that matter) so you could stay home on unemployment and keep torturing mother? I’m just saying…
‘B’s refusal to act in ways that would endear him to his date have motivations that could be variously described as stubborn, self-hating, “logical” or any number of other ‘good reasons’. But mainly, highly structured behavior also screams out another word to me: FEAR. People who have a need to control and micro-manage every little thing about themselves and their environment have a huge fear of the unknown or of having things slip out of their control. Part of ‘B’s motivation for acting as he does on these dates could have something to do with ‘control-freak anxieties’. Again, without being able to sit down with this guy and pick his brain all we can do is speculate, but it’s certainly another possibility.
This sort of thing is more like a bad habit than a personality disorder, but it can screw you up in countless little ways regardless, as you see here. Self-Awareness friends, self-awareness!
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13 Comments for this entry
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February 7th, 2010 on 12:07 am
I never hold the door open the way a gentleman does, although I will hold something open like I would for my guy friends, I never offer to pay for anything other than myself (although it’s not usually expected of me because I don’t invite people out to dates that cost any $), I don’t care who drives… and I almost always get laid on the first date, and have second dates.
In the early 90’s when I first started dating, I offered to pay for the movie tickets of the first few girls I brought out on dates and they all insisted on paying for their own tickets. I went on to have sex and relationships with those girls as well.
In short, I invited women out to dates, or even movies, they refused to let me pay for anything, we’d have sex, and then have second dates. I neither hold chairs out for women, open her car door for her, or insist the woman go through the door first, and everything still works out. Now I do everything the same except that I don’t actually invite them out to a movie, just to meet somewhere or have fun, I don’t pay, and it still works out just as well.
I have to say that I’ve heard this line before, “If you ask someone to dinner, you pay…. because you are the host and the pleasure of someone’s company is more than worth paying the tab.” That’s a pretty clever dodge basically saying “when it comes to the parts of equality between the sexes that I like, such as in the workplace, I want equality, but when it comes to the parts I don’t like, such as when it comes to paying for half of my own dates, I don’t want equality”. Oddly enough during the 70’s, when women’s lib first really started taking hold, that’s not how the women who I first started dating in the 90’s took it. How often do women invite men out to something that requires money, especially before a committed relationship? My experience has also been that the women who do are the last women in the world I want to be in a relationship with.
You can avoid all of that just by inviting them out to things that don’t cost money, to have fun, and take it from there. If anything it works out better.
February 7th, 2010 on 2:34 am
Mike,
You’re probably right about the fear and anxiety, control-freak thing. And also about the way this guy interpreted his mother’s feminist tilt. One other thing I thought of, though, is I’d bet he grew up without his father around or without a father-figure role model. And the latter can happen WITH the father being there, too. The picture: strong mother, wussie father = messed up son, not learning how to be a man.
February 7th, 2010 on 6:33 am
“Note that none of these actions are gender specific”
Ha ha ha ha ha! Oh, yet another princess that thinks her company is so valuable that guys should pay for the privilege.
As I type this my eye is caught by a headline in the list on the right “Guys should be a challenge to women” which sums up nicely what he is doing wrong. He certainly shouldn’t be the doormat Ms Hax suggests. His problem is that he is treating is if they are relatives, and not red blooded women who are looking for relationship that has the whole nine yards, which includes the six inches as well as fun, laughter, romance, putting up shelves, not farting in bed etc.
His mother never wondered (I hope) if he and she would make beautiful babies together, but someone looking for a life partner has that somewhere in her mind, even if tucked far in the back. If he’s fun and gets into her personal space now and again, it won’t matter whether he is a ‘gentleman’ or ‘jerk’. If he doesn’t he is just looking towards a life of giving free meals to people who don’t respect him coupled with increasing frustration, resentment and loneliness.
February 7th, 2010 on 2:08 pm
Man you just described my family! No wonders I always had trouble with this stuff!
February 7th, 2010 on 11:01 pm
I think that is an interesting point, it made me think a bit. Thanks for sparking my thinking cap. Sometimes I get so much in a rut that I just feel like a record.
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February 11th, 2010 on 2:24 pm
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