Tag: relationships

naamahdarling:

leeshajoy:

lilyvonpseudonym:

motleystitches:

artisansoulleader:

carrrrramelwax:

halfhardtorock:

Straight men who infantilize women’s friendships have no fucking survival instinct. Like my uncle is always making fun of and rolling his eyes at my aunt’s friend lunches and telephone dates with her lady friends, teasing her like she’s a gossipy teenage girl in high school drama. And my aunt just laughs about it but I know for a fact that if it wasn’t for her best friend K, she would have probably set him on fire by now. 

Like straight men are capable of maybe a quarter of the indepth emotional labor and support women do for each other. Like men can literally have one friend named Bob that they go fishing with once a year and still be content for life. Then they think it’s cute and girlish that their wives have these long term, integrated, emotionally intense relationships with women but like…LOL, it’s not because men don’t need those kinds of relationships, it’s just that they get it all from their wives while offering peanuts in return. PEANUTS.

Like if your woman is on the phone for 2 hours with her friend and you think that’s childish of her, just know that she spent half of that time getting the support that you should be giving her (but are incapable of) and the rest lamenting what a giant fucking baby manchild you are.

@sprinklecunttt lol

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

Men need to understand that women are capable of different friendships and they shouldn’t pass judgement whether a women are too ‘girlish’ or ‘antisocial’ or anything.

I always worry about these men. Like… Are they honestly incapable of understanding friendship? Are they honestly so messed up that they don’t understand what it’s like to be able to trust people to support you emotionally unless they’re sleeping with you?

This is the unspoken implications of the “friendzone” concept; it implies that friendship has no value. In fact, friendship has negative value, because it’s an obstacle in a man’s path to getting his dick wet, which is apparently the only valid reason for interacting with a woman.

OP is so right though.

Men don’t have differing needs for social support.  They just are encouraged by the toxic expectations placed on men to neglect themselves emotionally, and those same expectations also tell them women should take up the slack.

A lot of the time, the only reason men can get away with having one friend they see once a year is because there is a woman or several women in his life doing all the rest of that work for him.  Sometimes one woman doing the work of what really should be three other people.

Men aren’t taught to do emotional self-maintenance – hardly anyone is, but it seems especially neglected in men.  This is not only deeply harmful to these men, which is awful on its own, it is a completely unreasonable burden to put on women, it stunts their emotional development.  Those are emotional resources she could spend growing herself, actually reaching her potential, and they are being spent bringing someone else up to speed when that is a thing that they should mostly be doing for themselves.

This should not be an expectation we have of women, and yet it is.  We expect them to help make a man better.  And not just in the sense that a romantic relationship should encourage you both to be better, but in the sense that we expect women to do this at their expense, and any expectation that this should be a two-way deal is considered evidence of selfishness on her part, for some reason.  Women are expected to drop everything to tend to their boyfriends’ or husbands’ needs.

Men need to establish and nurture healthy friendships with other men.  Men need to take care of themselves emotionally, and contribute to the upkeep of other men in the way that women contribute to the upkeep of other women.

I’m not saying relationships between women are void of unhealthy dynamics, far, far from it.  I’m just saying that this plays out in hetero relationships in predictable and really disturbing ways on such a pervasive scale that it actually upsets me to contemplate it.  Most of the women I have known who are in relationships with women have been very happy.  Most of the ones in relationships with men have not been.  And ALL of the ones who have been with men have complained about the exact same set of behaviors.

Men aren’t natively awful.  Not at all.  We all start out as little babies, equally helpless and in need of support and attention.  But they get force-fed some truly horrible shit and as a result will utterly neglect themselves to the point of being barely capable of functioning without a woman as a caretaker, all while denigrating relationships between women as frivolous.  And they don’t see the problem with that, and then women are seen as selfish and awful for wanting to opt out of the whole deal.

Gross.