Background information:
It's been about eight weeks since I saw or spoke with my former best friend, the IG. We had a fight back in late May; she was the angry one who cut off contact, but it was my behavior that caused her to react like that. So blame to go around; to me for being an idiot and to her for not shaking it off or making herself clear in some less-extreme way. That established, we went about a month without speaking other than some very terse texts, and one brief face to face meeting when I retrieved a cat she was taking care of. Over the past couple of weeks we've gotten back to txting a little more frequently, but it's nothing like it was. During the spring we were trading numerous txts every day, talking on the phone several times a week, trading long emails, and hanging out for several hours at a time at least once a week. Perhaps too much time together, for a non-romantic M/F relationship...
The thing that's interesting to me, on a psychological level, is how she feels about our current estranged state. I spent all that time with her since I enjoyed spending time with her. While I understand that my jokes about, "Have you changed your mind about not wanting to fall in love, or be FWBs this week?" got old, and eventually drove her to demand a break, the way she's acting now is very annoying. And yet psychologically interesting.
Basically, she can't live with the fact that she instigated this, that she hurt my feelings and rejected me, and that she's not being a good (or adequate) friend now. She says we're still friends and that she just needs a break and that I need to understand that she's serious about not wanting to date/romance again. That's all quite reasonable. The part that amuses/vexes me is that she doesn't want me to feel bad about it, and she refuses to take responsibility for being the reason I do feel bad.
As I see it, this is
classic female-brain behavior. Women are negotiators and peace makers. They feel a need to patch over and soothe disagreements within the tribe. Not always, of course, and not all women, but the female brain tendency is towards agreement. They tend to be very unhappy and discontent when someone they care about is angry with them.
The obvious analogy harkens back to Malaya. During our relationship, I could never be in a bad mood. Especially not at her. If she did something that upset me, then she'd get upset that I was upset. Especially if I was upset with her. Very quickly things would escalate to the point that I had to stop being upset, since my anger was making her crazy, which in turn upset me. It sounds like a nuclear reactor, accelerating itself into a meltdown. It wasn't that bad, but the net result was that I could never be angry with her, since it made her so unhappy. Therefore, it was more or less incumbent upon me to not be in a bad mood or hold anything against her, and whenever she did something to upset me, that act or event became almost immediately irrelevant. (Because her resultant upset immediately trumped whatever I was upset about in the first place.)
I'm not suggesting this whole scenario was a conscious ploy on Malaya's part to change the subject or take my attention away from whatever she'd done to piss me off in the first place. It did basically have that as the end result, but she wasn't faking or pretending about it; she was genuinely anguished by my unhappiness. (And from my PoV, at least those disagreements were easy for me to fix. I just had to stop being upset. The times she was upset about something not due to me were the hard ones, since I couldn't so easily fix that.)
The IG's reaction now is much the same, at its root. She doesn't do the chain reaction/meltdown of increasing unhappiness (Or maybe she does; she doesn't say so in her sporadic txts, but we're not face to face or even voice to voice, so I really don't know for sure.) but she's totally unable to deal with the fact that she's done things to make me unhappy.
She's told me that she misses the long emails I used to send her (regular readers have probably noted an uptick in blogging frequency in June/July now that my various conversational observations are going up here, instead of to the IG via email), but when I do send her something she doesn't reply, or replies with a pointlessly brief comment. If I make a joke about how I'm going back to online dating since I miss leaving the house with female companionship, she gets all upset, like I'm blaming her for the fact that we're not hanging out anymore. After all, it's not like it was her choice to take some time off... oh wait.
The most recent example was yesterday, when I txted her to ask if she thought I could ever be happy dating a woman who wasn't talkative. It wasn't a hypothetical; I've had 2 online dating emails from a woman who is (apparently) interested in me, and they've been about 20 words. Combined. "Hi, how are you today Eric, I like that new photo, how was your trip to San Francisco?" That's almost an exact quote, of an entire email. With much improved spelling/punctuation.
I asked the IG about that since she's always urged me to date more, she loves to matchmake, she knows me pretty well, and (I think) knows that I could never be happy dating a woman who wasn't a good conversationalist with a lot of opinions and ideas. True, email writing doesn't necessarily preview how a face-to-face conversation will unfold (I've definitely learned that lesson in my months of online dating), but there's some correlation. Especially when this woman is the one pursuing me, she's trying to convince me that we should try a date, and she's read my dating site profile in which I stress that good conversation with an intelligent, informed, opinionated woman is about my #1 dating requirement.
The IG said (as I knew she would) something vague but cautiously encouraging, to the tune of, "Give her a chance, you never know!" To which I replied, "Well this woman has mailed me 2x and used about 15 total words. Most misspelled. Seems an ill omen." The IG said nothing back, and five minutes later I added, "Admittedly, the same is true of your emails. But this woman is trying to date me! In theory...."
In my ideal world, the IG would have replied with something like, "True, but it was you thinking with your dick that drove me to it." Which would be as (arguably) true as my comment, and along the same level of playfully-biting sarcasm. In reality, she said nothing for a few hours, and then sent me a long (for a text), hurt-sounding reply along the lines of, "Why do you keep making those sarcastic remarks. They hurt my feelings. I don't want you to be angry with me." Which is a reasonable remark, stemming straight from the typical female mindset of not wanting a friend to be upset... especially with her.
If we were living together, or seeing each other regularly, I'm sure that the same dynamic that went on with Malaya would be going on now. The fact that I was angry with the IG would be the thing that made her upset, and since her being upset was intolerable to me, I'd have to stop being angry to reset the whole dynamic. That's basically what's happening now, minus the fact that I can tolerate her being upset, and plus the fact that she's continuing to upset me by not communicating, not replying to emails, etc.
So my question, if I have one, is this. Does this sort of thing go on with most/all M/F relationships? Is this how most women react to the unhappiness of those they care about?
It's not that women can't take responsibility for being the source of someone else's unhappiness, and it's not that they must resolve, or at least contain/calm down all conflict, but there does seem to be a strong tendency for women to do all they can to avoid feeling that they are to blame for someone else's unhappiness, if that other person is someone they care about.
I don't think that men are immune to this urge, but as I understand it, the male mind is fundamentally more comfortable with competition and discord, even when the problem is with a friend. Brothers are quite often not at all friendly to each other, as their situation drives them to compete for resources and attention, and male friends can get into physical confrontations very easily. Men are able to make up and forget about it fairly easily too, or so the stereotype goes, and most men are much less bothered (than women) by the fact that they may have upset someone else.
In a semi-related issue, I realize that I'm being much more honest with the IG now than I was during the time we were friends, then dating, then friends, and then best friends. Now that I'm not harboring any thoughts, no matter how back burner'ed, about possible romance, I find myself much less concerned by her reaction to my normal behavior. I wasn't lying to her previously, but I was adjusting my personality in various ways. She's a very sweet, sincere, friendly young woman, so when I interacted with her I toned down my sarcasm and snark in general, and especially towards her. I wasn't doing that for some consciously manipulative, "Maybe now she'll want to fuck!" type reason. It was more about the fact that I knew her very well and had learned that she didn't appreciate that sort of thing. I think everyone does that around friends/loved ones; hides or brings out different aspects of their personality.
When you combine that with the fact that one of my (typically male) ways to deal with rejection or emotional upset is to get sarcastic and biting, it's a bad combination in terms of how I'm going to behave towards the IG. Especially when you add in the fact that I'm frequently annoyed with her, and not all that concerned if she realizes it. It's very male of me, I suppose.
Another related observation. The IG has lost about 3 points in attractiveness to me, since we had our falling out. I was going through the pics on my cell phone a couple of days ago, while trying lying on top of the covers in the early morning, waiting to cool down enough to go back to sleep after waking up in a sweat, courtesy of the two cats who were bookending me. And after deleting recent photos of cats and the garden and other bullshit, I eventually got to the 3 or 4 hot photos of the IG I've long cheered myself up by gazing upon. This time I looked and was like... eh.
The girl in them was cute, but nothing amazing. I found myself thinking, "I wouldn't click the thumbnail to see a larger view of these if I saw them on the Internet." Yet I could remember, less than six months ago, finding those exact same pictures absolutely riveting. Funny what emotional and sexual attraction does to the human mind and its ability to judge objectively.
Finally, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to reply again to the online dating woman. She chose me, and though she's fairly cute and slender, I would not have contacted her if I'd seen her profile first. Furthermore, WTF is with her emails? She'd have been hard-pressed to compose 2 messages that I found less appealing than the ones she sent me. Especially since she read my profile and knew the sort of woman I wanted. It's almost like she's playing a game or trying to win a bet: "Can I get this guy to want to date me despite sending him emails of exactly the type he's sure to dislike?"
I think not, even though if online dating has taught me anything it's that you really can't judge another person from their emails.
Labels: online dating, psychology, the I.G.
