“Through all the drama – whether damned or not –
Love gilds the scene, and women guide the plot”
– Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Irish satirist, playwright, poet)
Prelude
Since moving to the US, some of my girl-friends and I were on a frenzied search for ‘one of the ones’. There are guys who have been searching too. But recently a male friend pointed out to me that the genders liked to conduct the search in rather different fashions…
What do women want but drama
It was a weekday night and I was plotting my Coffee meets Bagel strategy to conquer some guy with a promising profile. ‘This time I don’t want you to go crazy and pretend that you are in love with him’ advised my wise male friend. If you’ve read my previous blog-post (Theory X and Y) you will recall I wrote about a guy as ‘Prince Charming’. At the time, I had texted him for a week, and never met him in person. When the spell wore off, I realized I had been drawn to an image of him which I’d built up in my mind. I barely knew the guy behind that image, nor would I have been particularly willing to learn, because when the image is so strong and attractive, who wants to peel back the layer and check what’s actually there. (Furthermore, if Prince Charming is honest and makes clear to you he doesn’t like you in that way, you should back down, which I should have done earlier).
But anyways, this time I was meant to show some maturity and level-headed-ness characteristic of a woman of my age. It was all going well. I was rational. I was calm…Then in the dark of the night, I started day-dreaming about the CMB guy, imagining what our children would look like. We both have round faces so our kids would be so cute, thought I. And then imagining our MBA degrees hung up on the wall next to each other. And then the shame set in in dark waves. I had NEVER even said hello to this guy in person. I had NEVER heard his voice, and I had exchanged but a few messages on CMB. And I felt so excited about him, I should have been checked into an insane asylum. “Failure is the mother of all success” says Pitbull. Sometimes, all it takes is another rejection to set you straight…
…Fast forward a week, the excitement was gone, as were all the dating apps from my phone. I stood in the hotel pool with my friend, looking at her beautiful skin and silky hair, and savoring her deep insights. We had been through a lot together. Synchronized stories of high highs and low lows, and then the calming realization that large parts of this drama was self-created and self-imposed, and created and imposed on women by other women.
In the Jacuzzi, that incubator of great philosophical ideas, one question came floating to the top of my mind: “Why do we women keep being so pathetic and desperate?”
Why? Why was the over-priced Harvard Alumni Cheese & Wine Singles mixer for 33-55 year olds full of women, with very few men? (I heard. I wasn’t there to be clear. Like really, I wasn’t). “No guy would pay $150 to meet women” observed my friend. And yet women do, in the hopeless hope that they will meet the man of their dreams at some canapéd event.
Why are we the ones who want to be friends after a fling when the guy can just walk away? Why do we want to know if his Launch Day was a success? Or how his trip abroad was? Why do we care so much?
Sure, some of us are unattractive (it’s just the truth), but there are other girls who are beautiful, intelligent, strong, healthy, funny, charming, all the good qualities…and yet searching for a relationship and obsessing over strangers as if their life depends on it. They are reading books on how to improve themselves when they could be writing these books themselves. They are going for expensive facials when their skin has a natural glow that anyone with eyes would appreciate. When nothing is wrong with them, and everything is wrong with the endless pool of sub-par men out there, women are still the ones hell-bent on ‘fixing’ themselves. Another guy-friend very accurately observed on his gender: ‘We think we’re The Shit, when really we’re just shit’.
Some of these women are searching so hard, that they don’t even see the mediocre guy in front of them and fall in love with some image of him. Eventually the rose tint fades off your glasses and you realize you are sleeping next to someone who is not particularly intelligent, has barely inspired you to do anything great besides watching some new YouTube video, who complains about doing a meager amount of work around the house, and who is always putting his needs first whilst eating up your time and mental energy. And sometimes you put up with it for months at a time because you so desperately want a relationship.
One of my favorite quotes, as I justified all the time I wasted on dating these past few months, used to be: ‘Something is better than nothing’. I’d say this to my friends, to my sister, to anyone who dared question why I was begrudgingly going for drinks with someone who I didn’t really like (“I want to give him a chance”), or why I was still texting someone who texted me in two-day intervals when he had nothing better to do. Now I confess: Nothing is sometimes better than something.
Women have the most to lose from a relationship or even interactions with someone who is not right for them, yet we are the ones chasing it, and guys are the ones being like ‘Omg I value my freedom. I can’t be tied down’.
Why do we do it to ourselves? I believe there are 3 main reasons and then 1 little one (I’m a consultant, there has to be 3):
- We have a biological clock — Thank you Nature for this (sarcasm). But here I would like to invite some debate: perhaps the biological clock difference is not actually as great as perceived to be? Whilst post-35 is medically considered a ‘geriatric pregnancy’, you and I can both think of many women who have had healthy children post-35. In fact, my grandmother had her only child – my father – at 36. With the newest technology, and the option of adoption, we shouldn’t be as spooked as we are. But geez, women and men love to scare the hell out of women with this ‘tick tock tick tock’ talk which starts when you’re 26. Seriously.
- We are creatures of deep feeling and want to love. When I was 15, I scandalously read ‘Shanghai Baby’ (It’s not that good. Mostly indecent. It is banned in China for being pretty sexual). I don’t remember most of it, but one quote that I remember even today: “The men were like envelopes for my love.” It’s true. The women I hang out with are women of feeling and thought. And that energy has to go somewhere. With our busy lives, we can’t give it to the causes that truly deserve it: animal rights, environmentalism, championing minorities, healing the sick. Our activism is mostly limited to sharing links on Facebook with some angry comment. And then you’re left with this beating heart that still needs to love and it wants to attach to something, anything. I understand these women, because I’m a feeler myself. When I told a few guys how I felt or how my female friends felt, they came back with reactions like ‘Why are you overthinking it?’, ‘Just don’t think so much’. Classic.
- There are real societal penalties for ageing — ‘It’s all in your head’ is also not fair to say about most women’s issues. There is increasingly greater evidence to back up what we all intuitively knew. For example, women don’t negotiate in the work-place not because they don’t want to, but because they actually get punished for it. Similarly, women get punished for ageing way harsher than men. And so in our heads, it’s not just tick-tock-baby-clock but tick-tock-wrinkle-clock. What can I say? As a society, we need to progress to caring less about women’s looks. I do my part for this cause by always looking shitty 🙂
And lastly, there may be a little, just a little, element of women loving drama and poetry — so even when there is no basis for it, we have to create it. This reason I find somewhat permissible. I’m Punjabi. I’m a woman. And that combination means I love drama more than anyone. But every now and again, I realize I have to take a step back and realize I can’t get caught up in the drama that I created, and actually start living in the air-castles I built up.
In my next blog-post, I look at the air-castles that society and Disney built up for us right from the start…your jaded Stiletto muse is baaccckkkk and it’s time to get real again!
