The other week a friend of mine was talking about her fiancée getting a new car and she was thinking about selling hers, leaving them with one car. She said she was leery about doing this. I knew what she would say but I asked her, "Why?" anyhow. She said, "What if something happens and we don't stay together?"
This got me thinking, probably WAY too much, about what would cause her and many other women to question the validity of their relationships.
I don't even know where to begin with this! I've been thinking about it for over a week and my thoughts are still jumbled. I suppose I'll start with what I had originally thought about this.
Has society changed SO much that people have become so exchangeable? Maybe exchangeable isn't the right word but I'm sticking with it.
No... this isn't right! I can't get the words from my head onto the screen!
Let me start somewhere else.
In the society that we live in, it has become very easy to leave someone, because we can very easily find someone else to replace them. It happens over and over again. We start relationships and then they end for some reason or another. Divorce has become an easy out. Not many people are willing to work together to make things work. It's too much work to do that and it's easier to find someone else that will take you as you are for a short time (even though it's really not much easier, in my opinion)
Are both the women and men equally responsible for this? I got to thinking about the expectations that women have... because women usually are the ones that get the ball rolling... either from being upset about something because the man didn't do something or another... or he did something that they didn't like. Women put MANY many expectations on men.
I'm trying to figure out where these expectations come from. Women didn't always require so many things from men. Something happened over time to change these expectations.
Why is this? Is it these expectations that are causing the decline in relationships?
From an early age, girls watch various movies and read various books that tend to have a common theme. There is a girl/woman who falls in love with the perfect man (which there is never much description about... the men tend to be these mindless beings that fall all over the girls) and then they have some sort of obstacle where the man proves his love and they end up living happily ever after. These stories lead girls to think about the man they will fall in love with. They think about how perfect he will be... how perfect their relationship will be together. Thus begins the search for the "perfect" man.
After a slue of relationships that are failures, women start to create new expectations that are almost impossible for any man to fill. It is understandable to have some expectations out of a relationship... but I think that women take it a little too far (I am guilty of this as well). Women begin to see men as these mindless creatures that aren't following the "rules" because they want to upset them. Everything that they do, or don't do seems to be done on purpose. What fails to be acknowledged is that men are human.
"To err is human." (Alexander Pope)
Men don't even know what these expectations are because women don't want to tell them. They should just know what they should be doing. How is this fair?
Women then tend to begin relationships with the expectation that the man is going to fuck up. The relationship is doomed before it even starts. Is it this expectation that causes the relationship to fail? We don't start our friendships with the same idea in mind... and those tend to last a lifetime.
One thing that many women expect is that their boyfriends/husbands will end up cheating on them. Why do women believe this? Well, for thousands of years men have been cheating on women and we hear about it ALL the time. Now, we can even hear about it on the nightly news! What people have failed to recognize, is that women have also been cheating on men for thousands of years. We just don't hear about it. Why is that?
Point of this blog?
When there is a job to be done people tend to expect the job to get done and that the job will be done well. If we don't expect it to go well, it usually doesn't. We are told what is expected and we do what we can to do the best that we can.
What we expect out of relationships tends to disappoint men and women alike. Why do we create these expectations without telling our partners what we expect? Romantic relationships tend to be the only situation where people don't share their expectations. Why is that?
Both the women and the men need to be more verbal and realistic in the expectations of their partner. Understand that there is no such thing as the "perfect man" or "perfect woman" because NO one is perfect. We can work with each other to make something that is really good but we will forever be doomed for failure if we keep expecting too much and leave no room for error.
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