Lollie72 Posted June 21, 2006 Posted June 21, 2006 Why do men approach relationships like their COMPETTITIVE or AT WAR! Please explain this to me or point me in the direction of one that doesn't and will be a whole lot more comfortable to love....
Trimmer Posted June 21, 2006 Posted June 21, 2006 I'm unsure ... how you reached this generalization. I will tell you, as a man, that it doesn't apply to me, although I don't expect you to love me for it. I won't apologize for a minute for expressing anger and hurt at what happened in my marriage, but until it went dysfunctional (and for that matter, even afterward), I never, ever, considered or treated it as a competition, a battle, or anything like that. If you spend any amount of time on the Separation and Divorce forum or especially the Infidelity board, you will find hurt and angry people of both sexes; this is partly a place to vent and share these feelings, so certainly those strong emotions run metaphorically through the discussions. Sometimes there is some very valid advice given in the direction of "stand up for yourself" or the like. And sometimes the pain is so intense that we men fall into a siege mentality, almost as a matter of survival. I know the kind of hyperbole you are talking about. But you are looking at a small sample of men under stressful, abnormal circumstances. I don't expect that it's reasonable to generalize this narrow sample to all men in all marriages, any more than it would be reasonable to say "explain to me why women refuse to communicate their needs and expect men to read their minds, hiding any true, open attempt at communication until the marriage is already dead and dried out, and then they complain that their needs were not being met..." I'm sure you can find repetitive examples of that here on LS, but I don't believe that it applies to "all women" as a generalization. Everyone's story is his or her own. Some are similar - sometimes eerily so - but no one likes to be lumped.
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