Grab some chocolate, cake, a glass of wine or a coffee, whatever works for you, and get comfortable, we are going to have a bit of a chat. I am anyway, feel free to join in.
There’s something that’s been simmering away in my thoughts for a while now and every now and then it bubbles to the surface and I express my thoughts calmly and effectively. Actually it’s more like I lecture or rant. It’s to do with the things women do to each other.
It’s so easy to blame all our problems on men – it may even be instinctual but I think if, as women we had an attitude adjustment towards other women, it would make a big difference. Not all our problems would be solved, I’m not naïve enough to believe there is a silver bullet out there that will make all the bad things go away, but I really think some parts of our lives would be run more smoothly as a result.
Before I go on there is something I need to confess, I’m not a girly type of girl. I don’t have loads of girlfriends, I probably couldn’t identify fashion if it bit me on the butt and makeup and I are mere acquaintances. However I am very definitely a woman and I have experienced many of the things other women have. Some of those things I’d like to talk about now and some I’ll leave for later.
Let’s start with the distant past.
I was not popular in school. I was teased in high school nearly every day. When it happens like it did to me it just becomes something that happened, there was no one particular time that really stands out. The thing is though it wasn’t guys who picked on me, it was girls. I don’t think the guys really noticed I was there unless they wanted help with something. Most of it was to do with having a brain that worked well, I wasn’t athletic or pretty and the teachers liked me. Funny thing was if none of the popular girls were around some of the popular guys could be downright nice to me. But the bottom line is by the time I got to senior high I’d built quite a wall around my emotions and had developed quite a thick skin. Neither of which prevented me from being hurt or wanting to be accepted but I convinced myself it helped.
When I was 16 I started a new school and mum introduced me to the daughter of a friend of hers. I’d just come from boarding school and this was an automatic in with the popular girls. Needless to say I didn’t fit in and one of them pulled me aside one day to tell me they didn’t want me to hang with them anymore. The reasons were silly but it was high school; I didn’t want to date older guys, sleep around, or party all weekend. I was bad for their reputation. When this happened more defences were built around my emotions. No matter how much I said it didn’t matter it was another thing that resulted in a lot of insecurities later in life.
Even now just thinking about it I have to wonder if those things are the reasons I don’t have many girlfriends. I have trouble trusting women and their motives. I expect them to hurt me, so I don’t open myself up to them.
We as girls and later as women do so much damage to each other, it’s no wonder so many of us have insecurities and self-esteem issues. It’s about time we thought about things before we said them, thought about the consequences and even how we’d like them said to us. This is something I need to remember as well. All those years of betrayal have left me cynical and somewhat harsh and it very definitely effects how I deal with other women.
Sadly this is something we see a lot of now, girls pulling other girls down for no good reason. It always happened though is seems more vicious and continues well out of school hours now. You don’t even need to be around them to be hassled by someone – don’t you just love technology. People are being bullied, abused and slandered via mobile phones and the internet. I’m sure if you asked people why they do it they would answer: ‘because I can’, or ‘it’s fun’, or ‘I wanted to’. I wonder what those answers say about our own mental states.
There’s a fair chance we hurt others to make ourselves feel better about ourselves but that’s not a good reason. There is no good reason to treat someone else like crap, to beat them down physically, emotionally or verbally. We should be helping each other not pulling each other down. We should be contributing to positive and affirming emotional structure in each other’s lives rather that laying the foundations for multitudes of insecurities. We get enough junk thrust as us from other areas like the media, we really should have each other’s backs. At the very least we should respect each other as females and celebrate the diversity we have.
Which brings me to more recent history. My husband is a musician and this woman went up to him one day, after flirting with him for ages, and asked if he was happy in his marriage. Despite him answering yes she didn’t drop the topic but started asking intimate questions about things like his sex life. Can you see where I’m going with this. This isn’t about something a man did to me, my husband was faithful and my thought is she had no right to do what she did. She knew he was married and had a daughter, he refused her several times but that didn’t stop her disrespecting me by pushing her own lusts forward. If women respected other women this wouldn’t happen. Married or taken men would be off limits. Selfish women wouldn’t try to destroy other women’s lives by pursuing this path. Oh sure adultery is two sided but just imagine if all women decided ‘no I’m not going to do this, you are attached to someone else, I wouldn’t like it done to me so I refuse to do it to her.’
If only we respected other women enough not to pull them down or take what they have. Why do we want men that other women have? Some women will say ‘but my guy wasn’t happy.’ I have two things to say about that. Firstly what makes you think he’ll be faithful to you? And secondly if he’s not happy he needs sort the problems out or get out of the relationship. Relationships can be tough enough without other people coming in and doing their best to undermine all your work.
Issues of faithfulness can affect the strongest of relationships, I never thought they would affect mine. I was wrong. My husband wasn’t completely blameless, he could have reacted differently to certain situations so as to not put himself in particular positions but when it comes right down to it he has made right choices. I am proud of him and love him, and think our relationship is stronger because of how we have dealt with these things. Of course I’m no angel and the resolution wasn’t a pretty picture of calm discussion. Not to mention I’d really like to have smacked this women in the face or more and if I happen to see her again I may be tempted to do just that.
Thing is though she’s not the only one to have tried with my husband. There is one thing I feel necessary to add and that is my husband isn’t the kind of man who goes out of his way to illicit these sort of responses he just happens to be a musician. Just after our first daughter was born a young woman approached my husband and after fishing around for the response she wanted decided on a more straight forward approach, she tried inviting herself back to our place, when he said he was married that didn’t stop her, the next words out of her mouth were along the lines of ‘I suppose you have a daughter too?’ when he said yes she said she wouldn’t do that to his daughter, not an ounce of care about his wife.
Why do we think it’s okay to encroach on someone else’s relationship?
Why do we think it’s okay to hurt another person for fun?
Why do we think it’s justifiable to hurt someone in order to feel better about ourselves?
Maybe just maybe part of the reason women struggle so much is because we do so much to undermine and hurt each other. Don’t you think it’s time we stopped?
There’s something that’s been simmering away in my thoughts for a while now and every now and then it bubbles to the surface and I express my thoughts calmly and effectively. Actually it’s more like I lecture or rant. It’s to do with the things women do to each other.
It’s so easy to blame all our problems on men – it may even be instinctual but I think if, as women we had an attitude adjustment towards other women, it would make a big difference. Not all our problems would be solved, I’m not naïve enough to believe there is a silver bullet out there that will make all the bad things go away, but I really think some parts of our lives would be run more smoothly as a result.
Before I go on there is something I need to confess, I’m not a girly type of girl. I don’t have loads of girlfriends, I probably couldn’t identify fashion if it bit me on the butt and makeup and I are mere acquaintances. However I am very definitely a woman and I have experienced many of the things other women have. Some of those things I’d like to talk about now and some I’ll leave for later.
Let’s start with the distant past.
I was not popular in school. I was teased in high school nearly every day. When it happens like it did to me it just becomes something that happened, there was no one particular time that really stands out. The thing is though it wasn’t guys who picked on me, it was girls. I don’t think the guys really noticed I was there unless they wanted help with something. Most of it was to do with having a brain that worked well, I wasn’t athletic or pretty and the teachers liked me. Funny thing was if none of the popular girls were around some of the popular guys could be downright nice to me. But the bottom line is by the time I got to senior high I’d built quite a wall around my emotions and had developed quite a thick skin. Neither of which prevented me from being hurt or wanting to be accepted but I convinced myself it helped.
When I was 16 I started a new school and mum introduced me to the daughter of a friend of hers. I’d just come from boarding school and this was an automatic in with the popular girls. Needless to say I didn’t fit in and one of them pulled me aside one day to tell me they didn’t want me to hang with them anymore. The reasons were silly but it was high school; I didn’t want to date older guys, sleep around, or party all weekend. I was bad for their reputation. When this happened more defences were built around my emotions. No matter how much I said it didn’t matter it was another thing that resulted in a lot of insecurities later in life.
Even now just thinking about it I have to wonder if those things are the reasons I don’t have many girlfriends. I have trouble trusting women and their motives. I expect them to hurt me, so I don’t open myself up to them.
We as girls and later as women do so much damage to each other, it’s no wonder so many of us have insecurities and self-esteem issues. It’s about time we thought about things before we said them, thought about the consequences and even how we’d like them said to us. This is something I need to remember as well. All those years of betrayal have left me cynical and somewhat harsh and it very definitely effects how I deal with other women.
Sadly this is something we see a lot of now, girls pulling other girls down for no good reason. It always happened though is seems more vicious and continues well out of school hours now. You don’t even need to be around them to be hassled by someone – don’t you just love technology. People are being bullied, abused and slandered via mobile phones and the internet. I’m sure if you asked people why they do it they would answer: ‘because I can’, or ‘it’s fun’, or ‘I wanted to’. I wonder what those answers say about our own mental states.
There’s a fair chance we hurt others to make ourselves feel better about ourselves but that’s not a good reason. There is no good reason to treat someone else like crap, to beat them down physically, emotionally or verbally. We should be helping each other not pulling each other down. We should be contributing to positive and affirming emotional structure in each other’s lives rather that laying the foundations for multitudes of insecurities. We get enough junk thrust as us from other areas like the media, we really should have each other’s backs. At the very least we should respect each other as females and celebrate the diversity we have.
Which brings me to more recent history. My husband is a musician and this woman went up to him one day, after flirting with him for ages, and asked if he was happy in his marriage. Despite him answering yes she didn’t drop the topic but started asking intimate questions about things like his sex life. Can you see where I’m going with this. This isn’t about something a man did to me, my husband was faithful and my thought is she had no right to do what she did. She knew he was married and had a daughter, he refused her several times but that didn’t stop her disrespecting me by pushing her own lusts forward. If women respected other women this wouldn’t happen. Married or taken men would be off limits. Selfish women wouldn’t try to destroy other women’s lives by pursuing this path. Oh sure adultery is two sided but just imagine if all women decided ‘no I’m not going to do this, you are attached to someone else, I wouldn’t like it done to me so I refuse to do it to her.’
If only we respected other women enough not to pull them down or take what they have. Why do we want men that other women have? Some women will say ‘but my guy wasn’t happy.’ I have two things to say about that. Firstly what makes you think he’ll be faithful to you? And secondly if he’s not happy he needs sort the problems out or get out of the relationship. Relationships can be tough enough without other people coming in and doing their best to undermine all your work.
Issues of faithfulness can affect the strongest of relationships, I never thought they would affect mine. I was wrong. My husband wasn’t completely blameless, he could have reacted differently to certain situations so as to not put himself in particular positions but when it comes right down to it he has made right choices. I am proud of him and love him, and think our relationship is stronger because of how we have dealt with these things. Of course I’m no angel and the resolution wasn’t a pretty picture of calm discussion. Not to mention I’d really like to have smacked this women in the face or more and if I happen to see her again I may be tempted to do just that.
Thing is though she’s not the only one to have tried with my husband. There is one thing I feel necessary to add and that is my husband isn’t the kind of man who goes out of his way to illicit these sort of responses he just happens to be a musician. Just after our first daughter was born a young woman approached my husband and after fishing around for the response she wanted decided on a more straight forward approach, she tried inviting herself back to our place, when he said he was married that didn’t stop her, the next words out of her mouth were along the lines of ‘I suppose you have a daughter too?’ when he said yes she said she wouldn’t do that to his daughter, not an ounce of care about his wife.
Why do we think it’s okay to encroach on someone else’s relationship?
Why do we think it’s okay to hurt another person for fun?
Why do we think it’s justifiable to hurt someone in order to feel better about ourselves?
Maybe just maybe part of the reason women struggle so much is because we do so much to undermine and hurt each other. Don’t you think it’s time we stopped?
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