A Man In Need of Validation: War of the sexes part 2

You can find part 1 here.

I wasn’t going to write about this until the shit hit the fan quite recently. A few of The Girls and I were out and ran into two of the three people I discuss in this entry. They’re the two individuals I dislike.

Recently, one of our dearest girlfriends was overlooked by a man for whom she deeply cares. No matter what we say or offer, try to understand and make sense of, she sees none of it.

All she sees is that: he chose another over her.

Unfortunately, and bypassing all of the excuses we try to make, we tend to agree. We were witness to their interaction and to the energy and chemistry that resonated from them when they were together. From the moment they met, their chemistry was instantaneous and obvious to all of us in that room.

This is a woman who is brilliant and gorgeous, witty, educated, elegant and dangerously fun. She has a smile that brightens any room she walks into; a room she immediately owns even when she knows no one. She’s also confident, sophisticated and isn’t easily intimidated. And therein lie the rub(s), which I will get to in a moment.

I won’t deny that he too is an attractive man, intelligent, worldly, well read, and extremely engaging. They made a handsome couple.

All The Girls can manage is a small fib of: He’s just not that into you? I hate this sentiment because it renders men 1-dimensional, and although it should be helping her, it’s not because we all know it’s a lie. We just couldn’t understand his actions…

Until we saw him with his new girlfriend. Unfortunately, our girl wasn’t with us; unfortunate because she would have walked out of that restaurant disappointed but understanding her real worth.

I write the following with the full recognition that we were only witness to their interaction for one evening, and we were in public.

The one thing that screamed out at me was that his attraction to Her is solidly rooted in the validation she gives him. Until that moment, we’d known nothing about Her. Watching them interact was like watching, in slow motion, an episode of How To Disgrace The Sisterhood. I also watched how she moved and walked through the crowd, how she interacted with others and her reaction to attractive women.

Naturally, I was also eavesdropping. Look, the restaurant is so small that they were both practically sitting on my lap. It was astonishing to note that she had no opinion, there were no questions posed, no challenges made, no intelligent remarks, but rather simple “uh-uh”, “oh wow”, “oh my god” peppered among the “you’re so clever”, “that’s so smart!” and of course “you’re so funny, tee hee.” My fu*king ears almost started bleeding. I’m still flabbergasted, and not by any stretch of the imagination am I a woman who is flabbergasted easily. Oftentimes dumbfounded with the appearance of stupefied, yes, but not ‘flabbergasted’.

I was also so completely disappointed in him. What a shame that this is the boy he turned out to be, when I thought my girl had given her heart to a man.

Because I’m the bestest best friend in the whole wide world, I immediately rang his best friend (who remains a relative good friend of mine) and told him what I’d seen. He agreed, and not reluctantly, he confirmed that she was a Yes Girl. Not very confident or terribly smart, simple, not a challenge and most definitely not someone his best friend was taking seriously or contemplating committing to.

My best friend, on the other hand, was all of the above. Granted, ‘unsophisticated’ does not necessarily mean it’s a situation from which one can’t experience pleasure…it just means that for me, I’d get bored much too quickly. My attention span and level of patience are severely short and so sophisticated is what engages me. If we were in a craft store, I’d be haunting the Logic Puzzle aisle, while He would be in the paint by numbers area.

This incensed me because I sort of went through this once (but nowhere near the same degree). Another of my best friends went through this and she was – physically and emotionally – ruined. I watched my mother go through this when I was 13. I watched her try to make sense of losing the only man she’s ever loved, I watched her fall apart as my father packed and left. At one point later in the timeline of each of these stories, the men regretted their actions and asked to be let back in. (Mine, moments before he announced his engagement to another woman.) Unfortunately for them, we’re not cut from the same cloth as the ‘simple’ ones; with us, the door is open only once, and when it’s closed it disappears completely as though it never existed. Simply stated, women like us don’t wait around.

Validation comes not from men, but rather from our achievements. Men, although still a necessity in terms of intimacy and love, strength, protection and all wonderful masculine qualities offered, are a bonus. This I truly mean in the most complimentary way possible. Ultimately, I believe that to be wanted when you’re not needed is much more satisfying and heartwarming than to be wanted only because you’re needed. There is a level of desperation in need, something that’s never served me as an aphrodisiac. Compare it to free will; I choose, rather than I need. Which would you rather?

Are a boy’s insecurities so great that he can’t see this?

All of this I raised with baba when we were dining the other evening; he was very forthcoming with me because he was once a typical boy. I guess that, for the most part, I think that my dad’s right about boys. I think he’s spot on…and I like men because they’re confident, aggressive, proud individuals who demand only the best from their partner because they return it in kind. But I really don’t want to date a 60 year old. So what do I do?