1st February, 2009
Question
I need to start by saying that I don't trust women, as friends I mean. I'm a 26 year old female, married, with a great family around me. However, my friendships with women have always been short-lived, and often end in some sort of disagreement. I feel that most women are sneaky, malicious, selfish - the list could go on.
Recently I cut ties with my best friend of three years. I felt she had purposely done something to hurt me. When I confronted her about it, she got very angry and we were never able to find common ground. I think I got more frustrated than I would normally have done because two weeks before our bust-up I threw a surprise birthday party for her, and went all out. Yet she never said thank you. I've always felt she believes she's entitled to things. I tried to look past that, because I truly cared about her. I now feel our relationship was always about me giving, her taking. That holds true for all my female relationships.
I am beginning to wonder if my expectations are too high. Perhaps I am the one who is all-together wrong. I just have such a negative outlook when it comes to women. Why?
Answer
We are, truly, the experts on our own lives. We invariably know what's wrong. We just don't know how to access the information. If you like, we're blinded by emotion, or habits of thinking, from recognising the facts in front of us. And so we draw false conclusions.
Look at what you tell me. You say that all your female friendships follow a distinct and familiar path. You give, and they take. That, I am sure, is unquestionably true. The faulty reasoning lies in what you draw from this fact. You say all women are, basically, bitches - at least when it comes to friendship.
You can see the emotional advantage in that conclusion. The quality of your female friendships is not of your making. You are the innocent among the thankless takers. You carry no responsibility for such a state of affairs. You can also see the penalty in such pronouncements. You are helpless, can have no female friends, are outside the circle of your sex, a being apart, and full of apprehension about damage that may be done to you.
Wouldn't it be more accurate, not to mention more emotionally advantageous, to see your own hand on that pattern of interaction which you have with female friends? We could argue that you try too hard. A plain-speaking friend might say that you attempt to buy friendship. And it's a harsh fact of life that when we attempt to buy friendship with excessive generosity, the recipients subtly reject us, even despise us, for they see the neediness which drives our desire to give. Some stick around. Others retreat. Either way, it is never a satisfactory meeting of equals.
Such neediness can come in different guises. Maybe there's a breach in your self-confidence and deep down you don't believe that another woman would love you, that there's something missing in your make-up. Maybe you learned early in life that a woman's love was not to be trusted, that you had to either buy them off, or expose their nastiness by being generous yourself - you know, a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy, where you're the good girl and they end us being ungrateful and nasty. We could speculate forever, but you get my drift.
Whatever the motivation, being excessively generous makes other people feel that you're choosing them out of desperation, rather than because you actually like, or treasure, them. They feel themselves as mere instruments of your need, and they dislike it.
Maybe you're competitive when it comes to other women. Competitiveness comes in many guises. I know it sounds harsh, but sometimes doing a lot of giving is about being top dog. You know, the bountiful versus being eternally on the receiving end. People hate being on the receiving end - even when their arms are wide open for whatever you're giving. It may be generosity on your part. It may even be the terrible need in you to be relevant. But it leaves a friend feeling one-down and dreadfully resentful.
Those who stick around, out of damage in their own psyche, get used to it, of course. And then, just as you describe it, there's no way back, no means of proper communication when there's a bust-up. That's the way it is with unequal relationships.
It doesn't have to be like this. You can have women friends. You just have to address your need to be so generous. That doesn't mean trawling in your childhood for signs of where it went wrong. You can change your behaviour without necessarily understanding exactly why you learned to be the way you are. It's enough to know that you can do it differently. It does, however, mean checking your generous impulses, and deciding to be more cautious. It means learning to ask, to receive, as well as to give.
In short, your task is to become more conscious of how you behave, and then to do it differently.
