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When Women Become Insecure About Male/Female Roles.

A single woman I knew who is in her late thirties asked me if she should allow a man to carry her packages to appear more helpless. She had read a book on how to get a man, and that was one of the suggestions – appear to need him.

Another woman I know who is highly intelligent recently told me that men have to be manipulated in order to “catch” and keep them happy. Men have to feel adored and be the smarter ones even if they aren’t. She insisted that it’s up to the woman to create the illusion of male superiority even if the females are stronger. They must give the impression they weaker. In other words, play the game, otherwise prepare to never find a mate.

I responded by giving her my theory on the inherent problems this type of behavior produces. Here it is. At some point, it is more than likely a woman will tire of game playing and lose respect for the man she is manipulating. In order to hold on to the attraction she initially felt, she might begin to feel tremendous pressure to intensify the game. Although she started the relationship in this way, she might have hoped to bring him up to a level of maturity where she’d be able to back off somewhat. That usually doesn’t happen. A kind of mother/son relationship is likely to occur and, under these circumstances, she has become his mother.

She represses her own needs in order to cajole and give him unconditional love. Resentment can set in because she is doing all the work in order to make him feel superior. She might ultimately see the man she is manipulating as hopeless, lame and incapable of a stable relationship. Then she starts repeatedly try to meet him on a level playing field. Even though he might go along with the program, it’s not uncommon for him to see her behavior as nagging. She acted one way to get him now she’s changing the rules Although he might complain to his friends, he won’t stop it because he is the center of her world and her efforts are focused on him. It can develop into love/hate relationship that has no happy ending.

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Learning Empathy

Are we losing the capacity to reach out to people? Is the age of electronics keeping us from listening and conversing face-to-face with others? Have we lost the capacity for human connection and involvement in community?
We live in a multi-cultural society and need to take heed of the universal needs of all humans. To do this we must possess the capacity for empathy no matter which field of endeavor we are in. Yet our world seems to experience diminishing empathy. 
The desire to want our children to do better than their parents, if taken too far, may well change the values needed to be a decent human being. It is important to want children to succeed. But where it can take an ugly turn is teaching extreme competitiveness. Pushing childhood sports over-the-top often comes with the price of depleting them of compassion. Competition for college admissions raises the stakes.
Intense pressure to inject ambition into children may make for an overly competitive young adult, unwilling to help anyone out of fear that person will supersede them in the climb up the ladder. This not uncommon among, for instance, medical students who fear someone may get ahead of them grade-wise. Teaching empathy seems to have become an unimportant aspect of how we raise children. The downside of that is that children lose a sense of compassion. The false myth that those children will be taken advantage of if they are too kind has created unsympathetic adults. They do worse in life than children who have empathy.
There is another aspect to why we are on the downslope of developing empathetic humans. Youngsters are deluged with electronic devices that preclude human interaction. When hi-tech games are the constant companion of children rather than games that rely on communication and collaboration, there is a ripple effect that bodes poorly for the future. Lack of reading stories because of reliance on electronic gizmos also creates human estrangement. That in turn impacts health and well-being.