What do women really want? How do men really feel? If you’ve ever found yourself reading an article that attempts to “decipher” the “code” of male or female behavior, congratulations, you are grasping at straws (or hate-reading). I, too, have read approximately 14,000 bajillion of these pieces over the course of my life, as hopeful as anyone that an article can divine that which is unknowable. Hint: It cannot.
Look, I get it: This is a question as old as time, I suppose: What’s he thinking? Does she like me? People have been wondering if this thing is actually called love for as long as they’ve been able to sidelong glance up the dude in the next rock formation. Here’s the thing though: I always naively think that you can only ask “he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me on Wednesdays, he loves me only when that other chick isn’t available” so many times before you just give up the ghost of guessing and simply accept that you cannot know another person’s thoughts, not really, unless they want you to.
As someone who lived through dating in the 90s, and I was sure that after He’s Just Not That Into You rocked the advice circles, that all such debates were settled. That the articles on what men really mean and women really mean would disappear. That, like, the discovery that earth, is, in fact, round and not flat, the crowd would thin out, the chatter would die down, and everyone would go home, realizing there’s nothing to see here. Not because I think that book is the gospel of all advice — it’s oversimplification porn, is what it is — but because it did actually inadvertently distill Something True, which is that your best gauge of someone’s actual interest in you when that interest is unclear would be their behavior more than words. If there is anything that a cumulative number of years on earth has taught me, it is this.
But I suppose that as long as there are newly vague and infuriating text messages, terrible breakups, confusing interludes, mysterious exits, weekends apart, there will be new iterations on this theme to guess at people’s real feelings. And we will all find ourselves at one time or another, whether single or hitched, trying to figure out what the fuck someone means in the greater scheme of things.
I do not mock the need to know. What I reject is the attempt to do so through some automatic gender roadmap. Yes, we are all a result of cultural influence, but the shortest path to confusing communication is to hear a person talking and assume it’s code. Articles which purport to tell you what a guy means when he says X or what a woman means when she says Y are bullshit articles because there is no way to know this purely depending on gender identity of the person in question. It would be easy to dismiss them as dumb Internet shit if so many people didn’t believe them, and also the fact that they motherfucking won’t go away.
For instance, this shit shows up in my feed about once a week somehow:
People always act like this sort of thing is a total riot of hilarity, but it seems actually incredibly damaging to me, and I will laugh at all “your face” jokes, so this is not a maturity issue. They all pretty much reflect this idea that women alone get mysteriously pissed for no discernible reason and that your first clue doesn’t even show up until she’s already mad and being cryptic.
She never means what she says, that much is for sure:
Or the idea that a woman says she’s fine but, duh, she’s not fine, because she is a liar. Here is how often she is really fine:
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