The news story that got away
Quick, quick! I heard there's a woman taking her clothes off in a tunnel.
You begin to wonder what sort of place you’re living in when even in the silliest of silly seasons a distressed woman takes her clothes off on a public highway and the nondescript incident, a commonplace in every city the world over – bar Islamic states – makes the national headlines.
I have lost count of the number of unhappy individuals I have seen behaving unusually on the streets of towns and cities elsewhere.
No news crews turn up to film and photograph them.
This is not because of indifference or the frequency with which such things occur, but because the more developed a society is, the less likely it is to treat private unhappiness – even private unhappiness in the public sphere – as a circus freak show.
On a Budapest street a couple of years ago, we walked past a young woman prone on the pavement, moaning and crying in a pool of blood, a broken bottle beside her. An elderly man who bore no relationship to the woman held her bloody arm high as politely and formally as though he had been asked to hold her coat while she rearranged her dress.
The woman had slashed her wrist. The man happened to be walking past when she did so. He knew enough to make a simple tourniquet and hold the wound above her heart to slow the bleeding. Somebody had rung for an ambulance already, he told us, when we asked whether we should do so ourselves. Please leave, he said; I will stay here until the ambulance arrives. And he went on standing there stoically, hat in one hand and the woman’s arm in the other, silently resigned to his responsibility for the next few minutes.
I thought him admirable, and more so the absence of gawpers.
I can’t imagine why we Maltese see it as a sign of our superiority that had something similar to occur here, the young woman would be surrounded by a crush of rubber-neckers in search of entertainment, all of them gossiping and speculating and nobody with either the knowledge or the inclination to do what that man did, and ringing Super One and L-Orizzont instead of an ambulance.
Are we really so backward that we believe the self-harming behaviour of disturbed individuals, even if it takes place in public, to be something of news value?
The division between public and private in Malta needs a great deal of consideration. Most of our media appear to be confused on this matter – just as confusion reigns as to what constitutes news value. While the real stories go unwritten, the newspapers are flooded with this kind of rubbish.
The story about the unhappy woman in the tunnel rivals another non-news headline only a few days before: Truck ALMOST crashes into bridge. Whoever wrote that has never heard the adage that a miss is as good as a mile, nor has anyone shouted it out from the rooftops loud enough to hear that something which ALMOST happens but does not is NOT news.
THE BISHOPS ARE RIGHT
The bishops are right when they suggest that many of the problems within marriage today arise from the insecurity caused by the new sense of its impermanence.
People were once able to relax into marriage, secure in the knowledge that this was it for life. Now they are permanently on edge, feel themselves constantly tried, tested and possibly found wanting, with the ever-present fear that their spouse will walk out – or worse, stay while filing for separation – if their floors are not clean enough, their food not good enough, their laundry not white enough, their body not taut enough, their conversation not scintillating enough (or, on the other hand, too scintillating), their sexual capers not thrilling enough, their pay-packet not big enough, or their spouse just not enough.
In the words of one woman who had just been told of another husband who’d run off with some tart, “How worrying. What can wives do to protect themselves, my goodness?”
I reminded her that most marital break-ups are instigated by women, not by men, but we don’t see men running around worrying about what they can do to make sure their wives don’t run off with the gym instructor, the tennis partner, the father of their child’s best friend or that nice man from the office they’re always talking about.
Men do pretty much what they like, and then if the marriage fails they blame it on the wife.
Then I spent about five minutes wondering if this is why so many Maltese women come across as increasingly desperate, starving themselves to the point of anorexia when they should be worrying about their daughters doing so, wearing clothes made for girls a generation younger, killing themselves at the gym, botoxing themselves to hell and back, bleaching and blow-drying their hair until they are left with a few dried-out rats’ tails, behaving like teenagers at parties, and constantly jumpy and on edge.
But they are not quite as ridiculous as the men who, having escaped what they saw as the tedium of family life by jumping into the sack with somebody who seemed exciting at the time, have since ended up with Tedious Family Life Mark II and the dawn of the awful realisation that even mistresses become wives, with or without a wedding ring, especially if they trick you into giving them a child.
If you meet a man who says that having a second round of children, this time with his mistress, was his idea and that those children were produced by consensus, you’ve met a liar. A gentleman would just shut up about it and say nothing.
I am surprised at just how many otherwise intelligent men seem not to be aware of the mechanics of conception, and that women over the age of 30 do not get pregnant by accident.
But the bishops are wrong when they say that divorce engenders this mentality. We have no divorce, and yet the insecurity is very much there. “(The Catholic Church insists) on the moment of consent (in the marriage rite) as the focal point of commitment,” they said in a statement last Saturday. “In divorce there is a shift from this focal point towards each moment which is presented as giving the spouse a potential right to consider his or her consent and commitment, so ending the marriage.”
There is no need for divorce for that to happen. It is happening already.
Unless we are very literal-minded, and take marriage to mean the paper contract rather than the relationship in marriage between two people, then the point at which the marriage ends is when one of the two walks out or both agree to go their separate ways.
People were secure in their marriages until fairly recently not because there was no divorce or talk of divorce, but because social and financial pressures prevented spouses from leaving each other. When leaving made you a social pariah, you just didn’t go. You stayed. But there was more than that.
Earlier generations seemed to understand at some deep level that marriage is not the same thing as living with someone. They understood that the nature of the relationship, the contractual commitment, was bigger than the individuals within it.
They also seemed to know something which their descendants appear unable to understand: that all relationships follow more or less the same trajectory when children are involved, and they follow another trajectory when children are not involved.
But the fact remains that the relationships of people without children are all the same and the relationships of people with children are all the same too. That’s why women always have so much to bond over when they meet, even if they are near-total strangers to each other.
Now marriage is seen as being no different to cohabitation, and the stupid new law to be brought before parliament by this government will further break down the perception of marriage as being something much more than just living together – even though it is precisely the opposite effect of what its proponents have in mind.
The current thinking is that it is not just acceptable to walk out on your marriage, it is actually fashionable. Maltese society today is where northern European society was in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We are 40 years behind the times even in this – especially in this.
In that vacuous way so very typical of the stunted psychological development of many Maltese adults (the word ‘vojt/vojta’ is perfectly descriptive), those who walk out on their marriages with barely a thought for the unhappiness they cause think themselves cool and thrilling while those who stay married are not.
I have noticed that those who walk out for the vainest of reasons – and who are therefore failures of the highest order – see themselves as great successes and congratulate themselves for their astuteness in getting away to live the life they never did (but should have done) when they were 20.
Meanwhile, those with genuine reasons for leaving, who struggled for years and then admitted defeat, beat themselves up for having failed, just like those who didn’t leave but were left.
And just as an afterthought, all those wives sweating it out at the gym and under the blow-dryer are wasting their time. You don’t keep a man with your body; that’s how you get him. You keep him with your mind. It’s just too bad there aren’t any gyms for those. If there were, fewer marriages would hit the rocks.
It’s just too bad that some women wake up to this fact rather late in life, after jumping through the million hoops of 20 years of raising a family, when they suddenly realise just how much they don’t know, how undeveloped they are intellectually and as individuals. Then they make a tremendous effort to do something about it, without really knowing where to start, and their husband’s reaction is resentful because the status quo is changing.
And how do men keep their woman? Simple: all they have to do is put her first. A woman will walk over hot coals to the end of the earth and back for the man who does just that. She will choose him over another man who has more money and status but who puts her second, third, fourth, fifth or last, after his work, his entertainment, his friends and his mother.
Women never forgive the men who make them play second fiddle to anything or anyone, and the amazing coincidence is that men tire of the women who allow themselves to be relegated.
Relationships are quite simple really, but we insist on making them complicated so that we can star in the film of our own lives.
This article was published in The Malta Independent yesterday.
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A bit idealistic, but I enjoyed reading it.
Dear Daphne, how on earth do you manage to really nail it down? I’ve read both sections of the article, of course. However, I find the one on marriage and divorce so true that I read it again to ensure that I’m not just putting my own understanding of things and life in your article. However, it’s so true.
Indeed, women mostly instigate separations (just look at the separation lawsuits: the woman, most usually, is the plaintiff). Your uncanny observation that having a family Round 2 is usually a trick thought of by the mistress and the thing about what men and women want.
I could go on but you get the gist of it. Well done indeed, I have to say, for describing relationships in such minute and true detail.
Regarding the first part of the article, I have to say I have heard most unkind comments on the young lady. Why can’t we leave unhappy people in peace rather than add to their misery?
Anyway, well done indeed!
Only a secure person can write this article.
No doubt, education/knowledge can certainly contribute to developing personal security.
The etiology, diagnosis and the treatment are on the mark. It’s a privilege reading your essays.
I guess they would never call Nazzjon or Net would they?
As I already mentioned, both parts of the article are excellent. I fully agree. The cycle, in fact, goes as follows.
The woman, in her mid or late forties, tries to act, feel and behave 20 years younger then she is. This usually works, at least until the botox effect starts to subside following which she ends up looking 10 years older then she did in the first place.
With her new wrinkle-free face and straight daily blow-dried (at the hairdresser, if you please) hair and ten-centimetre ceramic French manicured nails, she joins the “fun and frolic” groups posting her summer barbecues pics with her new cool friends on Facebook.
At this point, to complete the ego trip of how sexy and desirable she is now, she embarks on an affair, normally with a married man looking for a bit on the side.
Of course, she uses the affair as the final proof that her marriage was not working, so she then files for separation.
This is a cycle which has become commonplace. The end result is that the wife becomes more of a cretin each year, going from one man to another and embarrassing herself on social networks, the husband usually goes for a younger woman and, yes, more often than not, ends up with another family, and the children from the first marriage suffer terribly trying to adjust to their newborn half brother/sister who could very well be their son/daughter.
“and ringing Super One and L-Orizzont instead of an ambulance.”
Actually, one of the reporters (and presumably, the TV camera next to him) was a NET TV reporter, which I thought all the more shocking, on finding out what the traffic jam and gathered crowd were there for on my way to work that day. Had it been a One TV crew only, I would have expected it, but Net TV?
What an absolutely ridiculous idea this “Had it been a One TV crew only, I would have expected it, but Net TV?”
…and the PN have had exclusive rights to good taste since … erm…?
Taste is, not the sole domain of PN supporters, I’m sorry to say. If I must be brutally honest, taste goes over the heads of anybody interested in local partisan politics.
[Daphne – Oh, so superior and above it all, are we. Must be an AD voter then – typical attitude.]
My guess is that L-Orizzont’s reporting on crime is juicier than either In-Nazzjon’s or The Times’ only because L-Orizzont’s crime reporter is better at his job. I don’t believe any of the local papers have any standards to maintain.
AD? hahahaha. now that’s REALLY scraping the barrel.
I agree with Reuben regarding the reporters. I just can’t stand the news of NET. I prefer to watch ONE or TVM, because their reporters are just better at their job.
I once saw a local news report of a motorcycle accident a few years ago that had happened in the St Venera tunnels. The footage showed the crash helmet with a huge chunk missing were the poor man had his head crushed against the kerb. It was on Net News.
[Daphne – Where not were.]
Very relevant
I once read that a woman marries a man in hope that he will one day, grow up and mature. Whilst a man marries a woman hoping that she will remain youthful.
But women will tell you that their husbands are worse than the kids, and he will tell you that she’s become a grumpy old bitch.
What’s worse than an anorexic woman aged 40+?
An anorexic with fake boobs (which are usually there for people to avoid looking at the face, but let’s not go there …).
I would award this article, especially the second part, as article of the year. Just brilliant.
“You don’t keep a man with your body; that’s how you get him. You keep him with your mind. ”
“And how do men keep their woman? Simple: all they have to do is put her first”
So that’s your idea of a healthy marriage – that women do not have to make an effort for their husbands. It doesn’t matter if they become grumpy old hags before their time, and put on 30kg of extra weight within a few years of getting married. Her ‘mind’ will always be enough to compensate for that. Please ….
On the other hand, her man must always put her first, meaning that he must be content and feel himself lucky to remain with a wife who let herself go, who makes no effort to remain pleasing to her husband and to keep the fire of passion glowing, and yet she still feels entitled to be put first and call all the shots and behave in general like an entitled b**ch, even if she’s transformed into something resembling Jabba The Hut.
You’re a smart columnist, Daphne, but maybe you should refrain from giving marital advice. Really, I thought you could do better than that. You’re just regurgitating the pseudo feminist drivel that’s been rammed down our throats for the last couple of decades – total bollocks which is actually ruining marriages in the western world.
Really, can’t you see the revolting picture of what’s sadly become a stereotypical parody of marriage which you are painting here? So men must be meek, provider puppy dogs – slaves, if you want – to their oppressive, shabby wives who feel entitled to be always put first while they sit at home on their fat butts while their husband works for them all day. Excuse me for a moment while I go puke in a bucket.
The truth is the other way round. Women lose respect for men who turn into mere meek providers willing to be bossed around.
Women stay with such husbands only because and as long as they find it convenient – which of course it is, if it means that they are free to let themselves go, make no effort to keep the marriage alive nor be pleasing to their husbands, while still being entitled to be the queen and boss.
If the husband merely expects to be welcomed home warmly and find a decent meal after an 8 – 12 hour day at work, their wives will cry ‘oppression’ nowadays! Such is the crazy sense of entitlement many women have – with NO sense of responsibility or obligation – just because they happen to have a vagina! If the husband also expects to have a regular, satisfying sex life (geez, the cheek of it!), his wife will barter sexual favours in return for more husband slavery.
Meanwhile these same women will be lusting after dominant, strong men – manly men, who often treat these women with indifference, which only makes these women lust after them even more. Such an irony. Then, as if ruining their husbands’s lives and expectations was not enough, they decide that they are ‘bored’ and still file for divorce, talking half or more of their husbands’s wealth to go live with their lover bad boys, who will in turn dump them to find other younger and hotter women to play with.
“Thank you for being my slave and working your butt off for me all these years, dear husband. But now I’m gonna go with someone more exciting. Oh, the judge said that I get to take the house, the car and the kids with me as well”
This is precisely what is happening in countries like the USA since the introduction of ‘no fault’ divorce. Do some research and see. Marriages are failing at a depressing rate precisely because legislation has been moulded by the venomous and false feminazi drivel, and the laws have shifted the power totally in favour of women, giving them all the benefits and hardly any responsibilities and pressure to work at their marriages any more.
It’s a completely unbalanced situation which is bringing havoc on society. It’s nothing short of a a cartel designed to rape honest hard working men in divorce courts, and rob them of all their hard earned wealth as well as the best years of their lives.
The last thing we need is to import that kind of situation into our own country, and for the few sensible commentators like yourself to speak in favour of it!
To any men out there who on reading this article thought “oh this is brilliant”, please open your eyes and wise up.
PS: I am happily married myself and try to remain so, certainly NOT by following your advice. It doesn’t work. Sorry.
[Daphne – Miskina l-mara tieghek, qalbi, married to such an embittered misogynist.]
Iva Daphne – miskina Mrs. Stepford!
Daphne – Typical straw man argument. I totally expected that. If one says that men should be respected too (REAL equality that is), then he must be a misogynist.
[Daphne – Read your comment again. Your assumptions are quite incredible, as in: when husbands return home after eight to 12 hours work, they should expect to find a hot meal waiting and the wife shouldn’t complain. You take it for granted that all wives are kept by hard-working husbands and you don’t allow for the fact that, even in Malta, very many wives work eight to 12-hour days too. If you were to widen your experience, you would understand that, rather than non-working women objecting to cooking supper, the widespread situation in Malta is that of working women whose husbands behave exactly like their fathers (who were married to housewives) did. As for women letting themselves go, let me just tell you this: every time I go out, to a party or whatever, I am SHOCKED at just how shabby, flabby and altogether unattractive the men are, even in a vacuum, let alone when compared to their groomed, glossy, trim and buffed wives. It is Maltese men, not Maltese women, who let themselves go, and in this they are not helped by congenital lack of physical attributes, like very short limbs which are OK when you are 20 but really make you look like a Dalek (once we’re onto Star Wars similes) at 50.]
If one objects to uncontrolled illegal immigration, then he must be a racist. And so on and so forth. When reasoned arguments dry up, it’s easy to resort to arbitrary personal slurs and labels.
You basically said:
Women – don’t worry. You don’t have to make any effort for your husbands.
[Daphne – Wrong. That’s what you assumed I said. What I actually did say was something else altogether: that making an effort with your appearance is a complete waste of time unless you have something going on upstairs, because it’s with the something that’s going on upstairs that you keep a relationship alive, most significantly with the ability to keep a man amused and entertained. This is a fundamental truth and women ignore it at their peril. But people do ignore it, which is why so many were shocked at the most famous example of this in action: Camilla Parker Bowles versus the Princess of Wales. So you have a beautiful woman; so what are you going to do then – frame her and look at her for 40 years?]
“Men – you have to always put your wives first, above everything else.”
[Daphne – This is another fundamental truth which men ignore at their peril. Women need to be the ‘queen’ in their man’s life. We do not insist on this because we are spoiled, selfish, demanding or any other of the accusations you level at us. It’s is a primeval need, linked to the ancient social role of man as protector and provider. If a woman perceives that her man’s loyalties are divided, that he doesn’t put her first for a whole variety of reasons or just one (and women always know when they do not come first, even if the man insists otherwise) then she feels insecure and threatened at a deep level, so deep and ingrained in evolution that it seems irrational to men and even to we women ourselves. And that is why women become totally enraptured by the men who put them first. If you put your woman first, you will not need to fight for meals when you get home from work or feel insulted because she never makes an effort with her appearance. Again, we have two prominent examples of this on the national political stage: the prime minister and his wife, and the president and the first lady. You seem to come from the point of view that dictates ‘treat ’em mean and keep ’em keen’. But the only kind of woman you’ll get in a relationship like that is a natural victim who likes to be dominated and controlled. Women like this, despite pornography to the contrary, are in the minority. Most wives wish nothing more than to be treated with respect, and many of them are not. I am appalled at times when I overhear gaggles of men discussing their wives – so very rude and disparaging.]
So to you that doesn’t sound totally one sided it seems, and I’m an ’embittered misogynist’ for pointing that out. Your reaction actually totally proves my point about the current skewed trend of thought.
For a man to WANT to cherish and keep his wife, he must feel that she’s definitely worth keeping. So don’t you think that involves some effort from her part as well? That includes taking good care of herself both physically and mentally, and being the kind of woman her husband is proud of and happy to be married to. Of course, it works both ways.
By the way, attraction is not rational. It’s a primal biological instinct that exists in every one of us, no matter what strident ideologists say. For a couple to stay bonded, they must remain physically attracted to each other as well. Her ‘mind’ can only do so much to compensate for that. This is not opinion, this is biology. And in any case, a woman (or man, for that matter) who lets him or herself go without a care, is unlikely to have a very positive and attractive frame of mind, either. It’s all about attitude.
[Daphne – You are VERY inexperienced in these matters. Only a fraction of sexual attraction has to do with physical beauty. If that were not the case, the physically imperfect, the ugly and those over 50 would never have sex. Sexual attraction is overwhelmingly linked to other factors – everything from movement to facial expression to conversation to tone of voice to personality. And that is why you might sometimes find yourself falling head over heels for a plain Jane while being left stone cold sober by somebody who’s just walked off a fashion shoot. Again, this basic truth is something people ignore at their peril; that’s why beautiful wives have allowed ugly women to get too close to their husband on the basis that they can’t possibly be a threat, only to discover that their husband has been stolen away. Need I mention the notorious subject of that galvanising controversy earlier this year?]
Of course, a 50 year old woman cannot compete with her 20 year old self in the attraction department, but at least she should make some effort to retain some semblance to the woman her husband fell in love with, and to be a warm hearted companion he’s happy to live with. And her husband has the same responsibility towards her.
[Daphne – I’m sorry if I sound like a life-coach here, but you’re either very young or very foolish or, as I said, totally inexperienced. The semblance men want their women to retain is not to the looks of the woman they fell in love with but to her personality and outlook on life. It is not when the wife gets fat or goes grey that the husband begins to get fed up and look elsewhere, but when her personality becomes unrecognisable. This is because when we recognise people, it is their CHARACTER we recognise and not their looks. A change of personality is disturbing at a deep level in which a change of appearance is not. And as for women, we are really not that interested in looks. Women can look at a perfect man and feel absolutely no interest, but give us a man who can make us laugh and who looks straight into our eyes when talking to us, and we’ll just melt. Taking an interest in what we think goes a long way, too. But that six-pack? Forget it. The only sexual interest men provoke by parading their gym-honed bodies is from other men. In fact, we women invariably suspect that all men who are gym-obsessed and who are forever developing their pecs are really gay, even if they don’t know it themselves.]
But instead you promote the idea that only the husband should sacrifice everything for his wife, with no corresponding input from her part.
[Daphne – Rubbish. I have no truck with women who sit around all day doing nothing and bumming off others, and anybody who reads me regularly knows this. I wrote about it only recently, in fact. My outlook is this: women either work or they are full-time housewives. If they are full-time housewives, then they have to approach that role responsibly and do everything in the home. If the husband is providing all the money, then it follows that the wife should do all the house-chores. If both are bringing in the money, then the house chores should be split.]
If the idea that both should make an effort is misogynist to you, then it’s clear that you consider men to be second class citizens not worthy of consideration, and you are the misandrist instead.
Case closed.
[Daphne – Case closed? Why, because you said so? If you talk to your wife that way, it’s only a matter of time before she is seduced by somebody who treats her better – especially if, on your insistence, she’s working hard on her appearance. So watch out, because these things happen even if husbands don’t always find out about them. I certainly do not think of men as second-class citizens. I am the only woman in my household, for a start, and I have always got along better with men than I do with women – but I don’t have any time for bossy, domineering, patronising, boorish men who might as well have walked straight off Noah’s Ark, so that is a problem in a society flooded with them.]
Ah, a very articulate response. That’s more like it!
“ You take it for granted that all wives are kept by hard-working husbands and you don’t allow for the fact that, even in Malta, very many wives work eight to 12-hour days too. “
Not really, I wasn’t. It was just an example to drive home the point, since there certainly are women who are always complaining about doing their part even if they are at home all day. Of course there are many women who have full time jobs. My wife is one of them, though she works fewer hours than me.
No, I don’t keep her chained to the stove. She takes on the majority of the house work since she’s home by early afternoon. I help her out as well. I often am the one cooking many of our meals, which is something I actually like doing, and make sure to spend quality time with our son and give her a breather. So we strike a pretty good balance, believe it or not.
“As for women letting themselves go, let me just tell you this: every time I go out, to a party or whatever, I am SHOCKED at just how shabby, flabby and altogether unattractive the men are, even in a vacuum, let alone when compared to their groomed, glossy, trim and buffed wives”.
Good observation, which leads us to another point: those unattractive men must then have something else going for them to keep their attractive wives. Something strong enough for their wives to stay, and for their wives to make the effort to remain groomed, glossy, trim and buffed. More on this later …
(Oh, and Daleks featured in Doctor Who, not Star Wars, but nice simile just the same .. haha)
[Daphne – Well, I’m not into scifi. Why are the women keeping themselves buffed? For other men, obviously (one of the first signs that a woman has lost interest in her husband is not when she lets herself go, but when she perks herself up) and because, among women, looking good is a competitive sport.]
“Wrong. That’s what you assumed I said. What I actually did say was something else altogether: that making an effort with your appearance is a complete waste of time unless you have something going on upstairs, because it’s with the something that’s going on upstairs that you keep a relationship alive, most significantly with the ability to keep a man amused and entertained.”
Here we may be mixing some separate issues, which although related, need to be distinguished – short term attraction, as against a long term relationship. Yes, for a long term relationship, character and personality attributes become very important. A short term fling, on the other hand, can live on attraction alone for a while until it peters out (given a minimum amount of character compatibility, of course).
However, I don’t agree that in a long term relationship attraction is no longer important. A better way to describe it would be ‘necessary, but not sufficient on its own’. It still remains an important factor for long term happiness, however. Let’s put it this way – remaining physically attractive to your partner for as long as possible certainly won’t hurt your chances. It’s not a waste of time. I don’t mean that one should be obsessed by it or start resorting to silly cosmetic surgery to try and turn back the clock, but a minimum standard should be kept, which basically means being at least decently active and in shape, eating healthily and being reasonably well groomed. What’s wrong with that? And yes, physical attractiveness in their mate is usually more sought after by men than by women. Biology and evolution again.
“Men – you have to always put your wives first, above everything else.”
“This is another fundamental truth which men ignore at their peril. Women need to be the ‘queen’ in their man’s life. We do not insist on this because we are spoiled, selfish, demanding or any other of the accusations you level at us. It’s is a primeval need, linked to the ancient social role of man as protector and provider.”
Ahh, bull’s eye. You are describing the traditional masculine figure. Wasn’t that a chauvinistic ideal a moment ago? So we agree that women are turned on by it and even need it to feel fulfilled.
[Daphne – No, no, no, you’re completely wrong. Women want to be put first, but they do NOT want to be dominated, bossed around or told what to do. That is either a sexual perversion or the result of a troubled childhood that has turned the woman into a victim. It is NOT normal psychology. Most of the discontent in marriages – that I know of, and I know of a great deal – is the result of the wife’s opinion not being considered, decisions taken on her behalf and decisions taken behind her back and without her consent.]
Here we are more on the same wavelength. Your advice to always put the wife first was too open to interpretation. There is a huge spectrum of possibilities there, and it could be interpreted that a man should be the emasculated, needy, submissive version that some present as fashionable nowadays.
[Daphne – I’m sorry, but this description of a decent man who treats his wife as an equal as ’emasculated, needy and submissive’ is antediluvian. This is another thing that normal women hate: that so many men see respecting their wife’s wishes as a sign of weakness. It isn’t. It’s a sign of strength and maturity.]
However, you state clearly that women actually yearn for the traditional ‘strong’ male provider figure, which flies in the face of all the darts thrown against the “anachronistic, chauvinistic and oppressive” traditional male role. (And then the same people may even complain about the disintegration of family values at the same time!).
[Daphne – Everybody wants a strong and reliable spouse, and not just women. Men want a strong and reliable spouse, too. They do not want a a wife who cracks up and breaks down at every turn, or who can’t get out of bed in the morning because she’s ‘depressed’, or who can’t do her duty because she knows that she can rely on others to do it for her. The basis of marriage is mutual support. You cannot have mutual support if one is weak and the other strong. Both have to be strong, and when both are weak, disaster follows.]
“If a woman perceives that her man’s loyalties are divided, that he doesn’t put her first for a whole variety of reasons or just one (and women always know when they do not come first, even if the man insists otherwise) then she feels insecure and threatened at a deep level, so deep and ingrained in evolution that it seems irrational to men and even to we women ourselves”
True, and also, “it depends”. “Divided loyalties” is a very varied concept. Often it’s just about a man also needing to fulfill his desires and aspirations. Mind you, many women have also relinquished raising a family because they just couldn’t live without pursuing a deeply felt mission.
[Daphne – And even more women have given up on their dreams so as to raise that family. But because the received wisdom is that raising a family is a woman’s ultimate fulfilment, that replaces everything else she might have wanted to do, we don’t consider this. The woman whose only ambition was to raise a family is a very odd one. Many of the problems in homes, in the past as well as now, were and are the result of women’s frustrated and thwarted dreams and ambitions.]
In general though, it’s women who most often have been the support system of their husband’s quest. I don’t think a wife would resent her husband trying to become the best he can be, if doing that also reinforces his status as provider and loving carer for his family.
Of course, there has to be a balance, and the wife must feel and know that her support is vital, appreciated and cherished. Many women have held that role and been very satisfied with it. I’m not saying that all women *should* hold that role, but that many women willfully carry out that role and are fulfilled by it. The saying that “behind every great man there is a great woman” exists for a reason.
[Daphne – Rubbish, I’m afraid. That only applies in a situation where marriage is permanent, and marriage is not permanent. The reality is that experience has shown the foolhardiness of wives who support a man to become the best he can and gain the most he can, because when he finally ‘gets there’, the likelihood is that he will dump her or trade her in, and some other woman (or man…) gets to enjoy the proceeds of her hard work and deprivation. Wives who neglect their own career and income development to support their husband are taking a massive risk and gamble, and it doesn’t always pay off. The further a man goes, the more likely he is to get rid of her or to be hopelessly unfaithful.]
Again, there are evolutionary reasons for this. For ages, the women supported the group, raised the young, and managed the homes, while the men risked life and limb hunting wild animals for food, defending the tribe against attackers and doing the heavy work. We did evolve for distinct roles, and it is a model that has worked for thousands of years. The problem with many unions nowadays is a lot of role confusion which leads to both trying to be ‘men’ or both trying to be ‘women’, with the result that neither feels satisfied. You can fool biology only so much.
[Daphne – Don’t be so literal. If we were to go on what is ‘biological’, then women would live in groups with their children, men would live in groups away from the women, and they would meet only to mate when the need strikes. There’s still a lot of this around, in fact. Watch how women cluster together with their children at the slightest opportunity, while men hive themselves off from the women and hang around in batches.]
“And that is why women become totally enraptured by the men who put them first.”
Again, that “put them first” needs qualification, and it was our bone of contention in this discussion.
If it means that the woman gets to be the boss all the time (picture the wussified men portrayed in ‘Sex and the city’, for example, who bend over backwards and hand over their credit cards to placate every whim and tantrum of their superficial, spoilt, entitled women), then not only No, but Hell No!
[Daphne – No, not that. Putting them first means, at the most basic level, that if it’s a toss-up between what his mother wants and what his wife wants, then he understands that he is married to his wife and not to his mother, and that his mother’s wishes are secondary to his wife’s. That’s just one example.]
Actually, women are enraptured at a deep emotional level by men who display alpha qualities. Let me elaborate. Evolutionally, women have spent a great deal of time being hypergamous. That means that in a tribe, all the women will strive to get the attention of the few pack leaders – the alpha males. It meant that a few dominant men would get access to all the women. When a male was displaced in the pecking order by another male, the latter’s sexual desirability skyrocketed. It’s an evolutionary mechanism to ensure the propagation of the strongest genes. It’s observable in many other animal species, including our closest cousins the apes. We are not much different when it comes to primal biological urges.
A female who got selected by the alpha, did her best to merit his attention. A very clear power exchange was therefore in place. In this situation, a woman will in fact strive to be the best possible mate for her man, while he does his best to remain alpha in her eyes. As long as the man is high value in her eyes, she will remain deeply attached to him. She may also subconsciously test his alpha worth every now and then. In modern parlance she may “sh*t test” her man to see if he is really alpha.
This is where the babble about modern “real” men having to be nice and sensitive and vulnerable fails abysmally. He is allowed to be vulnerable every now and then, but if he consistently fails at showing the alpha qualities she seeks, she will quickly lose respect for him. Along with that, she will also eventually lose that deep sense of attraction and devotion. Another fine point: women often test their men subconsciously. To pass the sh*t test, the man must not give in to her every demand but assert his authority and value in her eyes when necessary. Once his and her’s relative positions are enforced, the bond is also reinforced. It may sound counter intuitive, but it’s the truth.
[Daphne – You have spent a lot of time on the internet, but you would be better off learning about these matters through experience. With all your talk of alpha males attracting females you are quite clearly new to life’s game. Women, like men, are attracted by possibilities. An alpha male who is all muscle and tough and the rest but who can’t stick to a job and has no money is possibly even more unattractive to a woman than a plain man who is reasonably solvent, and he is definitely much less attractive than an ugly man who is very rich, can make her laugh and treats her with kindness. The real deal-makers are the last two.]
Earlier we mentioned how one may often see less than attractive men with very attractive partners. That’s the answer. Women value the whole package of alpha qualities, not just pure physical attractiveness.
[Daphne – No, we don’t. We want somebody who puts us first, doesn’t lie to us and won’t let us down. Solvency helps and kindness too. And as for the alpha, forget it. Young women, perhaps, but certainly not experienced ones, who associated alpha behaviour with cheating and unreliability – indeed, the very opposite of what women want.]
Here’s some more proof. You have plenty of life experience and are a keen people watcher, Daphne. I’m sure you have seen legions of nice, respectful men – the kind who put women on a pedestal (hell, I was one of them), being shunned by women, while these same women tripped over themselves to get the attention of the sort of men who may be accurately described as “jerks”.
[Daphne – Ah, so that’s where your problem lies. I thought as much. I did detect a trace of bitterness there. You weren’t mixing with the right crowd, you were all young (and young people tend to be shallow) and you didn’t know how to make those girls laugh. And by now they have discovered that the jerks are jerks but it’s too late to do anything about it: either they are married to the jerks or they never married because they were so busy trying to get the jerks that they sidelined the husband material. It happens in every generation, don’t worry. My own generation is jammed solid with former glamour girls who made disastrous marriages or ended up on the shelf because the nice men were ‘beneath them’.]
So it’s not simply about putting your partner first, but more about making sure that the roles are fulfilled and the balance of power is ‘right’. When everyone has distinct roles and everyone knows what is expected of them and where the limits are, everyone is more fulfilled and less stressed. It is the same in business. If roles and rules and not well defined enough, problems arise.
“You seem to come from the point of view that dictates ‘treat ’em mean and keep ’em keen’.”
That cliche does have more than a grain of truth in it actually. It’s not us men who want that, mind you. The men who have figured that out and use the ‘treat them mean’ attitude are merely doing what will get them the women. They give the women what they want. If many more women actually wanted the “nice” men for real – as they will tell you they do want, but then are actually turned on by ‘bad boys’ – then more men would be nice. And most men are naturally nice in fact. But often the nice men will not be successful in getting the women they want. Some accept it and settle for it, others figure it out and adapt. It is what it is.
By the way, I don’t believe in ‘mean’. Partners in a relationship should never be deliberately mean to each other. But many women will admit that they rejected men with whom they felt no chemistry, because these men were ‘too nice’, too accommodating. No alpha, no sparks.
[Daphne – Chemistry does not come from meanness. It is either there or it is not. And in my experience, it is men, not women, who become obsessed with temperamental partners.]
“But the only kind of woman you’ll get in a relationship like that is a natural victim who likes to be dominated and controlled.
Women like this, despite pornography to the contrary, are in the minority. ”
This is typical false feminist propaganda, sorry. The idea that women are so special and so individually unique that they would never stoop to harbouring primal biological urges. It’s not about being a willfull victim of abuse, which is pathological. There is a big difference between that and between the innate desire for a mate who is assertive, strong and an able provider in the right measure, and who embraces that role and fulfills it.
Current ideas about relationships are getting so distorted, that if a woman accepts that her man is the head of the house – AND is perfectly happy with that – then she must automatically be an abused woman! That’s total bull crap.
[Daphne – Sorry, but men are NOT the head of the household. The law changed in 1993.]
Being the leader of a family or group is not about being abusive. Only bad leaders are abusive, and they do not last for long. Good leaders are good leaders when they act for the benefit of the group members they are responsible for. Sometimes this entails asserting dominance, but most of the time it actually involves a lot of self sacrifice, responsibility and energy for the benefit of everyone. It’s damn hard work. This demonisation of the natural role of leader in this context – as the head of the home – is just bullshit propaganda.
And then we lament that children nowadays have no respect and sense of civic responsibilities anymore. No wonder, seeing how the leadership and guiding roles of parents, especially fathers, is being attacked and discredited from all directions. Fact: a disproportionate percentage of young men who fall into criminality come from single parent homes – specifically, single mothers. The strong father figure, as leader, mentor and rule setter and enforcer, is vital for the healthy development of boys especially.
[Daphne – All this sounds so extreme right-wing and so detached from reality. You have a lot of growing up to do. The man who makes himself head of the household and asserts this dominance through fair means or foul will eventually face mutiny in the ranks, if not from the wife who undermines him secretly by having it off with the tennis coach, then from the children who rebel and go off the rails.]
“Most wives wish nothing more than to be treated with respect”
Absolutely. It goes both ways. See above. When the role dynamics are in place, everyone gets lots of respect and validation. It’s just a fallacy that if a man is the head of his house hold, it must mean that he does not respect his wife.
“I am appalled at times when I overhear gaggles of men discussing their wives – so very rude and disparaging.”
I agree. Certain things should be kept private. But then again, ever overheard a gaggle of women discussing their husbands or boyfriends? Just ghastly and worse than any male locker room banter sometimes.
“You are VERY inexperienced in these matters. Only a fraction of sexual attraction has to do with physical beauty. If that were not the case, the physically imperfect, the ugly and those over 50 would never have sex”
You are arguing from the point of view of a woman. In that you are perfectly correct. For women, the whole package of alpha qualities trumps mere physical beauty hands down. Men are far more attracted by beauty however, at least in the beginning. For long term relationship, other qualities gain a lot of importance too, of course. Many women lament that men will not ‘commit’ to a relationship. It’s usually just a case of the man finding the woman very desirable for a sexual fling, but he’s still not convinced about her suitability as a long term partner.
Of course it’s not only the super beautiful which get to have sex and have relationships. Everyone will have a sense of their value on the daring market and will seek to find the best they can get with what they’ve got. It’s all relative, which explains why only someone like Elisabetta Canalis gets to bag someone of the calibre of George Clooney, who has great looks and supreme status – a super alpha.
[Daphne – I am sure she would much rather have got ugly Bill Gates, but there you go: he’s still married to the same plain woman, despite being the Croesus of the 21st century. So much for that.]
“The semblance men want their women to retain is not to the looks of the woman they fell in love with but to her personality and outlook on life. It is not when the wife gets fat or goes grey that the husband begins to get fed up and look elsewhere, but when her personality becomes unrecognisable. This is because when we recognise people, it is their CHARACTER we recognise and not their looks. A change of personality is disturbing at a deep level in which a change of appearance is not”
Truth mixed with some kool-aid propaganda again. Yes, personality is vital. The lovely girlfriend morphing into a bitter, nagging wife is every man’s nightmare. But for prolonged sexual interest from her man, a woman must maintain a minimum standard of attractiveness, within the limitations of her genes and lifestyle. Again this is biology. I don’t intend to be crude here, but it has to be said – a man cannot have sex if he is not turned on enough. This is irrespective of how much he values and respects his wife for her other qualities.
[Daphne – Oh my, oh my, oh my, you have a long way to go. You can be as beautiful as a bird of paradise and be hopeless in bed, and you can be as ugly as sin and fantastic at it. You can be good-looking and well-groomed and have no sex appeal at all, and you can be ordinary looking and have tonnes of it. If men find themselves put off sexually by their wives after some years, then it’s almost certainly because they were never really lusted after them in the first place, but were merely pleased to have somebody to have sex with in inhibited and constrained circumstances. In many marriages which break down among people my age, it transpires that there was no sexual congress for years before the final decision to separate. The women are not just attractive but extremely attractive. Lust and sexual interest go way beyond physical appearance.]
Another fact: a man will be willing to put up with some hassles and shit tests, if he still finds his woman desirable and still enjoys great sex with her. He will be FAR less willing to put up with aggravations and personality changes if the sexual part of the relationship dies. And the more he distances himself from her, the more embittered she will become too. A vicious circle.
[Daphne – You’ll generally find that in those situations you describe, it’s the woman who has pulled away first and who has lost interest in having sex with her husband, and not the other way round. The women whose husbands have lost interest in having sex with them, on the other hand, are the ones who are running around like obedient mice, trying their best to do everything to please. They are certainly not the ones making scenes, because they are terrified that a scene will put their man off even more. They are the ones making themselves pathetic with fancy underwear and rigid diets and elaborate meals. it is the sexually confident women who make scenes, that much should be obvious.]
“And as for women, we are really not that interested in looks. Women can look at a perfect man and feel absolutely no interest, but give us a man who can make us laugh and who looks straight into our eyes when talking to us, and we’ll just melt.”
Describing alpha qualities yet again – confidence, charisma, leadership, etc.
[Daphne – Oh, this is so tiring. No, actually it’s generally what you would describe as beta males who have those qualities. Women (older ones at least) recognise the so-called charming qualities of ‘alpha’ males as competition. They know that this sort of man is so interested in himself that she will always come a far second.]
“Rubbish. I have no truck with women who sit around all day doing nothing and bumming off others, and anybody who reads me regularly knows this. I wrote about it only recently, in fact. My outlook is this: women either work or they are full-time housewives. If they are full-time housewives, then they have to approach that role responsibly and do everything in the home. If the husband is providing all the money, then it follows that the wife should do all the house-chores. If both are bringing in the money, then the house chores should be split.”
I totally agree.
So right…
There is nothing sadder in my opinion than watching women over 40 pretending to be teenagers again and telling everyone that they were “cool and thrilling” and ‘”strong” to leave the marriage and walk out..while they go ‘out’ everyday with ‘friends’ to ‘have fun’.
It is sad and pathetic in my opinion.
Well done for a good article.