This will be a short post, but may well be the most important thing you take away from my blog. Every woman considering divorce without serious cause should make up two lists, a sort of pros and cons:
List #1: Women who have your back, and know you can do better.
List #2: Women who will forever taunt and torment you for letting such a good man go.
I’m guessing by now you can already see the benefits of having these lists all sorted out. You have to know who you are dealing with. The first list is pretty easy. You know which of your girlfriends, female coworkers, and female relatives are sure you could do better than mister boring loyal dude. Don’t forget about women on Facebook, too. So write out the top 10 women and sort them in the order that they voice this opinion. The louder the voice, the higher the number (up to 10). Feel free to take a bit of time sorting this out. You really want to know who has your back.
Now that you have this valuable list, you really ought to make a copy for safekeeping. Go ahead and do this now. The internet can wait.
Now take the copy you just made of list #1 and cross out the title and replace it with the title of list #2; this isn’t really a backup copy, this is your list #2. There is one last change you should make though; find your mother on list #2 and bump her up a few slots. I’d say at least 2 or 3, maybe more. If she was already number 10 or wasn’t on the list at all, go ahead and put her down as #11. While you are at it, go ahead and bump the rest of them up a number as well.
Oh, and don’t worry about keeping backup copies of list #2. The women on the list won’t ever let you forget, so in a sense it will always be handy.
Do women actually torment and torment other women for getting divorced?
Depends on the social circle.
I wouldn’t use the word torment, but Looking Glass is correct about social circles. There is something to following the herd.
Yeah, but do they taunt and torment each other, or do they simply kick women out of the social circle if they do something of which the circle disapproves?
What happens is they will start off backing her up. “You should be happy” stuff. But what will happen is the newly divorced will start to ask favors of her supportive friends to fill in the voids left be the ex husband. Loyal dudes tend to be the types that make sure the internet connectionis good. They also seem to just magicly keep the cars running it just a matter of princess just saying the car is acting funny. Even if loyal dude doesn;t handle it himself he just seems to know who to call and princess gets to drive his car to the mall on saturday because it is his day off and he doesn’t have plans. Door handles stay tight,lawn seems to be cut, drains never seem to clog with princess’s hair. Things that don’t make the sexy relationship traits list. When she starts calling on her friends for these little things she will become a burden and that is when the comments will start. There will be some occasions when when making small talk when she will complain of some task and bring up “boring dude” used to do that and her loyal friends will remind her that she left him and add that maybe it was for the best. The female sniping will come when she tries to maintain her comfort of marriiage by having her friends fill in the void of boring dude.
Some of you guys have bit hard on the sisterhood myth. The key thing to keep in mind is that the women egging her on to frivolously divorce in the first place never had her back. Women are extremely competitive and often vicious with each other, which is why they try to trick other women into getting boy haircuts, sabotaging their love lives, etc.
The torment will often be subtle, something most men would misread as acts of kindness. What looks to us like commiseration or even a compliment can often be pouring salt in the wound: I admire you so much. You are so strong and independent. I’m too weak and always need a man in my life. By the way, did I show you the pictures of my latest (child, vacation, date with her husband, anniversary)? It could even be framed as a complaint about a bad day: Did I tell you that my car broke down? I don’t know what I would have done if my husband hadn’t been able to come fix it for me. Or concern: It’s so good to see you get out of the house! You need to go out and celebrate your independence girlfriend! Again, men don’t see this; this is why it isn’t uncommon for a man to be accused of cruelty by a woman when he was actually trying to help. To a man it really is intended in an understanding way, but women don’t think like men, they think like women, so they interpret it the way it would be meant if they said the same thing.
Indeed Dalrock the herd is a complicated beast. I would say that only the relatives and the absolutely closest friend (a sister almost) will have the best interest of the woman at heart regardless their own status, but in general terms women are always thinking in outranking each other. The lonely divorcee will fill her facebook pics with fabulous trips and tons of men. She will rarely post of the pic of her having Christmas alone or she paying a guy everything on a date with the hopes she will get some sex so if you ask her she will say that being divorced is the best choice they ever did.
And I would say this is not necessarily conscious from women POV they are rationalizing their choices. It takes a lot of ovaries to admit you are wrong and prevent a friend for making the same mistakes, YMMV.
I will say your idea of a list is very good but I would say that a woman that wants to keep her marriage should dump any toxic friends that she know will be rooting for her to do it, I believe in Zero Tolerance and all things couple related. If she keeps them around then chances are deep down she wants to have the possibility of validation in the case of frivolous divorce and that per se is a red flag, YMMV.
Dalrock my wife works as a teacher and what you have described is how it is. You could be a comedian and make a living off of the stuff women say to each other.
Dear Mr Dalrock
I am puzzled and wonder if you can help.
I quite understand the Male Dominance heirarchy. My cousin penned this little poem when I was about ten:
‘Opus is this strange boy’s name
Football is his favourite game
He only plays when he can win
When he loses there is an awful din’.
Opus demanded dominance: that much was clear.
I am however confused about female bitching. I can see that women do not seem to cultivate (true) friendships the way boys do, but even so they always have about a thousand facebook friends – thus there is no dominance heirarchy -, and on fb after an absurdly flatering profile photo there are endless posts about cute little puppies, the latest fashion, their holidays etc – but I notice – relationships and boys are always cryptically alluded to as if no matter how happy they are they are a-sexual, but it is clear their lives are fabulous. Where-ever they go they are always accepted as part of Team Vagina, and only have to meet another woman to become ‘instant best friends’. They are ‘booked up’ with their girlfriends for week-ends on end into the distant future (what they talk about heaven knows). They are always complimenting each other, for no matter how fat or ugly they seem to know that out there, are men who will be keen and eager for such a woman.
My question is (and I do not think this should be answered by a girl as they always dissemble or at least misuderstand their sex for I have found that female advice on relationships is always wrong-headed), Why do they seek such instant friendships if they know, as one presumes they do, that they will be deceived and back-stabbed, in the way you so wittily describe?
Opus you ask a very difficult question. I think it comes down to a mixture of things.
1) Women are often profoundly unaware of their own psychology. This is why as you mentioned they typically give the absolute worst dating advice to men. I think all women are aware of the bogus nature of the sisterhood at some level (and some times). But then at other times they seem to forget and buy into it all until the it bites them in the ass again. The comments section I linked to in my comment above is very much worth reading. It was one of those brief moments where all of the women felt safe admitting reality.
2) They really do seem to crave what the sisterhood would offer if it were in fact true. Wanting something too much can make anyone blind to reality. Women who don’t have a stable relationship with a man are even more prone to want to buy into this. And women who buy into the sisterhood are more likely not to have a stable relationship with a man, because they fall for the whispers.
3) The social hierarchy is absolutely there, but it is just far more subtle than it is with men. My guess is that moving forward you will start to notice it more. My wife tried to explain this to me for many years before I got it. The game guys see the same thing though because it is part of the environment they have to work in. One thing to look for are things which seem out of place. Woman A who you know hates woman B but pays her a compliment, seems genuinely interested in some aspect of her life or does something kind for her. If you look closer you usually can see what is really happening. From there you will notice it much more often even when it is less obvious.
4) Just like the social hierarchy the love life status is signaled much more subtly than men tend to be looking for. I would say for women those things which matter most are what they are most subtle about. As I understand it facebook has a “relationship status” field, so that part is more obvious. But the rest will be encoded in woman speak.
5) Women are fiercely loyal to other women in the abstract, but brutally competitive in person. Even conservative women tend to be for feminist policies and against slut shaming or efforts to combat cuckoldry, for example. At the abstract they vote for team woman. In person the long knives come out hidden only by a falsely sweet smile and tone of voice. Men tend to be the other way around. We are loyal to the men we know and are friends with, but very willing to throw men in general or men we don’t know under the bus. Women’s loyalty in abstract is very strong and visible, and many men (and deluded women) misread this as applying to the specific as well.
None of this is to say that women can’t have real friendships the way you and I know them, but they are far less common than men tend to assume. Stephenie alluded to the very short list of true girlfriends a woman might have in her comment. Even here there can be some cattiness, but it is more background noise vs the driving dynamic of the relationship. This is why I was specific about the friends who were egging the woman on to frivolously divorce. As Stephenie pointed out this is a glaring red flag that they don’t have her best interest at heart. This can be just as true from a sister or her mother, and more damaging because of the life long emotional connection. On the other hand, if her mother wasn’t egging her on to divorce, she will likely be honest with her daughter about the nature of the huge mistake she made. So either way if the divorce was frivolous her mother is likely to one of the louder voices pointing out how stupid it was.
Thankyou Dalrock for your prompt reply, and perhaps in time more will become clear. As my thoughts are still clouded I will not waist band-with with unsure further speculation. I would however like to say something about Relationship Status on Facebook (as you mention it though in such terms as leads me to suspect you are not a member of fb). There are a number of limited options: Single, In a Relationship, Engaged, Married and It’s Complicated. The proferred relational level may well be more to do with aspiration or denial than the answer purports, and should not neccesarily be taken literally. Face Book generally should not be taken at Face Value. Off fb last year a former acquaintance of mine described on more or less consecutive days, her man-friend as being a booty-call, a boyfriend amd her partner. This inability to define her relationship consistently amazed me. They have since separated (from whatever it was that they were).
Greyghost:
See how if we all just learned Game, all our problems would be magically solved? If men change our own attitudes, women wouldn’t think we’re ‘boring loyal dudes’ and run off with the bums selling drugs in the parking lot, right? LOL.
Stephanie:
“A woman who wants to keep her marriage should dump her toxic friends.”
That’s probably the most important thing a woman can do; and exactly what most American wives do NOT do. That’s because women in our culture are taught that men are inferiors; and so they value their female friends above their husbands (and often their children too). The family isn’t as important to her as the ‘herd’; because everything in our culture teaches women that men are disposable. Look how easy divorce and abortion is, compared to marriage and motherhood. The first two are considered a woman’s ‘right’; and the last two a ‘heavy burden’.
Belief in sisterhood seems to be a specifically American one. In other countries female cattiness is the subject of many jokes. A friend sent me a YouTube clip once, a part of a Russian comedy series, which shows two women, supposedly best friends working in the same office, who start their conversaion with compliments and it ends with them fighting and colleagues have to take them apart. It was really hillarious. The women meet after the weekend and then one of them says that she had been to Milan with her boyfriend and the other woman answers: “My dear, I’m sooo happy for you. FINALLY you went FOR THE FIRST TIME abroad and right away to Milan!” And it proceeds from there to more insults and finally to blows. I’m not sure they’d show something like this on American TV though.
Wow, your explanation of how women are cruel while looking kind is spot on, and I’ve never met a man who was able to grasp that. Keen insight!
Women are fiercely loyal to other women in the abstract, but brutally competitive in person. Even conservative women tend to be for feminist policies and against slut shaming or efforts to combat cuckoldry, for example. At the abstract they vote for team woman.
You’re seriously messing up neoconservatives, libertarians and blasphemers (aka fake “conservatives”) with traditional genuine conservatives.
“Belief in sisterhood seems to be a specifically American one. In other countries female cattiness is the subject of many jokes.”
I think one of the first thing the Men’s right advocates is to destroy PC language. I think is probably the biggest barrier you have. Women are the mistress of language and verbal communication they controlling the language making sure that no “hurtful” words are ever spotted is IMO 50% the fight.
We women are catty, I worked with children and this is obvious the moment they start to interact with each other, some of us are less than others. Some of us can be catty for the right reasons but in general women only support women as long as this support is beneficial to them and the opposite is harmful to them.
If you take the case of slut-shaming the PC police always use the “perfect victim” as straw-man argument. Hollywood always tells the story of the naive girl that got pregnant in the small town and got scorned by the whole population, to make Slut-Shaming looking like the worst crime against women. By contrast the good girl is presented as judgmental, repressed not fun at best and hypocrite being slutting herself up hiding….This is what is PC presented people in traditional values in negative light and everyone deviating from this as heroes or victims of society. Try that the other way around and see PC police losing it.
So even trad women are trained to be “understanding” of their hypothetical victim, use the same for abortion, and rape laws…and you see how great it works to manipulate the truth and how this things are ignored by the younger generation because really when was the last time that Disney Channel portrayed female cattiness? Aside from Mean Girls that is. The princess are usually up to older women with clear goals, thus it doesn’t look like cattiness.
Although I would say Maleficent cursing the Queen’s daughter with death because she wasn’t invited to the christening party might be the biggest example of cattiness in the Disney history. If you remember her words she looked composed and happy while spitting her venom a very female trait, YMMV.
Women need to admit that they hate each other. They browbeat their friends into divorcing (“You go, girl!”) then give ’em crap for not being able to find another (suitably hotter) man at their age, while they jealously guard their own relationship and wouldn’t even think doing any of that themselves– women feel better (and better about themselves) when everyone else (especially their friends) feel worse. Tell me that’s not unhealthy.
1 – Dalrock, you mother fucker…. I love your blog.
2 – You missed a valuable point by omitting this addendum to the second list: add in any unspecified amount of time between lists 1 and 2 based on separation. This differential can come at any time for the outside female observer that will invariably change their “position” based on other factual information presented to them. *
*Insert here: any number of commentary on female fickleness throughout historical publications, as well as fem bloggers changing viewpoints during the middle of their tirades [or choosing to refrain when they have been ousted by other sources – most nominally those that can refute their exclamations by hard, factual data.]
TLDR: Chicks will follow any advice, at any time, if it benefits them [or what they can rationalize.]
“Dalrock, you mother fucker….”
Apart from being downright rude and insulting .. Dalrock has a good and loving wife and a couple of kids. He’s a family man and doesn’t engage in such crudity.
I have never heard him use expletives to get his point across.. Not necessary.
You may think that you are the bees neez, but after reading that first line of yours? Pffft!
[D: No worries. I took it as I assume it was intended, as a compliment.]
I’ve been thinking about this post, and scratching my head. I know I’m a throwback and probably sheltered. I stay home with my kids, most of our friends and acquaintances have similar values. Divorce is very much frowned upon. When someone does divorce it is practically seen as a death, and it is pretty rare. It seems like the company that men and women keep can really affect their chances of staying married.Recommending both women and men staying away from unhappily married or divorced people sounds like good advice. Misery does love company.
[D: Very true. The research confirms this.]
Women are herd creatures. When the “never settle!” meme was spread around, it become a vast and stifling blanket of negativity that too covered way too many women. The divorce fantasy is a kissing-cousin to the “never settle” notion.
Friends are not often real friends:
http://theprivateman.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/her-toxic-female-friends/
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Ah, “having it all” and never being satisfied with men or themselves… apparently they missed the point when they were kids (see below).
Dalrock, I can attest to women having their mother taunt and torment them over a frivolous divorce.
My cousin and her husband were married when they were both 19, and they were very happy together… for about 10 years. That magic number was because around that time a lot of her female friends started going through “rough patches” with their own husbands, and instead of working things out they got divorced. My cousin decided to follow their example and dump her husband too.
Cut to now, about five years later. My cousin is single, living at home with my aunt who never lets a day go by without a dig about “her dumb mistake”. My cousin’s ex is happily re-married with twin daughters. The best part? His new wife was my cousin’s best friend, and one of the few women in her life (other than her own mother) who told her what a jackass she was being. My cousin’s favorite activity of late is either trying to find another “quality guy” like the one she dumped, or by trying to get other family members to throw her pity parties about how hard* her life is.
*She went into serious debt after the divorce through a combination of overspending on clothes/impulse shopping, and a failed attempt to go back to school for an equally useless liberal arts degree. As of now she’s well over 100K in debt, and has precious little chance of ever paying it off.
“The best part? His new wife was my cousin’s best friend, and one of the few women in her life (other than her own mother) who told her what a jackass she was being.”
Heh a Latin woman with a friend like your cousin would had told her before the divorce “well give me his number if you don’t want her anymore” those words works wonders. ;).
I know a guy who was going through a rough patch with the Mrs. She got a new circle of friends who she met at a night school class; all were/are l bitter angry man haters. His Mrs started big “D” rumblings…EVERY one of Mrs new “friends” approached my bud and expressed their “being” there for him, and asking that he give them a call. Mrs found out about this and Mrs went back to her prior circle of friends…Godly, marriage strengthening gal-pals, and dumped the toxic friends. The marriage is back on track.
This friend is a quality guy so my thought are;
1) the toxic friends were fomenting divorce in the hope of swooping in to try to grab this guy
2) bitter women can’t stand a happy marriage and can’t resist stirring up problems as a sport
3) the Mrs entertained greener pastures fantasies until she took a sober look around and figured out how good she has it.
4) my pal responded by calling her bluff via nonchalance born of his innate knowledge that he is a good catch and would not be on the market very long
Stephanie:
LOL, that is so true of Latinas! I know that whenever I’ve dated Latinas, when we broke up, her friends, relatives, and co-workers made sure I wasn’t single much longer!
@Eric
I mostly meant that Latinas are more likely to give a woman friend a reality check than utter the BS of “you can do better”. The snagging the man thread is a way to say to her that she is being nitpicky with an otherwise great way and she should wake up. Most of the times the women interested on the man for real stays silent. Getting the reputation of undermining other people’s relationships to snag the men herself wouldn’t go unnoticed for long and she would have a hard time finding female friends.
Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
H. L. Mencken
@ Kane..That is too funny!!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/10/married-divorce-finance_n_923455.html
“Why Even Happily Married Women Should Meet With A Divorce Financial Advisor ”
’nuff said!
My ex mother in law, who was a real nice peach of a lady, now has dementia, but everytime she sees her daughter, she asks how I am and why am I not visiting her at the nursing home. Oh revenge, how sweet in the declining years. My kids always get a chuckle out of it.
[D: That is hysterical. Welcome to the blog.]
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Sorry to open another comment on an old posting. This is in reference to the comments on Latina women being glad to take a rejected husband.
My first marriage was to a Cuban woman. She turned out to be a very angry woman, screaming curses at me all day long. A Mexican woman lived with us for a year or so, and learned I was a faithful husband. I adored her little daughter.
After I realized I had to get away from my wife and divorced her, well, to make it short the Mexican woman has been my wife now for 36 years. Heh, heh.
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“Dalrock says:
August 6, 2011 at 10:49 am
Some of you guys have bit hard on the sisterhood myth. The key thing to keep in mind is that the women egging her on to frivolously divorce in the first place never had her back. Women are extremely competitive and often vicious with each other, which is why they try to trick other women into getting boy haircuts, sabotaging their love lives, etc.”
Women are not capable of “friendship” in the same sense that men are capable. Women have this biological imperative that constantly whispers “me and my eggs before everything”. As a society, we know this – just try to think of any female “buddy” movies with two women; in so far as there are any, they’re all about loser women who have basically given up on having a successful life (I.e., marriage and children). “Thelma and Louise”, “Laverne and Shirley”, etc. There is an alternative – but it involves lesbian women, which is different kettle of fish altogether.
As far as personal examples are concerned, my wife, who is a good wife and mother, recently had a falling out with one of her best female friends. She is really depressed, because now she sees how this woman, who has two kids who are a couple of years older than ours, has always subtly put her kids in the “first born boy and first born girl” category when our two families get together, and putting our kids into the follower position. My daughter has complained about this for years, but my wife always denied it. Now, though, my wife gets it.
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