In this article, I am going to explore my personal opinions on, gender, sexuality, love, femininity, men, gender roles, etc. Please understand that these are just my personal opinions, and I am not trying to step on anyone's toes or discredit any other approaches or outlooks on these subjects. You are entitled to your own opinion and lived truths! This is just the way I think- I’m not saying this is the “right” way to think.
I’m a painfully sentimental person. I look for meaning and significance everywhere, and nothing makes me more upset than something just… meaning nothing.
For a long time, I thought this was a flaw that I needed to fix, but now it is one of my favorite things about myself.
This quality is one of my greatest strengths and the core quality of how I see femininity. This is one reason I love women SO MUCH. I find that women inherently understand this.
Sarah found amateur pottery in her dumpster and wrote a poem about it. Ellie cries when she plays the music she writes. Hope decorated an Altoid container for the trinkets in my purse. Dare sent me flowers when I moved into my apartment, and she gave me a letter and a stuffed animal when I was recovering from my head injury.
A simple tenderness and love for life… Seeing the beauty in the world, and if there is none, making it yourself just for the sake of making it. This is a quality incredibly prevalent in women and incredibly rare in men.
I think platonic love is the truest love because it is giving without wanting anything in return; simply giving because you want to spread happiness; because the more you pour out your cup, the fuller it gets. Women understand the weight of emotional connection, and tokens of love shared between us are what make our hearts beat. We relish in the comfort of each other’s company- we rely on each other. We lend a listening ear and a shoulder to cry on. We buy each other gifts- we have each other over for dinner. We have parties, we write letters, we take pictures, we remember birthdays, we celebrate victories…
The way women love is awesome in the truest sense of the word, and so easy- something inherently understood, which makes it difficult when you try to date men.
“I don’t want to give you nothing if you never give me nothing back”
I’ll admit- I am very jaded and bitter when it comes to dating men. It feels like starving.
Sometimes I wonder if I am a high-maintenance person, but I think I have just been wounded many times by incredibly selfish men who have little to no regard for my feelings, which has made me extremely picky with high standards.
I had a friend say that she once thought love had to be hard; that you have to prove yourself and kill yourself for the person, but this just makes me think of the ugly stepsisters in Cinderella who cut their feet to fit into the glass slipper. You can’t force anything, and you can’t make someone like you. You just have to walk away.
This friend has been in a happy relationship for several months now and has given me a lot of hope. She finished her thought to me- she said she realized that love is simple. He wanted to be with her and she wanted to be with him. That’s it.
Most women I know don’t play games with men- they are honest and communicative with their feelings, and they give their love purely and tenderly; only to be ghosted, led on, manipulated, cheated on, lied to, and taken advantage of.
A few weeks ago I was hanging out with this couple and this girl said “I’m going to go find my boyfriend, I think he’s getting me a drink” a few minutes later I was sitting with him after she got up to do something and asked him how long they have been dating. He said, “Oh, we aren’t dating… We are just hanging out.”
I wanted to bang my head against the wall.
I want someone who would go to the grocery store with me, to sit with me and talk about their day while I take off my makeup, someone who will walk around the bookstore and point out the books they want to read, someone who I can make breakfast for, someone whose socks I’ll fold as well as mine. Men, do you not know that this is what love is? Do you not want this? I don’t understand!
Women Who Run With the Wolves
I don’t understand why most men don’t want real love- why they throw it away when they have it and are so bad at identifying it. A chapter from this book has helped me make some sense of this.
I have been reading Women Who Run With the Wolves, a book written by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D.
Women Who Run With the Wolves explores myths and stories surrounding the Wild-Woman archetype.
It’s not a bra-burning, man-hating Portlandia-esque proselytization; It has been an incredibly helpful piece of literature for me to make sense of love and femininity.
The chapter I am reading is currently about the Skeleton Woman.
In this chapter, both men and women can be represented by the fisherman.
Skeleton woman supposedly was thrown off a cliff by her father after making him unhappy when she was alive. She sank to the bottom of the ocean and her flesh was consumed by the fish.
The Fisherman starts off wanting to hook a big fish- naively looking for fun, something he is expecting. Unexpectedly, though, he hooks a terrifying treasure. Terrified, he runs all the way home with the skeleton woman caught in his net, dragged behind him.
When home, in the soft light of the fire, he takes pity on her, untangling the net and setting her bones back into the correct position. It takes hours.
He falls asleep, and in his lonely dreams, he sheds a tear.
Skeleton woman has been holding still, hoping not to startle the fisherman and be kicked out, but when she sees this tear, she becomes very thirsty.
Skeleton woman clatters over to the tear and drinks it. While lying next to the sleeping man, she takes out his heart and begins to bang on it. As she drummed, she sang out for her body to be recovered with flesh.
“She sang for hair and good eyes and nice fat hands. She sang the divide between her legs, and breasts long enough for warmth, and all the things a woman needs.
And when she was done, she also sang the sleeping man’s clothes off and crept into his bed with him, skin against skin. She returned the great drum, his heart, to his body, and that is how they awakened, wrapped one around the other, tangled from their night together, in another way now, a good and lasting way.”
The fisherman didn’t want Skeleton woman… He didn’t understand her. He was not ready to have his life reinvented.
Estes details in this chapter how change is integral, and many throw the skeleton woman back when they catch her because they know she will change them. She says in the chapter that many don’t want to be changed without knowing how they will be at the end of the transformation. Skeleton woman scares you- she is the exact thing you are avoiding, yet you need. She challenges you- she is NOT what you want.
It is easy to write someone off because they aren’t perfect, or you think you are undeserving of their love, or you think you could do better, or you don’t want to be tied down to commitment, or you are scared of rejection, etc.
You are only able to have a successful love with someone else who is ready to face the Skeleton woman.
It is no secret that I am divorced and moved back home in March 2024. It feels like my life started after my marriage ended. I cried in my car to this song because I associate moving in with my sister for a temporary period as I got back on my feet. I have been so violently alive and happier than I have ever been since I was a child. I like myself now.
Now it has been over a year since my marriage ended, and I am realizing that I have a massive wound regarding love. I am suspicious, untrusting, and insecure. I’ve tried dating some people last year, but Skeleton woman reared her head and it made me realize I had a lot of work on myself I needed to do. I won’t get into the details of why my marriage ended, but it messed me up real good.
I’m still chewing on this problem, deciding that the best way to move forward is to not look or pursue love at all, yet be open to it if it finds me. I’m trying to be very careful about who I let into my inner-world now.
Another reason I wanted to get offline: Instagram learned I was mad at men, so every post I saw was man-hating content. It kept reinforcing all their awful qualities. I know there are good men out there, and I’m trying to understand that no man is perfect. It does suck when I keep trying to be open minded and I keep getting this negative outlook reinforced. I am Miranda, trying to be Charlotte.
“Can’t you understand I’m trying to be a good woman?”
Vs.
“Oh baby can’t you understand, I don’t wanna be your man?”
I’m accepting that being obsessed with love, whether in a negative or positive sense, isn’t healthy. I’m trying to put all my attention towards other things. I’ve made an intentional decision to focus on art, movies, literature, DND, family, etc.. instead of romantic love. This is a good choice.
I’m tired of playing the game- being seen as an embarrassment, or a Ramona Flowers type person. I am sick of trying to live up to the impossible standard for women. Short Skirt / Long Jacket.
The Kalopsian Wave 
Leave a comment