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Yes, I think you're 100% right. My complaint in dating for a long time was that I wasn't meeting women who were smart or passionate, and so many of them felt like blank slates without anything interesting to say.
I also think men just love talking with a lot of rhetorical force; I'm not the most confident guy in the world and even I can sound like a blowhard when I'm discussing something I feel passionate about.
But the important thing to note is I'm never actually cocky about it, I just feel passionately.
I've probably 'mansplained' a lot to my girlfriend, but she's never complained about it. In fact, she seems to enjoy it. We went out to dinner a few weeks ago and I was rambling on about the upcoming British elections, and she kept asking me questions ("Wait, who are the Tories?" "How is the Prime Minister elected?"), and when I apologized for rambling, instead of complaining, she just said, "No, I'm learning something here, I enjoy listening to you talk." And when I wondered aloud how the partisan split is so different -- with Labour soaking up both white working-class voters and more American-style social liberals -- she had some of her own thoughts and we had a good conversation about partisan splits in the US. When it's a topic she knows something about, like Biology, I'm always interested in hearing her thoughts and we go at it from the other direction sometimes too.
I don't know how this would go with a woman who wasn't so interested in discussing ideas, or was more insecure about her own intellect. This whole point of view is so alien to me as well.
I wonder if there's much difference in preferences between younger and older couples, related to wanting to have children together vs it being too late for that. With kids, it would probably be good if one of us were a bit more present and patient, rather than always going on about culture war stuff all the time. My parents are both very thoughty, they met over Dostoyevsky philosophy classes, and get along great -- but there isn't anyone to keep things in order, and their house is absurdly terrible.
The argument seems to be that many women have been trained to act interested even when actually bored or if they already know more about it, in order to make their men feel better. I don't know how often that's true, I would guess occasionally but not all that often.
Hm, I could definitely see how that could be the case. If that’s really going on, though, it sounds like the women in question would be the ones who need to change their behavior — unless the men are truly terrible people (which I doubt in most cases) I bet they’d appreciate either the more active interest of their partners with their own knowledge or a polite but clear indication that they’d like to change the subject. Like most things in relationships, communication is the solution.
My gf has definitely gotten bored of a discussion before, but I can usually tell. It’s also happened that she’s talked about something she’s passionate about and I got bored — I know a lot less about biology than she knows about politics and history, so there’s a greater disconnect. But honestly, I’m just excited that she’s excited and I love knowing she cares about what she’s doing.
So many of the relationship complaints I hear from people of both sexes just seem so petty to me. I respect that a lot of people have serious problems in relationships and I want everyone to be respected and appreciated by their partners. But so much just feels like a dark force just wants men and women to hate each other.
Yeah, I'm not necessarily saying that some women getting terrible relationship advice is the fault of the men in their lives. Like that article a few weeks back about college girls egging each other on to have sex right away with every guy they were a bit interested in, and then feeling upset about the results. It sounded like the girls in question had gotten a lot of really dumb advice from the women and female media in their lives.
Personally, I like it when my husband uses an interest to suggest an experience we can share, like he'll research some ruins and plan a day trip to go look at them and play tour guide. I don't like it when he tries to info dump about weapon usage in Ukraine or something, but that's at least half negative emotional valance of it being about ways to kill people.
Yeah, it probably was better to have a norm not to complain about one's romantic partner just because you got in a spat and are feeling angry about it. Healthy couples mostly seem not to do that. We seem to have lost some outlets, living so far from our families, -- I've called my in-laws to complain once or twice when feeling really outraged, and it was way more effective than complaining in the comments section of the NYT or something.
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