MGTOWer: “Women are like a bitter medicine that you force yourself to swallow because you believe it is doing you good.”

@inu – “Yes, you’re right” or some variation on that theme. Yeah, even though it should be obvious we’re not going to, and he does seem to read what is written, but comprehend it? Think about it? Mmmf. Dunno about that. The more I see, the more hints about why his girlfriend did eventually bail.

Bob, I’ve read all the comments here (I was bored at work today) and there’s been something niggling at me, and since you’re back I want to say it:

I think the problem you’re having here (aside from all the other problems) is that you’re clinging to the idea that people women just decide to fuck off with no warning because, flighty bitches. Even when your supposed Ur example – your own relationship – has been admitted, by yourself, to have warning signs. You also admit that this was better than you getting married.

Now, here’s the thing. I can’t speak for everyone, and I’m not talking about your relationship, but I certainly know a lot of relationships that have ended with one partner (usually male) being absolutely flummoxed as to why, while the person who actually left has, in part, left because their partner was so bloody inattentive that they haven’t glommed on to a single clue that they might be unhappy – these were usually men who cling to the idea that all relationships need are for there to be meals on the table and access to someone lying back and thinking of England three nights a week, and all this talking malarkey is for sissies* (although actually I will talk about your relationship for a second – she talked about wanting to be raptured and you had no clue she might not be thrilled with life? Fuck’s sake man).

If the last paragraph doesn’t make sense, I’ll use a personal example: I was with my ex for five years. We got engaged after four and a half years, and when I left him he was absolutely shell-shocked. Hadn’t seen it coming at all. Didn’t think a single thing had changed – he was right about that, nothing had changed. One night we were coming home from a night out and I got out of the taxi to take some money out to pay for it, then decided I wasn’t going home with him. That was it. Never went back. Even got my friend to go clear my stuff out of the house.

Now I know you think I’m queen bitch at this point, but the reason I left him that night wasn’t because I was ‘immature, flaky or unreliable’, it was because he was an abusive shit who’d treated me like hell for at least three years by that point, and I finally snapped. Best decision I ever made. Not having me at his beck and call (trust me, I was not the immature, flaky or unreliable one in that relationship) or to use as his verbal punching bag or walking wallet meant that he had to sort his shit out, so it benefitted him too (although to be honest with hindsight I couldn’t really give a fuck about that, but one of the reasons I stayed so long and accepted his half-assed proposal was that I literally thought he would die if I wasn’t around).

So while I don’t think you’re advocating for people to stay in loveless relationships, I do think you’re a fucking clod for thinking that every single time a person woman shocks a man by leaving him that it’s because she’s a big immature meany-pants and refusing to even entertain other notions. PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT THERE’S SEVEN BILLION OF US ON THE PLANET YOU CAN’T ASCRIBE ARBITRARY MOTIVATIONS TO THE BEHAVIOUR OF PEOPLE YOU DON’T KNOW.

(*I don’t think this is a normal thing for men to think but it was pretty common in the men I’d see coming into the pub I ran and telling me about their (ex-)wives, then hearing the story from the women the next night. Also happened to my mum.)

I had a feeling Bob’s insistence that his definitions of all things relationship-related being Inviolate Truth had something to do with his personal history. It was that or he was a young guy who had never had reason to question what he absorbed from his parents/teachers about cultural norms and thus insisted they had to be right because God forbid he have to ask himself some hard questions.

Actually it’s probably both, eh? Poor guy.

I never drink alcohol but I just had an awesome 4″ meatball sub for lunch. 🙂

I guess what Bob wants is to be reassured that he is allowed to feel hurt is allowed to feel sad when he is dumped His blaming is not a good or fair way to express these feelings. And yes he’s been told that before in this marathon-thread, but because of his current state of mind, he is not able to understand what he wants to hear.

Bob-Dude: and there hasn’t been something that has fundamentally altered your relationship

There was; on her end.

That’s the real problem… you aren’t granting her agency (same thing with the “no good reason to turn down a proposal” shit you opened with).

She, obviously, thought something had changed. So she didn’t do a great job of sharing that with you. That sucks. She could have done it better.

But that’s the way life goes. Let It Go.

Otherwise, the level of misery you have now is just a downpayment on the emotional wreck you seem to want to make of all your future.

Nobody should bat an eye when the person you’ve been seeing for a month or two says “Sorry, it’s been nice getting to know you, but I don’t think it’s going to work out.”

Horseshit. Being dumped hurts. The first month is all warm-fuzzies and happy-glow and imagining how glorious the future is gonna be. Having that tossed away hurts. Yo may not have as much invested, you may get over it quicker, but it not trivial.

You need to see a professional; because you don’t seem to have a clue about how things work; not relatioships, nor people in general.

Seriously dude. Get Over Yourself.

Not that you will actually pay attention. I’ve actually put a fair bit of effort into trying to explain things to you (what with personal history, outside sources, relevant questions) and all you do is parrot the same shit: “She just up and left; no reason, no warnings. Didn’t care and Oh!, She done me wrong”.

If you lavished the same attention on her you have given me… she was the one hard done by.

Oh sweet merciful heavens is this thread still going?

Honestly, I think more than anything, Bob needs some Captain Awkward up in this shit.
http://captainawkward.com/2011/11/13/lies-we-tell-ourselves/

I think this part is best:

Go hang out with your friends, lick your wounds in private, focus on other stuff, and live to seek another day. Your negative feelings are your feelings. You need to learn to process them and comfort yourself, and not blame them all on someone else, or persist under the illusion that there was a way that rejection sandwich could have been made tastier or that people who have rejected you owe you a self-improvement consult after-the-fact. Take that sense of entitlement you have about what the object of your affection owes you out to the back yard and shoot it like (rabid Old Yeller, an infected zombie). Even if the person who rejected you did act like a big confusing jerk about it, the result will be the same: You. Rejected. How much more energy are you going to pour into a lost cause?

Emphasis mine. Rejection sucks and people can be sucky. Even if all you said was true (debatable, since you seem to offer varying pictures of what happened and your words suggest you might not be as “of good character” as you might think), what does it matter? Does forcing her into some kind of contract mindset after the end of your relationship have any impact whatsoever on YOUR continued life? Do yourself a favor and forget her. Move on. Join one of those “male subcultures” you think are rightly giving the bird to women and society in general. I promise you, no one here is going to stop you. Get a hobby, a pet, a new motorcycle or a library card and MOVE ON WITH YOUR LIFE.

I promise you, for every woman who has a change of heart and breaks some man’s heart (since Bob is only concerned with the heterosexual romances – btw Bob, erasure IS a form of homophobia), there is a man who has done the exact same thing to a woman. This shit happens to people and it sucks and is hard but it is not the end of the world and it does not mark the need for some kind of moral imperative for people to behave a certain way that YOU deem acceptable. You have mentioned you think both men and women do this, yet you only seem focused on women who bail on serious relationships. You cite no actual statistics, but link to articles and talk about books and your experience as if personal anecdata marks some sort of growing phenomenon.

In regards to it not being “so bad” and “why did she stay if it was so bad?” – dude, you can’t know how bad it was. You might never know how bad it was. Because you are not her and if she doesn’t tell you, that is her right and you have to deal with it. And speaking from my perspective, it WAS “so bad”. I stayed available for an “on again, off again” guy in college who was moody, manipulative, and was basically on again, off again with me so he could hook up with other girls at parties. It was bad. It was real damn bad. But I stayed because he said he didn’t know what he’d do without me and he had suicidal tendencies. I didn’t want to break his heart (or possibly trigger a suicide). It was bad when I was in a LDR with a guy who seemed to have no actual plans ever to try to see me or move closer. We talked about it, but never actually decided on anything and whenever he would talk about coming up he would always talk in vague terms or when he would actually make plans, he would bail at the last minute. I stayed for three years because he said he was sooooo in love with me, I didn’t want to break his heart. I am willing to bet my bottom dollar that both men thought they treated me exceptionally well and couldn’t understand why I broke it off with them (and to be fair, the LDR was immensely supportive and wonderful to chat with). But both did things that hurt me, that made the relationship unworkable for me, but I stayed and I did try to work things out and I did try to explain when things were wrong until I finally couldn’t take it anymore. And for the record, “if it was so bad, why did she stay?” logic is very very much in line with abuser’s lobby DV apologia. No, maybe you weren’t an abusive asshole to your ex, but you’ll understand why, when you use the same language as the abuser lobby (and claim to agree with much of the MRM, which is basically shorthand for abuser lobby anyway), why many folks here might be inherently distrustful of your word. Because many of the words you have used (unwittingly or not) are inherently in contempt of consent and autonomy. And very very inherently distrustful of women being able to asses their own reality, which IS misogynist.

You talk about how horrible it is for people breaking people’s hearts (women in particular) but don’t seem to realize that the fear of hurting someone can be a HUGE part of the reason why so many women stay, even if it is, “so bad”. And that pressure to stay, that pressure to “not be a bitch” to not “break his heart” (that ultimately can cause more pain in the end), because, come on, it’s not “sooooo bad” does NOT come from feminists or computers or women’s advancement in the workplace or any of the things we have now that our grandparents didn’t have. It comes from the same culture that tried to keep women out of the workplace and bemoans how horrible it is that women don’t need men in order to live their lives. It comes from people telling women not to be horrible heartbreaking bitches and people telling women they’re getting close to their expiry date so they’d better start getting less choosy. If you want people to be more straightforward and forthright, pressuring people to either stay or go is not going to help with that.

And more to the point, it’s not like you can really mandate some sort of straightforwardness clause in the laws of dating because there are no laws of dating and thank the fucking lord for that. You cannot mandate that the dating people of the world behave in a way YOU deem acceptable because the only person in life you can control is yourself (at best, you’ll get some people who will flip you off and tell you to mind your own damn beeswax) and it won’t solve all the dating problems anyway. People are complex and weird and frustrating and delightful and funny and annoying and obtuse and blunt (sometimes all at once) and different things work for different people. The best you can do is tell people to be themselves and use their words and hope for the best. (which, again, is NOT something that was terribly encouraged back in “the good ol’ days” of our grandparents).

And even if there were official dating laws passed by the dating congress and signed off on by the department of dating, and even if you could get your “stay or go! No time thieving or emotional terrorism!” mandate made a law, what then? Would you really feel safe and secure giving your heart to someone else? Would it really help you move on? Would it really give you the closure you feel you need? I suspect it wouldn’t. And not just because then you’d wonder if people were only with you because of the damn straightforwardness clause instead of because they really loved you. It’s because 9 times out of 10 the best two things that heal a broken heart are 1) not dwelling and 2) time. So you aren’t ready for dating yet? That’s cool. Lots of people aren’t. Take some time for yourself. Read some new books, learn a new skill, join a new club. You seem to think there’s this limit on when and where you can’t find love, but there really isn’t. I promise you, the less you freak out about “time wasters” and finding “twu wuv NAO” the more likely you are to heal. And the more you heal, the easier it will be for you to fall in love again, if in fact, future you decides that that’s what you want (and it’s totally ok if you don’t).

Guess what whining on feminist blogs about time wasters and how much better things were back in the good ol’ days only to explode in a mess of uncomfortable (and unasked for, might I add) oversharing is? Dwelling. STOP IT. Stop it right now. Get lost. Whining to a bunch of strangers (who were a hell of a lot nicer in a lot of ways than they had to be) about your ex who done you wrong is NOT HELPING you to get over it.

I know right? I’m counting the remaining hours of the workday — my BFF/ex-gf and I are headed to Tavern to have fat appetizers and a pitcher of neon booze.

I value in myself the ability to enjoy tiki-inspired alchemy as well as classic cocktails.

Baileys, Southern Comfort and lemonade – surely the lemonade made the lemonade curdle? Euwww!

Are we talking american lemonade (lemon juice, sugar, water) or UK lemonade (citrus soda)? b/c the latter might not curdle, but the former absolutely would.

Like a cement mixer, but without the self-awareness. 😛

uuugggggh. I was sort of hoping that the fact that UK lemonade is more like soda would save the baileys. No such luck.

Ugh.

Inurashii, you didn’t have to clean the glass. *thousand yard stare*

thenatfantastic – glad you had fun on your weekend! Sucks about someone getting sick, though. 🙁

And that drink sounds appalling … bleaaargh.