Today, I point you to an article I stumbled across on the MSN Today site (my homepage when I open my internet browser.) It can be found here, and is titled ’10 Signs She’s Losing Interest.’ I clicked it just out of curiosity, as I often to with relationship based articles, and (as so often happens!) felt compelled to immediately rip all the Epic Levels of Fail to shreds.
So. At first, not too bad. This article contained a slew of decent-but-obvious points that I am surprised anyone needs to be told (if you’re always her last priority, if she’s constantly picking fights) but also a few choice moments of absolute What-The-Fuck-ery.
For example….
Pat on the back: A kiss can tell a thousand things, but so can a hug. If her cuddles are just a brief squeeze and she starts patting your back while she’s got her arms around you, it suggests she’s shying away from intimacy and putting you into the ‘friends’ zone.
…The fuck? This is really oddly specific and makes no sense. If something as personal as hug style can be interested as a reliable sign of a fading relationship, then… urgh, I don’t even know. This one isn’t even so much offensive as just bizarre.
Getting with her friends: If she swaps her cosy nights in with you for wild nights out with her friends, you could be falling off her radar. Reconnecting with her mates could be a sign she’s shoring up people to spend time with if she finds herself single again, and her nights out could be her trying out the single life to know if that’s what she’d prefer.
Okay, what the ACTUAL fuck? This is horrible. Is the author seriously suggesting that women in happy relationships never go out with their friends? Fuck that shit! When I go out and dance until dawn with my friends, it’s not a sign that I am ‘trying out the single life.’ It’s a sign that I am – wait for it – going out with my friends!
This is both really frightening, in the ‘if she spends time with her friends she doesn’t love you,’ encouraging really scary, possessive and controlling behaviour kind of way… and just plain offensive in suggesting that women only care about their friends when there’s no man to have ‘cosy nights in’ with. Just eww!
No need: Whereas once you were one the one she turned to when she had a problem to talk through or a picture she needed hanging, now she’s become much more self-sufficient. If she stops relying on you, maybe she’s preparing for life without you.
Ewwww. This is vile. If she’s self-sufficient, she doesn’t love you? What? And… hanging a picture? Seriously? If I’m capable of hanging my own damn pictures, I don’t really love my boyfriend? Hey, Nomad – I can do basic, fully-functional-adult things for myself! Be careful, Honey! </sarcasm.>
Being self-sufficient, and also having a support system beyond (but including) one’s partner(s,) is not only not a sign of a fading relationship, it’s essential for a healthy life and healthy relationship! This seems to be advocating really scary co-dependency.
_____________________________
Finally, I bring you this gem from the sister article of this one (surprise surprise, it’s ’10 Signs HE’s Losing Interest.’)
No one likes a possessive partner, but if the man in your life stops caring about your colleague he’s convinced has carnal intentions, it could spell trouble. It may mean he no longer wants you himself – or even that he’d like someone to take you off his hands.
Dear Relationship Columnists; please, please stop teaching your hundreds of thousands of readers that jealousy is the surest sign of love, and that if a boyfriends lets me go out with my friends or doesn’t fly into a rage about me being friendly with male colleagues, he doesn’t really love me. Just stop it. Why can you not see how disgustingly abuse-apologist this is?
SO… What is to be done to minimise the damage caused by this creepy craziness from mainstream commentators?
Get more information out, I guess. By word-of-mouth, by example, and by microblogging; and, I guess, by ‘targeting’ – get good information about communication and respect to teenagers (are adult Daily Mail readers and Sun drool-overs are beyond help? ) while they’re still learning, get close to scriptwriters for the Soaps (or become them) and comedians to get the message out, put commercial pressure on marketing and media-buying managers…
What else? Make pushing damaging social agendas and dangerous f**kwittering a painful and expensive thing to do. Which means: look for *effective* avenues of complaint and public reprimand.
I agree with what you’re saying, but I think the writers have an important safeguard: if one’s partner starts *changing* how they once were, then it’s time to look closer at the situation. If a boyfriend used to be very jealous, but then doesn’t mind when the girl hangs out with her gay-best-friend-that’s-not-actually-gay, it could be a sign of trouble. Same can be said of a girl who usually asks for help in doing certain tasks but starts to do everything herself.
This aren’t very good examples, but any time a partner starts changing habits, one should take caution.
This kind of crap has been out there for a long time. I just don’t understand why people glorify jealously when it’s so obviously negative. It is not a good thing people!
Also I’m kinda fuming that the article you refer to is so patronising towards women. Remember kids: Once a woman has a man she no longer has any reason for independence! Girls: If you love a guy please feel free to get him to do every damn little thing for you, especially those ‘difficult’ things like hanging a picture. And don’t you dare go out with your friends! Stay in that kitchen and make him a sammich!
Gawds! It’s worrying when a ‘serious’ relationship column has the same advice as internet trolls…
This is one of the reasons that I sold my TV 18 years ago and don’t read stuff from lifestyle magazines (except to remind myself how backward the majority of people are).
Hmmm… Just considering this… maybe it would be worth trying to get a regular column in a mainstream media publication to voice an opinion that isn’t straight out of a Jane Austin novel.
[...] EPIC FAIL….New Life On A HomesteadFifteen Minutes of Fun 11/14 & 15Ten Signs That Frightening Relationship Norms Are Alive and Well [...]
Also scary is the ex-coworker (otherwise a lovely, friendly, openminded and independent person) who asked without a trace of irony “What’s wrong with co-dependency in relationships? That’s what I want.”
*Shudders*
I guess that’s the converse (or obverse) of a healthy relationship in which all partners reassure and reinforce each other in a mesh of complimentary strengths and weaknesses.
The difference between a pathological codependency and a healthy mutuality is in the difference between zero-sum games and synergistic interactions*.
I suspect that your colleague has a zero-sum approach to many other things, some of them so deep in his subconscious that none of us have names for them. It’s a pervasive failure – we all have some of it – but zero-sum thinking is a perverse and pathological distortion of all human exchanges – emotional, sexual, social, civic and commercial.
As an aside, it worries me that an identifiable minority of the BDSM community take submissive dependency out of the playroom and into codependency in daily life.
*Apologies for the management-speak, but the words ‘synergy’ and ‘synergistic’ do have legitimate uses outside PowerPoint presentations. Occasionally.