Anonymous asked: Do you think some women don't see an emotionally vulnerable man as pathetic but want to support him instead or is that rare? Do older women do that as much as college aged girls?
Well, vulnerability can mean a lot of different things. One sense is that you’re opening yourself up to rejection or criticism, and I think that’s something you should always try to do. For example, you’ve heard fucking hipsters shitting on everyone’s music tastes while only admitting to liking stuff nobody’s ever heard of, or only liking objectively bad things ironically? That’s the opposite of being vulnerable. Being vulnerable in that way is admitting I love Rush even though you might say ‘Rush fucking sucks and Geddy Lee sounds like an old woman.’ Being vulnerable like that is good and avoiding it is a sign of weakness.
Or you can use vulnerable as just a synonym for weak/fragile/indefensible and that’s probably something you shouldn’t be. Like if I said I liked Nickelback. Big red glowing weak point right there. Don’t do the emotional equivalent of that. I’m not going to say there are no women out there who want partners who are totally pathetic because their drive to take care of charity cases is just that severe but relying on pity sex is a bad strategy.
In terms of how people more commonly mean emotional vulnerability, you’re not being emotionally vulnerable if you’re not letting your partner know how you feel because you’re afraid they’ll judge you or whatever. I think you should be judicious with how emotionally vulnerable you are with a partner - sometimes you do want to keep your feelings on something close to your chest to avoid causing unnecessary drama, making yourself seem like a low value loser, or pushing your partner away from you. Like I said, girls tend to push, push, push for you to open up about everything regardless of if it’s good for your relationship or not. Show her your best face and put the relationship first.
This is some pop psychology BS I picked up a long time ago and yet I find it’s proven accurate so far: men and women typically communicate differently, from an early age. Boys tend to be a lot more direct in their communication and they bond by doing stuff together. Girls tend to communicate more indirectly and they bond by sharing their emotions and secrets with each other, but that’s also how they get so much fucking dirt on each other to start girl-drama with.
A huge, huge percentage of relationship problems are reducible to people trying to understand and talk to each other using their own sex’s protocols - a man says something very directly and thinks he’s understood, but his partner reads all kinds of unspoken implications into it that he never intended to send. A woman tells her boyfriend something that any of her girlfriends would be able to understand as indicating her real message which he never receives. A man might try again and again to bond with his girlfriend through engaging her in his hobbies and interests and she blows him off and doesn’t get why it seems so important to him. A woman will press her boyfriend to be more and more emotionally vulnerable with her and he may not even have the words to express this stuff because none of his friends try to pull that gay-ass emotional intimacy shit on him.
If you’re going to do well in relationships with women, you need to understand where they’re coming from on this stuff and how it’s different from how you usually do things, and ideally, talk to her in her language. But relevant to the emotional vulnerability discussion, you need to know how to give that away (don’t just dump everything on her all at once, pace it out and let her do the whole overanalyzing thing women do, let her go have some conversations with her girlfriends that don’t pass the Bechdel Test), you need to know how to set boundaries with it, you need to press her to be vulnerable with you in return or she’s going to feel like you don’t give a single shit about her even if you’re totally in love with her (lots of guys fuck that up).
And most any woman who’s been through middle school has inflicted and received unfathomable degrees of emotional cruelty through this channel that a man may go his entire life having deep friendships and close working relationships with other men and never use once. A true feeling, what you share by being emotionally vulnerable, is a private secret that can often be used for leverage or even betrayal. Women who are happy in their relationships frequently refer to their partners as their ‘partners in crime’ - they trust their partners to keep their secrets, and vice versa. There’s some balance of power - that’s a good place to be. But if she pries everything about you worth knowing out of you while you’ve got nothing on her to keep her from cashing it all in to manipulate you, like she’s been trained to do by her Mean Girls upbringing, well, you’re in a vulnerable position all right. You want to be her partner in crime, not her victim of crime.
Older women - Christmas cakes and beyond - are kind of a mixed bag I guess, it depends on what phase of the modern female lifecycle they’re in. She can still be in her party years the same as a college girl, then there’s the epiphany phase when she realizes she’s on a clock to lock a guy down, which can mean she decides she needs to be hypercritical and swipe left until “The One” appears, or that she can’t afford to be hypercritical anymore because time is running out and “A One” will have to do.