do you think that the more risk you take, the more you have to gain AND lose?
We all take risks in relationships. I think the answer to your question would depend on the type of risk you're talking about. For example:
- If you do the Rules, you "risk" letting the guy you really want go without ever knowing your feelings, and you "risk" that you will drive away a great guy because he's gotten the wrong idea from your behavior.
- If you give a chance to a guy who is great and into you but who you don't feel chemistry with, you "risk" wasting time, and/or ultimately ending it in a way that reflects so poorly on you that your father calls the guy and thanks him for treating you better than you deserved. (Yep.)
- If you let yourself get your hopes up about someone, whether through putting up with their shit hoping they'll change or just trying to interpret their actions in a way that means they like you, you risk having them crushed.
- If you pursue someone or show too much interest, you risk rejection.
If I'm interpreting it correctly, Michael's question hits on the choice of risk between #1 and #4. (Some would not acknowledge this as a choice between risks, but would frame #1 as risk aversion and #4 as risk taking. The Rules supports this view somewhat.) Specifically, Michael wants to know if #4 might result in a higher reward than #1, and may therefore be worthwhile on that basis.
The scenario is as follows: there is a guy a woman feels strongly about, but who has not noticed her and will not pursue her. The logic goes (and I think this is Michael's point), the woman has a lot to gain from letting the guy know her feelings, in case he might like her too. By following the Rules she might end up with a guy she likes less.
So does this "high-risk" approach result in a higher reward than if the woman just forgot about that guy? The Rules answer to this is, for women, absolutely not. If you are a woman and you pursue a man or make your interest obvious, you are guaranteed a lower reward.
Do I believe this? Sort of. I don't believe that a woman pursuing a man is guaranteed a lower reward. I also see "showing interest" as containing many gray areas. If I smile at a guy and linger in conversation with him, but never call or suggest we go out, I don't buy the Rules's view that I'm dooming that relationship.
See, the Rules, when followed as a philosophy and not just as a set of behaviors, does not permit a woman to feel strongly about anyone who does not notice her. Rather, it trains her to focus on the guys who do notice her. This may seem artificial at first glance, but it is in fact very natural. Many women including myself have this messed-up instinct to fall for guys who will not treat us well. I consider this to be nothing more than a chemical imbalance. The Rules trains your brain to realign itself.
If you take an egalitarian view of the world, you of course disagree with this approach and in may in fact be offended by it. But the Rules and my life experience makes a pretty good case for a non-egalitarian view of heterosexual relationships.
For these reasons, I have come to feel strongly that (i) when a woman assumes the role of the pursuer in the relationship, there is less for her to gain and more for her to lose; and (ii) when a woman refuses to assume that role, there is more for her to gain and less for her to lose. I don't view the word "pursuer" as strictly as the Rules does, however.
Michael's second comment:
And in regards to the Rules, do you think you can actually throw yourself into the relationship at a later date and immerse yourself in it like you say you like to if the relationship has started out on a framework external to your core beliefs?
I'll start by going off on a tangent. I would never have described the Rules as "external to my core beliefs," although implementing the Rules is something that it would never have occured to me to do. The fact is that I have never really had a philosophy about finding love or finding the right guy because until now, there has always been a serious relationship existing or imminent. I would try to cobble some sort of moral together after, of course, but the resulting worldview amounted to nothing more than sour grapes. I had none of my own core beliefs about how relationships start out, simply because I had never experienced my adult self with no male counterpart.
Put differently, I had no boundaries. This prevented me from ever really evaluating a relationship on its merits, in the context of my own wants and needs. I leapt into something and then engaged in post-hoc analysis by critically scrutinizing the relationship and the person - I don't want this quality that you have. I want this quality that you don't have. I want us to be like this together. Needless to say, this is destructive; its tendency to make both parties miserable readily apparent.
The Rules provide a starting point in developing my own boundaries. One of my primary goals is in fact not to "immerse" myself in a relationship too soon (like I like to do). Here I am, two months into the six. I am failing at the Rules in some ways, but I am cognizant of falling short and I'm trying. But when I am done, I hope to have come up with boundaries for me, that I can implement without doing things I find silly.
So, Michael, I will not end up "immersed" in six months. But that doesn't mean I can't ever be immersed. The Rules is about going slowly, not about hiding yourself forever. "Men must be conditioned to feel that if they want to see you seven days a week they have to marry you." --Rule #13, Don't See Him More than Once or Twice a Week. "We are all looking for someone to share our lives, thoughts, and feelings with, but ... wait until he says he loves you to share your innermost secrets ... Always remember that in time you will be able to tell him just about anything!" --Rule #20, Be Honest but Mysterious.
Yes, the Rules would prefer that I was more of a lady. But I'm not and I'm ok with that. I don't fear ending up in a relationship where I can't be myself. Myself just comes through regardless of how hard I try to push it down in a fit of demureness. I will not end up in a relationship where I cannot be myself, quirks and clumsiness and expressive hand gestures and sporadic makeup application and all.
I was going to comment on Michael's post yesterday, but didn't know quite how to put it. Rulebreaker, first of all, thank you for forming the words.
ReplyDeleteI'm another new Rules practitioner. I wouldn't say it's external to my core beliefs - not by a long shot - because I'd already come to believe most of its philosophies on my own, through more than 30 years of dating experience. I used to be a model and still expend the effort and trained expertise to keep myself looking my absolute best - but I cannot capture a man's interest if I show interest first. Ever. As is becoming clear in my own blog, it's always seemed to me that my romantic feelings toward men are consistently unattractive. In fact, from attractive men's reactions to me, I'd started to think my romantic feelings toward them were simply somehow ugly and disgusting to them. Anyone can imagine how painful that thought can be - especially to the onetime shy nerd-turned-model.
So I'd started to think that perhaps I'd better try something new: pulling back whenever I had those feelings. (Think of George Costanza in the Seinfeld episode where he started to do the "opposite" of his instincts - and things started working out well for him!) At the very, very least, I could walk away with my dignity intact. My awkward attempts to show interest have in the past resulted in, well, TOO MUCH interest being shown, and poorly timed, so men have been scared away. Every single time.
After more than 20 of these experiences in a row, Michael, wouldn't you conclude that maybe some guidelines would help?
After I'd come to that point on my own, my sister gave me an audiobook of The Rules in December. I listened to it and felt as if the authors had put my own vague conclusions into a clear set of guidelines and numbered them. Ideal!
I've been trying some of them out - with surprising results. So I've determined to keep practicing them. Whenever I'm tempted to fall off the wagon, I think to myself: What's that definition of insanity again? Isn't it - to repeat the same behaviour over and over and expect a different result?
Continued in next comment due to space restrictions....
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ReplyDeleteContinued from previous post (and edited for a typo):
ReplyDeleteLogically, if I'm too available and easy for a man who has multiple choices among women, who's going to catch his interest? The one who throws herself at his face, or the one for whom he has to put in some effort?
My point, Michael, is that I read your post, but with respect, I was honestly shaking my head. I was thinking to myself, "Wouldn't that be nice - but man, for YEARS I've been hoping and trying for just that kind of 'honesty' from the very beginning, and it's never worked. If only this person could hear some of my stories, or knew what my consistent experience with that approach had been like." It would have rung true with me in the past, but now it just does not convince me. I wanted to somehow SHOW you my 30 years of it NOT having worked that way. There are many people who, after every failure, told me to just keep waiting for the "right one", the one who will let me declare lust at first sight and treasure me for it forever. They didn't believe I should try holding back - they just believed I should have faith and keep waiting. Well, I've tried that. For 30 years. He seems to be delayed....
Now, it'll be easy for you to dismiss me as "bitter". Nope. Not true either. No more than we say an obese person who decides to swear off donuts has become bitter about donuts. I've just decided to try not indulging in full attraction disclosure for awhile and see how much more fit my love life can become. It means self-control, and it's good for the man too. It will encourage him not to objectify me, which most decent men don't want to do. I'm learning how it's a good thing not to tip my hand.
Anyway, I think I must have made my point somewhere in the ramble above. :) (And that's one more behaviour I'm painfully learning to change, too - no more rambling emails to men I'm interested in!! As a songwriter, THAT is so character-building for me it almost physically hurts. ;) ) Take from it what you will - but to sum up, your points are well taken and I would absolutely love it if we lived in that kind of ideal world where my feelings toward men WEREN'T repellent if they were openly expressed from the very beginning, but we don't - at least, I know I don't. So I'm trying a new set of behaviours. That's all The Rules is really helping me to do - and I was going to do it anyway.
And I do expect different results. :)
Sometimes I wonder whether this relationship where you're completely immersed, open, blissfully loved for everything you are, is not something Rules girls abstain from or other girls find, not something you get if you play your cards right, but just a myth, an imagined paradise. To some extent it's possible, surely, but life and people are not constant, definable things - they are constantly flowing, changing, they are processes. Relationships and intimacy can't really be things you "get" and "have" and "keep," then. Right?
ReplyDeleteThere are a million relationships in my life - my family, each one of my individual friends, I have some sort of relationship with everyone I'm fb friends with, the people who give me my coffee in the morning, my landlord, I have a relationship with my self, with my work, with my dog. This is obvious, everyone knows this. A lot of times I don't really know what kind of a relationship I have with someone, I'm not sure of its boundaries. Sometimes I expect to have the same kind of relationship with a guy that I have with my close girlfriends - that one where you can sit down and spill - divulge - confess yourself. Because that feels like just "being yourself."
While I can and do look at my closest friends, my trusted confidantes, as people with whom I'm intimate, I'm "close to," people who I can tell anything and don't have to hide myself from or act a certain way for.... when I really think about how those relationships act, even THEY have rules. There are things I won't say and I know there are small pockets of space where our opinions, perspectives, philosophies diverge. And I'm careful with those spaces, I know them well, I don't press on them, I compensate for them almost unconsciously sometimes. If I had to visualize the way these relationships behaved, they'd be more like bubbles, sometimes smooshing up against each other and sometimes bumping away, but always moving gently with each other. And I don't regard this as any sort of shortfall in the relationship. We all take space from each other sometimes, we all fail to understand each other sometimes, we judge and appreciate in turns.
I guess I have two points.
1) This idea of finding someone you can be with where you don't have to govern yourself, where you're totally open all the time, might be a myth - and it might not actually be necessary for happiness.
2) I challenge the idea of "being yourself" as necessarily equated with openness and honesty, and the corresponding notion that acting in conformity with anything other than your present impulse is "playing games." Why am I necessarily not being "myself" if I'm not speaking everything that's on my mind?
Certainly there is some truth to these two ideas - we've created the words to reflect experiences that we have all had. And maybe following the rules has the potential to create other capacities in us.