This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
"I don't understand women."
Whenever someone has an issue with an SO, then extrapolates that to all women... that's a red flag to me that this guy has a lot more misogynistic views just outside the frame of view.
It is unfortunately common. Pretty much all of the guys I know IRL complain about their SOs with "Pft. Women, right?" And I'm sitting here like... No? Maybe that's just your SO? Or just your SO when they're with you?
Women and men do have a different way of thinking the majority of the time. It's about learning to cope with and deal with the other one's feeling. If you want a woman, you have to be willing to deal with woman moments. If you want a man, you have to be willing to deal with man moments. Simple. Relationships cannot be perfect.
Men and women have tendencies and subculture, sure. But they're not mutually unintelligible if you make even a little effort to try and understand the other side as fundamentally human people. For example, by listening to them and taking their positions seriously (even if the specific situation does not call for believing every factual claim).
I think we mostly agree here, just with slightly different framing.
Exactly, you cannot be a good spouse and not take your partner's opinion seriously just because "pffft women/men"
Not sure why you got downvoted because I had the same reaction when I read it. This is your spouse and treating her request for divorce and obvious associated emotional distress as something related to her gender rather than the specifics of your relationship seems incredibly dismissive and misogynistic.
Who knows, lol. But I'm more than happy to engage with people who disagree, so long as it remains relatively civil.
I've had plenty of gender-coded miscommunication with my wife over the years. But that's far, far outweighed by more individual differences (like neurotypical v neurodivergent, mismatched communication habits, and mismatched expectations from how we were raised. Hell even just regional differences.
And when it comes to the other married guys I know, I've provided advice (upon request) that basically boiled down to (1) you don't "win" a marriage, (2) treat her like a partner not an adversary (even if she's treating you adversarially for now), and (3) be open and vulnerable when you can. It's amazing how many of them have just... never once heard that advice from anyone else their whole life. Wild out here.
And this case like most relationship issues comes down to insecurities and bad/non-existent communication. To which, let's face it, male socialization is a major contributor.
With stoicism and a fear of vulnerability, we're far too often standing standing in our own way.
That is unfortunately the tendency for men, yeah.
It's not misogynistic to admit you have trouble communicating with women.
Do you think that's what's happening (both in my example but also the OP greentext)? That they're admitting they have trouble communicating?
I could see a literal interpretation of "I don't understand women" as a standalone sentence being reasonably interpreted that way, sure. But given the context, I think that's really unlikely.
I think they're expressing frustration about not being able to communicate with women, and I think it's easy to misinterpret that frustration as aggression or misogyny.
To be fair, I don't mean like, raging, beating your wife misogyny. Just the standard kind that results in overgeneralizing and venting in this particular way.
The behavior described seems like either (1) the wife has big attachment and insecurity issues (maybe a personality or mood disorder) or (2) the anon has major, major communication issues (essentially driving the wife to desperate measures she might not have gone to otherwise). In either case, these are extremes. And extremes really shouldn't be generalized to the whole gender population, y'know? I can't think of anything BUT some amount of misogyny that would lead to that type of generalization.
A lot of men genuinely have trouble communicating with all women (beyond superficial day-to-day interactions). I don't think that's misogynistic, I think it's a symptom of a bigger problem in society. Boys aren't taught how to interact with women, and when they fall back to what they were taught about interacting with other men they quickly get themselves in trouble.
I don't really disagree with your overall point, I just think that's being way over generous to the anon here.
Like, do you think talking to your wife like she was a dude is really the only thing at play here?
No. Since you asked, I think the communication issues are most likely caused by both people involved, not just the man. I think the wife (in the OP) was expressing her own frustration when she suggested divorce, then felt like she had to follow through with it when OOP didn't react the way she wanted/expected him to. It sounds like neither person in that relationship is communicating effectively.
Yeah, I agree with that 100%.