Not All Men Are Jerks

Men are taught to apologize for their weaknesses, women for their strengths.

Do we often have unrealistic expectations of men and how a relationship is supposed to be? I think we often do. Learning to accept others as they are can be the key to happiness. Do you toss your best friend aside even though she does some things that irritate you? I doubt it. We accept the flaws of others, we all have them, so are men excluded in this concept? Are they not human too?

Men are different, that is a reality, they are raised to hold things in, not show emotions, deal with problems on their own. Their communication techniques, levels of intimacy, need for space, etc..., are not the same as ours, never has been, never will be. They have a right to these differences whether they suit our needs or not.

How many times have you stewed in your life time because a man did not behave the way you thought he was supposed to. Maybe he forgot to call, maybe he did not take out the trash, whatever. One of our biggest frustrations with men is our inability to get them to do what we think they are supposed to do. We use "shoulds" and "supposed to's" as if we were the supreme beings in a relationship. The key to getting along with men well in general is to accept the answer to the question I asked myself. "Who the hell gave women the right to set the rules, to make their needs more important, and to decide how men should or are supposed to act or respond in a relationship?" Is that really fair? No.

Men have a right to be themselves. They have needs too! I think we as women sometimes get so caught up in what we deserve, what we feel entitled to that we miss the big picture. They are an equal part of the relationship. Men consistently say the one reason they hesitate to get into relationships is because they do not feel they can live up to our rules and expectations. Have we become like that? Have we lost sight of the ability to see men as who they really are, because they may not meet all of our expectations?

We have seen that trying to change men often means losing them. It's more effective to find ways to respond to his differences that we can feel more comfortable with. By lessening his importance, his differences can seem less irritating. After all, our happiness shouldn't be too dependent on what we get from him. That doesn't mean we should sell ourselves short, but is it time for us to accept that men don't have to change because we have a specific image of what we want. Men don't deserve to be labeled as jerks because they don't do things the way we want them to.