There is something I have been exploring, being back into the dating market in the USA after more than a decade of blessed expatriatism, and am currently seeing people and exploring all this.
Culturally, what are women supposed to do for men? No stative verbs (am/is/are/was/were/be/being/been), no nouns, no adjectives, but like what are the top 5 action verbs that women should be doing for a man and if she isn’t, there should be a good reason or maybe he’s going to leave? Or even 5 or 6 important ones or even mundane-but-expected ones? I can think of a list with regard to men, some of which are simple like hold the door or bring flowers, some of which are complex (like the thing above about flowing well with money)… but what verbs are like totally important and expected for women to do?
I think it’s a disservice to women to not have some explicit expectations or even setting bars. But the answers could also just be in my own blindspot. I’m curious and I hope the question is appropriate here.
Most of the useful ones are fairly symmetrical. Things like taking care of health and appearance for yourself but also more effort than you would otherwise on the margin because you care about your partner’s experience. Taking note of things that seem specific to your partner/make them happy and noticing opportunities to do them. Noticing that the way your partner expresses care is probably the way they also wish they could receive it, and symmetrically noticing that the ways you keep expressing care for your partner are ways you secretly want care and doing the counterintuitively difficult emotional work of learning to ask for it instead of resenting their lack of mind-reading.
Creating space in which your partner can be vulnerable to expose their real preference (e.g. sexual preferences). Both men and women have a pretty hard time with this (especially any gender-narrative dystonic preferences) and often have had some pretty hurtful rejections in the past from other unthinking young people.
Then there are things that people present as if they are relationship obligations and try to avoid the emotional maturity of having them be explicitly discussed requests instead of tacitly held/resented demands. Such as coddling their coping mechanisms while not being allowed to acknowledge that you are paying costs to accommodate them (or you doing this to them).
Men often wind up in the valley of bad emotional sensitivity where they think that going into these sorts of things will make them unattractive/feminine (see: gender-narrative dystonic), mostly because they haven’t had solid models of masculine emotional space-holding from their fathers and older male peers, modern age siloing isolates people from a lot of feedback from older people at every stage of life. They don’t have a context in which to train the first awkward 100 hours of these skills. I think this is often why people report things like circling being very helpful.
I am perfectly happy that the patriarchal roles are no longer shackling women. I would not like to roll back time, personally, on these matters. I hope my question doesn’t come across this way—it is just that I am confused about expectations.
How can expectations exist without roles? When everyone is free to do whatever they want to, no one can expect anything specific...
Well, we can still have general, i.e. not gender-specific expectations, such as: people should be nice and emotionally mature. Nothing wrong with that. But it seems like the traditional gender roles also provided some gender-specific “hacks”, and now we don’t have them.
Or you could ask which traits are valued at the dating marketplace, or more specifically at the part you are interested in. But there is no general answer anymore; it depends on what you are looking for. For example, if you want to have a traditional relationship, it would make sense to behave according to the traditional roles, and expect the same from your potential partners. Other subcultures have different rules. And I suppose most people are confused, do random things, get random results, then hopefully learn and try something different.
There is something I have been exploring, being back into the dating market in the USA after more than a decade of blessed expatriatism, and am currently seeing people and exploring all this.
Culturally, what are women supposed to do for men? No stative verbs (am/is/are/was/were/be/being/been), no nouns, no adjectives, but like what are the top 5 action verbs that women should be doing for a man and if she isn’t, there should be a good reason or maybe he’s going to leave? Or even 5 or 6 important ones or even mundane-but-expected ones? I can think of a list with regard to men, some of which are simple like hold the door or bring flowers, some of which are complex (like the thing above about flowing well with money)… but what verbs are like totally important and expected for women to do?
I think it’s a disservice to women to not have some explicit expectations or even setting bars. But the answers could also just be in my own blindspot. I’m curious and I hope the question is appropriate here.
Most of the useful ones are fairly symmetrical. Things like taking care of health and appearance for yourself but also more effort than you would otherwise on the margin because you care about your partner’s experience. Taking note of things that seem specific to your partner/make them happy and noticing opportunities to do them. Noticing that the way your partner expresses care is probably the way they also wish they could receive it, and symmetrically noticing that the ways you keep expressing care for your partner are ways you secretly want care and doing the counterintuitively difficult emotional work of learning to ask for it instead of resenting their lack of mind-reading.
Creating space in which your partner can be vulnerable to expose their real preference (e.g. sexual preferences). Both men and women have a pretty hard time with this (especially any gender-narrative dystonic preferences) and often have had some pretty hurtful rejections in the past from other unthinking young people.
Then there are things that people present as if they are relationship obligations and try to avoid the emotional maturity of having them be explicitly discussed requests instead of tacitly held/resented demands. Such as coddling their coping mechanisms while not being allowed to acknowledge that you are paying costs to accommodate them (or you doing this to them).
Men often wind up in the valley of bad emotional sensitivity where they think that going into these sorts of things will make them unattractive/feminine (see: gender-narrative dystonic), mostly because they haven’t had solid models of masculine emotional space-holding from their fathers and older male peers, modern age siloing isolates people from a lot of feedback from older people at every stage of life. They don’t have a context in which to train the first awkward 100 hours of these skills. I think this is often why people report things like circling being very helpful.
I am afraid that even asking this question would be perceived as horribly patriarchal today.
My parents’ generation would probably say “cooking” and maybe a few more things, dunno.
I am perfectly happy that the patriarchal roles are no longer shackling women. I would not like to roll back time, personally, on these matters. I hope my question doesn’t come across this way—it is just that I am confused about expectations.
How can expectations exist without roles? When everyone is free to do whatever they want to, no one can expect anything specific...
Well, we can still have general, i.e. not gender-specific expectations, such as: people should be nice and emotionally mature. Nothing wrong with that. But it seems like the traditional gender roles also provided some gender-specific “hacks”, and now we don’t have them.
Or you could ask which traits are valued at the dating marketplace, or more specifically at the part you are interested in. But there is no general answer anymore; it depends on what you are looking for. For example, if you want to have a traditional relationship, it would make sense to behave according to the traditional roles, and expect the same from your potential partners. Other subcultures have different rules. And I suppose most people are confused, do random things, get random results, then hopefully learn and try something different.