It was a perfect summer. I was staying at an extraordinary abode in South France, at the holiday-house-slash-mansion of a friend.
We had met at work. She used to be my boss when I was working at a London based software company. It was a girls-only weekend away and we discussed every little bit of our lives. What we admitted to be uncovered, that was.
We drank, we smoked, we ate, we laughed, we swam, we played tennis, we met my friend’s friends, we went out to clubs, we drove around the area of St. Tropez and its hinterland. In short, we squeezed everything we could into those four days we had together. And, bien sûr, discussions also came to the topic of dating.
I recall I was speaking about some of my meaningless dating experiences over the last years. In particular, I was irritated by the guy I was seeing back then, an awfully twisted and incoherent scene from the start. Delicious French rose wine led me to describing my situation as “I don’t know why this is all so complicated” or “what is so difficult about being independent, yet still being committed to a relationship” etc when my friend’s (the one with the mansion) best friend (a clever business woman, communicator par excellence and a competing triathlete, very attractive. I know, OMG!) was looking at me, paused for some seconds and then said those magic words: “You have to be vulnerable.” Ever since, I haven’t been the same.
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What did she mean? What is being vulnerable? What is the proposition here? What is there I can do to be vulnerable? Hang on, should I be vulnerable? My ever-optimising character of bettering myself took over.
I was extremely caught off guard by this remark. “Deep down, I thought I knew what she meant. Showing who you are, admitting your faults, signalising that you are okay that other people, in this case men, take care of you, yet never losing sight of who you are.” That is the blurb of that book or the headline of that article you are consulting immediately after those words have been thrown at you, aren’t they? I guess, I am now supposed to say: “Aaaah, that’s it.” But no, I actually do not understand the narrative. What is exactly meant by “taking care” of someone?
It is reminiscent of one-sided dependency. It smells like an emotional one-way street or a child-parent situation. It doesn’t seem to be an eye-to-eye encounter. Speaking of dependency: I depend on a lot of people, like my family or close friends to maintain my wellbeing and sanity. But I am not romantically involved with them. I am thinking: Isn’t it the “wrong” category when someone tries to squeeze too much into the same emotional bucket? There are romantic relationships, and there is also mental dependency on close connections. Both occupy spaces as human signposts in our lives.
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Intimate relationships have been experiencing an overkill of expectations over the last decades, I feel. Propaganda-like Hollywood romcom movies, mixed up with ill-informed backwards misogynist world views and patriarchally dominated media, have guided us towards a twisted perspective when it comes to our romantic relationships. The girl has to get the guy to marry her. End of story. End of HER story. Outch.
An overload of unrealistic expectations is looming over most dating experiences and consequent relationships. Not only a committed lover. The very same person needs to be a soulmate, a best friend, a financial co-partner, a holiday mate, an understanding therapist, a cut-from-the-same-cloth person. A lot of personas to fill! It feels that mainly women expect that from their partners. Or they think that those are their expectations. Traditionally so far, women have been educated towards a lifestyle where the only blessing was marriage and consequently a focus on the husband, children and family. An extremely narrow concept of life which was curated by a male dominated society.
The guys calling the shots only some decades ago pursued a rather different lifestyle though. Or shall we say more versatile? Or no, rather more flexible? Yes, that is the modern expression I was looking for. Different rules applied for the gents: Mistresses, check. Adventure, check. Business, check. Do as you like (as long as you can financially afford it), check. Throughout the last centuries, most men had always made sure their buckets were being equally loaded: Work, ambitions, adventure, hobbies, wife, other women, mates, you name it.
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Since this time in the Southern part of France, I have spoken to friends about their opinion and one remark of an artist friend of mine in Berlin stuck with me: “Being vulnerable? Ha! Who wants a hurt woman?” Yes, right, is it about being destroyed? Is it about lowering yourself so you fit in the traditional standards of the brain-amputated wifie-slash-girlfriend image admiring the man? Do I need to be broken in order to deserve your attention, appreciation or love? Would I be your dream date while being hospitalised? Is that being vulnerable enough?
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The prevailing dating scene most of us experience in pertinent apps seems like a polyester made jumper: It’s mostly cheaper to procure, sparkly when looking at it, yet not comfortable when wearing it. You get exposed to fabrics of life you really are not familiar with. You think you are. Let’s face it though: Mostly you are talking to an extended range of strangers who pretend or project something that they are not. (And, mind you, that is what you might do, too. Sometimes without knowing).
Which is, of course, rather easy when you operate in a virtual environment. And then there is the first and the second or the third date. And potentially a flourishing relationship. Or a sometimes one-sided situationship. Often though, you are left with the feeling of disappointment. I mostly rather felt the whole dating experience resembled an ancient battlefield or a lottery competition or a shopping experience at Aldi or an appointment at the dermatologist.
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“Emotions become bargaining chips, with the ‘winner’ being the party with the least to lose, the least invested and the least emotionally attached. The irony in this logic, of course, is that if intimacy is the prize, then neither party will win as neither is willing to put themselves on the line”.
This is what sociologist Alice Denby wrote for Eloise Hendy’s article in the British online newspaper “The Independent”.
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Are those beautifully put words the essence of vulnerability? Putting yourselves on the line? Without knowing what will come back? Why would you take such a risk lowering your guard and leaving you without your protection shield to defend yourself against the risk of rejection? Or even worse in my eyes: Indifference.
That just totally sucks.
To prevent you from being either bored to death or being emotionally shipwrecked during those dates, you have to be an experienced people reader with quite some pre-qualification training. You’ll otherwise face time-consuming activities, meaningless encounters or rejection-loaded potential for ensuing self-worth issues. Or, ever-optimising-character-self tells me, you need a rigorous qualification guide. Step-by-step. That is of course as romantic as going to the routine check-up at the hygienist.
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I had a chat with one of my flatmates. A Millennial in his mid 30s. A handsome bloke, yet defensive, and he seems someone “collecting” women. When not working as surgeon, he is checking his dating apps. There is Japanese soft-spoken stylist Saya, there is grittier Hong-Kong born Karen, there is Yoga girl, there is Polish film-makeress, I could go on. Whenever he is complaining about the fickleness of women and that women are really the ones who choose the guy (contrary to what my girlfriends tell me by the way), I am thinking: “You are the designer of that train station that is now your bedroom, you have chosen to be this guy. What are you exactly complaining about?” When I ask him if all of his flings know of each other, it is a “Hmm, no, not really” answer. His explanation: “I am not going to stay in the UK, I am not prepared to commit, and besides, relationships are never discussed by the girls anyway. They never address it. So, I am not lying.” And “besides”, he adds, ”this principle of not being exclusive was introduced by one of my former girlfriends. After staying with her for some weeks, and I really liked her, she just declared that we are not exclusive anyway and that she is seeing someone else”. And that is, my flatmate explains, why “I do the same. If women think this is the way forward, I do the same.”
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This is where I stopped and just thought: OK, so because this has been done to you, now you think this is “the standard” and you potentially hurt other people by not declaring your intentions, because you can? Is it as they say that “Hurt people hurt”?
I do not want to exclude myself here as a saint. Guilty as charged, I have done that, too. So what do we do as modern people with all of those undeclared and not spoken about emotions? And expectations coming with it? We are expecting quite a lot of the emotional partner to begin with. Soulmate, intellectual fit, emotional equal, financial peer, physical counterpart. OMG!
But that doesn’t mean that you are not allowed to have expectations, either. Another friend told me that after 25 years of an on-off relationship, she is still thinking that she cannot have any expectations of him. Excuse me? What are you exactly saying? That after so many years of knowing each other, you still think you have no right to formulate your requirements and you have abandoned the idea that those needs are heard?
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Yet another friend of mine (independent, business woman, cute, beginning 40s) described her dream partner as someone “being able to lead me through a crowd” to which one potential online match responded “Sorry, I really like your looks, but I need a co-pilot, not someone I need to lead.”
It seems we modern people, as in both wo*men, are not really aligned when it comes to understanding expectations of each other. And most importantly: How to negotiate our needs. Is it so difficult to admit and say: “Great you like my looks. A good start. Let’s meet and see if we click in person.” Or “I can do the steering now and then. So, will you from time to time do the same? I am assuming you have other qualities I like you for?”
Dating those days is reminiscent of a Hollywood-Barbie-and-Ken-dream-shopping-list, fought out with essay-style text messages or voice notes. A done deal. Before you have even met someone in person, looked them in the eye and laughed out loud about their jokes. Or not.
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It seems after industrialisation has thrown us into information age’s life-work-balance debate, we Western World lot with too much leisure time at our hands are focusing on, well, simply, ourselves. Too much, I feel. I think we need a new subject matter to be taught at school: Emotional communication. How to navigate human interrelation and communication.
And as so often, I do have to ask my consistent question again. Now that women are about to be liberated from domestic slavedom of the past centuries and to take their rightful position in society as equals to men, it seems wo*men are struggling to communicate. I do understand it might be a transition bleed.
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I know there might be some eye-rolling now from my dear readers about the “domestic slavedom” part about women. Yet, let me just point out: How do you feel about being told what to do? How would you feel about not being able to earn money even if you’d wish to? How would you feel about not being able to spend your own money, as it is administered by either your father, your brother or your husband? How would you feel about not saying ‘no’ to carrying yet the 13th child mutilating your body and mind? You know the answer.
Yet, something tells me: That might be a thorough conflict. Men and women have never existed eye-to-eye in human (recorded) history. Historical records we have access to nowadays were always recorded and edited by men, hence those records were distorted from a male dominated perspective. And there was always the hazard and danger of childbirth. Now, this burden at least has been relieved through modern living. Women are advancing in all competitive spaces men have ever covered. And we have to ask ourselves coming back to the “vulnerability” question: What exactly is it here that we ask of each other?
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That we are reduced to tears when talking about ourselves, a “dismissive vulnerability”? That we potentially overshare, an “emotional vulnerability”? That we are honest about our faults, “sincere vulnerability” as it is named? That we are clear about the happenings of our past, experts call it “historical vulnerability”?
And then, my reliable sources tell me, there is also “fake vulnerability”. A state of deceptive behaviour where one projects misleading self-doubting honesty in order to take advantage of someone’s compassion and gain undeserved affection. Another flatmateress of mine described the situation as follows: “And then there was this attractive and down-to-earth guy I had met on a dating app I was speaking to for two months or so on WhatsApp video calls – we were in two different cities. And he tells me how busy he is in his job and how he really is aware of his bodily shortcomings. I found it refreshing and cute that he would admit to that. Yet, little did I know that this was his pick up line…while so many other women were on his dating ‘roaster’.”
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How can one show vulnerability, yet protect oneself from its potential negative consequences? Vulnerability was seen as inferior for such a long time, mostly tied to women as emotionally hysterical. So how to change that narrative?
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Young Goethe couldn’t. In his novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther” he couldn’t and wouldn’t protect his protagonist from despair and ultimate suicide. Though that is the literary outpour of a different time experimenting with radical romanticism and romantic obsession of a misogynist writer. We let him off the hook.
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Some other historical figures, mainly women, often suffered from their own vulnerability. Read: their affection they projected on men mixed up with potential lifestyle expectations. One of the primary examples is Ophelia. A fictional character from the Shakespeare play “Hamlet”, Ophelia is a young noblewoman of Denmark. She sings before she drowns in a river. Made a household name through a painting of one of the Pre-Raphaelites, British artist Sir John Everett Millais, he depicts Ophelia in that moment of complete vulnerability. Rejected by her lover and bereft of her father. There is no one else to save her. She dies in the ice-cold water. Methinks, Ophelia was driven to this situation by a lack of options she couldn’t see for herself. And society at the time didn’t allow her to do so. All of her life’s expectations were thrown on the guys. A recipe for disaster in the first place!
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Now looking at todays’ news, TikTok and Instagram reveal all of “vulnerability” without being asked. It is the old honey pot trap of attention, appreciation and affection? We all want it. We all need purpose. We all need to know why we are here on this planet, in this existence, and what are we supposed to do.
We want to be accessible and likeable. But do we really need to be vulnerable (read hurtable) to be available to our friends, our lovers, or our family?
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No, I do not think so.
All the talk and writing about “just be yourself” and “just accept yourself how you are”. That is not really actionable if you are unsure about yourself.
How can you be yourself if you don’t really understand what you require to be content? Or haven’t learnt how to identify and communicate your expectations? And be prepared to negotiate and, if need be, compromise about your expectations?
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I think we need training. Identifying and defining our needs, learning to speak about and handling emotions. Negotiating expectations of each other.
Vulnerability in my opinion needs context.
You need a safe space to be vulnerable in. I once read (and I really don’t remember where, sorry) that “true connections are born from vulnerability”. Uff. Yes. That is true and would be the best case.
Yet, I feel vulnerability without context is simply oversharing.
What do you think?
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