Every woman is the star of her own melodrama.

Roissy has discussed at some length women’s need for emotional drama, and why it is important for men in relationships to keep a push-pull dynamic of varying degrees of emotional instability going in order to maintain her interest and attraction.  (I think he typically refers to it as “installing dread.”)  In the context of Roissy’s blog, it would be easy for many men to dismiss this advice as applying to the kind of women that Roissy and his ilk typically go for.  “I like nice girls,” they declare, “not slutty drama queens WHO WILL CHEAT ON ME AND MAKE ME PAY FOR SOME ALPHA JERK’S OFFSPRING IF I SUCCUMB TO MARRIAGE 2.0 WITH HER!”

But EVERY woman wants some emotional drama.  Why do women watch Grey’s Anatomy?  (Well, aside from the fact that the men on that show are exceptionally good-looking.  And are all surgeons.  And the titular character is a just-pretty-enough plain jane who snagged the best-looking guy, who is ranked above her, and who was formerly married but separated but the hot, sexy, also-a-top-surgeon wife came back and tried to get him back, but his desire for Dr. Plain Jane won the day.  And they are now “married” on the basis of a Post-It note!  Every woman’s dream!)  Why do women read romance novels?  Why do women love to hear about the trials and travails of their friends (assuming their friends are not emotional vampires)?  It’s because women are programmed with a need for emotional turbulence.  Every woman is programmed with a need for emotional turbulence.  It doesn’t have to be her own personal drama.  That is what separates drama queens from the typical woman:  a drama queen’s drama must revolve around herself.

I realized this was true of every woman, not just young women or stupid women or cheap women, when I was talking to my mom recently, and she mentioned that she had had an interaction with a friend and thought she had “made the friend mad.”  I realized that at least half the time when my mom is talking about interacting with friends, she thinks she has “made the friend mad.”

Now, an objective observer would be able to point out right away that my mom has not “made her friends mad.”  She hasn’t burned any bridges with these women, and is still being spoken to and invited to activities and isn’t being shunned in any measurable way.  But I’ve realized over the years that my mom is very invested in keeping all of her friends happy with her, and so it is a thing of some concern when she suspects that the friend was made “mad.”  It was only recently that I connected this with a woman’s need for emotional drama and realized that this is how my mom gets her own little emotional drama fix.  Does she ever confront these women?  No.  Does she ever ask them if she has offended them in any way?  No.  The mere existence of some emotional uncertainty is what she’s really after.  As she is a woman in a decades-long marriage of great stability and comfort, a woman who shuns tabloids and trash TV, and a woman who takes her faith very seriously, where else is she going to get her drama fix?  (You can only read about David and Bathsheba so many times before familiarity breeds contempt.)  So she finds it in the tiniest amounts of less-than-total-happiness with her friends.

I think the bottom line, at least for men, is that all women crave some drama, and they will find it somewhere.  Yes, even the most upstanding, drama-free, moral pillar of civility wants drama.  The question a man, particularly if he is a husband, should ask himself is, “Do I want her to get her fix from me, or from somewhere else?”  Because she will find it somewhere.

She likes someone else’s boyfriend.

Today in my internet surfings I came across a thread at one of my regular haunts that I knew I had to share with my dearest of readers.  It is a capsule of Roissy validation, i.e., it is a real-life, real-time dramatic incarnation of most of the principles of female nature he discusses.  Social message boards for women are some of the most instructive reads for insight into female nature; the nature of the medium does not alter the substance of interaction.

So, here’s what happened:  OP, in a thread titled “I like someone else’s boyfriend.“, goes attention-whoring by posting the following:

Lol, it sucks. But yes, I am smart enough not to ever do anything about it. He’s so awesome and we are so alike. I like him as in yes, I wish I could have him, but I just honestly like him as a person. Oh wellllll.

Right off the bat, we know we are dealing with a young woman, probably early to mid-20s, who craves attention and drama and is set on getting it by denying the very thing everyone with half a brain can tell she wants, even as she herself wants to believe that she really doesn’t want to steal this guy away from his girlfriend.  When the first reply suggests to simply enjoy the friendship since the guy does like his girlfriend, OP says:

Yes, he does. Should I add the story that I am 100% sure he would cheat on her with me. But, I just can’t. I would feel so bad no matter how much I like him. It’s not like a I’m liking him from afar thing. We talk all the time.

The East German judge gives OP’s hamster a 10.0 AND strikes a deal under the table with the Soviet judge to give OP a 10.0 also.  Anyone who believes this girl would “feel so bad” if she had sex with this guy needs to go pick up his White Knight suit with the Honors Beta badge from the dry cleaners.

With this additional piece of information, the dogpile begins.  Admonitions – rightfully so – that the guy is “shady” and that OP should “be careful” start up.  This attention prompts OP to reveal even MORE salacious details so her inner narcissism monster can be fed:

Because he’s mentioned it. We live in a SMALL town, and everyone knows everything, so that sucks. He apparently saw me leaving yesterday night and asked where I was going. So I told him out to the bar in another town. So he text me all night telling me to come over after I was done. And text me some dirty messages that I won’t even type here. I was like “aren’t you with your girlfriend?” He said yeah, but she will be gone later.

Now, that being said, I DO like him. So much. But I’m smart enough not to do anything. Because it is shady, and yeah, not cool. I know that I need to stop having contact with him, and it just sucks because I like him. I don’t know why I like him so much. He is willing to cheat on his girl. I think it’s because like I said, we have SO much in common, and I never meet people like me.

This is CLASSIC attention-whoring in the tried-and-true junior high girl tradition.  “I’ve got a SECRET!!!!!!…but I can’t tell,” “I’m in so much emotional suffering,” and “I don’t deserve this” techniques are all deployed here.  The only other biggie she left out was “I’m SUCH a ditz, tee-hee!”.

In a bid for even more attention, OP also starts denying that anything will happen between herself and Shade:

Whatever makes me feel better? I’ve already mentioned I won’t do anything about it. And I am serious about that.

In my experience, if you have to assure someone that you won’t do something, then you’ve already thought about doing it and are looking for someone to tell you that it’s okay to do it.  (Exceptions:  when your mom makes you promise that you WON’T DO SOMETHING despite the fact that you never discussed the topic with her EVER and never even thought about it seriously until she brought it up.)

Now that Shade’s douchebaggery is out in the open for everyone to see, the shaming tough love begins:

Wow, he sounds like a real prize and I can’t believe you’d like a guy like that. He obviously just wants you for a booty call and otherwise has no respect for you or his girlfriend.

//

Yeah, I think you should try to see his infidelity for the turn-off that it is. Maybe it will make it easier not to mess with him.

//

Ew he sounds like trash.

This is where things get interesting.  Are these other girls correct that Shade is a super d-bag?  Of course.  Any guy with a girlfriend who is sending dirty texts to another girl and talking to her all the time is prime d-bag material.  But are these girls correct that his douchebaggery is a turn-off?  No, they’re not.

The only reason that these girls can be objective about the situation is that they themselves are not attracted to Shade.  It’s pretty clear from the discussion that no matter how low-rent Shade is (and if he works at any place more prestigious than, say, Best Buy as one of the incompetent louts who can’t tell you anything about any of their products, I will be shocked), he has enough game to get OP to throw ethics to the wind and soak up his attention AND go seeking even more attention by telling strangers on the internet about the situation.

So, no matter how much these girls tell OP to stay away from Shade, to delete him from her phone, to tell him to…go jump in a lake (they use some more, um, forceful language), OP won’t.  OP already likes Shade, so nothing will be able to trip up her hamster.  OP will tell herself until she’s blue in the face – as she has done and continues to do in this thread, and until, I imagine, she is in the very act of having sex with Shade – that nothing will ever happen between her and Shade and that she has no desire to steal him away from his girlfriend.  And she will honestly believe herself.  And when it DOES happen, she will not be able to understand how it happened, and she’s not that kind of girl, and she feels SO bad (except she doesn’t).

And the thing is, all women are like this.  I’ve felt these seeds in myself at times and wondered why I was doing things that I would hate myself for if I weren’t the one doing them.  Even feminists are like this – maybe even more so, because I think that the more feminist a woman is, the more deeply and idealistically romantic she is.  A friend of mine who is a self-described “pinko commie” feminist fell for a roadie for her favorite band.  Roadie had a girlfriend, and would ignore my friend whenever the girlfriend came to a show, but it did not matter to my friend:  she and Roadie shared something special that was beyond the ken of the average person.  I tried to explain to her that Roadie was a loser, that she had no future with him, and that I did not understand why she was accepting second-best treatment and outright disrespect, especially when she was supposedly such a feminist and trying to be a role model for young women who have no better sense than to read Twilight.  Nothing I said made any impact.  Even when I pointed out that as a woman, why would she try to undermine another woman, all my friend did was shrug and pawn it off as not her problem.  She was in heaven when near Roadie, in angst when the girlfriend, known as Bitch, was around.  I finally told her not to talk to me about him ever again.

So what is the Christian spin on all of this?  The first is that you need to develop discipline NOW when you don’t have this kind of temptation in your life.  You also need to develop discernment so you will be able to pick good friends, and humility so you will listen to your friends and trust that their judgments are good.  If you find yourself saying about a guy, “Well, they don’t know him the way I know him, so they must be wrong!”, you most likely should stop and chiggity check yourself before you wreck yourself.  (I mean, think about it:  the way you described him to your friends was enough to raise red flags in their minds.  That’s not exactly a glowing endorsement for his character.)  And you need to develop character so you won’t become a common attention whore, chronicling your narcissism on the internet for everybody in the entire world with an internet connection both now and in the future to read.

As a companion piece, I recommend Ricky’s latest blog post, “Raw Concepts: Double Messages.”  It addresses the narcissism angle that OP so robustly demonstrates.

ETA:  OP is also constructing a scenario for plausible deniability in her actions with Shade.  She is giving him signals that she’s DTF but won’t jump him herself.  Being a man, eventually he is going to feel like experiencing someone else’s vagina, and being an alpha, he is going to be able to get it from an easy target, a.k.a. OP.  Then OP can say that it wasn’t her fault, “Shade just came after me when I was vulnerable and one thing led to another.  He’s the bad one.”

Self-portrait.

In the last thread, commenter La-Riss was so overwhelmingly complimentary about me that I felt compelled to draw for you readers a self-portrait.  I think I’m a pretty typical single Christian woman.  (All physical resemblance to Cartman completely coincidental.  I’m not a professional artist, people!)

^Click for the full, clear image.  I had a little program crash just as I was about to add angry eyebrows, and this is the best I could salvage.

The difference between a young woman and an old woman.

According to men on the internet:

All art by moi.

Out with the old, in with the new!

The old:

The new:

Verdict:  Almost as good as a boyfriend (after calibration, of course…factory settings are wretched)!

Most men don’t care if they marry virgins.

Everywhere in the manosphere, men obsess over virgins like they’re some sort of magical unicorns that have healing powers and can tell the future.  Everywhere, the refrain of “MARRY A VIRGIN” rings out like a catechism.

But realistically, most men, and I include Christian men in this, don’t care if they marry a woman who is a virgin on their wedding night.  They only care that she is a virgin at the time they begin dating.  I think the majority of Christian men, if they were honest with themselves, are happy to marry non-virgins, so long as the non-virgin is their non-virgin.

Rebecca St. James to marry Beefcake Missionary.

Friends, we are on the brink of the end of an era.  What era, you ask?  The first decade of the aughts?  No, we’ve already passed that mark, and moreover, I speak of something far more momentous:  the end of the era of Rebecca St. James’s virginity.

It was announced today in the press that Rebecca St. James has become engaged to Jacob Fink, a Colorado native and sometime missionary to South Africa who now resides in SoCal pursuing his “career in music” (whatever that means, which is most likely “doesn’t really have a job”).  Judging by the photo of the couple, Fink is your basic ideal Christian beefcake beta:  good-looking enough to be desirable, not dangerous enough to be sexually threatening or do something risky like skateboard down a railing or drink semi-copious amounts of alcohol.

For those not in the churchian loop, Rebecca St. James is a very physically attractive Christian pop/rock singer whose main claim to fame is her very public proclamations of her virginity and her determination not to have sex until she is married.  She has been the poster child of the True Love Waits campaign and, since she has been Christian-famous since she was about 16 years old or so and is now 33, it has been a very long, very public wait indeed.  So, with that in mind, congratulations are quite obviously in order.

But St. James’s case is an interesting one, and one made even more interesting by the articles that have been published about the announcement.  The first question is obvious:  what took so long?  St. James is very good-looking, so lack of male interest couldn’t have been a problem for her.  Moreover, she is famous in the circles where she would be most likely to find a husband, which certainly had to add to her perceived attractiveness.  (I believe that fame always adds to a person’s perceived attractiveness regardless of sex, if not in looks, then certainly in interesting-ness.)  And because St. James is both good-looking and famous, she had to have access to some of the highest-quality men that she would consider acceptable marriage material.  So what took so long?  Was she unreasonably picky?  Was she just too busy with her career to put in the time necessary?  Was she not that interested in marrying young?  Was her father’s dual role as her manager an impediment to her ability or desire to meet men?

Second, is Jacob Fink the best that St. James could do?  My knee-jerk reaction is no, especially given that Fink seems to have no significant life accomplishments beyond doing well in college and being a missionary in South Africa for two years.  We can infer from the articles that Fink has no notable pedigree, is not independently wealthy, and does not have a prestigious job (or any job at all?).  Yet St. James, who is famous and beautiful and far better of a Professional Virgin than Britney Spears ever was, is marrying him.  Couldn’t she have done better?  Don’t women want to marry up?  Why is St. James tying herself to a man she’ll probably have to financially support until she dies?  Well, there are a few plausible possibilities.  One is that at age 33, St. James hears the clock ticking and is more willing to settle.  Another is that St. James regards Fink’s beta qualities as Christian-alpha.  Ten bucks says he’s kind, good with kids, and devoted to a fault.  For someone with St. James’s mindset, which places top priority on fidelity and “cherishing,” Fink probably looks like a manly man uber alles.  Plus, I’m sure a good percentage of her brain is sublimated by his inoffensive beefcakey-ness.  My third theory is more of a subconscious level idea, which is that Fink IS actually the best that St. James could do, given her requirements.  To get someone as good-looking as Fink who also is able to keep it in his pants for somewhere between 28 and 36 years (I’m going to assume Fink is a virgin due to St. James’s statement “We are truly amazed at finding our dreams and ideals met in the love we’ve found. We are exceedingly grateful for this precious gift from God.”  [my emphasis] The whole thing seems cloaked in virginity-speak), St. James pretty much had to go beta.  A Christian alpha would have either married young or fooled around until he felt like marrying.  Additionally, Fink is good-looking enough to be sexually appealing while harmless enough not to be threatening.  St. James could date him and feel sexually attracted while not experiencing anguishing despair over her desire to surrender her virginity.  Fink allowed her to remain in control of her sexual destiny.

So what lessons can single Christian women take away from St. James’s story?  Well, one, it is indeed possible to meet and marry someone in your thirties.  The caveat is that however much more attractive St. James is than you, you need to subtract that from the attractiveness of Fink to get an idea of the ballpark where you’ll be playing.  Second, I think St. James is the exception that proves the rule, which is that for the most part, physically attractive men who may still be virgins in their late 20s or 30s and who are faithfully following God to the point that a devout Christian woman would find them attractive, are nearly impossible to find; that St. James is far more attractive than the average 33-year-old woman, which gives her opportunities the average woman will not have; and that St. James, despite the advantages of her wealth, fame, beauty, and virginity, could not get the “whole package” because Fink apparently doesn’t have a job worth mentioning in the press.

Holding bags and leading the way.

To quote drunken Ted Mosby from one of my favorite episodes of How I Met Your Mother, I’M BACK, BABY DOLLS!  I hope everyone had a good Christmas and New Year’s and got at least one gift that truly pleased them.  (For those following my new TV saga, I pulled the trigger last night and ordered a 46″ Samsung 1080p/120Hz LED.)

While I was home, I got to see the sad state of Midwestern male fashion, which seems to consist of fat guys wearing Bears sweatshirts and baggy stonewashed jeans.  Hipsters don’t really exist in the Midwest, probably because very few adult men in the Midwest are actually thin enough to fit into any hipster clothes.  (Exceptions include youth pastor types trying to stay ~relevant~ to the kids**, and college grads who live in Chicago.)  When I mentioned the sartorial downfalls of men in the area, my mom immediately turned on me and said that women have a duty to look good, too.  Thanks, Mom!  I know I keep beating the fashion drum here, but seriously, men, dressing well, especially in an area where all the men look dumpy, will make you stand out to women.  You will seem better-looking, more interesting, and more intelligent, and women will be more interested in talking to you.  (**But if you look like a member of MercyMe or a guy from Rascal Flatts, then you have probably failed in that endeavor.)

Also while I was home, I gleaned more manly insight from my dad, who complained about men who hold their wives’ bags while shopping and men who let their wives lead the way in the movie theater.  Recalling that this is a topic that has come up more than once in the manosphere, I formulated some guidelines and decided that there is only one scenario where it is appropriate for a man to hold his lady’s shopping bags:  where he takes the bag from her in a display of manly authority.  By this I mean that he does it because he wants to as a show of courtesy and caring, not because she expects him to be her bag carrier.  This is akin to the ’60s stereotype of carrying a girl’s books to class.  If a woman just hands you her bags so she can be free to go buy more stuff, then she thinks of you as her personal manservant, not a man she respects and admires, though she may tell you otherwise.  As for men letting their wives lead the way in the movie theater (or anywhere else), the same principle applies.  If the man, out of courtesy and generosity, lets his wife or girlfriend pick their seats, that’s fine.  But if she naturally charges ahead and decides where the two of you are sitting because she’s the decider and you’re the follower, then there’s a problem.

Yesterday my eHarmony-using friend picked me up from the shuttle center and told me about two dates she’d been on with two different matches.  One acted like he was God’s gift and couldn’t be bothered to make conversation or show any signs of courtesy that a man would normally show on a date.  This is probably why he is still single at age 40.  The other was very, very nice and gentlemanly, but he is suffering from extreme oneitis for his ex-girlfriend, who left him after seven years for a thug who beats her.  (Insert Roissy post about nice guys and thugs here.)  Lessons learned:  (1) There is a difference between being alpha and being rude.  DON’T BE RUDE.  No one likes to feel like their time is being wasted, and no one likes to feel like they are dirt on the bottom of someone’s shoe.  (2)  Don’t be a nice guy to show her you love her.  Be a man.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

I was going to try to crank out one last post before I went home for the holidays, but, well…I ran out of time.

Thank you to all the readers and commenters who made this blog more than me just writing into the ether for the past ten months.    Enjoy your time with loved ones, your vacation time (you of the non-retail jobs), and let go of any bitterness ESPECIALLY TOWARD THE OPPOSITE SEX for at least a day.  Jesus didn’t come to this world so you could nurse grudges, but rather so you could be freed of them.

Finally, [insert Christian holiday platitude here].  (You know I mean it.)

See you in ’11!

Steve Harvey says that men and women can’t be just friends.

While promoting his new book, comedian/author Steve Harvey tells CNN’s Frederica Whitfield that men and women can’t be just friends because, a la When Harry Met Sally, men want to have sex with their female friends and are only “friends” because the woman has LJBFed them yet they are still hopeful that there will be a chink in her LJBF armor at some point.

For the most part, I think this is true, but then how do you explain men with chubby female friends?  Is this implicit confirmation that men like chubby girls, despite all the manosphere screeching to the contrary, or do men just like to keep a “safety” handy in case of sexless emergency?  Maybe what we really need is definitions of “chubby” and “friend” that everybody agrees on.  There’s just too much wiggle room for those terms.  Also, is a woman who doesn’t really have any male friends yet is not getting asked on dates de facto unattractive to men (the logic being that if she is attractive, men will try to be her friend if they’re too scared to ask her out)?

Other questions that women might have about this topic that the men here can answer:

• You have a male friend who considers himself progressive, straightforward, and Unlike Other Men.  He insists that you and he are, and will only be, Just Friends.  Is he lying?
• You have a male friend who insists that you are a wonderful woman with many amazing qualities, but he needs to Pursue Jesus right now.  Is he lying?
• You have a male friend who likes to have long, deep, one-on-one conversations with you, but he never asks you for a date.  Is he attracted to you?

HT to ONTD.  For good times and, um, ~insight~ into the mindset of single, college-age, non-religious, liberal millennials on this topic, read the comments.