Female self-deception

We always choose people similar to ourselves. Why "I just ended up with an egotist" is a convenient illusion that blocks a good relationship.

Over the past 4 days I’ve written a series of posts about male leadership, a woman’s freedom from responsibility, and femininity. This text continues them.

Under each of those 4 posts there are plenty of comments, which I read carefully and try to respond to. What do I see in them?

Many women (not all) carry a very high degree of self-deception, and it can seriously get in the way of building a good relationship.

Before I unpack my thought, let’s look at 3 situations:

1. Your son, who is in his final year of school, comes to you and says sadly that every day at school he hangs out with a ten-year-old and for some reason he’s bored and not interested.

2. A smart woman studied economics, holds 2 degrees, has a management position at a large company earning $7,000, has read hundreds of books, goes to the gym, runs her own blog on social media, eats well, is learning public speaking and works with a psychologist.

She meets a warehouse loader on the street who has never worked on himself, hasn’t read a single book, never studied anywhere and earns 12,000 hryvnias (around $300) a month. Strong feelings flare up between them and they start dating.

3. You’re growing your own business. You own a beauty salon. It runs well and brings in a good income. You wake up one morning and decide to take on a partner who has never done business in his life and has no experience whatsoever in the field. You give him 50% of the profit with no expectations at all.

What do all 3 of these situations have in common? Exactly! One word — UNREALISTIC.

As you read each of these examples, you understand perfectly well that they’re nothing more than a product of my imagination with no relation to reality.

Because in real life final-year students are always friends with their peers, a wise woman who has built a good life will look for a man just like her, and as a business partner we’ll invite someone with the skills and experience we need.

That’s why we have a folk saying: “A horse keeps company with a horse, an ox with an ox.” It tells us a very simple thing — we always choose people similar to ourselves. Seventeen-year-olds always hang out with people give or take their own age and level of development.

My last 4 posts drew a mass of comments from women along the lines of: “Dima, everything you write works with smart, self-aware men. Unfortunately, not all of them are like that! There are plenty of egotists who only take and give nothing back.” They were hinting that they just got unlucky and ended up with a man who doesn’t understand much.

I have bad news for the women who wrote those comments:

1. Either you choose complete egotists and sociopaths (which might happen in 0.1% of cases)

2. Or you choose a person similar to yourself (which happens in 99.9% of cases, from what I observe)

I have yet to see people from fundamentally different social layers, at fundamentally different levels of awareness and development, build a romantic relationship.

Such people simply aren’t interested in each other. Just as a seventeen-year-old isn’t interested in a ten-year-old.

The second argument many women made was that a woman of course melts and opens up from male attention, but a man, when he receives a wise line of behaviour from a woman, just consumes it, becomes an egotist and relaxes.

I have a question: why do I think better of your men than you do?

I’m just some guy on the internet, and I somehow believe that if you behave wisely toward your man, he’ll respond with the same line of behaviour — so why don’t you believe it?

It’s in your interest to think otherwise. Your happiness at home is at stake. In theory you should want to think well of the closest, most beloved person in your life, not try to convince me that he’s a hopeless egotist and a fool.

When I write posts like this, I’m not relying only on the experience of my relationship with Nastya.

I see it in the couples I work with as a family consultant: the moment one person in the family starts understanding me and acting differently, the situation in the relationship improves dramatically — even if the other person doesn’t hear me or accept a word of it.

The moment a man or a woman stops doing foolish things and starts acting wisely, the other side always feels joy, warmth, inspiration, happiness.

Why do hundreds of men go through my consultations and not one of them relaxes, puts his feet up or becomes an egotist when his wife acts wisely and well? Why do they try, in return, to make her happy and content?

Because when our reservoir of happiness is full, then regardless of whether we’re a man or a woman, we want to make the person we love happy in return. That’s the natural line of human behaviour.

But it’s hard to believe that, because then you’d have to roll up your sleeves and work on the relationship. Staying in illusions is relatively easier.

So many women tend to lie to themselves and soothe themselves with the thought that “I just got a bad man” — while of course I did everything right, he just didn’t appreciate it.

But it doesn’t work that way. We choose people like ourselves and we build relationships to the extent of our own understanding.

And if I don’t like my relationship at home, it means I never learned how to build one (and possibly neither did my other half).

So thinking that a woman becomes grateful, happy and attentive in response to a man’s wise behaviour, while a man becomes an egotist and relaxes in response to his wife’s — that’s some strange form of sexism.

It’s just that resentment toward a man blinds many women so badly that analysing their own actions becomes hard, and they stay in the illusion of “I did everything right.” If we really do the right things for the person we love, their attitude toward us will only improve, not get worse.

Do you agree with the idea that we choose people who match us? And do you believe that if a woman behaves wisely, her man will act the same way?