Tuesday, March 11, 2014

The advice they give: Abbie Cornish

I have no idea who Abbie Cornish is. Her sole qualification for giving advice seems to be that she is smoking hot and that she is, apparently, some sort of celebrity. She is doling out relationship advice at the request of the editors of Men's Health in their March 2014 issue.

Before getting into the meat of the matter, how pathetic is this? Fawning over babes is not what a man does. Never mind that Abbie has zero qualifications for dishing out advice beyond winning the genetic lottery, are you so unobservant that you can't figure out a woman from, you know, actually observing her behaviour? Okay, you've made mistakes, we all have, but are you incapable of learning from those mistakes? And if you aren't, trust me, no amount of advice will help.

Anyway, here is the bit of Abbie's advice that leaped out at me:
If you're going to dump her, she wants a truthful explanation
"Do it face-to-face, gently, and with honesty. So many people look back on past relationships and feel they messed up or something went wrong. It's nice to look back and go, "That's what this relationship taught me , and now I know how to make my next relationship better."
First thought: Abbie is telling us a lot more about herself here than she realizes and one of the things she is telling us is that she is morally and emotionally insecure. I know I'm not the first person to say this, but please do note how little happiness (meaning eudaimonia) being a smoking hot babe has purchased for Abbie. She's just another insecure girl-woman.

Second thought: notice how self-centred all this is. I'm going to provide this information so her next relationship can be better than the one she had with me? How very selfless of me.

I can grasp how I might want to be kind on the general principle that it is good to treat other people well. I'm not sure why I want to invest a lot of effort in her personal growth after I've decided to dump her. To tell you the truth, I can't even think of a reason to invest any effort in her personal growth project while we're still together.

I don't mean that I won't support her if she decides that she needs to work on her personal growth. But that is her project. I wouldn't even be dating her in the first place if I didn't think she was good enough just as she is.

The blunt truth is that if she doesn't know why you are dumping her, then she either didn't deserve you in the first place or you having been sending her such confused signals all along that she has no idea what you want and need.

I'll take the second point first. There are, of course, guys who don't know what they want or aren't willing or able to express their needs and, therefore, don't send clear signals about their needs and desires before and during a relationship.  Know what? These guys rarely dump anyone; if anything, they get dumped; more likely, they spend years, and maybe the rest of their lives, in frustrating, difficult relationships because they won't express their needs.

If you are not one of those guys and she has been paying attention to you and what matters to you, she should have been able to see what the deal breakers were without any help from you. She should have seen it coming. If she didn't, it's somebody's fault and it's unlikely that your efforts to provide an explanation when you dump her are going to help because one of the two following explanations must apply:
  1. either she didn't care enough about you to meet your needs after you expressed them (and that expression need not have been verbal),
  2. or you were so bad at making them known that she couldn't figure out what they were in the first place.
If the first applies, then explaining now isn't going to help. If the second applies, you aren't going to be any better at explaining now than you were during the relationship.

Now a woman reading this might say, what if I don't want to be the kind of woman he wants? To which I say, then you should be with someone else. And so should he.

(That said, perhaps the problem is that you have never found a guy who wants the kind of woman you really want to be. In that case, I feel your pain and good luck with your problem. I would point out, however, that no one is busying themselves feeling sorry for men who are determined to be the sort of man they want to be and never mind what women want. As Homer says, life is tough in any case but it's hard to feel sorry for the people who make it worse.)

Final thought:, Abbie says,
It's nice to look back and go, "That's what this relationship taught me , and now I know how to make my next relationship better."
If you are in a relationship with the sort of ditz-brain who says "go" when she means, "say", you need to dump her right away and, no, the fact that she is a smoking hot babe is not even close to good enough reason to overlook this problem.

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