Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Why do married men tell me they love me, then fail to take any action? Plus: I'm in love with him, but his kids hate me.
Mar 12, 2002 | Dear Cary,
I was married 13 years before getting divorced four years ago. A couple of years before I left my marriage I was faced with a "declaration of love" from an unhappily married friend. We followed this up with an affair, which I foolishly figured would give me a good excuse for a divorce -- and a ready-made relationship to jump into afterward, because he was equally motivated to get out of an unhappy marriage, right? Wrong. After nine months and much prodding on my part, he dumped me (and is still in his marriage, seven years later). I was devastated by the loss of the relationship with him, but also decided to get on with my divorce and thus with the rest of my life.
Soon after I had moved out and moved on, yet another unhappily married male friend I had known since college made a similar "declaration of love," saying he had carried a torch for me for many years. I was shocked, but also not looking to him as future relationship material, nor did we become physically involved.
Now a good friend of mine is experiencing her own version of my story. Is this a case of "men want to change their wife, but women want to change their life?" (Two of these guys are "righteous and Christian" men who don't feel they are free to get divorced.)
Why bother us women with their "love" if they don't intend to back it up with action? (I've always hated those plotlines in romance novels, too.) What did these guys think would happen? Fantasy would supplant reality? Yuck.
Dazed and Confused Female of the Species
Dear Dazed and Confused,
This indeed sounds strange, baffling and irritating. The thought of a righteous Christian man making a declaration of love is a little redolent of cheap hair oil and Flannery O'Connor stories. Like you say, yuck. Maybe you should move to a part of the country where people don't do that.
The only thing I can think of is that where you live such utterances wield power, because of the gender thing, the unequal distribution of goods and services. Consider: If a woman were to declare her love for a man, he would take her to bed and that would be that. But when a man declares his love for a woman, there's property implicitly attached (at least, I'm assuming, there is in your part of the country). That's the only thing I can think of -- that it's a magical incantation used to place a woman in a holding pattern, which is a kind of power. And it may be that you underestimate how much we men love power. We love to watch the women wait. And a woman in a holding position is a nice option to have.
Consider: Why would a man say such a thing if it did not get results? If women universally said "So what?" to such vague and toothless imprecations and insisted on action, it might cut down on it. And that would be a good thing, for righteous Christian men, for unhappy marriages, for everyone!
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