A Self-Made-Man girl discovers that life as a man is harder

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when we upload our consciousness to machines probably

There're some women on WP.net who can't get any dates and haven't been in a relationships. I don't understand why they don't ever post on 'who has it harder' topics.

I didn't even provide a number...and to me quality would be a lot more satisfying than any quantity, I've really only had a few date/relationship instances and none turned out well. so to me having gone on more dates than another person does not imply to me that I have it easier based on the outcomes...but cannot speak for everyone that is just my experience.

Because they've pretty much given up discussing the issue, and they're tired of being told what their lives are like, and that they have no significant problems.

Mostly, women don't even post in L&D much anymore, and stick to discussing women's problems in the Women's subforum.

Because they've pretty much given up discussing the issue, and they're tired of being told what their lives are like, and that they have no significant problems.

Mostly, women don't even post in L&D much anymore, and stick to discussing women's problems in the Women's subforum.

Because they've pretty much given up discussing the issue, and they're tired of being told what their lives are like, and that they have no significant problems.

I meant I did not say how many relationship attempts I have had, so wasn't sure how you'd determine it was a lot...lol. And I think I'd really prefer the latter, less stress.....though ideally finding someone to actually bond with and form a real relationship where I know what is going on and am not being used would be most ideal. But if I gotta choose one of those options... the latter, of course it really does get to me when I get my hopes up only to get massive disappointment.

I have family/friends and acquaintances for social interaction....there are ways to satisfy sexual needs without a Significant Other without ever having to end up in the position of 'oh they just wanted someone to sleep with but don't really care for me'... and the terrible feeling that comes with.

It better happen soon, because I'm tired of all those mind games that are centuries old.

Because they've pretty much given up discussing the issue, and they're tired of being told what their lives are like, and that they have no significant problems.

Mostly, women don't even post in L&D much anymore, and stick to discussing women's problems in the Women's subforum.

I have lots of posts here on WP....and I'm semi-happily married.

"I thought dating was going to be the fun part, the easiest part. Certainly as a man I had romantic access to far more women than I ever did as a lesbian. I could partake at last in the assumption of heterosexuality and ask out any woman I liked without insulting her. Of course, I was in for a mountain of rejections, but to be a guy I had to get out there.

I figured it couldn't hurt to enlist a compatriot for support, so I asked a friend, Curtis, to be my backup. He was perfect for the job. He was a handsome, well-built, gregarious type, secure and sensible enough not to take himself too seriously, or care much what a stranger might think of him.

Curtis had said he would nudge me when I got out of line and he spent most of our first night out together kicking me under the table. I was on a roll, eager to test my new treads. So as soon as we sat down, I picked out a couple of twentysomething women sitting at a table across the room. I gave them a few lingering looks to check their interest. I caught one woman's eye and held her gaze for a second, smiling. She returned the smile and looked away. This was signal enough for me, so I stood up, made my way over to their table and asked them whether they wanted to join us for a drink.

"No, thanks," one of them said, "we're on our way out in a minute."

Simple enough, right? A brush-off. No biggie. But as I turned away and slumped back across the room toward our table, I felt like the outcast kid in the lunchroom who trips and dumps his tray on the linoleum in front of the whole school.

"Rejection is a staple for guys," said Curtis, laughing as I crumpled into my seat with a humiliated sigh. "Get used to it."

"How do you handle it?"

"Let me tell you a story," he said. "When I was in college, there was this guy Dean, who got laid all the time. I mean this guy had different women coming out of his room every weekend and most week-nights, and he wasn't particularly good-looking. He was fat and kind of a slob. Nice guy, though, but nothing special. I couldn't figure out how he did it, so one time I just asked him. 'How do you get so many girls to go out with you?' He was a man of few words, kind of Coolidge-esque, if you know what I mean. So all he said was: 'I get rejected 90% of the time. But it's that 10%.'
That made us both cackle and pound the table. "That's the thing about being a guy," Curtis finished. "Rejection is part of the game. It's expected."
"'

Not only was dating one of the hardest of Ned's experiences, it was also the most fraught with deception. I decided I would out myself to anyone with whom I had more than a passing, unsuccessful, date or two. To most of the women I dated, even the odd date meant a lot, especially women who had been out roaming the singles scene for years in their mid-30s, trying to find a mate amid the serial daters.

For these women, men as a subspecies - not the particular men with whom they had been involved - were to blame for the wreck of a relationship and the psychic damage it had done them. It's hardly surprising, then, that in this atmosphere, as a single man dating women, I often felt attacked, judged, on the defensive.

Many of my dates - even the more passive ones - did most of the talking. I listened to them talk literally for hours about the most minute, mind-numbing details of their personal lives; men they were still in love with, men they had divorced, roommates and co-workers they hated, childhoods they were loath to remember yet somehow found the energy to recount ad nauseam. Listening to them was like undergoing a slow frontal lobotomy.

Weren't people supposed to be on their best behaviour on first dates? Weren't they supposed to at least pretend an interest in the other person, out of politeness if nothing else?

Certainly that's what I was doing, making polite conversation. So much so that I never expected to hear from these people again. I was boring myself. But to my surprise, many of them did contact me again - enthusiastically.

Ironically, one of the women who was the least well-adjusted, and the least graceful at dating, turned out to be one of the most important of my relationships. I had met Sasha, as I met most of my dates, through a personals website on the internet. We'd exchanged photographs and a number of emails. After a week or so of back and forth, we'd decided to get together for coffee.

That first date was lousy but the email relationship continued. Indeed, email is now central to dating. Correspondence was mandatory, even with the women I met at speed-dating events and followed up with later by email. These women wanted to be wooed by language. They weren't going to meet a strange man without measuring him first, and they weren't going to waste a meal or even a cup of coffee on a suitor who couldn't be bothered to craft a few lines beforehand. I was happy to oblige. It was rare, most of them told me, for a man to write at such length, much less to write with consideration and investment.

For a little contrast, I went on a few dates with men as a woman during the course of my time as Ned. The men I met on the internet, and then subsequently in person, didn't require this epistolary preamble, nor did they offer it. They were eager to meet as soon as possible, usually, I found, because they wanted to see what I looked like. Their feelings or fantasies would be based on that far more than, or perhaps to the exclusion of, anything I might write to them. On dates with men I felt physically appraised in a way that I never did by women, and, while this made me more sympathetic to the suspicions women were bringing to their dates with Ned, it had the opposite effect, too. Somehow men's seeming imposition of a superficial standard of beauty felt less intrusive, less harsh, than the character appraisals of women.

The women I met wanted a man to be confident. They wanted in many ways to defer to him. I could feel that on many dates, the unspoken desire to be held up and led, whether in conversation or even in physical space, and at times it made me feel quite small in my costume, like a young man must feel when he's just coming of age and he's suddenly expected to carry the world under his arm like a football. And some women did find Ned too small physically to be attractive. They wanted someone, they said, who could pin them to the bed or, as one woman put it, "someone who can drive the bus". Ned was too willowy for that. I began to understand from the inside why Robert Crumb draws his women so big and his diminutive self begging at their heels or riding them around the room.

Yet as much as these women wanted a take-control man, at the same time they wanted a man who was vulnerable to them, a man who would show his colours and open his doors, someone expressive, intuitive, attuned. This I was in spades, and I always got points for it. But I began to feel very sympathetic toward heterosexual men - the pressure to be a world-bestriding colossus is an immensely heavy burden to bear, and trying to be a sensitive new age guy at the same time is pretty well impossible. Expectation, expectation, expectation was the leitmotif of Ned's dating life.

In my mail exchanges with Sasha, I wasn't playing a role. I didn't try to write or say the things I thought a man would write or say. I responded to her genuinely in every way, except about my sex.

Our time together lasted the longest, three weeks or so in all. We had only three dates during that time, but we wrote several times a day. Naturally, during the course of all this, we talked about her past relationships with men, which, as she indicated at some length, had been less than satisfactory. I suggested that perhaps if men were so unsatisfying to her emotionally, she should consider dating a woman. To this she sent a sharp reply, something of the order of having about as much interest in lesbianism as in shooting heroin.

She had, by this time (about two dates and a week and a half into our correspondence), told me that she found Ned attractive, though she also made it clear that she was emotionally engaged elsewhere and was likely to remain so for a long time. Still, something had grown up between us in a short time and I decided that it shouldn't go any further. I would tell her the truth on the third date, which we were scheduled to have at the end of that week. I was curious to see what would happen to her supposed attraction for Ned when she learned that he was a woman. Would it evaporate?

We met for dinner at her house. During dinner I told her right out, in the blurted way our conversations tended to go, that there was something I wasn't telling her about myself, and that I couldn't tell her what it was. I told her that if we were going to go to bed together she would have to be willing to accept the untold thing and the physical constraints it required. She took this well. She was curious. Not frightened. She didn't need to know, she said.

The conversation moved on to something else and then back again to the prospect of sex and my visible discomfort with skirting the edge of full disclosure. We decided to go into the bedroom. Once there, she lit several candles by the bed. I sat on the edge of the bed, which was low to the ground, and asked her to sit with her back to me on the floor. She did so, leaning against the mattress between my legs. I gathered her long hair in my hands and draped it over one shoulder, exposing one side of her neck. I eased down the V-neck of her sweater, exposing the shoulder, and traced her skin with my fingertips, behind the ear, along the hairline, the collarbone. I leaned down to kiss the places I'd touched. She moved in response, lolling her head to the side. She reached up behind her and placed her palm on my cheek. She would feel the stubble now for sure and know that it didn't feel like stubble should. The jig was probably up. Anyway, this was about as far as I was willing to take it - the make-up was smeared now for sure - so I got up from the bed to move around in front of her, to face her on the floor.

"Do you want me to show you or tell you?" I said. "Whichever you prefer." It took me longer than I'd thought it would to spit it out. I was holding her hands when I finally did. "I'm a woman." She didn't pull her hands away. I went on immediately to fill the space. I told her about my plan to write a book and why I was doing it. Then I waited. She was still quiet. Then she said, "You're going to have to give me a few minutes to get used to this." We sat in silence. Clearly, whatever physical deformity she'd been expecting, it hadn't been femaleness.

She took up one of my hands, which she was still holding, and examined it. "These aren't a man's wrists," she said, caressing them, "or a man's hands, or a man's skin." She looked me over for a few minutes in the dim light, making out the feminine parts and nodding. "I always thought you weren't very hairy for a man," she said. She laughed a little and said, "Well, now I can tell you that my nickname for you in the past few weeks has been My Gay Boyfriend. You set off my gaydar the first time I saw you. Your hair was too groomed and your shirt too pressed, and your shoes too nice."

Sasha and I went to bed together, and obviously Sasha had to thereby revise her hard ideas about lesbianism and her desire to "go there". Yet she did so with stunning alacrity for someone who, I'm fairly certain, was not a closeted lesbian all along, or even a genuine bisexual. In our weird stilted exchanges, we had connected mentally in some way. Maybe I'd come to admire the adventurer and even the oddball in her. Maybe she just desperately needed a good friend. There could be a thousand reasons, good or bad, but I think none of them had much of anything to do with sex. And this, I'll maintain in an entirely unscientific manner, is a stubbornly female tendency.

The trendy term "metrosexual" came up a lot in my company during my dating career as Ned. Ned wasn't everybody's type by a long shot. Sure, some women - like Sasha, as it turned out - still wanted to go to bed with him once they knew he wasn't a guy. But plenty of others didn't.

If you have never been sexually attracted to women, you will never quite understand the monumental power of female sexuality, except by proxy or in theory, nor will you quite know the immense advantage it gives us over men. Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power, and it made me, of all things, into a momentary misogynist, which I suppose was the best indicator that my experiment had worked. I saw my own sex from the other side, and I disliked women irrationally for a while because of it. I disliked their superiority, their accusatory smiles, their entitlement to choose or dash me with a fingertip, an execution so lazy, so effortless, it made the defeats and even the successes unbearably humiliating. Typical male power feels by comparison like a blunt instrument, its salvos and field strategies laughably remedial next to the damage a woman can do with a single cutting word: no.

Sex is most powerful in the mind, and to men, in the mind, women have a lot of power, not only to arouse, but to give worth, self-worth, meaning, initiation, sustenance, everything. Seeing this more clearly through my experience, I began to wonder whether the most extreme men resort to violence with women because they think that's all they have, their one pathetic advantage over all she seems to hold above them. I make no excuses for this. There are none. But as a man I felt vaguely attuned to this mind-set or its possibility. I did not inhabit it, but I thought I saw how rejection might get twisted beyond recognition in the mind of a discarded male where misogyny and ultimately rape may be a vicious attempt to take what cannot be taken because it has not been bestowed.

There were other surprising discoveries. With all the anger I felt flowing in my direction - anger directed at the abstraction called men - I was not expecting to find, nestled within the confines of female heterosexuality, a deep love and genuine attraction for real men. Not for women in men's bodies, as the prejudicial me had thought. Not even just for the metrosexual, though he has his audience, but for brawny, hairy, smelly, stalwart, manly men; bald men, men with bellies, men who can fix things and, yes, men who like sports and pound away in the bedroom. Men whom women loved for being men with all the qualities that testosterone and the patriarchy had given them, and whom I have come to appreciate for those very same qualities, however infuriating I still find them at times.

Dating women was the hardest thing I had to do as Ned, even when the women liked me and I liked them. I have never felt more vulnerable to total strangers, never more socially defenceless than in my clanking suit of borrowed armour. But then, I guess maybe that's one of the secrets of manhood that no man tells if he can help it. Every man's armour is borrowed and 10 sizes too big, and beneath it he's naked and insecure and hoping you won't see.

That, maybe, was the last twist of my adventure. I passed in a man's world not because my mask was so real, but because the world of men was a masked ball. Eventually I realised that my disguise was the one thing I had in common with every guy in the room. It was hard being a guy.

Rather than choosing to become a woman again, it is probably truer to say that I reverted to form. I stopped faking it. I came back to myself, proud, free and glad in every way to be a woman.

More from her:


The 2 last lines strengthen my theory that men rarely genuinely choose their wives/gfs/partners, they just take what they can get best - going with the flow with their rare unicorns who said yes to them - women on the other hand have a more power of choice.

So hey! You the married women here! if you think that your husband chose YOU, you are probably wrong, YOU chose him while he didn't really chose you, he just went with the flow simply because you said yes.