What Men Won't Tell You

I was recently sent an article about eleven secrets men keep from women. The article attempted to shed light on the fact that men golf to get away from their wives and think that women with curves are sexier than the stick figures in magazines. The article explained that men like to fix things around the house even if they complain about it and value a woman who can give them freedom to be an individual. Reading it I was not surprised by any of the information it provided-- as a woman I share a lot of these sentiments when looking at successes in a long term relationship. I want my own space, I like men who eat ice cream without running a mile the next day and I may not golf, but "girl's nights" and manipedi parties give me much needed escape. What the article did was make me think about the things men really don't tell us, and shuttered when the reality hit me that it is the things that matter most.

From the 1990s single woman in Ally McBeal to Carrie Bradshaw and even the newly single Blair Waldorf, stories of women devastated by breakups and live their aimless single life dominate the airwaves. Each show reveals a break-up that shatters an otherwise intelligent, powerful woman. In each situation there were push and pulls in the relationship that resulted in an eventual end, but the end always manifests the real things men don't tell us: how they stopped loving us. In each strong, single woman's journey they maintain a connection to the men that destroyed something inside of them, not out of desperation (or even patheticness as the shows sometimes depict it as) but out of a lack of closure. For some reason women are always caught of gaurd by the how and why and thus search for it in ways that lead us nowhere but deeper into the depths of what-ifs.

It is not just television. Friends of mine who have successful relationships worriedly call after their mind wanders to a past love who slipped away. I consistently find myself in tears during romantic films and audible books not out of dispair but apprehension. Like Ally, Carrie and Blair I too am an alpha-female. I am constantly surrounded with everything a person needs to be happy-- friends, success, a gym, a loving family and whiskey. And while I am not haunted by the end of my past relationships (the most recent being the most painful) I am haunted by the fact not a single man has ever really told me why. None of them have let me know something was wrong until it was too late-- over in their minds, while it was thriving in mine. I was of course attuned to problems as all relationships have their problems, but being caught off-gaurd begs the question why won't men tell you the truth: it is not, and never REALLY was going to be you.

In a famous episode of Sex in the City, Carrie, relieved to finally make amends with her ex wakes up the next morning to a post-it. Ally McBeal finds out five years after her break-up that he had already met the woman he would marry when he decided it was time to end it with her. Blaire Waldorf stood in front of her man, who had cheated in the past, and heard him tell her nothing could keep them apart only to abandon her immediately upon discovering her own indiscretions. The men all explain they didn't want to hurt the woman. They didn't want her to know it was entirely her fault. They didn't want her to know that she just was not the one for them. Instead they just thought she should know it was over. Relationships don't end, they dissolve-- yet for these women and myself, the dissolution culminates in a man trying to protect himself (or his soon-to-be ex) with what he will not tell us.

I do not know if it is better to hear from someone you love that on some level they knew that you were not for them. I do not know if it is better to hear that you are not the person they wanted you to be and someone else seemingly is that person. What I do know is not knowing makes the next relationship nothing more than a trap. For your damned if you assume that it will end and damned if you don't. What men do not tell us is when they don't think they love us anymore. They don't tell us that they are unsure about this relationship because there might just be someone better. They don't tell us that after weeks, months, years, decades of loving us, it has started to fade. They just tell us when it is gone.

So perhaps men do stare at other women's chests, perhaps they do like to hold the remote, perhaps they like when women take control in the bedroom, but these secrets of men are not what men won't tell us. I don't know how to discover the real secrets.