The Plight Of The Woman

Women are eternally screwed. Men will always feel they are superior. Just like women will always know they are superior. Not in every scenario. Men will always be better at peeing standing up, having sex without emotional attachment, and growing facial hair. But women will always be able to look at whatever situation their brother, father, boyfriend, husband or fuck buddy concocts and see the stupidity in it. Let’s look at some case studies.

Nina met Dave, the Tennessee native, when he was working in Florida on a campaign. They started dating, but she told him it couldn’t possibly keep on if he was just going to leave in a few months to work on his next campaign project. So Dave, being the impeccably stand-up and serious, committed Southern gentleman that he is, quits his campaign job, gets a decent job in Florida, and asks Nina to move in. Wonderful. What a serious, compromising boyfriend, right? He even tells her he wouldn’t dare ask her to move back to Tennessee with him without putting a ring on her finger. Finally! A man who isn’t afraid of commitment, right?!?

WRONG.

Once Dave gets Nina hooked and moved in and all involved, he quits his steady job and takes a job in Tennessee for three months to work on a campaign. If they win, it will be longer. It looks like they are going to win. Again, he reiterates, he wouldn’t dare ask her to move there without a serious commitment. A ring. A promise. A lifetime of being stuck in fucking Tennessee.

The thing is, Nina loves her job in Florida. She is 26-years-old, she’s on the fast track to a managerial position, and there’s no way to transfer to Tennessee. She’d have to start from scratch. So instead of being honest with her and telling her he wants to go back to this job in another state, Dave goes behind her back, acts like it’s temporary, and thinks that if he promises a ring, she’ll be so smitten she’ll just do whatever Dave wants to do and not notice that it requires her quitting her life to pacify him.

I know a lot of people are going to defend Dave. Why should he have to quit the job he liked and compromise but she doesn’t?

Well he was a deceitful tool about it, that’s why.

Nina told him early on that her life was in Florida. Her family, job and friends. She was upfront about what she wanted and what she was willing to bend on. Dave, on the other hand, knew what he actually wanted but went about it in a different way. He told Nina what she wanted to hear and did what he wanted to do and banked on the fact that she’d be so in love that she’d let it slide.

Anna was not too different from Nina. They actually were friends and started dating their significant others around the same time. Anna did not love her job. In fact, she hated her job. The kick was that she is super close to her mom, grandmother and siblings, and was feeling torn about asserting her independence and leaving her grandma (who she lived with) alone. She was feeling out ways to leave Florida and either start grad school or get a job in Boston (her dream city) when she started dating Rick. Rick and she had been friends in high school, but she was a couple years older so he never asked her out due to being utterly intimidated. At least, that’s what he told her. He also happened to have a girlfriend who was putting out for the majority of that time, but that’s beside the point.

Fast forward a few years, Rick is finishing college and Anna IS smitten. She figured, what’s another year spent close to her family while she waits for the guy she loves to finish school so they can start their lives together?

Then graduation gets pushed back. Then Rick’s brother moves to California and it’s the best thing in the world – to Rick. Anna agrees that it’s fun to visit, but she is an East Coast girl at heart and always will be. It’s a big difference to be in a new city and a two-hour plane ride from everyone you know and love than to be in the same situation and have many more hours and a few more hundred dollars between you.

But it always comes back to that same pseudo-promise.

“I plan on marrying you,” he says, through grit teeth and a tight throat.

“Well we’ll figure it out once we’re engaged!”

That’s what she should have said. Instead, she continued to wait and wait for him, knowing that even thought she had made it perfectly clear that she did not want to move across the country, that she wanted to find a happy medium of somewhere they could both be happy, that he planned on “taking advantage of all the connections” that he has on the West Coast.

Now I don’t know how these stories end. I just know that they are representative of how guys treat girls, even the ones they supposedly love enough to spend their lives with, and how women accept it because they can’t imagine a love that’s different or better.

Maybe Nina goes to Tennessee and finds a job she likes more, or she gets knocked up after the honeymoon and is glad she doesn’t have a job she loves so that there isn’t even a fleeting moment  of regret when she leaves to stay at home and raise her little brats.

Maybe Anna goes to San Francisco and finds her calling and is so content in her field that she can accept only being able to see her family a couple of times a year.

Maybe.

Or, maybe Nina and Anna realize that both guys are selfish pricks who see their happiness as the ultimate goal. Maybe they stand up for themselves and leave those foolish boys and find real, compromising, truly loving men who find happiness in making them happy. And they live happily ever friggin’ after.

Or maybe they never really do, and maybe that’s the ultimate plight of women – that compromise always comes at someone’s expense, and it’s usually ours.