As I’ve been indulging my nostalgia more recently, I’ve been drawn to mid-century musicals. Oklahoma, My Fair Lady, The Music Man, etc. And while the music still slaps and the vibes are immaculate, it suprised me how skeevy the leading men come across to me as an adult.
Some of them show outright distain, all of them belittle/condicend to the women they are courting. It’s especially frustraiting when the leading lady is self composed and intellegent – very Belle like from Beauty and the Beast – and she is somehow worn down and won over by a narcissistic dickhead. I’m not even saying by today’s standards – in My Fair Lady there is a whole song the servants sing about how Professor Higgins (the male protag) is an asshole. There’s a feeling like – when a woman is single for too long, she starts to put on airs, and thinks shes immune to a man’s charms. She needs to be humbled and shown how her romantic feminine core makes her weak and pliable.
And while my initial reaction was “ick”, when I sat with it more I realized how much my ex of 8 years was a less exaggerated version of this type of guy. The constant negging masked as banter, making me feel stupid when my inclination to trust made me gullible. I can distinctly remember feeling like “wow, I’m so lucky I found a guy who loves me so much that he tolerates how annoying and airheaded I am.” I’m sure he would object to this characterization, but he disliked me the most when I was my happiest. When I was with him I was doing the emotional self-monitoring equivalent of constantly sucking my stomach in. Still to this day if I feel myself start to get bubbly and talkative, I get a deep pit in my stomach and a tightness in my chest.
It’s just crazy to me that even though my dad was the complete opposite, the cultural narrative of “if a guy is mean to you it means he loves you” still got in my head. Its especially hard to unlearn those messages because in romance, so much of it is about intuitive feeling. Does this interaction FEEL like love. Those chidhood stories and social conditionings are running the show in that arena, unless you’ve done some deep work with your therapist. When I think about being open to romantic advances after something like 6 years, I worry I’ll still be missing the green flags, and barreling like a bull to the red ones.
>>robyns_ramblings 