So I was talking to a friend who was explaining how catching her bf in a lie made her so made. She used the standard, “It’s not what he did, its the fact he lied. How can I trust him now?” But she also kept excusing the action and focusing on the lie. Which every woman does, blaming broken trust as the reason for her future actions. Yet I knew there was more to it. Broken trust is a problem and valid.. but I just felt there was more to it. After all “Broken Trust” is really a pretty damn vague term!
Then it hit me the best way to describe it. So I told her (and the other woman listening, lol. Don’t I always attract an audience!)
You have this ideal in your heart and head of who your man is. Like a bunch of balloons filled with helium. When he lies or cheats or does something hard to forgive, one of those balloons pop and he drops a level in your eyes. So your feelings of disappointment, its actually you mourning the little death of his status.
Because the way men & women status relationships is is different from the very beginning. When a woman meets a new man they like and start a relationship they place him at the highest level of potential perfection. He is never more “the one” than at that moment of possibility. As she discovers his flaws, his human-ness, those balloons of perfection pop and his status drops lower and lower.
In some cases he drops and drops and suddenly he’s at a level she cannot tolerate. And she moves on. Or sometimes she starts to see the dropping as ways he can improve and tries to facilitate that! The dropping is important because every woman needs to see her man with the reality of who he is… not the elevated status of her ideal or who she thinks he can become. But some panic as they see this perfection they feel they need slowly disappear.
Now men… men tend to see women in the opposite way. They see a woman as just a woman. But as they get to know her they attach balloons to her and she rises closer to the ideal they’re looking for. Even as he’s unknowingly dropping himself in her eyes.
When a relationship works.. I think they meet in the middle and stabilize. Which is why women get so upset when a man does something to drop further in her eyes. Not only does it mess up this delicate stabilization, she misses the man he was to her.
Hmmmm…. perhaps this is why women feel if they’re good at being a wife and mother, it raises their status in the eyes of their man.
Lucky for me I never understood the appeal of balloons!