Girl Talk: Why Relationships Fail

Following in the footsteps of Tracy McMillan, whose advice to her girlfriends has now become a book, Cassie Fiano offers some advice to her lovelorn sisters today

Like McMillan Fiano finds that too many of her girlfriends are suffering through too many bad relationships.

Clearly, they are not drawing the right lessons from their failures. Just as clearly, they should stop getting advice from their empathic girlfriends. Too much commiserating never solved anyone's problems.

Fiano’s advice might seem redundant, but as long as so many women get hurt in bad relationships, it’s worth examining her observations.

Given the anguish that attends a failed relationship, it makes sense that women have devised a series of face-saving explanations.

All begin with the staple: all men are jerks.

Fiano responds that perhaps all the men you are choosing are jerks, but if that is the case, then you are choosing the wrong men.

There are good men out there. Unfortunately, women who have followed the modern dating plan are more likely to go with their hearts and guts than with their heads.

If they have involved themselves in hookups or friends with benefits relationships they have been traumatized to the point where they continue to be attracted to the same kind of man, over and over again.

Women who have suffered a series of relationship failures have learned how to deal with relationship failure. They have not, however, learned how to conduct a successful relationship.

Women rationalize their bad decision by saying, Fiano suggests, that their love can transform a man from a frog into a prince.

It cannot.

Get over yourself.

Next, she mentions another obvious point, namely that having sex too soon is a bad idea.

How do women rationalize this behavior? Fiano explains that otherwise intelligent and accomplished women believe that if they feel strongly about a man and believe that he feels strongly about them they believe that great sex will just bring them closer together.

Wrong. It won’t.

Men are not women. They do not experience sex the same way. It’s time for adult women to learn this lesson, and not the hard way.

Then, a woman might rationalize relationship failure by saying that the man is not ready for a relationship.

To which Fiano responds: he’s not ready for a relationship with you.

If you want to gamble that your powers of feminine attraction will win him over, you are missing the point: men know what they want and what they don’t want.

If he does not signal that he wants you exclusively, that is because he does not want you exclusively.

Show a man enough respect to take him at his word.

Some of Fiano’s advice involves the therapy culture. Women think that men are afraid of their feelings. This implies that said man ought to be packed off to therapy, the better to get in touch with his feelings.

Yikes.

If you treat a man like a malformed woman, needing serious therapy, you will be insulting him. It will never make him want to commit to you.

And then there is the ultimate illusion: women tell themselves that men are intimidated by strong women.

Fiano’s take makes it sound like she is channeling Tracy McMillan:

The problem isn’t that men are intimidated by your six-figure paycheck or your banging bod. The problem is that you come across like an arrogant, stuck-up, materialistic snob. When you’re rattling off all the reasons you’re awesome to a guy who then never calls you again, it’s not because he was thinking, “Wow, this chick is amazing… she’s way too good for me.” No, it’s because you just turned yourself into a snob who brags about herself incessantly. And who wants to be around someone like that?

Guys don’t care about how much money you make. And if you’re that funny, smart, sexy, and amazing, then you wouldn’t have to tell someone that. You’d just be those things, and it would be evident to the people around you. So when you’re lying to yourself about how intimidating you are to guys and that’s why you can’t get a date, the better course of action just might be to cut back on the ego a bit.

Men are not intimidated by strong women. They are just not interested.

Male disinterest is not a psychiatric condition needing diagnosis.

Women should ask themselves how they could have believed that men would find them more attractive if they were strong, independent feminists.

Women should ask themselves who told them. 

It wasn't men. In fact, today's modern woman has been trained not to listen to men or to respect men.

They reaping what they and their feminist handlers sowed.