I was a full-time homemaker for a lot of years for a woman my age. Most women my age have spent more time in the work force than I have and I generally speak of that as me having lived a very private life and I try to clarify that I mean my relationships were "private"/personal relationships (friends, family) and NOT "public" relationships (coworkers, clients, bosses, etc).
I think this helps me see something most people seem to not see:
That my expectations for a lot of things are rooted in the idea that this will be a personal relationship and this shapes how I behave in ways that have actively undermined my efforts to establish a real career that pays good money.
I think many other women suffer from the same pattern but it's not extreme enough to be visible to people. I think the degree to which women are trained to have personal/private relationships from the time they are born and men are not is a hidden and critical part of what creates the so-called glass ceiling.
Most women are still more-or-less trained from birth to be full-time wives and moms even though this no longer makes sense because they probably will not have eight or ten kids. One of the issues this causes is that women expect most of their income to come from marrying well and this actively undermines their efforts to establish an adequate income in their own name.
That's a practical matter that can keep people trapped in a marriage they no longer want and there are two parts to that: Men often don't know how to feed themselves, how to keep a home adequately clean, etc. So she stays -- sometimes "until the bitter end" -- because it pays her bills and he stays because she knows how to feed and care for him and he doesn't know how to do any of that adequately for himself.
That's something I intend to explore more in future posts. That is NOT what this post is about.
This post is about something I feel is more fundamental that helps keep those patterns alive: How women typically approach social stuff and relationships and how that goes bad places in a world where the approach they have learned is maladaptive to our current reality.
I have had men tell me that networking to enhance your career involves talking about your work. I'm apparently super bad at networking though I'm a people person and have social skills, it leads inevitably to people wanting me to be THEIR new BFF (while they do nothing in return for me) or their one true love.
I have historically focused on the fact that I see other people network by making small talk and being friendly and trying to break the ice and establish trust. I'm good at those things and I can relate to that and so I have tried to do the part I understood and it never leads to enhancing my career. It leads to men hitting on me.
It's taken me a long time to get the memo that I need to somehow talk more about my work and I need to somehow get the focus on my work and my credentials, qualifications and experience. And I don't think that's just because I'm stupid.
I think other people actively encourage me to keep being very personal because they don't have enough of that in their lives and don't do it well. That's what they want from me. They aren't worried about my career and me figuring out how to pay my bills. Not their problem.
In fact, a lot of men clearly see my longstanding lack of an adequate income as an opportunity for them to "rescue" me from poverty. They don't want me to earn a living. They want to marry me as the answer to my financial problems and they see "I can offer you a better life because I have a good income" as a convenient solution to their problem of being lonely and yadda.
I have a long history of knowing apparently a lot of people well and I am hesitant to do business with someone I don't know well because I don't trust them, I don't see how we can meaningfully come to terms, etc. And my experience with trying to cut a deal with people I don't know well has been very negative, so that just reinforces my feeling that "I need to know these people better to do business with them." and then they just want it to be a personal relationship because, as best I can tell, most people don't get to know too many people all that well.
I sometimes read stories about, say, some guy who is suspected of killing all three of his wives and I'm like "How could his later wives NOT be suspicious????" I have trouble relating to the idea that you would get involved with a man who habitually murders his wives and not notice that something is OFF.
I don't usually say that to anyone because, heck, what if I'm wrong and don't know what I'm talking about? But my impression is a LOT of people are so used to not really knowing anyone well, SOME people actually marry people they don't know well and can't really trust.
The upside seems to be that I'm a good judge of people. I've known enough people well, it seems like it's harder than usual to get certain things past me.
The downside is that I tend to want to spend a lot more time with people than seems to be the norm before I trust them and one potential way my expectations can go bad places is that this means I can just suck up all of someone's time and it can be a burden to them -- which I tend to not notice because people tend to WANT to come back for more -- and this is a thing that actively undermines efforts to get work done -- aka establish a career.
I'm divorced in part because I was clear this was something that could go unhealthy places.
I'm a middle-of-the-road extrovert. My ex is EXTREMELY introverted. Also, I was a homemaker and he had a serious career that allowed him to support the family.
And the fact that I'm an extrovert helped me meet the emotional needs of my husband and our sons without it being burdensome, but being home all day with children and not having enough adult contact was a hardship for me. It was exacerbated by the fact that my husband dealt with people all day at work and wanted to be left the hell alone when he got home.
So Monday through Friday, I gave him his space and let him have alone time in the evening so he could function at work, but this was hard on ME. And I left him in part because it became clear to me that he planned to recreate this scenario with his future work plans, post-military career.
He was pursuing a degree in Computer Science but he was NOT planning to be a programmer and have a work environment where he was left the hell alone all day and then eager to give me his attention when he got home. No, he wanted to get his PhD and become a professor.
So he LIKED his life. I hated mine and did not wish to live this way anymore AND I felt that insisting he plan a future in which he gave ME all of his limited ability to put up with social crap was not a reasonable or healthy thing to do.
That realization is one of the things that made me feel that getting divorced was the only sensible, humane outcome here. I didn't want to make him my bitch and say he couldn't work with people, he couldn't have friends, he needed to just give me all of his attention because that was the only hope of me feeling satisfied with the relationship.
If you are a woman, I suggest you consider the possibility that you may need to spend more time on solitary activities and less time on "bonding" with people.
This was counterintuitive for me. For me, work meant interacting with people.
It meant interacting with my children. It meant interacting with my husband. THAT was a large part of my work as a full-time homemaker.
Yes, I ALSO cooked and cleaned but cooking and cleaning often happened while interacting with people. And it was some man talking about how lonely his work was that got me to begin to rethink that.
My volunteer work also tended towards interacting with people. For example, I was a moderator at one time.
All well, fine and good but those sorts of things have something of a tendency to pay less well than the kinds of work men typically do. Waiting tables, cleaning houses, being a servant, etc. are similar to the kinds of work a homemaker does and they tend to not pay that well.
People somewhat often interpret me wanting to know them very well as me volunteering to be their personal servant. Yeah, no, I'm doing no such thing.
I don't personally know how I am going to fix this for me. I'm seriously handicapped and I NEED to know people well and for them to know me well so they don't accidentally and casually KILL ME by being unaware of my special needs.
So, for me, this is a hard problem to solve.
But if you are a generally able-bodied woman, not seriously handicapped like I am, and frustrated with your lack of a real career, THIS may be an invisible and significant part of the problem.
YOU need to decide what YOUR goal is here and start cutting men off at the knees when they push for this to be a personal relationship. Otherwise, you will just like sleep with all your professional contacts, make excuses about how it's not your fault and wonder why in the hell your career goes nowhere.
If you want a real career, what THEY WANT from you cannot be your highest priority. That works if and only if everyone is on the same page that women are good for one thing: sex/marriage -- a personal relationship.
If you do not want to spend the rest of your life being the personal property and personal servant of one man because he pays your bills and you have no hope of adequately paying your own bills, you have to set goals, establish relationships that are more personally "superficial" and where the focus is on the WORK you do together.
The phrase the strength of the loose tie comes from a piece I read about job hunting that said that acquaintances -- NOT close friends/family and NOT strangers -- were the best source of job leads for people out of work and job hunting.
Your closest contacts tend to know most of the same people and such you know. They often can't tell you anything new.
Strangers don't know anything about you. This means any "suggestions" they make are random shots in the dark that are highly unlikely to be relevant to your needs.
Acquaintances -- people who know you a LITTLE -- know information you are unlikely to know and know enough about you to mentally sort it in short order and say "Oh, call so-and-so. He's looking for someone who does the kind of work you do."
Women who want to support themselves financially need more of that in their lives and fewer BFFs.
I think this helps me see something most people seem to not see:
That my expectations for a lot of things are rooted in the idea that this will be a personal relationship and this shapes how I behave in ways that have actively undermined my efforts to establish a real career that pays good money.
I think many other women suffer from the same pattern but it's not extreme enough to be visible to people. I think the degree to which women are trained to have personal/private relationships from the time they are born and men are not is a hidden and critical part of what creates the so-called glass ceiling.
Most women are still more-or-less trained from birth to be full-time wives and moms even though this no longer makes sense because they probably will not have eight or ten kids. One of the issues this causes is that women expect most of their income to come from marrying well and this actively undermines their efforts to establish an adequate income in their own name.
That's a practical matter that can keep people trapped in a marriage they no longer want and there are two parts to that: Men often don't know how to feed themselves, how to keep a home adequately clean, etc. So she stays -- sometimes "until the bitter end" -- because it pays her bills and he stays because she knows how to feed and care for him and he doesn't know how to do any of that adequately for himself.
That's something I intend to explore more in future posts. That is NOT what this post is about.
This post is about something I feel is more fundamental that helps keep those patterns alive: How women typically approach social stuff and relationships and how that goes bad places in a world where the approach they have learned is maladaptive to our current reality.
I have had men tell me that networking to enhance your career involves talking about your work. I'm apparently super bad at networking though I'm a people person and have social skills, it leads inevitably to people wanting me to be THEIR new BFF (while they do nothing in return for me) or their one true love.
I have historically focused on the fact that I see other people network by making small talk and being friendly and trying to break the ice and establish trust. I'm good at those things and I can relate to that and so I have tried to do the part I understood and it never leads to enhancing my career. It leads to men hitting on me.
It's taken me a long time to get the memo that I need to somehow talk more about my work and I need to somehow get the focus on my work and my credentials, qualifications and experience. And I don't think that's just because I'm stupid.
I think other people actively encourage me to keep being very personal because they don't have enough of that in their lives and don't do it well. That's what they want from me. They aren't worried about my career and me figuring out how to pay my bills. Not their problem.
In fact, a lot of men clearly see my longstanding lack of an adequate income as an opportunity for them to "rescue" me from poverty. They don't want me to earn a living. They want to marry me as the answer to my financial problems and they see "I can offer you a better life because I have a good income" as a convenient solution to their problem of being lonely and yadda.
I have a long history of knowing apparently a lot of people well and I am hesitant to do business with someone I don't know well because I don't trust them, I don't see how we can meaningfully come to terms, etc. And my experience with trying to cut a deal with people I don't know well has been very negative, so that just reinforces my feeling that "I need to know these people better to do business with them." and then they just want it to be a personal relationship because, as best I can tell, most people don't get to know too many people all that well.
I sometimes read stories about, say, some guy who is suspected of killing all three of his wives and I'm like "How could his later wives NOT be suspicious????" I have trouble relating to the idea that you would get involved with a man who habitually murders his wives and not notice that something is OFF.
I don't usually say that to anyone because, heck, what if I'm wrong and don't know what I'm talking about? But my impression is a LOT of people are so used to not really knowing anyone well, SOME people actually marry people they don't know well and can't really trust.
The upside seems to be that I'm a good judge of people. I've known enough people well, it seems like it's harder than usual to get certain things past me.
The downside is that I tend to want to spend a lot more time with people than seems to be the norm before I trust them and one potential way my expectations can go bad places is that this means I can just suck up all of someone's time and it can be a burden to them -- which I tend to not notice because people tend to WANT to come back for more -- and this is a thing that actively undermines efforts to get work done -- aka establish a career.
I'm divorced in part because I was clear this was something that could go unhealthy places.
I'm a middle-of-the-road extrovert. My ex is EXTREMELY introverted. Also, I was a homemaker and he had a serious career that allowed him to support the family.
And the fact that I'm an extrovert helped me meet the emotional needs of my husband and our sons without it being burdensome, but being home all day with children and not having enough adult contact was a hardship for me. It was exacerbated by the fact that my husband dealt with people all day at work and wanted to be left the hell alone when he got home.
So Monday through Friday, I gave him his space and let him have alone time in the evening so he could function at work, but this was hard on ME. And I left him in part because it became clear to me that he planned to recreate this scenario with his future work plans, post-military career.
He was pursuing a degree in Computer Science but he was NOT planning to be a programmer and have a work environment where he was left the hell alone all day and then eager to give me his attention when he got home. No, he wanted to get his PhD and become a professor.
So he LIKED his life. I hated mine and did not wish to live this way anymore AND I felt that insisting he plan a future in which he gave ME all of his limited ability to put up with social crap was not a reasonable or healthy thing to do.
That realization is one of the things that made me feel that getting divorced was the only sensible, humane outcome here. I didn't want to make him my bitch and say he couldn't work with people, he couldn't have friends, he needed to just give me all of his attention because that was the only hope of me feeling satisfied with the relationship.
If you are a woman, I suggest you consider the possibility that you may need to spend more time on solitary activities and less time on "bonding" with people.
This was counterintuitive for me. For me, work meant interacting with people.
It meant interacting with my children. It meant interacting with my husband. THAT was a large part of my work as a full-time homemaker.
Yes, I ALSO cooked and cleaned but cooking and cleaning often happened while interacting with people. And it was some man talking about how lonely his work was that got me to begin to rethink that.
My volunteer work also tended towards interacting with people. For example, I was a moderator at one time.
All well, fine and good but those sorts of things have something of a tendency to pay less well than the kinds of work men typically do. Waiting tables, cleaning houses, being a servant, etc. are similar to the kinds of work a homemaker does and they tend to not pay that well.
People somewhat often interpret me wanting to know them very well as me volunteering to be their personal servant. Yeah, no, I'm doing no such thing.
I don't personally know how I am going to fix this for me. I'm seriously handicapped and I NEED to know people well and for them to know me well so they don't accidentally and casually KILL ME by being unaware of my special needs.
So, for me, this is a hard problem to solve.
But if you are a generally able-bodied woman, not seriously handicapped like I am, and frustrated with your lack of a real career, THIS may be an invisible and significant part of the problem.
- You want too much personal attention.
- You take up too much time to merely be a professional contact. It only makes sense to them if this leads to love and marriage or at least sex.
- You talk too much about YOU and too much about THEM and not enough about THE WORK.
- You LET their expectations DRIVE this into overly personal territory.
YOU need to decide what YOUR goal is here and start cutting men off at the knees when they push for this to be a personal relationship. Otherwise, you will just like sleep with all your professional contacts, make excuses about how it's not your fault and wonder why in the hell your career goes nowhere.
If you want a real career, what THEY WANT from you cannot be your highest priority. That works if and only if everyone is on the same page that women are good for one thing: sex/marriage -- a personal relationship.
If you do not want to spend the rest of your life being the personal property and personal servant of one man because he pays your bills and you have no hope of adequately paying your own bills, you have to set goals, establish relationships that are more personally "superficial" and where the focus is on the WORK you do together.
The phrase the strength of the loose tie comes from a piece I read about job hunting that said that acquaintances -- NOT close friends/family and NOT strangers -- were the best source of job leads for people out of work and job hunting.
Your closest contacts tend to know most of the same people and such you know. They often can't tell you anything new.
Strangers don't know anything about you. This means any "suggestions" they make are random shots in the dark that are highly unlikely to be relevant to your needs.
Acquaintances -- people who know you a LITTLE -- know information you are unlikely to know and know enough about you to mentally sort it in short order and say "Oh, call so-and-so. He's looking for someone who does the kind of work you do."
Women who want to support themselves financially need more of that in their lives and fewer BFFs.