Unnecessarily gendered things. No one should be responsible for their partners personal growth.
While everybody should still experience personal growth with their partner. Noone is a fully fledged person and you should grow together.
Edit: i.e. Maddy is right and never implied you should fix your partner.
I agree, but I also think that it is more expected that women be their partners’ endlessly patient therapists(/mommies).
But what if they’re really, really hot?
Jokes aside, that is (more or less) the excuse I’ve heard far too often for people of all genders. And that sometimes trying to “save” a friend in a screwed up relationship was the exact thing they were trying to do for the walking-disaster they’re involved with.
Wait, that Maddy?
I’m a rehabilitation center for badly raised women, thank you very much.
I can fix her.
We can fix each other 😍
I can barely rehab myself, no one should be trusting me to rehab my partners lol
Isn’t that the point? When you focus on fixing other peoples problems, you get to ignore you own. Right?
I had a somewhat similar conversation with some friends recently about early relationships and boundaries.
I had a boyfriend that didn’t take a no early in our relationship. I first just indicated no silently (moving hand away etc), then indicated no verbally, and he still tried to do something to me physically that I just expressed no about. I’m really proud that I stuck to my boundaries and got up and left, but that could have gone very differently. He was much bigger and stronger, and had I not known him through certain circles I might not know how he would react to me leaving. I was previously SAd and had done a lot of work building up my confidence and boundaries and he was not very experienced. He later sincerely apologized. He was legitimately confused about the situation and thought he was doing what he should. We had multiple extensive conversations about enthusiastic consent and eventually resumed dating. He was always good about consent from that point forward, but he essentially used my body as a learning experience. I’m glad it happened to me and not someone else, and I’m glad we had the conversation we did because now he knows for any future partners, but it really is scary to think how entitled he felt to my body and that there are other people out there like that.
There are several things people learn when just starting out dating, and I’m sure I messed up a lot and said things I shouldn’t have or said things wrong, but I never took liberties with someone’s body. Obviously, it happens to all kinds of people, by all kinds of people, but on the whole it seems like it’s heavily related to socialization. I think we need to do a better job of teaching consent and boundaries to all children. That and kindness. I think more of that and we’d stop mistreating our partners, because it ends up just being a microcosm of how we treat society.
‘Poorly’ would ring better than ‘badly’.
From an early age girls are expected to be more emotionally intelligent and more personally responsible. They are used as peer role models for their struggling classmates routinely. In any Prk-1 cohort, the amount of boys vs girls who can’t do basic hygiene tasks is also…staggering. As in the parents aren’t teaching their boys how to manage emotions, or wipe their own ass. Then they grow up.
