The Need For Security Comes From Within

How much does a craving for security run your day-to-day decisions? Some people will swallow almost anything rather than risk a confrontation that could cost them a relationship. There's a quiet calculation at work: if this person gets angry with me, I could lose them, so I stay quiet. And the one doing the putting-down, often a partner, often a man, tends to win the argument before it starts, just by landing the first comment. It becomes easy, almost automatic, to drop a complaint or a sharp remark when you're asking about something you don't like or don't understand.

Men seem to handle open conflict with less fallout. Two guys can go at each other pretty hard in the morning and be joking around by the afternoon. The fight doesn't register as the end of anything. For a lot of women the math is different. One cutting comment to another woman can close a door permanently. So picture what happens when someone criticizes a woman who is leaning on that relationship for support and a sense of safety. She doesn't shrug. She drops into something closer to crisis, blindsided by a person she believed loved her and had her back.

A woman will often absorb a stream of negative remarks from the man she's with, remarks he's already forgotten by dinner because they never weighed much to him. He may not have noticed she took it to heart at all, or how deeply. Men are forever testing each other, angling for position, trading jabs. From inside that habit, it rarely occurs to them that a comment could be carried around and held onto long after it was said.

Related