“I’ve got a blank space baby,
and I’ll write your name”
Taylor Swift, “Blank Space”
A very few years ago a young lady in the place I was working told me that her fiancee had broken off their engagement after the wedding and honeymoon plans has been set. She was, naturally, quite upset about this, and at one point she asked something like “Why would any guy do that?”
Well, okay, it was rhetorical, she wasn’t really looking for an answer and I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I’m sure I said I didn’t know. To a large degree that’s true, I never met her fiancee and have no idea what kind of guy he was, and it would have been inappropriate for me to have guessed what his motives were.
Though I didn’t say so, I had a guess in mind, and later she pretty much confirmed it as a strong possibility.
Weeks later we were in another conversation on the same subject when she had gained a little distance from the event, and at one point I asked her point-blank why she wanted to get married. The answers I got, as far as they were concrete at all, were pretty much what I thought they might be.
She talked about the need for “being married”. She talked about not being alone, and she talked about the need for “a man” in her life.
Not a word about him in particular. She never said a word about how much she loved him. She was broken up about the destruction of her wedding plans, and honeymoon plans, and her plans for her life, but nothing about losing him.
Like many women, she had a role in her life for a man and she was intent on finding someone to fill that role. No doubt there were criteria that the man had to meet, and preferences, but within those relatively impersonal parameters it didn’t seem to matter much exactly who it was. The role was important, not so much the individual performing that role..
Not exactly most men’s dream relationship, that.
By my working definitions, I found no indication at all the she loved the guy. Again, I don’t know anything about him, have no clue how he felt about her, and maybe he was just a jerk, but I suspect that on some level he knew the same thing. I have no doubt that she loved the idea of having someone like him in her life, but that’s not the same thing at all.
A lot of ladies make the mistake of thinking that because men don’t constantly talk about their feelings, that the man’s feelings are either absent or less intense than theirs. That would make it hard to explain, for example, why so many more men die soon after the death of their spouse than the other way around, but a great many women assume that if a man can’t articulate his feelings he doesn’t have any.
I have heard variations of the complaint among younger guys trying to date for a couple of decades now. I have heard about dates where the young lady was texting everything that happened to her friends in real-time, relationships where every date turned out to be focused on some family or friend crisis, dates that start out with a verbal questionnaire about what he does for a living, where he lives and what sort of car he drives. The complaint I hear behind all of this, over and over, is that whatever the dates turn out to be about, it’s never about the two of them and who they really are. This is so pervasive that a lot of guys seem to come away with the feeling, not entirely unjustified, that the ladies don’t really care who they are.
I suppose there are a lot of guys out there willing to take advantage of such situations while they last, and I know there are a lot who are capable of deluding themselves about it, some possibly for a lifetime, but for a lot of guys- especially the nice guys- a relationship like that is just never going to give them what they really want or need. If they’re astute enough to realize that, then their best and most honorable option is to walk away. It doesn’t really matter how he feels about her, how attracted he is, how much he wishes she felt differently about him or even whether he loves her. Bottom line, he is not the problem. She has signaled clearly that it’s not about him, it’s about the role, the open position that needs to be filled with a qualified candidate, the man-shaped “blank space” in her life, and that’s the problem.
IMHO, the guys are right about this. Having a role to fill that could just as well be filled by any qualified candidate is not a foundation for a relationship, much less an ostensibly life-long relationship with staggeringly heavy legal and financial penalties for early termination. My impression is that men don’t usually think of women in those terms, they are looking for someone who they uniquely want to be with, and whatever “qualifications” they may have had in mind all become very flexible indeed for the right person… and whether they can articulate it or not, they want that right person to feel the same way about them. Yes, that does seem to imply that most men are more “romantic” than most women. Believe me, these days that’s not hard.
Heterosexual men find women attractive in many ways, and for some time that attraction combined with wishful thinking and maybe some degree of self-delusion may get them to overlook this issue right into an engagement, but if the woman’s core indifference to exactly who they are results in them getting “cold feet” and fleeing before committing fully (and legally), I don’t find that surprising.
In previous ages this was a main function of long engagements, so that each party could gauge the motives, sincerity and depth of feeling of the other. Anyone can deceive or be deceived for a week or two, very few can pull it off over a period of several months or even a few years. If we’re not willing to go back to long engagements, it’s natural to assume that that will result in more false starts.
I don’t pretend to know where gender relations are going. That’s at least fifty percent up to women, and women right now, as a group, seem conflicted and confused as to what they really want from men (if anything). The one thing they seem certain of is that they don’t want our help or suggestions in the least.
Fine. But we men do have a say in where any relationship goes, or doesn’t, and no man I know wants to feel that he’s not particularly valued for who he is, he’s just filling a role in a woman’s life, a candidate for a currently-empty position.
Sorry, your “blank space” is not our problem… and that may well be why it exists.
– Robert the Wombat