Double standards.
For the last three years, my GF has been telling me, usually the day I go and get my hair cut, that she wants me to cut my hair.
I don't wear long hair by any stretch of the imagination. It's short and parted. She wants it short and spiky because that's "cute". Or that's what she says. The day I go to the barber, she has completely different ideas. "Just shorter than last time" she told me. But evidently that wasn't short enough when I got home.
So after three years of trying to accomodate her opinion of my hair, and still not liking it, she says she wants to get her hair cut and asks me what I think. It should be no surprise that I like hair. And I love her. But I have no fancy for her hair...which is a nice thick silky black that would be wonderful long...except that she keeps it in a bowl cut, never below her ears. I can't even run my fingers through it.
"I think you should let it grow longer." I admitted.
Conversation ensues. I know it takes time to maintain long hair. I'm not asking for ankle-length. Just give it a couple inches below the back of your scalp. Maybe shoulder-length. That shouldn't be substantially harder to maintain. She finally asks, "So you don't like my hair?"
"Honestly? No." That's pretty truthful in a 'yeah those jeans do make your butt look big' kind of way. I really don't like her hair.
I also really don't like going out to dinner with her and having the waitress say things like, "What would you gentlemen like?" or saying to her, "Yes sir." That really irks me. She's asian, so she looks 16 even though she's older than me. I swear people point at me and murmur like I'm some kind of depraved boylover if we hug or smooch in public. Really, any feminine haircut would be just fine. It's ok to wear girl hair even if you wear boy clothes. Anything so I wouldn't have to feel I need to defend her honor every time someone mistakes her for a guy.
But I love her, so I don't let it get to me, I let her be the person I love rather than who I want her to be.
An argument ensues in which I try to underscore that I can still love her without liking her hair. It's all going to fall out eventually anyway. No dice. In the end, I'm an insensitive prick because I don't like her bowl-cut boy hair.
I'm still paying for it. Let that be a lesson to you, never be honest. No, not really. I'm working on her, I'll get her to appreciate honesty someday.
So it's OK for her to not like my hair, no matter what I do to it at her behest so it seems, but I'm not allowed the similar sentiment. Asking me to bend over backwards to try and satisfy her is fine, but vice-versa I'm just being an insensitive prick.
And she won't admit that this is a double standard.
It's littered throughout our relationship. We were both EQ players in the past (no, we didn't meet that way), and now and then we enjoy playing WoW together. We play games both on our handheld devices and our PC's. In our house, you will find all 3 game consoles and a 57" HDTV plus a surround sound system on which they are played. Only one of the consoles was mine, the other two and the TV gear is all hers.
And yet, if I'm playing a game and she opens the door, looks in, says nothing and closes it, and I don't run out and find her then clearly I don't love her as much as the game (or I would have paid attention to her instead).
In the living room, she has on four occaisions walked into the room, watched the TV while I played, and then left...when I finally find her at the prescheduled end-of-gaming time, she's crying her eyes out because I didn't notice her.
I did, but you didn't present yourself as needing anything. For all I know you just wanted to watch for a bit or were thinking about doing something in one of the other rooms.
What the hell?
I played WoW with an RL friend, joined his guild and did a raid to see how it was, played for two hours. All pre-scheduled. She knew in advance and told me she was fine with it. From 2030 to 2230 hours, I was going to play WoW with our mutual RL pal. At 2237 I came out of the computer room. She cryed all night because this was some kind of sign that I was hooked on WoW and didn't love her, and was going to slowly spend more and more time on WoW and less and less on her, and our relationship was ruined.
So I started reading books instead of playing games. This she seemed to like better, but if I'm too engrossed in a paragraph that I don't stand up and hop to it the moment she suggests some alternate behaviour, we still get another "that book is more important to you than me" cryfest. It's been all I can do to finally negotiate 1 hour of peace where I don't get interrupted every 10 seconds, thus necessitating reading through a book again.
I just wanted to finish the fucking paragraph.
Meanwhile, through all of this, when I'm being an "insensitive prick boyfriend who loves his (games|books|tv) more than her", she's rejecting all my ideas of activities we can do together, instead choosing to sit on the sofa and play Nintendogs or some GBA game, and get disgruntled with me whenever I cause the sofa to move so that it disrupts her game.
Yet somehow I'm under no illusion that she loves these games more than me.
How do you get rid of double standards in a relationship without ruining it? How do you even get someone to admit that they are double standards to begin with?
For the last three years, my GF has been telling me, usually the day I go and get my hair cut, that she wants me to cut my hair.
I don't wear long hair by any stretch of the imagination. It's short and parted. She wants it short and spiky because that's "cute". Or that's what she says. The day I go to the barber, she has completely different ideas. "Just shorter than last time" she told me. But evidently that wasn't short enough when I got home.
So after three years of trying to accomodate her opinion of my hair, and still not liking it, she says she wants to get her hair cut and asks me what I think. It should be no surprise that I like hair. And I love her. But I have no fancy for her hair...which is a nice thick silky black that would be wonderful long...except that she keeps it in a bowl cut, never below her ears. I can't even run my fingers through it.
"I think you should let it grow longer." I admitted.
Conversation ensues. I know it takes time to maintain long hair. I'm not asking for ankle-length. Just give it a couple inches below the back of your scalp. Maybe shoulder-length. That shouldn't be substantially harder to maintain. She finally asks, "So you don't like my hair?"
"Honestly? No." That's pretty truthful in a 'yeah those jeans do make your butt look big' kind of way. I really don't like her hair.
I also really don't like going out to dinner with her and having the waitress say things like, "What would you gentlemen like?" or saying to her, "Yes sir." That really irks me. She's asian, so she looks 16 even though she's older than me. I swear people point at me and murmur like I'm some kind of depraved boylover if we hug or smooch in public. Really, any feminine haircut would be just fine. It's ok to wear girl hair even if you wear boy clothes. Anything so I wouldn't have to feel I need to defend her honor every time someone mistakes her for a guy.
But I love her, so I don't let it get to me, I let her be the person I love rather than who I want her to be.
An argument ensues in which I try to underscore that I can still love her without liking her hair. It's all going to fall out eventually anyway. No dice. In the end, I'm an insensitive prick because I don't like her bowl-cut boy hair.
I'm still paying for it. Let that be a lesson to you, never be honest. No, not really. I'm working on her, I'll get her to appreciate honesty someday.
So it's OK for her to not like my hair, no matter what I do to it at her behest so it seems, but I'm not allowed the similar sentiment. Asking me to bend over backwards to try and satisfy her is fine, but vice-versa I'm just being an insensitive prick.
And she won't admit that this is a double standard.
It's littered throughout our relationship. We were both EQ players in the past (no, we didn't meet that way), and now and then we enjoy playing WoW together. We play games both on our handheld devices and our PC's. In our house, you will find all 3 game consoles and a 57" HDTV plus a surround sound system on which they are played. Only one of the consoles was mine, the other two and the TV gear is all hers.
And yet, if I'm playing a game and she opens the door, looks in, says nothing and closes it, and I don't run out and find her then clearly I don't love her as much as the game (or I would have paid attention to her instead).
In the living room, she has on four occaisions walked into the room, watched the TV while I played, and then left...when I finally find her at the prescheduled end-of-gaming time, she's crying her eyes out because I didn't notice her.
I did, but you didn't present yourself as needing anything. For all I know you just wanted to watch for a bit or were thinking about doing something in one of the other rooms.
What the hell?
I played WoW with an RL friend, joined his guild and did a raid to see how it was, played for two hours. All pre-scheduled. She knew in advance and told me she was fine with it. From 2030 to 2230 hours, I was going to play WoW with our mutual RL pal. At 2237 I came out of the computer room. She cryed all night because this was some kind of sign that I was hooked on WoW and didn't love her, and was going to slowly spend more and more time on WoW and less and less on her, and our relationship was ruined.
So I started reading books instead of playing games. This she seemed to like better, but if I'm too engrossed in a paragraph that I don't stand up and hop to it the moment she suggests some alternate behaviour, we still get another "that book is more important to you than me" cryfest. It's been all I can do to finally negotiate 1 hour of peace where I don't get interrupted every 10 seconds, thus necessitating reading through a book again.
I just wanted to finish the fucking paragraph.
Meanwhile, through all of this, when I'm being an "insensitive prick boyfriend who loves his (games|books|tv) more than her", she's rejecting all my ideas of activities we can do together, instead choosing to sit on the sofa and play Nintendogs or some GBA game, and get disgruntled with me whenever I cause the sofa to move so that it disrupts her game.
Yet somehow I'm under no illusion that she loves these games more than me.
How do you get rid of double standards in a relationship without ruining it? How do you even get someone to admit that they are double standards to begin with?