Girl on Girl Hatred: A Primer for the Newly Attached

You’ve got a new girlfriend – hooray!  Life is wonderful, full of cherries and flowers and sex and deliciousness.  Right?

…right?

What’s that you say?  Your female friends hate your girlfriend? They’re always telling you that she’s a bitch, you deserve better than her, that she’s not that pretty or smart or successful.  In short, they are really displeased in your choice of mate.   What gives?

Welcome to the wonderful world of estrogen.  While men are easy to read and wear their emotions on their sleeves, women are a bit tougher to figure out.   Try to stick with me here, okay?

Here are some possible reasons why your gal pals hate your new mate:

They are jealous

I have a story for everything.  Here’s another one, sad but true.  Jen and Tony had been best friends since high school.  They took all the honors classes together, helped each other with homework, were in the same clubs.  But they were both too shy to do anything about the fact they were crazy about each other.  Mostly because each one feared the other one would think they were nuts to want to ruin the friendship by dating.  Of course, since they didn’t ever admit this to each other, they went to college thinking that they were best friends and that was that.

They went to separate colleges, but kept in touch daily over email and IMs.  (This was back in the day before everybody had cell phones – I know, ancient history!)  Tony spent his nights fantasizing about what it would be like to get with Jen and Jen spent her nights wishing more guys were like Tony.  Crazy how dense people can be, isn’t it?

So one day, junior year, Tony gets a girlfriend.  She’s practically Jen’s twin – same build, same hair, same interests.  Tony thinks, “Wow, Jen is going to love Becky!  They’re so alike!”

But Jen hates Becky.  In fact, the more Jen hears about Becky, the more she gets angry.  She tries to pick at everything Becky does and convince Tony that she’s a horrible choice for a girlfriend.  The funny thing?  Jen doesn’t even realize she’s doing this because she likes Tony – this is just her instinct.   Her GUT tells her to do this.  Why?  Because her gut wants to be the girl in bed with Tony but she’s too dense to admit it.

Your girlfriend really is horrible for you

There’s another reason why your girl friends hate your girlfriend.  It’s actually based in reality, rather than pure guts and emotion.

That reason is this – your girlfriend is horrible and you need to dump her.

Girls know other girls.  So if you have gal pals who you know FOR SURE aren’t interested in your romantically, and they tell you that your girlfriend is bad news, 90% of the time you should believe them.

A quick list of good reasons to dump your new girlfriend:

• She’s dating you for the sex (it happens).
• She’s using you for a place to live.
• She’s using you for free dinners and activities.
• She’s a gold digger and will eventually leech your bank account.
• She’s using you to get back at another guy or girl.
• She’s using you to get access to someone in your social circle.
• She’s a dirty whore and you’ll get a gift that keeps on giving.

Listen to your girl friends, guys.   Here’s a flowchart:

The Female Mind – Why We Read Into Things

Every guy I know is baffled by the amount of THINKING and OVERTHINKING that women do.  Why can’t things be straightforward and simple, the way they are in a man’s brain?   Men seem to ignore anything that doesn’t actively threaten the safety of their loved ones or their egos, but women dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, looking for reasons and answers that sometimes don’t even exist.

When a guy says, “Don’t worry about it, it’s nothing,” a woman can’t leave it be.  If he says, “Everything’s going to be okay,” she doesn’t believe him.   Because in her mind, it IS something.  It’s NEVER nothing.  And seriously, if we don’t come up with every possible route that our current situation could take in the future, we have no idea if everything will be okay in the end.  We want to play out all the possibilities in our minds and feel like we’re prepared for the worst, no matter what form it may take.

Part of this comes from the differences in male and female brains in the way that we build intimacy.  Psychologists have realized that men build intimacy with others through shared activities – thus, they feel closest to the people who they do things with.  Women build intimacy with others through sharing of important issues and problems in their lives – thus, they feel closest to the people with whom they share the most emotionally.

Put a man and a woman in a relationship.  As long as they’re doing things together and getting on fairly well, the man will assume that all is well, everything’s going to be okay.  Trouble brewing?  It’s okay, we’ll figure it out, the man thinks.  The woman, however, immediately wants to talk it over with her man.  She wants to go through the details, she wants to share with him and have him share with her.  When he refuses to listen or share his thoughts on the matter, she begins to get anxious and feel less intimately connected with him.

Weird, huh?

Our worrying is our way of trying to connect with you and build intimacy.  Sure, it’s annoying.  Sure, it’s a bit neurotic.  Sure, sometimes it’s borderline crazy.  But in the end, we do it because we care about you and we want to feel close to you.

What can you do to help us?

Listen.  I know this article is taking a kind of serious tone, but this is important, dangit!  The one thing you can do right now to make your woman worry less is to listen more.  Take time to sit down with no distractions and really hear her out when she talks about the things that worry her.  Don’t try to tell her that her fears are unfounded – if she feels them, they’re real.  Share with her any worries you’ve felt on the same subject so she knows you’re with her.  You “get it.”  Then come up with a few options together that will soothe her back into a sense of security and intimacy again.

Get your intimacy meter full and you’ll find that you get more of that OTHER intimacy, too!  Funny how that works, isn’t it?