Tonight I watched a very odd French film, L'Appartement.
It wasn't odd because it was French; it was just odd. Since its oddness lay mostly in its treatment of love, it got me to thinking about love - or rather, it kept me thinking about it, since I've been pondering that pretty much all this week, anyway.
On Sunday, as part of a discussion about Pushkin (just so you know it's not all dimwittery round my way), my friend M. told me that my friend S.A. (he of the tango skills) has a theory that women prefer men who treat them badly - indeed, she called it "a belief." I was already sort of aware of this, only I would have called it "a fear." In any case, as I said to her, it's not true. But as the week has progressed this theory has rolled around in my head, and I've been giving it some more thought. I don't like men who treat me badly, and I never have, but in fairness I have to say that in my time I've stuck with some people who were highly critical of me, and I have to admit that there are a lot of women who stick with men who treat them badly.
Sometimes when I'm trying to unwind a mystery I pretend that I'm explaining that mystery to someone in my head: by articulating my ideas as if to someone else, I somehow find them clearer to myself. I did this in this case, and this is what I came up with: some women, maybe even many women, do seem to prefer men who treat them badly, but those are women who dislike themselves. That is, those women believe they deserve to be treated badly, so they find or remain with men who do so.
A couple of years ago a therapist told me one of the most interesting things I've ever heard. He said to me that, whether they realise it or not, people often get comfortable in certain patterns or behaviours, and then they repeat them. They may not like those patterns or behaviours, he said, but they're used to them, and for many if not most people stepping outside what you're used to is scary - essentially, the fear of the different outweighs the desire for happiness. This made a good deal of sense to me then, and it still does.
I think many women - and perhaps many men, too, for all I know - dislike themselves, or (what I fear) believe that in some way they are dislikable: not good enough in some nameless but nonetheless (or, and thus) terrible way. Believing this, they find someone to reinforce that belief. This is awful, and strange, but in a funny way not illogical. To put it at the most obvious level, it takes a lot of guts to like yourself in a world that's constantly trying to sell you stuff to make you better.
That being said, though, I think you have to make some kind of allowance for love. Love moves on a different line from good sense, and often by the time you see someone is not good enough for you, or not right for you, you're already quite deeply in love with them. I've certainly been in relationships where I realised that I was unhappy, or that my partner was not right for me, but I've loved the person very much, and the pain that ending that love would bring me has seemed so awful that I've stayed in the relationship past its sell-by date.
That being said, love is an excuse for an occurrence, but I'm not sure it can be an excuse for a pattern.
When I first heard about this theory/belief/fear, I thought that what I would like to say in response is, Women who stick with men who treat them badly are women with problems you will never solve. But not all women are like that. The world is filled with women who want to be treated well, and who want to be happy, and who want to treat others well and make them happy. Trust me, and hold out for one of those. But, as I know from personal experience, if you are someone who wants people to be happy, it's very very hard indeed to turn your back on someone who's being made unhappy, even if you know that at some level they want to be made unhappy. If you care for someone, as a friend once said to me, you want them to be happy.
Also, thinking further on the topic this week, it occurs to me that women of course have similar ideas about men (and I do not exempt myself): they believe that men (the collective) like weak women, or stupid women, or women who treat them badly. But surely if the women who like men who treat them badly have some problem lurking round the back, the men who like weak women, or stupid women, or women who treat them badly have some problem lurking round the back. And if you were a really strong or capable person you'd realise that about whichever gender you fancy, and hold out for someone who didn't exhibit those tendencies. But that would take enormous strength.
So what is to happen? As usual, all my pondering gets me back to I Don't Know. I said to MCLSJB a couple of weeks ago, "Love ought to be simple. It should be that two nice people discover they like each other's company, there is some amount of attraction on each side, and they decide to enjoy sharing each other's company. But it isn't." People (and again, I do not exempt myself) feel that love ought to be difficult; or they want to be treated poorly; or they have any one of a thousand other difficulties and foolishnesses that I can't think of at the moment. And so frankly, as I remarked to someone tonight, it's amazing that anyone ever gets together with anyone else at all, or that they manage to stay together.
But they do.
Believe me, I just want to call out, smart women, good women, worthwhile women, do not want men who treat them badly. They want men who will love them, and treat them well, and make them happy. And they will love those men back, with dividends. On this one, I know.
So, let's end with a joke, since the jokes seem to have gone over well. No, it won't be the octopus joke (otherwise what would you have to look forward to?). And it won't be a play on words, either. It's late, so it will be a genuinely stupid joke:
What do you call a boomerang that doesn't return?
A stick.
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