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Dear Dr. Alasko: I'd been dating B. for a year until I just learned that she was seeing another guy. This is the third time a girl I've fallen in love with has betrayed me I'm so angry and upset that I can hardly sleep. I'm angry because women seem to be so shallow, focused on money, shopping and anything that comes their way. It makes me think I'll never be able to trust anyone, and I can't stop fuming.
Dear Reader: Your letter is steaming with frustration, anger and bitterness. It's also very one sided, blaming women as a group for being shallow and untrustworthy.
But you say nothing about your own role in these relationships. That leads me to recall a similar letter from a woman I responded to who complained that men just wanted sex and weren't interested in serious relationships. I'll repeat the essence of my reply to her, and add another critical point.
First, and most importantly, no matter what your current feelings, lumping all members of one gender into a specific category is emphatically wrong. Neither all men nor all women are any specific thing, just as no one group or race share a single attribute. We call such sloppy and hostile categorizations sexism and racism, respectively. Only a person who is intellectually and/or emotionally undeveloped would embrace such demonstrably incorrect groupings.
Therefore, as a first step, you must reorganize your thinking and attitude to be more in line with reality.
The second step is realistically analyzing your own role in these disappointments. You make choices about whom you date, and how you interact with the people you choose. These choices are indisputably under your control.
Your letter implies that you're a victim, an unwilling casualty of other people's behaviors. That you have no personal responsibility in the outcome, that you did not voluntarily say and do the things you said and did, as though some other entity controlled your behaviors.
None of this is actually true. However, because of your disappointment, you feel that they are, and are generating anger. Fortunately, anger generates a great deal of energy that you can, if you wish, channel toward a useful and productive purpose.
I suggest that you use the energy your anger is giving you to rigorously examine your own behaviors and figure out which choices you're making that create this pattern of unhappiness you're experiencing.
Here's an example of what I mean. A male client of mine once lamented about his relationships with women. After some examination, he recognized that he had a pattern of attracting women who needed his financial assistance. While he would initially enjoy playing the role of benefactor, as his relationship matured, he felt exploited, then resentful. And yet, this was how he continued to set up his relationships - including his most recent - from the outset.
Once he understood this pattern, he began dating women who didn't need rescuing. Eventually he married a woman who was his financial peer.
So don't simmer in your resentment and blame others for your unhappiness. If you do, you're doomed to keep repeating your past patterns and history.
Instead, use the clarity your anger gives you to make fundamental changes in both your attitude toward women and in how you relate to them. On the simplest level this means working to actually change the behaviors that help create your problems.
