New Jeanland

Okay, well, sometimes you are too demanding. I think that probably needs to be said before anything else.

Not every desire is reasonable simply because you have it. You can expect too much attention, too much money, too much accommodation, too much reassurance, or too much control over another person’s life. You can have standards so rigid that no ordinary human being could satisfy them. Women are no more immune to unreasonable expectations than men are.

But there is another possibility that receives considerably less attention: Sometimes what you want is perfectly ordinary. You just keep asking for it from someone who does not want to give it to you.

After enough resistance, those two things can become difficult to distinguish.

A woman asks for more consistent communication and gets told that she expects too much contact. She wants actual dates instead of spending every weekend on his couch and learns that she is materialistic or demanding. She wants marriage, but he thinks marriage is unnecessary. She wants more affection, more initiative, a more satisfying sex life, greater financial stability, or a partner who remembers that her birthday exists without requiring a calendar invitation and three reminders. Eventually, she stops asking whether the relationship suits her and starts asking whether she is simply too difficult to satisfy.

Maybe she is. But one man’s reluctance to meet a need does not establish that the need itself is unreasonable.

Many times, you are simply asking the wrong man.

His Capacity Is Not the Universal Standard

It is very easy to confuse what one person is willing to provide with what you are allowed to want.

Suppose you prefer frequent communication. The man you are dating does not. He considers daily contact unnecessary and becomes irritated when you expect it. There is no obvious villain here. Perhaps his preference is completely reasonable. Perhaps yours is too. The mistake would be concluding that because he experiences your preference as excessive, you have discovered an objective truth about yourself. You haven’t. You have discovered something about the distance between his preferred relationship and yours. Another man might naturally communicate at exactly the frequency you prefer. What felt like a recurring negotiation in one relationship may barely register as an issue in another because nobody has to be persuaded.

This applies to considerably more than texting.

Some people are naturally affectionate. Some are not.
Some love elaborate romance; others would rather be hit by the bouquet.
Some want enormous amounts of time together. Some require substantial independence.
Some consider financial ambition essential in a partner. Others care very little about income as long as the bills are paid.
Some want marriage and children with absolute certainty. Others want neither.

The fact that your preference inconveniences a particular person does not make it excessive. It may simply make the two of you incompatible.

Stop Using Resistance as a Measuring Stick

Women can gradually recalibrate their expectations around the resistance they encounter.

At first, perhaps you want him to plan dates occasionally. He rarely does, so you ask. He responds that planning is not really his thing and that he does not understand why it matters who chooses the restaurant. You can explain why it matters. Maybe what you actually want is not the restaurant at all; you want to feel that he thinks about spending time with you before you arrange it for him. He still does not understand.

After several conversations, the original desire starts to feel embarrassing. You hear yourself bringing it up again and wonder whether you really are making too much of something trivial. So, you lower the expectation. You plan the dates. Then perhaps there is another thing. Eventually, you can become extraordinarily skilled at wanting exactly what someone is willing to provide.

That can look like compromise from the outside. Sometimes it is. Compromise is necessary when two people with different preferences build a shared life. You will not get everything exactly the way you would design it alone, nor should you expect to. But compromise is supposed to produce a relationship both people can live happily inside. It is not a process by which the more dissatisfied person repeatedly learns to require less.

There is a difference between adjusting an expectation and slowly training yourself not to notice that you are unhappy.

The Wrong Man Can Make Ordinary Needs Feel Enormous

A request feels much larger when it is being made to someone who deeply resents providing it.

Affection is a good example. If you are naturally affectionate and date someone who enjoys giving and receiving affection, you may never have a serious conversation about whether you are “too needy.” The thing you want is already happening. Put the same woman with someone who dislikes frequent touch, rarely expresses affection verbally, and requires considerably more distance, and suddenly affection becomes a major relationship issue.

She asks. He tries. She notices that he is trying. Now she feels guilty because she knows the affection is being performed primarily because she requested it. She becomes reluctant to ask again because she does not want to force him. Eventually, she starts wondering whether wanting affection this badly indicates some defect in her.

Nothing about her preference changed. The man did.

This is one of the stranger things about compatibility: a trait that makes you feel profoundly difficult in one relationship can become almost invisible in another.

You may spend years believing you are too affectionate and then meet someone who thinks you are exactly affectionate enough. You may believe your expectations for communication are excessive until you date someone who communicates more than you do. You may think wanting regular dates is unrealistic until you meet a man who enjoys planning them. The experience can be almost disorienting. You discover that something you spent years negotiating for can simply happen.

Stop Trying to Make the Wrong Man Agree That Your Need Is Reasonable

There is another trap here: Once a man has characterized something you want as excessive, you may begin trying to prove that it isn’t.

You explain that most couples communicate more frequently. You ask friends what they think. You read articles about relationship norms. You show him examples. You point out that you are not asking for anything extravagant. Maybe you are right. But proving that your request falls within the statistical range of normal human desire does not solve the actual problem: He still does not want to do it.

This is where arguments about reasonableness can become a distraction. Suppose you want to marry and he does not. It does not matter whether marriage is a reasonable thing to want. Of course it is. It is also reasonable not to want it. The problem is not establishing which preference would win before an impartial tribunal. The problem is that you want different lives. You do not need him to agree that your preference is reasonable before you are permitted to treat the disagreement as important.

Sometimes women spend years litigating the legitimacy of a need when they should be evaluating the compatibility revealed by the disagreement.

There Is No Universal Relationship Package

We talk about relationships as though there is some objectively correct amount of everything.

The correct amount of communication. The appropriate number of dates. The reasonable amount to spend on an engagement ring. The proper division of household labor. The healthy amount of independence. The correct frequency of sex. There are certainly extremes. Some expectations are controlling, exploitative, financially reckless, or simply impossible. Most relationships, however, operate within a very large range of normal human preference.

You may want considerably more togetherness than I do without either of us being dysfunctional. You may care deeply about traditional romance while another woman finds it tedious. One person may want sex several times a week while another is perfectly content with much less.

Compatibility is partly the good fortune of finding someone whose preferred settings are close enough to yours that the relationship does not require constant renegotiation. That matters because people sometimes romanticize struggle as though overcoming enormous differences proves the strength of a relationship. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it means you selected a partner with whom ordinary life requires an exhausting amount of negotiation.

There is no special virtue in choosing the hardest possible person with whom to get your needs met.

Pay Attention to What Requires Constant Negotiation

Every relationship contains recurring disagreements. I think women should pay particular attention when the same category of need requires negotiation over and over again.

If you have explained for three years that you need more affection, the problem is probably no longer that he does not understand the sentence.
If you repeatedly ask him to initiate plans and he repeatedly returns to passivity, you have information about his natural behavior.
If every conversation about marriage ends with another vague extension of the timeline, you may not have a communication problem.

At some point, the question changes. It is no longer How do I explain this so he finally understands? It becomes Do I want a relationship in which this particular thing requires so much explanation? That is a much more useful question because it centers the life you are actually living rather than the behavior you hope to eventually negotiate into existence. There are things worth negotiating. There are also things you may prefer to have in common from the beginning. Knowing which is which matters.

Someone Else May Find It Easy

There is an uncomfortable implication to all of this. The thing you have been begging one person to provide may be something another person gives naturally. Not because the second person is morally superior, but because people are different.

A man who hates texting may be a perfectly good partner for a woman who also hates texting. A man who considers Valentine’s Day commercial nonsense may delight a woman who would rather spend February 14 doing literally anything else. A man who wants enormous independence may be ideal for someone who values the same.

The problem appears when we become so attached to a particular person that we decide compatibility must be manufactured rather than discovered. Then the objective becomes convincing this man to provide this relationship. Why? Because you love him. Because you are invested. Because you have history. Because there are many things about him you genuinely value. Those are real considerations. But they do not change the basic reality that you may be attempting to extract a style of partnership from someone who would naturally prefer to build something else.

Meanwhile, there are people for whom what you want would not feel like an imposition. That possibility is worth remembering before you spend another five years becoming increasingly apologetic about wanting it.

This Is Not Permission to Demand Everything

There is an obvious danger in telling people that they are simply “asking the wrong person.” Sometimes you are asking too much.

If every partner you have ever had independently tells you that your expectations are impossible, some self-examination would probably be useful. If satisfying your needs requires another person to surrender his friendships, privacy, autonomy, finances, career, or every hour of his free time, incompatibility may not be the only issue.

Your desires deserve consideration. They are not automatically entitled to fulfillment.

A partner is a separate human being, not an employee whose job description consists of meeting your emotional specifications. Female-centered dating does not mean deciding that whatever a woman wants is reasonable by definition. It means refusing the opposite assumption too: that whatever a particular man does not want to provide must therefore be excessive.

You have to evaluate both possibilities honestly. Sometimes you need to adjust the expectation. Sometimes you need to change the man.

The Goal Is Not to Need Less

There is a particular kind of pride women can develop around requiring very little. We congratulate ourselves for being easygoing. Independent. Undemanding. We tell ourselves that we do not need flowers, dates, reassurance, frequent affection, help, attention, or much of anything else.

Maybe that is genuinely who you are. But needing less is not inherently more evolved.

The purpose of dating is not to reduce yourself until you become compatible with the widest possible selection of men. It is to find someone with whom your actual preferences can coexist. That will still require compromise. You will still occasionally annoy one another. There will be things you wish he did differently, and he will certainly have his own list about you. The standard is not effortless perfection. It is whether the relationship you naturally create together is close enough to the relationship you both want that neither person has to spend years being remodeled into the appropriate partner.

Sometimes you really are asking too much. Sometimes he is giving too little. And sometimes neither statement is true. Sometimes you are simply asking a man who does not want what you want to provide the kind of relationship you do.

When that happens, you do not necessarily need better arguments. You may need a different man.