What She Really Means When She Says, “Just Be Yourself.”
Translating “Just Be Yourself” For Men
The frustration of misunderstandings between men and women abound, and since as long as I can remember, people have been promising to understand some secret code about the other sex, a covert language, so to speak, one that helps us to truly understand the sex we’re interested in once we learn it.
Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, so goes the narrative, and most of this is built on straight-up bad science, bunk assumptions, and motivations of profit…add a dash of sexism here, a bit of closed-minded bigotry there, and voila, you’ve got yourself a dating book, complete with $500 seminars!
This is all complete nonsense, of course. Whatever happened to just being real? Being real died out — and consumer dating culture killed it. I personally believe that between pickup-artists and machismo internet “gurus” the male sex has undergone some pretty bad changes in the past two decades and I’ve watched them happen. Outright lies have promised guys that they can understand women by understanding various codes and men have taken the bait hook, line, and sinker, believing in evolutionary psychology here and “negging” there, and all of this has happened to the immense frustration of women. “Where are all the good guys out there?” women ask…
