All women are evil. Or is it all men are evil?

Ask A Woman: Men are from Mars; women are from Venus; everyone feels like they’re in hell.

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Hello Dappered readers,

If you typically tune in on Thursdays you know that the Ask A Woman column appears in this space, in which readers write in to ask me about going bald, picking up women, wearing suspenders, and other quandaries. And that’s fantastic. Send in those questions here. I look forward to reading them. But sometimes I want to delve more deeply into some of the issues we only touch on during the advice column portion of the program. And that’s what today is all about.

The inspiration for today’s topic is the mounting number of questions about dating I receive each week from men. Most of them ask me to explain a woman’s perplexing behavior. My typical approach to these questions is to try to interpret the behavior for them (based on the limited amount of information I have) and give them options for further action. It is not unusual, then, after the post is published, to find that at least a quarter of the comments say something along the lines of, what do you expect, all women are teases/gold-diggers/evil. Hmmm.

I’ve also noticed, among female friends and acquaintances who are perpetually single, a similar attitude–we broke up because men are assholes/selfish/evil. Hmmm.

 Not helping the situation. At. All.

It’s safe to say these men and women have had bad luck (or made bad choices, a topic for a different column) finding someone. They have a few bad dates, or a few unsuccessful relationships even, and suddenly all women ages 25-29 who live in Boston are shallow, cheating liars. Besides the obvious logical fallacy here, the main problem I see is that we have to get past hating people we end relationships with. Of course there are exceptions. Girlfriend sleeps with your brother? Egg her house. Fiancee opens credit cards in your name and runs up a $25,000 bill? Hate away. But when a woman says, “This isn’t working for me anymore” or she admits to having feelings for someone else or she wants marriage and children faster than you do…this is not the time for anger towards or generalizations about the entirety of womendom. And it’s not a time for hate. Sometimes people just don’t click. Can we really perpetuate hate and ugliness towards a relationship that fizzled simply because the two people weren’t a good match?

I want us–and this could be Dappered readers or men and women of integrity or whoever might be listening in this space–to get to a place where when a relationship ends, it’s not because she’s a bitch and he’s a dick. It’s because it didn’t work out. And let’s have the grace to leave it that way, lick our wounds, and move on to something that is inevitably better than what came before.

-Beth

Got a question for Beth? Send it to: askawoman@dappered.com