I haven't done that meme . . .
. . . where you ask people to tell what's great about you. So many people are doing it that I've given some thought to why I don't. This is just stream-of-consciousness; feel free to jump in. There are also gross generalizations ahead; if you think that any of them is not true/valid/accurate as a generalization, please point it out, but there's no point in saying that something is a generalization and that there are exceptions. I know that; in many cases, I am an exception.
First, an observation: most (not all, but by far most) of the people participating in this meme are women. I've mentioned before that when things are depicted on a male/female scale, I'm often on the "male" end of the scale. But that does nothing to address "why."
I've always had empathy for men whose female life-partners complain that the man doesn't say, "I love you" all the time and tell her how wonderful she is, when the man's viewpoint is "I'm here, aren't I?" The man thinks, "If I didn't want to be with you, if you weren't the best thing life has for me, I'd leave." Well, yeah, that's certainly the way I feel about it.
Then there's the talking about relationships. I don't want to talk about "the relationship." My attraction isn't to the relationship, it's to the person. But I think that--here comes one of those generalizations--that's a primarily male viewpoint, and women are indeed more focused on the relationship. This may be tied into the evolutionary pattern that makes males tend to go after multiple mates and females tend to find the one best available mate. So a male focuses on the individual he is involved with at the moment; the female focuses on building a relationship so that if the attraction to the individual fades, there will still be an attraction to the relationship. This may carry over to friendship: the women are the ones who create the relationships that hold the society together; the men focus on whether they can trust the other guy in a hunt for the saber-toothed toger.
If--I say, if--women's loyalty is more to the relationship than to the individual, it goes some way toward explaining why so many women stay with batterers. It isn't, as some of them say, "I love him too much to leave him"; rather, they are being faithful to the relationship, which remains even when the attraction to the individual is gone.
As part of that relationship-building, I think, women tend to pay more attention than men do to the specific things they love/like/admire about the other person, while men tend more to feel--in the words of an old song--"I don't know why I love you like I do. I don't know why, I just do." So women are more likely to be able to list the specific things they like about another person--and probably are more interested in doing so.
There's another factor: I generally don't care much what other people think of me. I don't know whether there is a gender difference here. I suspect there is, though, because on most measures of self-esteem, males tend to score higher than females.
The areas where I care about other people's opinion of me tend to be pragmatic: Do other people think that I write well ("clearly" is a big factor) and say things worth reading? If they don't, there's no point to my spending the time and effort to write stuff for public reading. Do other people think I'm both intelligent and a good editor/copy editor? If they don't, I won't get work, or the kind of work I prefer. And so on. These seem to me to fit into the male "Is he reliable on a mammoth hunt?" pattern.
If you ask me to name one thing I like about you in person, or one reason that I read your LJ, I'm sure I can easily do it. But no, I don't think I can write whole paragraphs about your greatness (with the possible exception of my brother, but I have 43 years' knowledge of him). I'm here, aren't I?
First, an observation: most (not all, but by far most) of the people participating in this meme are women. I've mentioned before that when things are depicted on a male/female scale, I'm often on the "male" end of the scale. But that does nothing to address "why."
I've always had empathy for men whose female life-partners complain that the man doesn't say, "I love you" all the time and tell her how wonderful she is, when the man's viewpoint is "I'm here, aren't I?" The man thinks, "If I didn't want to be with you, if you weren't the best thing life has for me, I'd leave." Well, yeah, that's certainly the way I feel about it.
Then there's the talking about relationships. I don't want to talk about "the relationship." My attraction isn't to the relationship, it's to the person. But I think that--here comes one of those generalizations--that's a primarily male viewpoint, and women are indeed more focused on the relationship. This may be tied into the evolutionary pattern that makes males tend to go after multiple mates and females tend to find the one best available mate. So a male focuses on the individual he is involved with at the moment; the female focuses on building a relationship so that if the attraction to the individual fades, there will still be an attraction to the relationship. This may carry over to friendship: the women are the ones who create the relationships that hold the society together; the men focus on whether they can trust the other guy in a hunt for the saber-toothed toger.
If--I say, if--women's loyalty is more to the relationship than to the individual, it goes some way toward explaining why so many women stay with batterers. It isn't, as some of them say, "I love him too much to leave him"; rather, they are being faithful to the relationship, which remains even when the attraction to the individual is gone.
As part of that relationship-building, I think, women tend to pay more attention than men do to the specific things they love/like/admire about the other person, while men tend more to feel--in the words of an old song--"I don't know why I love you like I do. I don't know why, I just do." So women are more likely to be able to list the specific things they like about another person--and probably are more interested in doing so.
There's another factor: I generally don't care much what other people think of me. I don't know whether there is a gender difference here. I suspect there is, though, because on most measures of self-esteem, males tend to score higher than females.
The areas where I care about other people's opinion of me tend to be pragmatic: Do other people think that I write well ("clearly" is a big factor) and say things worth reading? If they don't, there's no point to my spending the time and effort to write stuff for public reading. Do other people think I'm both intelligent and a good editor/copy editor? If they don't, I won't get work, or the kind of work I prefer. And so on. These seem to me to fit into the male "Is he reliable on a mammoth hunt?" pattern.
If you ask me to name one thing I like about you in person, or one reason that I read your LJ, I'm sure I can easily do it. But no, I don't think I can write whole paragraphs about your greatness (with the possible exception of my brother, but I have 43 years' knowledge of him). I'm here, aren't I?