serious question for men who’ve been in relationships with women, not gonna elaborate on context for the time being but might later: how do you hold women responsible / accountable for ways they’ve hurt you? (in your own sensemaking at least, not necessarily confronting them)
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there's something rubbing me the wrong way about framing unintentional emotional wounding as holding the other person accountable for hurting you
im feeling like that frame emphasizes their actions and not our feelings, which seems 🔄, this is about our hurt, not their hurting
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i get where you're coming from but i've focused exclusively on my feelings for 3.5 years now and now i'm thinking it might be worth balancing things out a little bit in the other direction. other people in other situations may need quite the opposite, yes
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like i will probably not be able to convey this well in a tweet but this question came out of a conversation i had with a friend about this situation who pointed out that there was an asymmetry in the way i held myself accountable in the situation but not her
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if i focus exclusively on my feelings and not on her agency in doing things that caused those feelings there's a way i'm not treating her as fully an agent in the same way i treat myself an agent. it's actually a kind of infantilizing
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this sounds like a wonderful insight for you man! i too have focused on my own feelings too much in the past and didnt ask enough of my partner to pull her own emotional weight and investigate the ways her actions were harming me
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gonna be thinking about this, as im unsure i have anything 🤯💡 insightful to share
my original reply came from a place of, i dont want to do *any* work in holding another person accountable for how they treat me
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Our needs are always our own, never about others. We can end up in unequal relationships where one party feels taken advantage of and builds up hurt. What is the need behind this feeling? Perhaps a need for reciprocity or a need to not end in an unequal relationship again? Or...
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And/or A need for acknowledgment: person X hurt me, they took advantage of me, I denied myself for a long time; other people/cultural norms gaslighted me into giving too much, blaming myself etc
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