Over the summer, I was seeing a guy who had a consistent, running narrative that every ex-girlfriend of his was, in his words, “crazy.” Pushing my skepticism aside, I deemed it merely a string of bad luck and shrugged it off. But, the more he reminded me of his bizarre past, the more I caught myself subconsciously overcorrecting any behaviors that could also be deemed “crazy.” Essentially, I became hyper-vigilant about being low-maintenance, swallowing my natural reactions, just to prove I wasn’t like the women from before, who had supposedly traumatized him.
After I, thankfully, ended relations with him, it made me wonder, as women, why do we feel as though we have to shrink ourselves just to keep from becoming another “crazy” girl that men survive to tell the tale? Women have become so afraid of men labeling them as crazy, clingy, or dramatic that we’ve learned to suppress perfectly valid emotions in order to be the “chill” girlfriend. And because of this, inadvertently, we’ve created a hierarchy of femininity where the woman who asks for less is considered more desirable.
Personally, I believe it begins with the “chill girlfriend” trope perpetuated on social media platforms. On TikTok, the “chill girlfriend” hashtag consists of blueprints, made by men, in becoming the ideal, laid-back girlfriend. The rules of some of these blueprints entail “only taking five minutes to bounce out of a bad mood rather than five hours,” and how “femininity is softness, not when she’s yelling…giving us a piece of her mind.”
Evidently, our emotions are constantly weaponized against us, and seeing such an intolerance to human sensibilities casually integrated into the media we consume every day can be so harmful, so damaging, to young women’s vulnerable, developing minds. This phenomenon creates the idea that, in order to be or remain appealing to men, we should lessen our valid emotions, and those whose emotions convenience men the most are put on a higher pedestal than those whose emotions hinder the male.
Yet, there’s still time to reverse this assumption, and it starts with challenging the idea that emotions make women difficult. Through history, women’s emotions have been tainted by different standards to adhere to; for example, the ideal 1950s housewife was a woman who was docile and obedient, whose value lay in her ability to accommodate men, and now, at the forefront of men’s criteria, we’re seeing the same desire for an ultra-passive, self-effacement practicing woman.
Stated simply, things like being upset, needing reassurance, and expressing disappointment shouldn’t automatically equate to being deemed as unreasonable or dramatic. These are all extremely common adversities that appear in relationships, and healthy relationships at that. In fact, M.D., F.A.P.A. Mark Goulston attributes unexpressed disappointment as one of the greatest intimacy killers in relationships. So, it turns out, curbing your emotions, whether that be disappointment, fear, or anger, is actually inhibiting the basis necessary for stability, and it’s catalyzing the potentiality of a perforated relationship.
Though, undoubtedly, there’re times in relationships where individuals may act irrationally, strictly out of emotion, and if that inflicts serious physical or mental harm upon the other person, that, immediately, is inexcusable. However, the problem we face today lies more in how we have blurred the lines of rationality, having people being punished for simply being humans who feel all the feelings; we even have people in society who become genuinely terrified of women during their menstruation cycles because they’re often associated with heightened emotions.
As women, we are worthy of feeling. We’re as worthy of feeling motivated as we are lazy, of confident as we are insecure, and of peaceful as we are irritated. There’re far too many times where we let others assign meaning to our emotions rather than ourselves, and this is ruining our perception of normal, valid human emotions.