I often do not write very encouragingly about men on this blog, it’s a place to vent and frankly I don’t think any woman gets to forty without ending up needing to vent about men. Maybe lesbians if there’s a real place to live in some kind of utopia like a low-budget version of The L-Word.
However, a guy said something at the weekend that really made me feel good? better? some kind of resonance? One of those anyway. It wasn’t especially unique or new. But it hit me just right when he said it. It being a brief statement that he had improved from who he had been.
I don’t really know the guy, I like role playing with him and I’m pretty sure I like him from our brief chats as ourselves. I’ve made a number of friends in this pandemic like that and so far I genuinely do like them.
But yeah, knowing that men change, that some are self-aware enough to realise they were awful, that makes me feel relief. There’s three lovely guys that I’m thinking of that I do know personally, two married. Two of them I knew when they were behaving awfully, and one of them assumed I must not remember which was an interesting conversation.
Yeah I remember and it’s been good to watch the improvement, albeit at a little distance. That’s a thing, I get men apologising to me a bit since the MeToo movement and it’s never for me, it’s all about them (usually), and I know that because it’s usually for things that I either instigated or have forgotten as dealt with at the time.
The men who try to change don’t seem to apologise, maybe they get that they can’t, depending on how bad they were or that the act of pushing their apology onto the women they mistreated (however loosely I’m using that term) is just making her relive the problems in the first instance. Or perhaps the men who’ve screwed me up along the way are none of them self-aware enough to try to improve.
But that’s why I like when men do say they’re not who they used to be. Both of the guys present in that conversation were in that boat and I remember looking at them and thinking “oh good” as he said he’d changed and feeling hopeful.