VANESSA RONDON

Thursday, 27 - 09 - 2012

I swear to jesus, if it’s the last thing I do, I will find every single person who reblogs and/or supports shit like this and I will slap them until they understand why they’re wrong.

Look, I get it, we want to talk about the particular validation that SOME people get from romantic and/or sexual relationships. It’s application beyond that is mind bogglingly incoherent and untenable.

I won’t go around saying feeling good is all in you and everyone has it in them. Some folks do need and crave outside approval as part of their self-affirmation process. Hey, that’s no biggie, either. Many of us crave the confirmation of our self-esteem in the way others perceive us. And that’s without even getting into the particular nuance of being from a marginalized group. Because that is real and I won’t ever deny the effects that has on self-esteem, never mind a holistically healthy sense of self.

That’s real. Human needs are real. And pretending like it’s all reducible to some trite crap about a man swooping in and affirming a woman is the ultimate disservice to the fact that individuals need and crave, to varying levels, outside affirmation.

Yeah, it’s just a stupid slogan that gets bandied about as some sort of directive to better behavior on the part of men or whatever. Or maybe it’s meant to be inspirational, like “Plenty of fish in the sea” (which is a whole other can of douchefuckery)?

Doesn’t really matter does it? Because no matter what, these phrases reduce human need to human vanity and nothing else.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to focus on a satisfying relationship? Or talk about finding partners who make us feel more ourselves?

Who knows, maybe I’m missing the point, but it would seem, to me, that boiling all the complex elements of human connection to “making her feel beautiful” misses the whole point of finding “the one” (or two, or three, or none, for that matter).

And, before I have to hear it, there is nothing wrong with making the person(s) you care about feel beautiful.* That is certainly part of achieving a healthy connection.

*Note: “Beautiful,” for my purposes, is a catchall term that signifies a context-specific feeling rather than a singularly identifiable aesthetic notion.