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When I was just a girl, I watched the movie, “White Men Can’t Jump”. There is a scene where Billy is laying in bed with his girlfriend, Gloria. She tells Billy that she is thirsty. He climbs out the bed, pours some water but she tells him that wasn’t what she wanted. He is confused and as a girl, I was too.
Now, as a woman, I understand what Gloria was asking Billy for.
Her response was something like:
If I’m thirsty, I don’t want a glass of water. I want you to sympathize. I want you to say, ‘Gloria, I too know what it feels like to be thirsty. I too have had a dry mouth.’ I want you to connect with me through sharing and understanding the concept of dry mouthed-ness.
Of course, this doesn’t seem to make sense on the surface. I would expect any man like Billy, to assume she had a problem that needed to be fixed and by providing the glass of water that he satisfied her issue.
Gloria could have gotten up to get her own glass of water just as easily as Billy. However, what Gloria was asking Billy for was intimacy and empathy. She wanted Billy to think back to a time when he felt the same type of thirst she must be feeling on a hot summer day having just woken up from sleep. She wanted him to connect with her over that feeling and feel no difference or distance between her and himself.
This is a simplistic version of something bigger that can occur in relationships when a woman is venting to her boyfriend or husband about a problem.
Instead of listening and offering sympathy or empathy, he responds with a solution and misses the opportunity to connect his past frustration with her current frustration and feel what she is experiencing.
Women do this when they are together. They vent to their girlfriend and the girlfriend mirrors back an understanding of why her friend feels upset or frustrated before she offers advice. The girlfriend says, “yes, I have felt thirsty. I get it. And, it sucks until I get something to drink.”
Men are fixers. They want to apply a solution to the problem. It is logical to them that if there is a problem then it should just be fixed. But, women want to go through the emotion of having the problem before they fix it and it is here where the opportunity is missed to connect and offer empathy.
Having said this, I would not advise the next time that your wife or girlfriend says she is thirsty that you just sit and offer a compassionate soliloquy about the depths of her thirst. Get her a glass of water. It’s just a dramatic interpretation for a movie.
But, the next time, your wife or girlfriend has a problem, before you offer a solution, take a dramatic pause and think about what emotion she might be experiencing and connect a time when you felt the same. Offer her empathy. You may find you avoid an argument.
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This story has been republished to Medium.
Photo credit: Image by StockSnap from Pixabay