As though it is a desirable quality in someone really makes me feel like schooling some girls. There is nothing cute about jealousy. It’s not a way to show someone that you care for them.
Recently, I was asked by a young woman what my thoughts were on a situation with her fiancé placing an ultimatum on her regarding her friendship with a guy that had been her best friend since high school. She explained that the fiancé was uncomfortable with the close nature of her friendship and was inferring that there was a sexual undertone to the friendship that was apparently visible to everyone but the young lady and her friend.
And I asked her if there was a history between her and her friend. There isn’t.
I asked if she was friends with any other guys. She stated that she used to have several close male friends, but since her engagement, it seems they had all drifted out of her life.
Hmmmm. Okay.
And the fiancé, was he a fan of the other male friends? She told me that although he never said much about it to her, it was evident from his demeanor that he wasn’t a huge fan of those male friends.
OK. Now we’re getting somewhere.
An Insecure Man Isn’t Comfortable With “Male Friends” …
It won’t matter that you’ve been friends since grade school, or that you have no history of infidelity. To the insecure man, any other male is competition and “friendship” isn’t a relative term.
This is a bad sign.
If he can’t understand platonic relationships between the sexes, it’s because he doesn’t have any. That’s another bad sign. A man that isn’t capable of having female friends usually doesn’t value the opinion and contribution of a woman. He views women simply as conquests. That is the reason he thinks that all of your male friends look at you as though you are just another conquest, instead of the longtime friend that you really are.
She Confirmed He Had No Female Friends…
And his relationship with his mother was volatile and abusive. This entire scenario has bad news written all over it if you asked me, and she did, so I told her as much.
He doesn’t value and respect women because his mother isn’t a woman to value and respect, so he assumes all other women aren’t worthy of respect or friendship, either. This has so many red flags I feared it would start looking like Pamplona in here before too long.
Jealous men with no respect for women are the same men that abuse women. Jealous men who secretly believe you’re sleeping with your male friends are the same men that seriously hurt women that they’re involved with. This whole scenario has bad news written all over it, and I told her as much.
Sadly, she knew the entire outline, yet she was still pursuing a relationship with him.
She thought she could “show him that not all women are his mother”. I explained to her that she could, but she could also be cut into bite-sized pieces and mailed to her relatives. The odds were about the same.
That looking for zebra when you hear a stampede in Montana is just idiocy.
When you’ve been quoted all of the statistics, and you know all of the horror stories, what makes you think that all of the women before you didn’t think they could change the man that hurt them, or in the worst cases, the man that took their lives?
What are you doing so differently that you have defied the odds and rewritten the probabilities?
You aren’t. You know exactly what type of dangerous situation that your mind is warning you about, and that is the reason you’re framing your fears as questions. You don’t want to come right out and say, “his behavior is turning scary”, so you ask for advice in getting your fiancé to see that you’re not like all the other women.
Unfortunately, it’s not you that needs to explain things and reassure someone. He is the one with the problem. You’re just being a normal human being, and his other side is starting to bare itself to you. You weren’t reading things out of context. You are seeing the beginning of a serious issue.
Your safest bet, and the one I would place my money on every time, is the only safe way is leading to the exit. This has every sign that it will end very poorly for you. Listen to that part of you that can already sense the danger. Leave him before you have a terrifying story to tell.
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This post was previously published on April Hawkins, Ask A Bitchface.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
 White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism |
 Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box |
 The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer |
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