Last night I got a call to pick up a young woman around 2:00 a.m. When I arrived, she was saying goodbye to a very good looking young man, who waved and greeted me with the friendliest smile ever. Of course, men do the pursuing, but women do the choosing, right?
Naturally the prettiest women choose the best looking guys who are really nice too. He was waaaay better looking than me and obviously nicer, which is why he’s got the date and I’m driving her home.
They took a long time saying goodbye to each other, which I didn’t like but I would’ve done the same thing. So I sat waiting, thinking about all the good women I’ve lost because I was too much of an asshole to value what I had in my hand. Not like this guy.
Obviously.
Finally she gets in my car, and I start my thing: “So how are you?” She muffles a tense “OK”, so I follow with, “Is everything okay?”
She breaks down crying, which takes 40 seconds to mature into full blown sobbing. Between sobs, she manages to eek out “I’m scared.” I turn around the corner to make sure the guy is gone, and pull over to check on her. She’s inconsolable. She assures me she’s in no physical danger, but she’s traumatized because he yelled at her.
“I don’t know why he yelled at me” she kept saying. Mostly she sobbed. She didn’t want to talk, she wanted to cry. So, I drove her 20 min home listening to her cry, my heart breaking like an elephant tip-toeing across thin ice.
Thin ice of my own pretentious BS, the elephant of all the times in the past that I raised my voice aggressively to a woman. Her tears fell like hail on my windshield while I thought about how a man YELLING can be traumatizing to a woman.
Twenty years ago I was on an MKP training with a beautiful, grizzled old Vietnam Vet (USMC) named Rich. Tough as nails, he told me, “I never curse in front of my wife.” I couldn’t imagine not cursing in front of my girl/wife, and asked why.
“Because women experience cursing and yelling as violence.” I was young then, and not mature enough to handle the responsibility of managing my fear/anger around women. That should be the pass/fail test for every man. If you can’t manage your fear/anger without invoking violence on them, you should get a dog instead and practice being kind. #WisdomComes2Late.
When we got to her place, she was ready to talk. Kept apologizing to me. Every time she cried, she apologized. She said “I’m sorry” about 12 times in 5 minutes. Clearly she was in a state of trauma. He thinks he’s just expressing himself, but she’s being vaulted back into some hell-realm in the past, and now she’s in my car and can’t get out.
I helped her out of the car. I reminded her she hadn’t done anything wrong, that it’s not her responsibility to take care of that dude’s emotions, and she doesn’t have to apologize for crying. I tried to help her get grounded in the present, to remember she’s SAFE and OK. I gave her my card, and this morning got a note that said, ” Thank you. I’m sorry for crying in your car. No man has ever told me that I shouldn’t be yelled at.”
Sigh.
*Names and some details have been changed to protect identities.
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Original post appeared at Greg Liotta. Reprinted with permission.
Photo credit: Author
Thanks Greg! What even more devistating is a man who yells at you behind closed doors; yet in public, he’s soft spoken barely above a whisper.