What This Woman Wants

I have absolutely had it. I am tired of being part of an alphabet-ending generation of women who refuses to come to terms with who we are and how we have to start running our lives.


We run the market-place, we run our homes with the efficiency of Sun Tsu marshalling his armies into camps on the dawn of Monday mornings to take on The Battle of the Week –and win; and most of the single 20-something gen-Xers I know are struggling with the fact that even the men they’re trying to date know that they already run the relationship. So why can’t we run our working lives with the same efficacy?


We have an exceptionally strong work ethic but we want balance –a satisfying work and personal life. Having grown up in an economic transition which forced many families to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit of a new South Africa as opened-armed as they possibly could have, watching our mothers run home finances, and then being thrust into our own recession 10 years later, our parents still succeeded in developing in us the biggest generational ego, a great self-confidence, and a real desire to have an impact. We are high-performing, highly civic-minded, highly motivated –we’re just not high maintenance enough for our employers to take notice of.


If we actually accept that we want to manage our professional lives very differently from the way our parents did and we take a look around our places of work we should see three things: 1: Talented men and women of our age who understand that they want to work, differently; 2: A generation younger than us who are driving us crazy – no, we’re not just verging on 30 and this is not just us getting older. They’re in demand and they won’t be tied down; people listen to these 20-somethings and not to us and that’s why we don’t like them. And 3: A looming talent shortage in the next 10 years.


Add to this the realisation that our world today demands a flexible working environment that means more than your boss calling you in and proudly announcing that you’re allowed to employ “flexi-time”, and arrive at work a whole two hours early if you’d like to leave at 4pm on a Friday, as if he’s offering to carry your two years from now planned twins to full term and pop them out his rear –and enjoy it. The Man’s primary fear is that we want to work less. When really, empowering employees to do their work on a schedule that works for them is recognizing a need for flexibility which will allow us to run our careers and our lives –and when has a woman ever run something unproductively?


What I’m saying is that women in particular need to make sure that the companies they are working for make creative, hard-line self-management possible. And it’s happening:


• A well known accounting firm offers its staff work-compressed workweeks, flexible hours, telecommuting, job sharing, or even reduced workloads. And workaholics beware: The firm has implemented wellness scorecards to find out whether someone is working too hard or missing vacation. If so, supervisors get in touch to urge a slowdown. Oh, and how about eight weeks fully paid maternity leave, even for adoptive parents? And two-thirds pay if you need more time.


•A midsize law firm in Chicago, started a two-tier pay scale. Hard-chargers who bill 2,000 hours a year are paid top dollar. For those who prefer to slow down and see their families and friends, they can bill 1,800 hours and earn less. More than half chose the reduced schedule.

Families and Work Institute of America, Award Winners 2009


We have known for a long time that the one size fits all work-place does not work; it never has spoken to our generation – and it’s time we speak up. We have lived with a notion that working full-time year in and year out on a single, linear career trajectory was vanishing beneath our parents’ feet leaving us treading water and we haven’t known who to tell or what to do about it. What to do is to tell your boss that you need and you want to work in a different way.


More than ever before women I know are killing themselves trying manufacture more Time and fighting for Control over the time they do have; it’s time to redefine our working lives. Money has always come in a close second to having the choice to make less of it –if doing that is actually going to give you the time you want to do what you need. How many of us would trade money for a day off? Not a week, not a month, not a sabbatical –a day. A couple of hours. A couple of hundred rands –less. A couple of moments where you look after who you are and enjoy having made a choice that keeps you, you –more.


-Soba

Paint your love a different colour

These days relationships are apparently all about compromise.

The generally accepted view is that a sign of a healthy relationship is when couples have the ability to compromise. The compromise is an arrangement involving mutual concessions in order to make a combination of two rival systems. Part of each system is therefore sacrificed to make the combination possible. People are supposed to be able to let go of what they want in order to get what is best for both people involved. So it seems as though you should come half way, and I will come half way and we can meet somewhere in the middle.
If I'm at a braai with my man, and 9:00pm rolls round finding me bored to tears and sleeping with my eyes open, and he is standing outside with the boys by the fire guzzling down beer number 38 with no sign of relenting until at least 1:00am-ish, then we revert to the compromise and we leave around 11:00pm.
Well excuse me, but what a crock of shit.


This sounds to me like an agreement whereby both parties get what neither of them wanted. ALL THE TIME.

My theory is that if I am always coming half way and you are always coming half way, neither of us are ever actually winning are we?
Now I realise we're supposed to tell ourselves that it's not about winning, but how you play the game, and sacrificing for the good of the relationship and being selfless, and etc. etc. etc. SNORE. This is a delusion. And the delusion is bullshit. And we know it.


Human nature dictates that we are instinctively programmed to want to win or have our own way at least MOST of the time.  We need it. We crave it. We will sadly even hurt the ones we love to satisfy it, feed it, and surrender to it. This is because at heart, we are primitive and basic and we cannot help ourselves. Man has never needed to stop to contemplate necessity.
THIS is necessity.

On some days we have to force a WIN.
This is how we defy our loved ones in sometimes even the cruellest or most humiliating way, no matter how great we appreciate the consequences to be ahead of time.  We cheat, we lie, we betray and we hurt. 
We almost feel we have to take the power back because we are so incredibly nauseated by having to leave that braai at 11:00pm and deny our own desires for the 40 billionth time, that our primal nature can no longer be contained.

This is the man who stays out until sunrise when he has promised to be home by midnight or the man who talks down to his girlfriend in company.  
This is the woman who blows R3000 on their joint credit card because she must have those red Aldo sling backs, or the woman who explodes irrationally over the most miniscule insignificant detail in the relationship. This is a power play.


You see it in the small things, you feel it in the big things and we all do it to each other.  And I know that some of you ladies out there are thinking "oh no no..... not MY man!" But yes my girls..... YOUR MAN TOO.
Your man especially, because MURPHY himself finds you're self righteous attitude to be just the kind of example he wants to make for the rest of us.


So if this is the case, then how can this ridiculous concept ever work?  We will all constantly feel dissatisfied and subconsciously resentful of the other.  And resentment my friends, is like relationship wood rot on heat.
It creeps into the cracks of your union like a determined horrific cancer and it very slowly, but very calculatedly, eats its way through the fabric of all the layers of memories, and support, and sacrifices, and childbirth, and tears, and commitment, until you are both so tremendously blind with rage, that you can't even remember why you're together anymore or what you even like about each other.
No my friends, unless both sides win, no agreement can be permanent.

My brilliant alternative since I am such a relationship expert these days, you ask?
INTREGRATION.
By domination only one side gets what it wants.
By compromise neither side gets what it wants.
By integration we find a way by which both sides win & both sides love it.

This means ladies, that sometimes you suck it up, quit whining and you party with your man like it's 1999 until 4:00 in the morning with his friends by the fire or on the dance floor, if his heart so desires.
You know.......... like maybe the person you were when he met and fell in love with you?
I mean, NO nagging, NO tapping your foot, NO standing around looking bored or henpecking every move he makes and how many beers he's had and how rude his jokes are getting. No, I mean a full blown authentic double whammy of a WIN my girls, where you take your den mother badge off, you remove the firmly lodged stick from your ass and you lighten the f*ck up.

This does NOT of course include passive aggressive manipulation like yawning and smiling and being all so very good natured about the whole thing, whilst you actually don't really participate. This also does not include sulking in the corner until he finally gets the hint or alternatively going home early or sleeping on the couch until he's had enough. This is not a TOTAL win ladies.
This is a SEMI, and men don't appreciate a SEMI any more in a partner, than they do in their pants.  It's the equivalent of starting to get excited over nothing and it's a buzz kill.
However vacant men may appear, they know when you're trying to steal from their WIN, and it brings on the wood rot.


Sometimes you need to tell him to take a day for himself, play golf with his buds, crush beer cans on his forehead, (or whatever it is they do) and relax and just be a man. No incessant phone calls and psychotic texting to promote guilt or vent frustration or even tell him you love him, just your pure unadulterated blessing.
NO emotional blackmail as a side salad.

Other times, you need to whip on a pair of sexy shorts and sunnies, and go with him to the race track or the rugby field to take an interest in what he loves and be the playful goddess he fell in love with and not just his boring kitchen bitch. This, is even if you can’t understand the purpose of a bunch of Neanderthals running around in the mud chasing after a piece of leather. This is the kind of "compromise" I believe was intended.


Guys, you also bring your end of the bargain by treating your woman like the queen she is ALL the time.
You traipse through shopping centres from Material World to Scrapfinity and you LIKE it.
You take an interest in the difference between tank tops and turtle necks and your bottom lip does not pooch out like a 3 year old until you are finally banished to WONDERLAND to entertain yourself while she rushes around alone and ends up forfeiting most of the shopping she had planned. You DO NOT moan like a stuffed pig every step of the way and ruin the experience for her. This is not a full WIN.

This means some Saturday mornings you give up Rugby with the boys and you offer (yes OFFER) to take the kids out for the morning so she can go to the beauty salon or for brunch with her girlfriends. This also means you sometimes select a romantic comedy in the video shop and instead of rolling your eyes or snoring with your hand in your crotch during the screening, you actually watch and take a tip or two, or just plain get a clue.

You also sometimes leave a braai early if you can see your lady is tired because she has been running all week long.
RUNNING after your children, RUNNING water for their bathes, RUNNING up and down to the grocery store, RUNNING out of patience, RUNNING out of time, RUNNING on a treadmill so that you don't look elsewhere, and generally RUNNING your life because most days you don't know your ass from your elbow and she keeps it all together.


This does NOT include throwing your partner under the bus and rolling your eyes in front of the guys while you mumble witty little intelligent ball-and-chain diatribes like "my chick is giving me a theory again" "I suppose I have to go". Yes you actually grow a pair and muster up some "That's it for me tonight guys, having an early one".
OH THE SHAME OF IT ALL!
You do this because what matters to you most is bundled up and waiting in the car, and she deserves to know it.



So some days HE wins and some days SHE wins, and when it's your turn to win, you win all the way. 
The kind of pleasure you will watch your partner take from your life together in this kind of relationship, is so awesomely rewarding, you’ll start to forget you were ever even compromising in the first place.
Your WIN's feel like authentic WIN's.
Your losses even start to feel like WIN's, because you will see it on partner’s face, witness it in their actions and feel it in your heart and theirs. The blissful fulfilment from a love this solid, will be more than you can bear and more than any of us deserve in this lifetime.


News flash for those of you that think that the grass is always greener on the other side.
At some point in life, everyone looks at their circumstances and thinks, If only… If only I had a better job. If only my spouse were more like the slutty, thick waitress at work who strokes my ego, or the easy white trash girlfriend of my dead best friend (sick much) who is so terrifically sad and pathetic, that I can only but FINALLY feel superior, and so forth:) If only I had gone to Varsity. If only I had the opportunities so-and-so had or if only my parents gave hand-outs and set me up the way he or she has been. We look around and think everyone else has it better than we do.

See, I don't believe the grass is greener on the other side; I believe the grass is greener where you water it. 
We have to tend to the things that are important to us if we want to see those things thrive.

If you want better relationships, quit dicking around and making excuses, and invest in the people around you.


Woodwinked - over & out  
xx