October 13, 2008
Are Jordanian men intimidated by smart, strong women?
Sunday October 5, 2008
I had a nightmare yesterday… in the dream I sat in my room, knowing that I am home alone… suddenly my door opened and a total stranger poked his head into my room… I almost gave myself a heart attack… I went through the motions and the feelings of this scenario as if it was real…. I woke up in a cold sweat….
I knew the nightmare was related to a conversation I had with the sister the previous night… it was about a guy she thought I should meet… Meeting a guy has been on the agenda of several people lately… I guess people worry that I am not getting any younger. For some odd reason I absolutely have to meet someone right now, get married on the spot and reproduce immediately (…don’t waste your time… you get married today, you have a baby nine months later… boom…boom…boom… as if this process is in the same category as buying tomatoes).
The problem here is that i don’t seek the same kind of guys i had when i was in my early twenties. At that point I was looking for someone Strong, i felt vulnerable and wanted to be protected. I wanted someone with the standard shit, money, house, car…etc. So that he can provide for me (I still did not know that I can provide for myself… ) And of course intelligence.
Today things are different, what i need is someone i could be friends with! someone who is intelligent enough, not to be intimidated by the fact that i don’t need to be protected or provided for.
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A few days Later….
I see that I have a wandering keyboard this week… but to return to the original thread, I want to introduce another couple of incidents that took place this week…
“Guess what?! Hala told me first day of Eid “Fares got engaged to XXXX,” She said…Fares was her cousin’s boyfriend for a long time … we both were surprised at his choice, since both women were so extremely different… while the cousin was smart, ambitious and strong… the fiancée was quiet, unmotivated and dull….
The long conversation we had about why men tend to prefer boring women for marriage was shelved in my head till last day of Eid…. I visited some family members for Eid… They just moved back from Saudi Arabia… I said naively to the lady “you must be happy about being here, you regained your freedom now”.
“On the contrary”, she said… “In Saudi Arabia, I did not have to do anything at all…my husband had to do everything.” She said…
I was appalled! What I heard was “in Saudi Arabia, I could sit on my lazy ass the whole days, and the poor ass I married had to do all the work!”
I found her completely unimpressive… she seemed smart enough when she was first introduced to the family… (five years and three children ago) even though we were a bit uncertain. I mean the husband is quite an intelligent man… and we did not feel that she was that spectacular… what we failed to realize then, was that he made an intellectual decision to marry beneath him….
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12 November 2008
For years, there’s been a popular conception that men are intimidated by intelligent women in this part of the world… however, intelligent women have a strategy…
They play dumb!
I can’t remember the number of times my grandmother told me to tone it down when I meet someone… or ordered me not to read publicly because it is not appealing… or treated my glasses as a shameless secret… The holly fear is that women who are too strong are less likely to find a man who will love them, let alone marry them.
Honestly I look at my grandmother and she is one of the strongest women on earth. She always knew how to play it down. And well she has been married for more than 60 years now!
Are Jordanian men intimidated by smart, strong women?
Well…I was browsing when I came across an exhaustive study of people from primary school to middle age has proved that clever men are much more likely to marry than those with lesser intelligence. But for intelligent women, the reverse is true. Their chances of have that beautiful white wedding at Intercontinental Amman are considerably lower than other women who went through university because it was better than staying home!
The study says that one possible cause of this result is that many smarter women are too choosy in wanting higher status men whereas the men are not as choosy about status of females and hence can find a suitable mate from a much larger pool of women.
Another possible explanation (my lovely caveman analogy) men are more driven to seek physical beauty and youth as a result of selective pressures to seek fertile mates. Whereas natural selection favoured a female preference for higher status men as better providers…
Omar explains:
“Men have no problem with an independent intelligent woman, but what I have found with women that call themselves that, is they are very judgmental, closed minded to certain things, and love to argue or debate as they call it”
I have been writing this post for a week now. I guess the new Jhumpa Lahiri book Unaccustomed Earth has been keeping me busy…. Not bad at all.. Lahiri knows how to show the human side of her characters…. Also this week i have realized that i am in love with Lebanese singer Marwan Khouri!
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