Hello, MXM—
Thank you for stopping by to read again! Your comment here made me wish to go back and revise this piece to provide a bit more context that may—or may not—alleviate confusion. Your comment here makes me think that your interpretation is that the one time a man texts this, women get up in arms about it. If that were the case, then I’d have to agree with you that women are over-reacting and seem childish if they respond so negatively to one seemingly-simple text. I’m a big proponent of benefit of the doubt and the need for us all to give each other a break—and grace!—if we don’t say or do exactly the most perfect thing.
But maybe I can give you a little context that may help you see why some women might not be childish when it comes to the wording of this particular text. Bear with me—I’m not the best at analogies, but I’m going to make a stab at giving analogies that help you and perhaps other readers see what is meant.
I don’t know if this happened to you, but when my mom called me or one of my siblings by our first name AND our middle name, we immediately knew we were in big trouble. We knew she was mad. How did we know? After all, she just said 2 words. Well, the first time she yelled our first name and middle name, we went to her, and we ended up getting scolded and/or a spanking. The next time she called us by our first name and middle name, we again ended up getting scolded and/or spanked. So…after enough times of this happening, that’s how we came to believe that hearing our first name AND middle name didn’t bode well.
Similarly, I’ve heard some guys complain about women asking this question: “So, what do you do for a living?” In some cases, men ghost a woman after she asks this question. Why are these men over-reacting to such a seemingly-harmless question? According to some men I know, their experience was that, after hearing the answer to this question, women would seem to totally lose interest. The men believed it was probably because the woman was looking for a man who had a more prestigious job or a job associated with higher income. So after seeing enough women seem to lose interest, men became ‘sensitive’ to this question. Perhaps it’s ‘childish’ to rule a woman out for asking one question…or…does repeated experiences teach some men to just shortcut to what, to them, seems like a given outcome?
So what I’m getting at here is that the women I’ve heard complaining about this text weren’t complaining after they got the text once. Instead, it was a pattern that had developed. Women were seeing that it was common that the men who texted this were men who went on to put little effort into developing the relationship or, as in some of the endings, didn’t take turns at the effort it takes to plan cool dates. Either way, when this text was associated enough times with poor outcomes, some women cringe as soon as they see that text now, just as surely as I still cringe when I hear a parent call a kid by first AND middle name, and just as surely as some men cringe when they hear that question, “So, what do you do for a living?”
So…please don’t be too quick to dismiss these women as ‘childish’ when it was, perhaps, my poor writing that didn’t fully present their case as to why this text can be a bit alarming to some women. Hopefully, with context, you can see it’s not quite as infantile as it may seem at first glance. I do wish women and men would give each other some benefit of the doubt and give each other a chance when we don’t word texts ‘perfectly’, but I also hope men and women will make the effort to learn why the other gets bothered by some common mis-steps in dating and make the effort to avoid them, if, and only if, they want to do so. If a man wants to keep texting that question, or a woman wants to keep asking that question, even knowing why those questions are common mis-steps, they absolutely can, no problem, but at least they do so knowing why the questions can prevent them from achieving their dating goals.
--Lee
