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Well, to some extent, we are probably likely to understand people who have a similar experience of sex and gender as us better than people who have been categorized or categorized themselves as the or an other sex/gender: in broad terms, boys and girls are socialized very differently and are taught to be different from each other, and to eroticize/exoticize that difference - which is heavily policed - from an early age.
My own thinking on this is that if there is a pattern in your relationships that the gender of your partners - the way they experience and express their gender, the way their experience of sex/gender affects the way they think and act - is causing problems, you need to think about your erotic investment in gender - here, I'm guessing, in masculinity, specifically heterosexual male masculinity.
"Heterosexual" is a pretty broad term (like all descriptors of sexuality). What is your experience of heterosexuality? What attracts you to men? (I know that to some extent these questions are nonsensical and unanswerable.) What is it about men that attracts you, and what is it about being-a-man, specifically, in your boyfriends that has caused a pattern of lack of communication/breakups?
I don't know how long this pattern has been going on for - how many relationships you've had that have ended or whatever - so I can't really comment, but remember that if your criterion for a relationship is that it doesn't end, then that's only ever going to happen to you once. It seems quite normal to me to go out with people and then break up with them, to be honest, so it's likely that there's not actually a pattern at all.
If the pattern is to do with the fact that you always go out with people who can't talk about their feelings, then you should probably stop doing that, but that's a cross-gender phenomenon, to be honest. If the problem is to do with gender, then you need to find people of the physical sex that you are attracted to who relate to their gender differently.
Or maybe the problem is to do with race, or class, or the fact that all the boys you've been out with have liked the wrong kind of books or eroticized the wrong parts of the body or eaten their boiled eggs from the wrong end or yadda yadda. I don't think you should leap to the conclusion that it has to do with gender just because a lot of people have made a lot of money peddling the idea that there is some kind of deep binary division in the human race.
Hmm. Got a bit carried away there. Sorry to hear that you broke up with your boyfriend: that's a hard thing to go through, and good luck with it. Hope you have good friends to look after you. |
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