When I was writing the last blog entry, I did not expect myself to be writing a part 2.. but my friends’ responses inspired me to continue this topic. There will always be more to talk about, but in this blog entry I will focus on three topics:
- What kind of gifts do girlfriends enjoy receiving?
- What do you do when girlfriends cry?
- And finally, why should you not use reasonings with girlfriends when they’re emotional.
I’ll take Adam’s suggestion into consideration and write in smaller paragraphs.
Before I begin discussing what kind if gifts girlfriends like, I should first remind all the boys out there that usually there are more days within a year that the girl would like to celebrate than a boy would like to celebrate. It frustrates me sometimes when a friend of mine asks me how much money he should spend on a girl for a particular occasion. Because really, this friend should rather be looking at a bigger picture: how many gifts are you willing to give out per year? When this friend is answering that question, please also taking into account about how many MORE days the girl wants to celebrate and how many MORE presents she’s preparing for you. In most relationships I see a pattern of gift exchange between the boyfriend and the girlfriend, which is that the girlfriend would come up with days that she’s expecting surprises where the boyfriend is not aware of. This results in girlfriend getting upset (she either brought a gift for him on the day of and got shut down or hinted before hand and realized that there will be no return and started to hold a small grudge against him). On a brighter note, girlfriends are usually more forgiving than just one time disappointment, so they’d hope for a bigger and better present on the day that everyone would celebrate. This vicious cycle in the girlfriend’s mind is usually hidden from the boyfriend or not as serious as the boyfriend thought it would be.
(Oh god, I hope the last paragraph was short enough for Adam…)
Taking that into account, this bigger and better present ought to be good.. I’m not sure how much more pressure I just put on you, but relax, I’m not going to tell you some advice that requires you to throw in big bucks to satisfy her (unless your girlfriend is more interested in your money). Throughout years of gift exchange, I have a handbook in mind for almost every day out there where gifts are required. Some of the rules that I usually follow are: get something that can easily be valued at a higher price than I purchased it for for strangers (if you don’t know the person, you can’t make it that special so you can only show the person how much you care by money’s worth); for family members I try to get something that can be used in the household; and I usually can figure out what kind of things my friends like so it becomes easier to shop for them (for girls it’s usually clothes and for guys it’s usually things you can find in futureshop).
Girlfriends are a totally different story. If you plan to be with this girl for a long time, do not shower her with a lot of presents all at once. I have a very bad example from I-can’t-say-who, but for the first Christmas they spent together, he bought her a white gold bracelet engraved with their initials on it, a lovely sweater, and on top of all that, a personalized card and a bunch of candies that he knew she loves. Ever since then, she expects gifts at least at the same level if not better for Christmas. Until finally one Christmas, he ran out of crazily romantic ideas and bought her what she has been complaining that she couldn’t find in the mall – a pair of black leather gloves that fits her tiny hands. He did purchase a pair of black leather gloves, but it was not from the store she likes, they do not fit her tiny hands and she thought the gloves looked hideous. She claimed the gift to be not thoughtful and she felt that he doesn’t love her anymore. But the truth is, he just ran out of ideas. I do feel bad about this boyfriend, nevertheless it was stupid of him to buy those black leather gloves. Think about it, if your girlfriend can’t find it in the mall, what makes you think you can?
Other than the one I already mentioned, another moral of that story is, never try to buy something the girl said that she can’t find in the mall. If she complained about how she can’t find the perfect pair of cotton slippers, don’t go out of your way to try to find it, chances are the pair you find won’t be good enough. The more the girl searches for something, the higher the standard of that certain something becomes. Unless it’s something she described in great detail and doesn’t require any aesthetic judgment. For example, if she mentioned that she needs a new Sephora eyelash curler in red color (The last time I checked they only have one kind that’s red), then you go and get it for her, it’d be a wonderful casual gift. Notice I said casual, for special occasions, never try to buy something she preassigned you to get her. Also remember not to substitute with another brand or another style. If she said Sephora and she mentioned the color red, she has her reasons.
So what kind of gifts can you give her for special occasions? The key is to make the present as personal to her as possible. If you can change the name on the card and give the present to another girl to receive the same reaction from the gift, then it’s not personal enough. In order to make it personal, you need to always listen to the girl so that you understand her interests, her past experiences, and her tastes in pretty much everything. This is hard. It’s very very hard. So right now I’ll tell you tricks that will make it more personal even though you might not know the girl well enough (You may think you do, but I can’t even say that I know myself well enough, not to mention someone else). However, you should still try to get to know the girl more.. but I realize that comes with time and time is equally cruel to every one of us. I don’t want to even try to begin saying how to use time wisely or anything remotely close to that matter, so instead I’ll be talking about tricks.
I’m going to first start on a side topic here, it’ll seem like it’s non-related but I promise I’ll link it back. In many relationships I know of, the couple hang out in a group setting sometimes. This group is usually gathered up by the boyfriends. There are rare scenarios where the girlfriend is equally if not more sociable and enjoys planning events for people, but usually the girlfriend tags along with the boyfriends’ friends. Then there comes with this issue of the girlfriend being labeled an “add-on” by the boyfriend’ friends. To the boyfriend’s friends, since they don’t know this girl well enough and they can’t hit on her, she’s just someone who happens to tag along whenever there is a gathering. In even worse cases, they need to live with her when she comes to visit her boyfriend who happens to be their roommate. I’m not sure how hard it is to be around such a girlfriend they don’t know much about, but I’m sure it’s not easy on them and the boyfriend should know better since they’re his friends and he probably has to deal with the same thing with his friend’s girlfriends as well.
I’ve heard several boyfriends including my own telling me that it’s unavoidable for their friends to feel the girlfriend is just an add-on to their friends because the girlfriend doesn’t talk to them or introduce herself so that they’ll get to know her as an individual. I agree with them, if the girlfriend wants to be treated as a person who has a mind of her own, then she should introduce her thoughts and deliver her personality to the table. I haven’t heard much complaints from the boyfriends side about being treated as add-ons by the girlfriends’ friends. I’m sensing this is because I’ve always became friends with the boyfriend, so obviously I won’t get such complaint. But the trick I’m telling you about is in fact becoming friends with your girlfriend’s close friends. You’ll have to rip off the add-on label on yourself from her friends.
There are many benefits that come along with being the girlfriend’s close friends’ friend. Other than getting tips about the type of gifts your girlfriend might be expecting this year, you can also get information about the gifts that she disliked from past experiences. Talking to the girlfriend’s close friends might not always provide you with an idea of the present, but it will at least always tell you what not to get her as presents. But in order to get that information, you need to become friends with a friend who’s fairly close with your girlfriend and most importantly, trustworthy enough that she won’t big mouth about your conversation with her.
The second trick I’m going to write about is digging up old memories. This is difficult for some people, so this trick might not be applicable to everyone. I had this one friend telling me that he doesn’t know what to write in a card to make it sound special. I’m sure the girlfriend knows that you are not Shakespeare and is not expecting to read some kind of timeless sonnet in the card. What she wants to read is something personal, something reflective of the experiences you two shared together. I remember this guy telling me a wonderful story of the two a few days later. I couldn’t help but to wonder how much better the card would’ve been if he had just jot down some details of that story instead.
I’ll use his story as a sample of what kind of things would mean more than just “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Birthday” to the girl. In order to understand how wonderful his story is, I need to first explain something about the girl. I’ve been rooming with this girl for quite some times and I’ve been there for her ups and downs. She’s not the typical emotional girl who cries during movies or shed tears when a bunny dies. In fact, I only remember seeing her cry once over the past few years of knowing her. But the boyfriend told me that she cries all the time, he immediately grabbed my attention away from coding. (For the ones who do not know me, it’s quite hard to grab my attention away when I’m coding..) He then mentioned this one incident.. She fell asleep this one time watching a movie with him, so he paused the movie and started playing games thinking to himself that he’ll wait for her to wake up and then continue the movie with her. But when she woke up, she started crying. After a few minutes of mumbling to him, he finally figured out that she cried because she thought he was mad at her for falling asleep.. I doubt anyone who knows this girl would guess that I’m actually talking about her because this does not sound like something she’d do.. Yet it’s sweet, and awkwardly adorable of her. I’d bet the guy a hundred bucks that if he had juiced up this story a bit in the card, it would’ve made a better card.
I’ve also heard of this question from boyfriends: is it okay for me not to get her a card? The answer is no.. First of all, it’s really hard to get her a present that she’ll like and even if she likes it, she might not after a few months and by then she has completely forgotten the existence of that one bad present you gave her. But it’s much easier to pick out a card that she’ll like and personalize that card (refer to last paragraph). So it’s wise to always get a card along with the present. You can think of it as the “Perfect Plan B”. Just a note: do not get those “witty” or “funny” cartoon cards for your girlfriend. Even if she’s a tomboy and enjoys reading those occasionally, it will not be a card she’s keeping in her drawers to look at when she misses you. Again, I’m referring to special occasions where she’s having high expectations.. if you felt like bringing a joke when you are visiting her, then by all means..
Alright, so to be more specific, don’t get her gifts that are cliche unless it has more meanings to her.. for example, unless she’s in the chocolate tasting business and truly adores truffles, do not buy her chocolate. I never felt buying flowers is a good idea either because its beauty will fade. Nothing edible is that good of an idea for the same reason.. if she can’t keep it, it’s not worth it for a special occasion. I usually tell the boyfriends to buy accessories for the girlfriend because it comes in a wide collection with various styles and size is usually not an issue. It’s not some kind of technology that will eventually become a piece of junk and it’ll always be one of her collections that she’ll look back and feel that aw at heart. But again, it’s hard to make it personal. I find that one way to make it more personal is to engrave some messages on it.
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I didn’t realize how wordy I truly am until now.. the above section only covered 1/3 of the topics I planned to talk about in this blog. I’ll try to keep the rest more concise.
Personally, I consider myself to be very emotional. I cry a lot, in various settings (settings that most people would feel embarrassed about), for various matters (matters that most people would feel trivial about). When it comes to my own relationship, I become even more emotional. I’ve always experienced the frustration of this situation: boyfriend feeling clueless about what to do when I’m crying and ended up doing something totally stupid. When I say totally stupid, I mean something that did not help him to do what he wanted to achieve and made the situation even worse. When the girlfriend is crying, the boyfriend wants her to stop crying, let’s call this his goal. In order to accomplish this goal, there are a few things that he should not do.
For some people, when they read this they might laugh because it’ll seem so stupid if they did this, but believe me, people DO do this. When she cries, do not leave her in her room and go home.. Unless you absolutely dislike this person and feel this person should be burning in hell, I’d never suggest to anyone to leave a crying person alone when you were there with this person in the first place. Same thing goes with the phone: if you sense she’s crying at the other end of the line, do not let her off the hook unless you plan to rush over to her house to talk to her in person. If you feel I’m being stupid for telling you not to leave her alone when she’s crying, then I think you obviously don’t care enough about her and really shouldn’t be dating her in the first place.
Dating a girl is a lot of work, it involves keeping her happy and making her stop crying. Two of the most complicated tasks to accomplish, and not to mention you need to maintain them.
Before rushing to explaining anything or even begin talking to her, ask her why she’s crying. If you feel you have a shot at why she’s crying, then begin by asking this: Is this (replace this with what you think it is) why you are crying? Again, this might seem trivial and stupid to some people, but it’s like writing an essay, you should always keep the thesis at the top of the page to remind yourself the primary idea you want your paper to evolve around. If you want to make her stop crying, you need to be 100% positive about the cause of it.
Once you’ve figured out why she’s crying, don’t tell her your opinion on the matter. I beg you not to because usually your opinion is something like: that’s so trivial, you are so stupid for crying; or it wouldn’t have helped if even I did this (replace this with whatever that you didn’t do that caused the crying); or it wouldn’t have helped even if I didn’t do this (reverse of the previous bracket). You may think expressing your opinion of why she’s crying would “teach” her not to be crying because you can “convince” her that the matter is trivial.
Wrong.
I’m going to explain why reasoning with your girlfriend might not be a good idea when she’s emotional in the next topic, for now, please just take my word for it that it’s not doable and that it’ll make her more upset and complicate the situation even more. For now, just accept the fact that she’s crying and you can’t change her mind on whether or not it’s worth her tears for. If she’s crying because the hero died in her favorite TV show, don’t argue with her that it’s just TV; if she’s crying because your best friend said something and you didn’t correct him for saying it, don’t tell her that even if you did it wouldn’t have changed anything; if she’s crying because you went clubbing with other friends and didn’t invite her, don’t tell her that even if you’ve invited her she’d still not go… Avoid anything related with changing her opinion, it’ll be like fanning the fire (not sure if this saying makes sense in English or not).
Instead, you listen. All you need to do is to listen to her about why she’s crying. You know, from past experiences, I’d say most of the times I just needed someone to listen to me when I’m crying. I don’t need the boyfriend to solve anything for me, I just want him to understand me. I have many female friends who concur with me on this matter. Women nowadays are capable of solving their own problems, when we cry, it’s just an emotional outburst, we do not need men to come and rescue us. What we want, is for them to be there to listen to us.
I don’t get why boyfriends think it’s bad to see the girlfriends cry in front of them. Because in my opinion, it’s a good thing. If she’s willing to cry in front of you, then she’s willing to show you her ugly side.. if anything, it’s one step closer in getting to know the real her. I have this theory about crying: if this person is not crying in front of you when he/she should be crying, then it’s one of the following two reasons – 1. the person feels you do not care or 2. the person feels you do not understand. Take toddlers for an example, if you leave him alone in the park and he fell, he’s not going to cry immediately unless someone beside him picked him up and started comforting him. The reason being, if he’s not surrounded with people he knows who care about him greatly, he doesn’t cry; and he starts crying when strangers pick him up because he feels this stranger understood his pain for falling.
You don’t have to agree with me on my theory and the toddler example was merely from observations, but please do believe me that it’s not a bad thing when girlfriends cry in front of you so stop freaking out about it.
After the crying and the explaining through mumbling, there might be a time she turns around and looks at you waiting for your response. What you do now is you say: “I understand” and then you kiss her. If the reason she’s crying involves you, you say “I understand and I’m sorry” and then you kiss her.
Sometimes it’s more complicated than that because sometimes it’s something you did and she expects you to “change”. I’m not sure if it’s because when god created men he put a line of code that reads “if input.NextLine == “change” then System.Console.WriteLine(“No!”)” but that’s the idea I got from most men.. Please excuse my stupid CS joke.. But I really don’t get why it takes tries over tries to make the boyfriend believe that change isn’t so horrible?
I’ll list some of the things I’ve tried to change.. I understand most of the times why I can’t change them and I’ve made them understand that the change is good for them, but the actual execution still failed time after time during debugging. (There are multiple boyfriends and the list does not follow a particular time line.. stop guessing who’s whom..) I had my reasons for trying to convince him and just so you know, never succeeded.
I’ve tried to convince him..
- that he should try harder in school and get better grades..
- never make any decision about his own life because of me..
- stop skipping classes..
- talking about me in any way in front of his friends will not be good..
- not to rate/judge/complain about me in front of his friends or anyone in general..
- never walk away on me when I’m upset..
- gaming is time-consuming and bad for him..
Even if I convinced him of the above, as I said before, I’ve never ever succeeded in changing him. The furtherest I got is making him to agree with me but action wise he just feels more restricted.
Damn, I just lost my train of thoughts…
So yea, I don’t think it’s doable to change the boyfriend and I don’t think it’s a good idea to do this especially through crying. Take my word for it, I’ve tried many times. Even if I get the guy to agree with me, he’d still not change. And most of the times if you think you’ve changed him, he’s only doing it behind your back.. or he’s resting for a bit.. or he becomes unhappy being with you.
When it comes to time like these.. as yourself the whether if it’s worth it question. Is it worth continuing the relationship if he doesn’t change? For the boyfriend, is it worth dating her if she expects you to change in the future?
There are certain values in life that are important to me. Those will never change in my opinion, so I try to avoid myself dating guys who hold opposite position in such issues. For example, if one is a big spender and the other is a big saver, it’s hard to have a lifetime of happiness together without settling down the money disagreement. I think trying to change someone else is harder than changing my own perspective, but if it’s something I strongly believe, then I can’t change myself. Thus the only solution is to not get myself involved with guys who share different views in these unchangeable principles of mine.
If I’m already involved, then there’s really no better way out. It’ll be painful and I’ll have to ask myself that is it worth it question. I bet a lot of people tell themselves lies before going to bed, “he’ll change” is probably one of the most told lies of all times. I think underneath it all, women know men cannot change. Perhaps most of the times, they just want them to say they will to show how much they care.
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Finally.. the third topic….
First of all, I want to say that I don’t think women are more emotional than men are. I think men show more emotions towards aggression, anger, and happiness than feelings such as disappointment, distress, and vulnerability because of their social role of being masculine. Having said that, I think I should change it to “don’t try to reason with boyfriend/girlfriend when he/she is emotional”. If you are interested in this topic, there are some reads (1, 2, 3, 4) off the Internet. Those four articles jumped out in google when I searched for “women are more emotional than men”, yet they are all ideas that support women are not more emotional than men.
I think when people are emotional, it becomes harder for them to adapt to newer concepts, thus making it harder to point it out to them that they might be wrong on certain matters. Having said that, I think it’s easier to calm the person down first before trying to reason with him/her. When it comes to boyfriend/girlfriend issues, I think one should try to be even more considerate and understanding given the situation involving one of the two being emotional. I understand that when you feel you are right, you always want to get out there and derive to the conclusion as soon as possible, but that road will be longer if you choose to shout out your reasonings at someone who’s emotional about the topic.
I truly believe that there will always be different opinions on certain things in a relationship. When such opinions are brought to the table, and you two can’t seem to sort out who’s opinion out rule the other, it’s probably better to think this way: if you can’t make everyone in the world agree with you, what’s the big deal if he/she can’t? If you want to argue saying: well, because he/she’s more important to me than the rest of the world, his/her opinion means more to me. Then why are you not agreeing with him/her if his/her opinion means more to you than the rest of the world?
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Alright, I think I’m done with those topics..
I was reading this today, and a section of it caught my attention:
The Five Components Of Emotional Health
Emotional health consists of five key components:
- Being aware of your emotions. Emotionally healthy people are in touch with their emotions and can identify and acknowledge them as experience.
- Being able to process your emotions. After connecting with their emotions, emotionally healthy people develop appropriate ways of expressing them.
- Being sensitive to other people and their emotions and having the ability to empathize. The ability to identify their own emotions enables emotionally healthy people to identify emotions in others and to have an intuitive sense of what it feels like to experience them.
- Being self-empowered. Emotionally healthy people honour their emotions, which empowers them to fulfill their goals.
- Being in healthy relationships. Using their emotional intelligence and empathy, emotionally healthy people build and maintain strong, functioning relationships.
I think I lack step 1.. I always feel certain emotions, yet I can’t tell what caused them. I cry, and then after a day I realize why I was crying the other day.. It takes me a long time to follow the road back and find the root, and usually I need to start this thinking process after I’ve felt it. I guess this concludes that I’m not an emotionally healthy person… >_>