Why I Don’t Tell You Anything

I’m not a comic person, but I get a kick out of Hypergamouse. It’s a play on the SSH illustrated by Lacy Fairchild. There are mices of every type – Alpha, Bravo, Delta, Gamma… Vox Day has been posting them on Saturdays with commentary.

Last week or so was a great one. It’s the buildup of a series. One of the guys – Stoke, gets interested in a girl. He asks his friend, Apex the Alpha, about her and he says go for it. The commentary there was that since and Alpha feels no need to compete with a Bravo or Delta, he’s encouraging. He has nothing to lose or gain.

The next week, we see Stoke with the Gamma – Doof, who tells him no way, don’t ask her, she may say no. Stoke replies this is stupid, if he doesn’t it is a no.

This episode we see Apex with his girl, who he tells about Stoke and his crush – Jami. She asks what he said, which was “She’s hot, go for it!”

“SO YOU THINK SHE’S HOT?”

And so it begins. He responds “And you wonder why I don’t talk much”

The lessons:

Not only is this offense-taking unnecessary, manipulative, and annoying, but it absolutely guarantees that any man with even a modicum of self-control is going to leave you entirely in the dark about his opinions, his feelings, and even what is going on in his life. I’ve heard many women complain over the years that their husbands and sons are increasingly closed-off to them, and I’ve yet to observe any of them recognizing that they, and their behavior, are the culprit, and that this habitual reserve on the part of the men in their lives is an obvious reaction to their proclivity to take offense so easily. – Vox Day

Oh, yeah. Been there.

Men are perfectly capable of learning from experience. So when a woman “wins” a conversation by transforming a man’s words into a rhetorical attack on her and forcing him to retreat from his own expressed feelings, opinions, or observations, she should understand that she hasn’t convinced him to change his mind in the slightest. Instead, she has convinced him that she can no longer be trusted to hear his feelings, opinions, and observations, and he will conceal them from her in the future.

Mindy has now all but guaranteed that the next time she asks Apex what is going on, his response will end with “not much”. In fact, if you are a woman and that is the customary response from a man to your inquiries, you can be confident that he does not trust you enough to talk to you about anything important to him unless it is absolutely necessary. – Vox Day

This is so true.

Over the years, the list of stuff that I flat out wouldn’t bother talking with Herself about got so long that we rarely talked about anything substantial towards the end. It just wasn’t worth the static.

In retrospect, this was probably wrong, and I probably should have simply let fly and let the chips fall wherever. In the end, it really didn’t spare any grief, did it?