Unmoved

Over on Dalrock's place, he has a post up about a woman who lost her best friend:

On Saturday new commenter Constance left a heartbreaking comment on a post I wrote back in 2010:

My ex husband and I had a mutual divorce 5 years ago and I’m still not over it. It hurts every single day. There was no cheating, just a long period of separation and drifting apart. I suffer from depression, so that also contributed. Now, he has moved on, but I can’t and don’t know if I ever will. I still love and miss him. Always will. I deeply regret the divorce and I feel like I had amnesia and trying to find my life back. But, the wall is thick and tall. Feels like a living nightmare that is inescapable. I dream of trying to find him, but he can’t be reached. I can’t find any peace in my life. Drowning with sorrow and anger. Angry at my depression. Angry at the demise of a marriage to the only man I will ever love.

The eternal paean whine of the predator who mindlessly let the best thing she ever had...go. Dalrock continues his post:

Constance, the former blogger referenced above, and millions of other divorced women with similar heartbreaking stories show the absolute cruelty of those who either directly sell divorce or sell the benefit of threats of divorce to unhappy wives.

I will admit, this makes my head ache.

Why?

She did it to herself.

Now she whines about it.

Now she gains sympathy from the readers of her story.

Now Dalrock puts up a post about her. Her, specifically.

"Heartbreaking." Twice. "Heartbreaking."

She is validated. She has attention. She has been gifted with sympathy - hallelujah! - her existence now has meaning! For a brief and sparkling moment the shooting star flares...

...before the ash-grey depression sets in again. (Supposedly 1 in 4 American women take antidepressants. That's just the ones who are diagnosed and who can afford them. Perhaps this one was missed?)

Why, Dalrock? I'm not trying to give you shit about it. I simply wonder: why give her your attention?

Why give her your sympathy?

I know you've been writing about those who prey upon the unthinkingly and dully bored women who apathetically destroy their marriages at the prodding of the greedy. In my view those greedy pieces of shit should be put in the stocks and rotten eggs thrown at them. Hung, drawn and quartered. Beheaded.

They are parasites upon the parasites, encouraging worse and worse behavior for their own profit. Never mind the destruction of society that their siren lure of Feminism's hope - "you can have it all!" - brings to this world.

Yet. Still. I am forcefully reminded of Florence Nightingale (from the Wikipedia entry):

In one sense, I do believe I am "like a man," as Parthe [the writer's sister] says. But how? In having sympathy. … Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so. [Emphasis mine. - BPS] … They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?

Letter to Madame Mohl (13 December 1861)

This is no world for men. In women's minds, all men are disposable.

We exist only to give her what she wants in the moment.

"Listen to me. Give me your sympathy. Poor, poor, pitiful me..."

At the best, they are pleasant diversions - at the worst, very unpleasant distractions. Because the world doesn't run on her feeeelings: it runs on blood, sweat and diesel.

Mine. Yours. Other men's. This is where the Crap Colored Glasses™ came from. Hear the yap-yap-yap long enough...hear variation upon variation of the same old greedy and unthinking story...until finally you snap...

"ENOUGH, WOMAN!!!"

You know the lies, the manipulations, the spin, the self-seeking, the narcissism, the inane, the insane. We all do, in this wretched wasteland of the interwebs.

We're not soulless. We're not heartless.

We've simply heard it before. Endlessly, endlessly...

Cut, razored, flayed, over and over and over.

We become a mass of keloid tissue. Stripe on slice over cut, crosshatched with scars, calluses that you couldn't hammer a nail through.

Until we are unmoved.

Heartbreaking? The only thing that is heartbreaking about this situation is that we Men were foolish enough to gift these women with a rope by which to hang themselves until dead.

Their death is ours.

And we cannot take that rope back.