Communication and the way we're brought up.

The messages we're taught - explicitly, or things we pick up on subconsciously - as a child have a great influence on how we interact with the world when we're older. Growing up as a female I learnt not to raise my voice, not to start or get involved in arguments for fear of what others would do, to let people down gently, not to make people angry or upset, and that whatever the situation was, if you got into an argument with an adult (whether you were right or not) they were right, because they were adults, and were more important than you.

Little girls are called 'bossy' - you don't hear this about boys, because boys are expected to take charge of situations. Boys are expected to be loud, domineering, to get themselves heard, to be more violent (though it's always referred to as boisterous). 

If a boy pushed a girl over, or pulled her hair, people would say he was just being a boy, or that it was obviously because he liked her. Because obviously violence is how people show affection.

Anyway, I got a little sidetracked there. This next bit is my interpretation of some events involving a few of my friends, and I may have got it completely wrong - I can't read minds or intentions, but here's how I see it.

There's been a situation with some of my friends recently, where a female friend had been trying to gently let a male friend down without hurting his feelings. She never explicitly said that she didn't want a relationship with him, she said things like 'I'm not ready for a relationship', 'maybe we can see how things are in six months'.

Now to me, that comes across as 'no, I don't want a relationship with you, but I don't want to hurt your feelings or provoke an argument so I'm trying to let you down gently.'

The guy involved obviously heard this as 'I need a bit of space right now, but some way down the line I'd like to be with you.'

I talked about this situation with Azariah, and he said that because this girl hadn't said no explicitly, it was assumed (and he felt it would be assumed by most people) that this meant that she wanted a relationship of some kind to happen. This really shocked me, because I learnt to avoid confrontations out of fear of what the (generally male) person involved would do. So I'd try say anything possible to avoid an outright no in these kinds of situations, for my own personal safety. The idea that men seem to take anything other than an explicit no as a yes in some form is not only scary, but also shows just how big the gap in the communication methods we learn growing up is.

I'm not sure what else to say at the moment, I know there are lots more thoughts swimming round my head at the moment but they require some more thought to be coherent ideas.