For as long as I can remember I have always gotten along with boys better than with girls. It started when I was young. There were never many girls in any of the neighbourhoods where I grew up. I always remember having boys as neighbours, and we would hang out building forts or playing hide&seek in the bush across the road from our duplex. When my younger brother got old enough he joined us. Since my parents had a cabin 30 minutes from town we spent many weekends there and most of the summer holidays. There were no other kids nearby, so my brother and I used to make up games and hang out.
I had a few girls as friends in public school but never anyone who I considered my very best friend. The one girl that I considered to be my closest friend had many other friends in our class so she never hung out with me exclusively. As we got older the girls in my class would have Barbie parties. I remember two or three girls bringing Barbie outfits over to another girl’s house, and they would dress up their dolls and swap outfits. I used to take my Barbie outside and make her ride around the back yard in GI Joe’s Jeep with his army guy friends. While the girls were plotting ways to make Ken like their dolls, my Barbie was going on jungle adventures.
Around men I never worry about competition because men and women traditionally compete on different levels. (And as I wrote in a previous blog entry, the person I most love competing with is myself.) I ran a small town half marathon a few years back and at about the half way point I began leap-frogging with another woman on the course. I would ease ahead of her and then she would come from behind and pass me. This kept me on pace for the second half of the race but as we got closer to the finish line she kept looking over her shoulder nervously. Then when the finish line approached, she took off like a bat out of hell. I didn’t give it another thought as I was racing my own race and assumed she was too. Later on in the washrooms I was changing before the awards ceremony and I overheard a woman’s voice saying, “I HAD to pass her! I was going to be fourth…There was NO way I was going to be fourth female!!” I emerged from the washroom stall to see her look up at me. She instantly turned red and shut up. I turned and left the washroom, secretly thrilled that I had placed fourth female overall and oddly confused about why she was more concerned with what didn’t happen than with her own placement.
I also don’t have to worry about a guy vying with me for another guy’s attention, or trying to outdo me by showing up in a fancier more stylish outfit. Throughout the years this still hasn’t changed. I am intimidated by stylish women. I don’t have a fashion sense worth beans and couldn’t pick out an original outfit without seeing something on a store model and trying to emulate it. Some women look as if they don’t even try. No matter what I do I always feel like a clumsy wallflower lacking grace around other women.
I’ve tried to determine the source of why I don’t feel nearly as comfortable around women as I do around men. Looking back into my past there was never a defining moment that changed things but I guess there were lots of little things – for example one winter when I was in grade four I’d had a fight with the girl who lived down the road from me and the next day at recess she rallied our friends around her and they followed me at recess “erasing my footprints so I wouldn’t exist” giggling and whispering behind my back the entire time. That symbolic gesture has remained with me over the years because it hurt me so deeply. I remember going home and crying.
It can be argued that boys can be just as hurtful as girls, and they often were, yet I forgave them quicker. Maybe I assumed that boys didn’t mean to be hurtful, but the girls knew exactly what they were doing. I had too many secrets revealed by girls I’d trusted. (To be fair, I do have some very strong relationships with women today, and there are some women in my life who I will always be close to and able to talk to about just about anything. But these relationships have been carefully nurtured and are a subject for another post.) Boys didn’t really care about my secrets. If they thought I was being silly they would tell me. They also told me when they thought I was being smart. The girls I knew seemed to have a secret language that I wasn’t privy to. I’ve never been big on the subtleties of the female psyche, or perhaps I am just extremely naïve, but I continue to remain wary. I think when it comes down to it most of the men I’ve known have always told it like it is. I never have to try to read between what they are saying to figure out what they are saying.
Monday 25 October 2010
Wednesday 6 October 2010
Competitive Spirit or Competitive Nature?
We, as humans, are a competitive species. It stems back to early days of man when one literally had to fight for food, for shelter and ultimately for survival. As humans evolved, the need to fight for the basics requirements of life began to subside. We had homes, we had jobs, and we had clothes on our back. We didn’t need to get up in the morning and wonder if we would live to see another day.
But the need to compete remained. It is a rare person who can honestly say that they are completely fulfilled and lack nothing in their lives. We all want something, and more often than not, that something needs to be fought for – in the way of competing for a better job, bidding more money for a home in a desirable neighbourhood, or sometimes even finding the perfect mate. Competition exists in some form in nearly every facet of our lives.
My own biggest competitor is myself. As long as I am achieving as much or more than I am personally capable of, I am usually happy. This drive to better myself is what motivates me on a daily basis. I don’t need to use another person’s achievements as a benchmark as long as I have my own. But that’s not necessarily true of everyone. Anthony Garcia in his article Decoding Personality: Why We Compete, Reward & Buy says, “Our whole lives are motivated by an internal sense of worth, measured by ‘rewards’ — both internal and external. We’re each addicted to our own reward system. It stains every action we take.”
Some people compete ferociously and will stop at nothing to try to win. I’ve seen soccer coaches push their young players to tears for the sake of the win. The losing team feels inferior and the players begin to believe that winning is the only outcome worth playing for. I’ve seen this intense competitive nature in my youngest son. He is very good at Wii Sports and will challenge me every chance he gets. He practices and plays more often than I do, so understandably, he is better. But there are the odd times when we play that I beat him. When my points begin to creep up he’ll pause the game and ask if we can start over stating: “My hand slipped”, “I didn’t mean to do that” or some other pretext. I refuse. He always has an excuse for why I beat him and none of them are because I played better. Some people may think this is cruel, but I believe in teaching my children the honest (and simple) facts of life, that you can’t win all the time, and that if you only play to win, no one will want to play with you anymore. Already his brother is hesitant to play against him for this very reason, and even less so when he rubs it in. This is a stain that takes a long time to wash out.
I try to instill in him the sportsmanship that I was taught in school years ago, which seems to be slowly fading in today’s society. It always seems to be about the win. For me, because I am not overly competitive, it’s more about the game, and sharing the experience with others: it’s hard for me to weigh in on why some people need to be first and/or best. I am a runner and there is competition at every race I have ever run in. I have never won a race, and yet I am not at all discouraged or disappointed by this. Simply put, I don’t expect to win. On the rare occasions when I have unexpectedly placed in my age category I am pleasantly surprised. An unknown author sums it up perfectly: “The principle is competing against yourself. It's about self-improvement, about being better than you were the day before.” A little competitive spirit is good for the soul. Like I wrote earlier, it’s part of what makes us human.
But the need to compete remained. It is a rare person who can honestly say that they are completely fulfilled and lack nothing in their lives. We all want something, and more often than not, that something needs to be fought for – in the way of competing for a better job, bidding more money for a home in a desirable neighbourhood, or sometimes even finding the perfect mate. Competition exists in some form in nearly every facet of our lives.
My own biggest competitor is myself. As long as I am achieving as much or more than I am personally capable of, I am usually happy. This drive to better myself is what motivates me on a daily basis. I don’t need to use another person’s achievements as a benchmark as long as I have my own. But that’s not necessarily true of everyone. Anthony Garcia in his article Decoding Personality: Why We Compete, Reward & Buy says, “Our whole lives are motivated by an internal sense of worth, measured by ‘rewards’ — both internal and external. We’re each addicted to our own reward system. It stains every action we take.”
Some people compete ferociously and will stop at nothing to try to win. I’ve seen soccer coaches push their young players to tears for the sake of the win. The losing team feels inferior and the players begin to believe that winning is the only outcome worth playing for. I’ve seen this intense competitive nature in my youngest son. He is very good at Wii Sports and will challenge me every chance he gets. He practices and plays more often than I do, so understandably, he is better. But there are the odd times when we play that I beat him. When my points begin to creep up he’ll pause the game and ask if we can start over stating: “My hand slipped”, “I didn’t mean to do that” or some other pretext. I refuse. He always has an excuse for why I beat him and none of them are because I played better. Some people may think this is cruel, but I believe in teaching my children the honest (and simple) facts of life, that you can’t win all the time, and that if you only play to win, no one will want to play with you anymore. Already his brother is hesitant to play against him for this very reason, and even less so when he rubs it in. This is a stain that takes a long time to wash out.
I try to instill in him the sportsmanship that I was taught in school years ago, which seems to be slowly fading in today’s society. It always seems to be about the win. For me, because I am not overly competitive, it’s more about the game, and sharing the experience with others: it’s hard for me to weigh in on why some people need to be first and/or best. I am a runner and there is competition at every race I have ever run in. I have never won a race, and yet I am not at all discouraged or disappointed by this. Simply put, I don’t expect to win. On the rare occasions when I have unexpectedly placed in my age category I am pleasantly surprised. An unknown author sums it up perfectly: “The principle is competing against yourself. It's about self-improvement, about being better than you were the day before.” A little competitive spirit is good for the soul. Like I wrote earlier, it’s part of what makes us human.
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