Beware the Man who says, "I Don't Want Drama"

 😢 😢 😢

ARTICLE #1: 

https://bryanreeves.com/dont-want-drama-beware-man-says/ 

"I Don’t Want Drama" (Beware Of The Man Who Says This)

December 29, 2017

Have you encountered the man (or been that man) who emphatically claims, “I don’t want drama!”?

Swipe right … or left … I don’t know … whichever way you swipe to pass on someone you don’t want to date, because pass on this man you must.

“I don’t want drama” is what the perpetually confused and frustrated man puts on his dating profile – or repeats in conversation and often with a fair amount of drama in his voice – who is nonetheless irresistibly drawn to women with whom he will co-create “drama” until he is one day finally willing to learn how to EMBRACE the fullness of a woman, or the fullness of life itself!

Because when a man says “I don’t want drama,” he is essentially saying, “I am terrified of feeling out of control, and I cannot be with anyone who feels feelings or acts in ways that are beyond my current capacity to feel or simply outside my tiny stress-free comfort zone.”

Which means he will inevitably reject any woman who feels more than he does or who acts in ways that aren’t easy for him to be with, which is pretty much every woman, and certainly the women he will be drawn to.

That’s the nature of life itself!

For every man, in his deepest heart, ACHES to be held accountable to showing up fully in his life, and fully for love. So actually, a man requires an intimate partner who challenges and inspires him to grow everyday more into his masterful self.

And yes, every man yearns for an intimate partner who loves him profoundly despite his imperfections, one who can consistently see through his human flaws to the very best of him.

But no man genuinely wants an intimate partner who will just let him get away with living and loving small, with playing safe where nothing is at stake.

Which is why a man will often stop choosing a woman who stops challenging him by not being true to herself.

In other words, no man truly wants to live anything less than his full potential as a deep-souled human being who is every day committed to giving his greatest gifts to the planet, to his community, to his family, and to his intimate partner.

Whether or not he is conscious of it, a man needs a partner who will challenge him, because challenge is the only thing that inspires a strong, masculine-identified man to rise into becoming his best self every day.

I’m not saying every man responds so well to a challenging partner. Of course not! Many men clearly don’t.

Many men choose a perfectly challenging partner and then soon lament their choice. He’ll even blame her for making his life more difficult, all the while ignorant of or just in outright denial of the fact that he is choosing this experience!

But only because no one teaches us men why we would actually choose – can ONLY choose – a woman who challenges us.

And I want to clarify, there are countless unskillful ways that women challenge adult men that will only cause even the most self-aware of us men to drive that “no drama” stake deeper into the ground!

So I encourage anyone who wishes to partner with a strong man to learn skillful ways of offering him the more wild and unruly passions of your authentic heart … in other words, you can learn how to challenge him with love, with respect, rather than merely mirror his “no-drama” neediness with your “emotional-connection-at-any-cost” neediness.

Always remember this:

Until a man can just embrace that a partner who lovingly challenges him is what he REQUIRES to help him live into his mastery as a truly powerful, authentic, heart-centered man, he will continue his futile quest for that mythical woman who is BOTH mysterious and alluring enough that he wants to have sex with her AND who will somehow give him “no drama.”

ARTICLE #2: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/opinion/sunday/tinder-bumble-okcupid-drama.html

Opinion

The Ridiculous Fantasy of a ‘No Drama’ Relationship

Online, that’s what men say they want from women. Do they know nothing about life?

By Laura Hilgers
Ms. Hilgers writes about addiction, love and other topics.

July 20, 2019

Credit: Hannah K. Lee

I was recently on the dating app Bumble when I came across the profile of an attractive middle-aged man, a few years younger than I am. He was born on the East Coast and had a big dog, which I liked. But then I read that he was “100 percent drama-free” and demanded that any dates be the same way. I thought, “Here’s somebody who probably won’t listen if I’m having a bad day” and swiped left to indicate my lack of interest.

This guy was far from unusual. A surprisingly large number of men say they’re looking for “no drama” or something “drama-free” in their profiles, and I swipe left every time. Women write it too. But according to Tinder, which looked at the profiles of its American users earlier this year, heterosexual men were three times more likely to use these phrases than heterosexual women. Profiles of gay and lesbian users included the phrases much less often.

Another dating app, OkCupid, examined the 2018 profiles of all its users in the United States without separating for sexual orientation and found that men over all were 10 percent more likely to say this than women. They also found that 47 percent of millennial men said they were looking for no drama or something drama-free in their profiles, as did 25 percent of Gen X and 12 percent of baby boomer men.

I understand that people want joy, laughter and happiness in their relationships. I want that too. But when heterosexual men say they’re looking for something “drama-free,” I suspect they want something that doesn’t exist: a problem-free partnership with someone who has no life experience. Are they looking for a woman who never gets angry or afraid or sad, who never worries about her family or struggles in her job? Who would want to be with such a person?

One man I came across online even wrote, “No drama given or allowed.” Aside from questionable grammar, this implies an ability to control life that none of us possess. Life is full of drama. I know. I’ve experienced it. Although I’m an even-keeled person and daily meditator, I’ve still had to face challenges over the last eight years that I never saw coming and required all my strength to endure.

After 23 years of marriage, I went through an unexpected and painful divorce. Several people I love deeply suffered from addiction and found their way to recovery (a sentence that doesn’t begin to capture nearly four years of hell). I had to sell our family home and move to a rental. Then I lost my beloved dog, Spike — which, weirdly, felt the worst, coming on top of everything else.

Life got messy. But I know many people, including men, who have suffered far worse. It’s hard to live for any time without facing something difficult, whether it’s financial problems, illness, divorce or death. Some people call this “drama.” I call it life.

Because I didn’t quite understand what men meant when they said they were looking for “no drama,” I spoke with Jessica Carbino, a sociologist in Los Angeles who specializes in online dating and who used to work for Bumble. She told me that when men in their 20s and 30s say they want something drama-free, they’re looking for women who are “lower maintenance.”

When middle-aged men use it, they’re trying to avoid the entanglements that come with former spouses and family. “They could have just gone through a terrible divorce,” Dr. Carbino told me. “They could have presumably been dealing with a lot of issues with their own families, with their children, with their ex-spouses, and they want something that doesn’t present any type of problem or issue.”

Vanessa Valenti, co-founder of the feminist website Feministing, had a different take. “I think it’s pretty sexist,” she told me. “You might as well say ‘no humans,’ you know? But sexist behavior exists offline, just like it does on dating apps. This is simply another medium.” She added, “I think there are unrealistic expectations put on women to be accommodating at all times in their relationships.”

Ms. Valenti said that when men say they want no drama, “they’re signaling to others that they’re someone who’s incapable of witnessing and honoring another person’s feelings.” She also expressed concern that the numbers are higher, at least on OkCupid, the younger the men get.

“It makes me wonder if it’s become more like online dating app lingo, which actually makes the ‘no drama’ potentially more dangerous because the more it’s used, the more it’s normalized as a common characteristic of a desirable partner and what a desirable partner should be,” she said. “Are we setting a precedent of the emotionless partner who has no needs? In my opinion, that would create a culture of pretty disastrous relationships.”

Wouldn’t it make more sense for men and women in the dating world to look inward and develop compassion for themselves, rather than try to control the drama outside them? “When you’ve suffered in these serious ways,” Dr. Mark Epstein, a New York City psychiatrist and Buddhist author, told me, “it lets you see the suffering everywhere, if you’re not pretending that it’s not happening to you.”

He said that the growth that results from looking honestly at your challenges and problems — in other words, from being vulnerable — also makes people better partners. “You might actually be more available, more open, more able to be with someone else as a result of this,” Dr. Epstein said.

I also wonder if people mean it when they say they’re looking for “no drama.” Imagine “Romeo and Juliet” without the feuding future in-laws and “Brokeback Mountain” without society’s resistance to two men in love. Or “Casablanca” without the return of Ilsa’s husband, not to mention the Nazis who frequented Rick’s bar. Sometimes, love grows sweeter in contrast to the hardships.

Perhaps we’re simply all on drama overload, and online profiles reflect what we’re experiencing in the world. We live on a planet whose climate is warming rapidly. We wait in fear of the next mass shooting. We have a president whose tweets elevate our heart rates daily. In a 2018 American Psychological Association survey, 69 percent of respondents reported that the future of the nation caused them stress — six percentage points higher than the year before.

This precariousness seems like all the more reason to find a partner who can face the challenges and roll with them. There are days when you accidentally sideswipe your neighbor’s car or you have to check someone you love into rehab. Other days are steeped in joy. The kind of partner I’d like shows up for it all.