Addicted to Male Validation

It feels dehumanising, degrading, and an admittance of low self-worth, to contort, shape, and shrink yourself into an ideal woman you think he wants. Eventually, one starts to wonder what this is all for.

Why do we do this? What do we gain out of this?

I have been asking myself these questions since I entered teenagehood, when boys started noticing me, and I noticed that people, both men and women, determined my value by how much boys desired me.

While these questions have lingered in my mind for years, I have yet to find an adequate answer. After all, I know intellectually this is all arbitrary. I know that other people’s validation should not matter to me if I choose not to let it affect me.

Yet, I choose to let it affect me. Again and again.

Every time a boy rejected me, I ran to the weighing scale. I checked myself in the mirror. Took notes on what to fix. My thighs were too big. My stomach is too bloated. I was looking for something, anything I could fix. By fixing this one last thing, I hoped, I could get someone to love me.

Love doesn’t work that way. I understood that intellectually. True love, I read, is the acceptance of another’s flaws and errors, to accept them in their full humanity. I just never understood how that was possible. After all, if we are unwilling to purchase slightly imperfect fruit, can we sincerely give something as priceless as love to a deeply flawed human being?

I felt that love was something I could purchase or achieve. If only I were thin enough, beautiful enough, intelligent enough. But when I look at my friends, who I love more than anything in the world, I hold no such expectations for them. I didn’t care if they struggled with school, work, or body image; I loved them just the same.

In fact, the more they opened up to me, cried, or were vulnerable, the closer I felt to them, and the more I felt our love strengthening. The fact that they had nothing helpful to offer to me was proof that I genuinely loved them.

Then, why does it feel that romantic love is different? It is possible that while unconditional love is possible in platonic and maternal love, it is not in romantic love. After all, romantic love necessitates the existence of sexual attraction, which is predicated on certain conditions to exist.

I cycle between working really hard for love, burning out, and trying again, but I’ve never been able to give up. I’ve considered men to be an addiction that I wanted to quit, but while I’ve successfully stopped my shopping and social media addiction, my addiction to men feels like something more ingrained rather than superficial.

While it is human to want to love and be loved, I’ve also wondered whether the pining for romantic love is natural. After all, my friends give me all the love and support I could ever need. In reality, a romantic relationship serves no practical purpose for me.

There is something in a romantic relationship–not present in a platonic one–which triggers some level of age regression and the feeling that I was brought back into childhood. Some men, I felt, challenged me to see if I could hypothetically win my father’s affections through good performance. However, just as my father did, the men I obsessed over remained eternally apathetic toward my efforts.

As a child, I clung to a variety of father figures. Teachers. Uncles. Strange men on Facebook. I was seeking the same thing from all of them: to be told that I was a good girl.

While genuine praises from women felt routine and perfunctory, half-assed praises from men felt like the whole world to me. Especially when it came from men who were not known for being kind.

When a man is somewhat generous in his opinion of me, my brain defaults into assuming he wanted something from me. I could not imagine a man’s kind opinion being sincere without strings attached. What does he want? I automatically think. Indeed, my presumptions usually hold after they ask to sleep with me.

As much as I try to curb my love addiction, my efforts are not helped by the cultural messaging associating a woman’s worth with her ability to secure a man. A woman is seldom happy in a movie until she gets married. A woman’s relationship, not career, is usually the primary topic of gossip. Everything a woman’s worth is based on, like her beauty, weight, and charm, is mainly based on how much she adheres to the male gaze.

As much as I am tired of it, burnt out, exhausted, and depressed, I can’t seem to let go. I want to be successful, but society does not give women our own success stories beyond having a male figure see our value.

To carve our own success story that is not based on standard myths requires a complete upheaval about how we view ourselves, our social role, and even society itself. It takes tremendous mental effort to undo the roadmap given to us through generations of patriarchy and draw a map from scratch, not knowing the landscape or whether the ‘X’ we have marked leads to true happiness.

Regardless, we have no option but to try.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.