Projecting: What's standing in the way of Men and Women understanding each other

According to 2017 data from Match.com, dating for millennials is unsurprisingly more complex than in past generations. It probably wouldn’t surprise you to find out that millennials are 57% more likely to try online dating than other generations or that 40% of single millennials have dated someone they met online. In saying that, the research also shows that 22% of millennials are more likely to feel that technology has made love more complicated. It also shows that a staggering 57% of millennials report being lonely. While this data is interesting, it doesn’t address the lack of understanding between the sexes that is a tale as old as time. Numerous books and articles have been written addressing this topic over many years and I predict many more will be written. I don’t claim to have a special insight or insider knowledge about this topic, but for whatever it’s worth, I do have an opinion. I would suggest the biggest obstacle to men and women understanding themselves better is our need for projecting at each other.

When men and women start out as boys and girls, we learn to view the opposite sex as the ‘other’. From kindergarten to primary school, from our coloring books to the TV shows, from play dates to church classes, we are taught that the opposite sex is different in so many ways. But this doesn’t really affect us until puberty strikes in our teenage years. Now all of a sudden, we are dealing with strong biological urges to interact better with the ‘other’, but how can we when we don’t even understand them? At this point, your options are either to confide in an adult (unlikely) or get information from older friends, cousins, peers, magazines or the internet. Before you know it, you have a generation of young men and women who are walking around misinformed. When these young men and women make decisions based on this misinformation and it doesn’t work, their first instinct isn’t to unlearn what they learned, but to develop bitter attitudes based on unmet expectations. These expectations will keep getting unmet because even though we learn all our lives that the ‘other’ is different, we make the mistake of projecting at each other.

When men and women start dating, they look for partners that they are attracted to physically and can complement their personalities. This is the way it should be in an ideal world but unfortunately the world is not ideal. So what happens instead, is that young men and women get crushes based on superficial attributes e.g. looks, swagger, social influence etc., and project desirable personality traits on the object of their crushes. If you think back to your high school or university days, chances are you can remember how a popular guy or girl seemed to get all the attention from the opposite sex. You might have wondered what exactly the appeal was. Now you know. It’s something we carry from our early teen years and replicate for the rest of our lives. We find what we like in terms of external qualities and fill whatever gaps they might have in terms of their internal qualities ourselves.

Take a hypothetical guy called Deji. He’s 22 and in his final year of university. He’s the shy, introverted type who’s more into video games and anime than sports. He’s had a couple of relationships in the past, but nothing too serious. His friends introduce him to Ada, a second year student who recently switched schools. She uses glasses and wears her hair natural. Despite her reticence around Deji and his friends, she seems to have a decent sense of humor as she laughs heartily at the jokes they tell. When he bumps into her later that week they have a great conversation where he finds out she is studying engineering (like him) and also watches anime. Before you know it, Deji has fallen for Ada. Can you blame him? She’s physically attractive, clearly intelligent and has the same interests as he does. What he doesn’t realize is that Ada also likes to turn up every other weekend. He also doesn’t realize that she is a huge sports buff and is strictly attracted to athletic types. Sure she watches anime from time to time, but she’s also loves Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Love and Hip Hop and Real Housewives of Wherever. Deji has basically fallen for a version of Ada he formulated in his mind. All because he chose to project things as opposed to paying close attention to who she really was. If he asks her out and she inevitably says no, he’d probably feel a certain way because he’d not understand why. It sounds like the most basic error to make and yet people make that mistake all the time while dating.

So the question is where do we go from here? After all, if the above is true, then this is something that people are going to find difficult to unlearn. For me, the only solution is honesty and empathy. Part of the peculiarities of living in 2018, is adjusting to shifts in attitudes in dating which means different people want different things. If more people could be forthright with what they really want and who they really are, then interested parties wouldn’t need to project their own desires on them. Empathy is also crucial as it would help us actually learn to understand each other better.

#relationships #love #women #men