Nobody Needs Tough Women, They Are Hard To Break And Even Harder To Love.

A lot of things going on in my life and my friends’ lives recently made me think about women, generally. How do we go through life, our choices, our hopes, our fears.

So, I guess I am a tough chick …

Without really calling herself that, my mom was and is a feminist. That didn’t come without drawbacks. She is a tough cookie and she made me one as well. To quote her, ‘Nobody will take you by the hand and stir you toward shade in a hot sunny day. You have to make it happen by yourself.’ or ‘If you want something, go and get it.’ Of course, these are generally applicable, and she didn’t discriminate between genders; that is how I deducted her teachings were rooted in feminism.

We didn’t show emotions in our family, especially the positive kind. We were too busy making jokes or pointing out faults. That’s why I seem to have only two gears: fun or seriousness. This has recently occurred to me when an old friend (she knows me since we were 14) made a remark watching the video of my and Alin’s wedding ceremony; she said something like “I would’ve never thought Oana is a softy”. Dude, seriously, I was getting married for f**k sake. What chick doesn’t cry when she is getting married?!

And my friends are tough women as well.

It really seems that most of my girlfriends are that kind of self-made people, not afraid to try, to fail, to succeed, generally … to do stuff. They are women who like to take charge of their own lives and not wait for some knight in shining armor to save them from themselves. They work hard, they continuously improve themselves, they go places. I am sure it is no coinkydink they are my friends.

But then, they have this weird thing in common.

A good part of these 21st-century chicas stares into an abyss of idiotic relationships with questionable men.

Until Alin, I could have very well included myself in this lot. The word you are looking for here is l-u-c-k-y.

So why is it that educated, self-sufficient, intelligent, well-spoken women have it hard, romantically speaking?

I came up with this analogy, which I am sure it’s a bit offensive, but bare with me. Think of a woman as of a pebble in a man’s shoe. And the man walks and walks and walks with the pebble in his shoe. He doesn’t have any other choice. Nobody gave it to him. After (light) years of walking, the pebble becomes fine dust. Now, we all know it does make a difference if the pebble is made of limestone, granite, or diamond. The softer the material, the quicker the pebble becomes dust.

Until recently, even Western society was a place where women’s role was to accommodate men, to dissolve in their shoe as quickly and quietly as possible. A woman with her own ideas was considered capricious and hence difficult to partner up and secure a future for herself. You can, therefore, understand why tough women have it hard. They don’t mold, they don’t obey, they are inconvenient. They make men want to take off their shoe and go hunting barefoot.

And suppose you do find some guy who is ok with that, hunting barefoot and all, but from all those brave hunters out there, how many do you think would be able to actually fall in love with the pebble in their shoe? So you see, it’s slim pickings out there.

My vivid analogy aside, I think that those rights we have as women mean really nothing unless men’s mentality will catch up with them. So, girls, it’s really up to us: we have to educate our kids in the spirit of true equality — a boy should be allowed to be scared or cry, a girl should be allowed to go to war. First and foremost we are people with the same rights and secondly, we are men and women.