What I learned from being the only lady in the gang
My mom always told me that since I was a little girl, I had more male friends than… let’s use the “expected” word here. More male friends than expected.
I guess that back then little girls were expected to spend more time with other little girls, rather than covered in mud, full of bruises from running too much and too fast and learning the bad words way too early.
20 years later I’m in the same situation. I have more male friends than girlfriends and I must admit that I would more often spend my time with them than with my girlfriends. Don’t get me wrong, I love all my friends very much! I don’t have too many of them and I’m fully dedicated to all these few relationships I have. I value their exitance and I don’t think I could ever be grateful enough for having them in my life.
But I have this tendency to be too casual. And this kind of attitude would better describe a guys’ world. I’m afraid we’re still living those times, where the world is secretly split in too many well defined categories, but this is a topic for another time… For the sake of this story, we’ll casually keep this natural segregation of genders and mentalities and all those other concepts that must be too well defined in order to please everybody.
So I feel more myself when I’m with men than with women. I speak more freely, I’m more open and there are no forbidden topics. I’m always confident to have my own opinion and I’m not afraid someone would get upset if I don’t agree with them. I have less female friends than male friends because it was quite hard for me to be able to do all of the above with the ladies. So I kept in my life only the women that allowed me to be myself.
Now let me tell you what I’ve learned so far…
Being emotional is something that you can learn
I never wanted to believe in that popular opinion that women have a more developed emotional intelligence than men. Or that men think with their other brain. Or that they grow up slower than girls. And I succeeded in being impartial and even educating other women to.
However, I couldn’t help noticing that in my group there are a few differences in…
