I'm not a failed man. I'm tall, handsome, and intelligent. I have dated 10 or so women in my life, with several relationships lasting 2 years or so. And I went through my crazy college days, where I was more promiscuous and had many sexual encounters with many women. And I am successful by most professional measures of income, title, recognition, and so on.

Despite all of that, women continue to confound me. And not women in general, but only women in the context of intimate, romantic relationships. I don't see women as better or worse in the workplace, because I've worked long enough to have had the experience of working with plenty of incompetent men.

As best as I can tell, there seems to be some kind of internal, psychological conflict that takes place both inside my partner's mind and my own mind once we get to that stage of being in a serious relationship together.

On the one hand, she struggles with her fears of being dominated by a man (which she was often trained to fear by her mother, education, or other external influences). This leads to a situation where I am open to persuasion and will change my mind as a result of constructive conversation (even on major issues), while she will seem to dig her heels in at every turn, even if this is a highly intellectual woman who claims to enjoy this kind of collaborative, exploratory dialogue. It's a strange kind of "collaboration." We will explore some topic and I will adjust my thinking as the error in my thought becomes evident to me, while she pleasurably joins along in the process so long as none of her thinking is actually threatened. Once her thinking is threatened, the authentic moment is lost, and she commits herself to post hoc rationalizations for why the thinking she brought into that conversation must still be perfectly correct. It is as though she is overcome by a fear that changing her mind would mean she is somehow being dominated or controlled by a man--what she has been taught to see as the ultimate failure of modern womanhood.

On the other hand, her level of attraction to me will be driven by how assertive, dominating, and commanding I am. She wants me to always know what restaurant I want to go to. She wants me to pick out and plan exciting things for us to do, without even really asking her too much. And she wants me to grab her and seize her and sexually "take" her when I want.

The thing that's really shitty about this, is that it makes it impossible for me to get in the groove of some global "way of being", whether dominating and controlling or accommodating and passive. If I could just pick one or the other and let that become a habitual way of being, that wouldn't be so bad, but the need that these women have for me to be constantly oscillating back and forth between the two is so exhausting and draining that it has a very meaningfully negative impact on my work performance (and work is an important and satisfying part of my life). And it's not just physically exhausting and time consuming, but also emotionally exhausting. It's hard to feel "good enough" when you're supposed to be Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde on purpose and to have control over the transformation at just the right time when she wants you to be one or the other. One moment, I need to be calm, patient, and sensitive to her soft spots on a conversational level, then the next moment, I need to be bold and full of bluster, steamrolling us into action to do something in line with her conception of male assertiveness.

I really don't think it's actually possible for me to do that without sacrificing the bulk of my work ambitions that I really care about. The only way I could make it work would be to find a woman that allows me to stick with one way of being (either dominant or passive), so the "power of habit" could take over, and it wouldn't be such a physically and emotionally draining process to be with her. But it seems like that is something that modern women are not willing to accept.

Can anyone relate?