I Love Women

I’ve wanted to write another positive post about women for a while now (earlier posts are here). All because of a female blogger I stumbled upon last year. She is a misogynist, even though she’d be the last to admit it.

Apart from her small group of immediate family and close friends, she holds the view that women are bickering b*****s–insanely jealous of each other (in her case, of her good looks), and unable to get along with each other. She is well-traveled and swears that women are the same everywhere: argumentative, petty and mean. She prefers to work and play with men. Her posts always made me want to say, Billions of Blue Blistering Barnacles and Thundering Typhoons! Excuse me, what??

I’m almost certain the problem lay with her; not with other women. There is just no way all the women she met could have been so terrible. I have known many women in my relatively short life, and they have been the support that has carried me through some of the worst seasons of my life. They also make up the fabric of some of my favorite memories of being fully alive and happy.

One of my BFFs and I were once unwittingly caught up in a love triangle. Jean-Marc had just told Sofia he had feelings for her; she didn’t have feelings for him. As she shared this with me, I informed her that I had feelings for Jean-Marc, which he seemed to reciprocate. Sofia and I were both shocked. Jean-Marc later declared he had no feelings for me. As you can imagine, it was a hot mess. I wanted the world to end.

The months that followed were difficult, at best. But early on, Sofia and I had decided that we would fight for our friendship. We valued it too much to allow this storm stirred up by a man’s mishandling of relationships to destroy it. Sofia and I showed up for needful conversations with each other that were sometimes beyond painful. We honored each other. Privately, we each wept and railed and agonized. And we continually chose love and forgiveness, sometimes several times in one day.

As months went by and healing came, our friendship emerged from the storm even stronger than before. Sofia is one of my greatest champions. She fights for my dreams and I for hers. She wouldn’t hesitate, if she had to jump into the path of an oncoming train to save me. I’d do the same for her. You can’t convince me that women are horrible.

Women are deeply relational, tender and compassionate. When we live from our true selves, rather than from our woundedness, we release a fragrance of beauty that smooths out the rough edges of life. We love fiercely and well. We invite the world to life, to elegance and laughter, to vulnerability and goodness.

I love women.

*Picture by Sujin Jetkasettakorn

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