A few weeks ago I was at a game afternoon and I felt personally attacked. The game, not really important, relies on math, but also on having a very in depth knowledge of the game (there is a over 100 page rulebook for starters). Having never played the game, that alone presents a huge challenge. Having never played the game, not knowing the terms presents another huge challenge. While passionate about playing ‘correctly’ I have read many pages of this book, more than I should have, because a lot of it is very jargon heavy. If you skip a chapter because you have a paper to do or just no interest in reading 30 pages about a character you never want to be, you could miss a term you never even heard about and can’t figure out how to define. Even the internet doesn’t help that much to make it clearer to me. So these two were the biggest hurdle.
It doesn’t help that my math skills are pretty bad under pressure so having people basically yell at me why I wasn’t doing it right, to do it faster, and why I didn’t understand it moved me to tears. This was not a fun game. There was nothing fun about it. I felt like walking out. I was trying to do something new, to fulfill a social obligation, and to have fun, but I was being yelled at for not understanding. I felt personally attacked and I can say that I don’t think I will play the game anymore.
I have better things to do than feel badly about myself and be yelled at. I can stay here, in my apartment, in the quiet, and be fine, happy, and not yelled at.
But what it made me realize is that in that moment, instead of yelling or flat out walking out, as I wanted to, I began to feel upset that my partner hadn’t stepped in to tell his friends to back off.
There are a number of problems with this.
- I can’t ignore that they’re his friends, and so I don’t want to yell and make a scene and have them call me ‘over’emotional’ behind my back
- I rely on him to check some of his friends when they are saying genuinely hurtful things, knowingly or not, because is it really my place to go around making everyone aware? Saying ‘hey even though I don’t know you, that’s not funny and you shouldn’t say that about people’, no one would even listen to me at all. So I rely on him for that.
- But even more startingly, is that I knew if he stepped in, it would stop. I had said, hey I didn’t understand in a back off tone, and it had done nothing. But I had more faith if he, as a man and their ‘bro’ (a slang term for brother), had said something they would have stopped. And that’s the crux of this post.
Is that in a lot of situations I know if a man steps in to defend me against other men, it will be more respected and taken seriously. And that’s messed up. Because I’m tired of fighting with people, and saying ‘my no, really meant no, it wasn’t cute it wasn’t a joke, it was what it was – no’. Or dealing with their harassment at night. And when I’m with him, he’s there, and other men respect that. They say, ‘oh she’s taken’ or something else in their strange mind.
I was going home from Oktoberfest I think and we encountered some drunk guys who tried to speak to me, in that really freaking annoying drunk guy ‘want to talk to pretty people’ way. I didn’t answer. That was pretty clear to me. And they kept doing it. I never answered, didn’t even look at them, and you’d think they would have gotten it. So my partner stepped in and got them to go away, being perfectly friendly, but that was the hint they needed to leave me alone.
So while this board game incident fueled my injustice meter, it reminded me that it’s not the first time I have felt safer with my partner, or relied on him to step in when I have been verbally attacked.