Fascinating thread...
I'm married. Hence, don't do much flirting. But I was always pretty crap at it.
I have to admit, I'm pretty uneasy/quasi-terrified by men (DH, excluded). Even now, I hate finding myself in a one-on-one situation with the opposite sex. Like, say, if one of our couple-friends comes to visit, I positively
dread the moment when I find myself alone in the kitchen with my girlfriend's husband. I feel horrendously uneasy/closed off, can't think of a thing to say to him, can't be in the moment, can't really listen to or respond to whatever he has to say, then feel as though I'm coming off like an icy snob.
My NM was a man-hater. From the time my sister and I were very young, NM was always banging on about how men treated women so poorly, got preferential treatment, got more attention/better advantages, were boastful, self-interested, self-serving, etc. And she really encouraged us to identify as feminists. GC-sis has taken the man-hating to the extreme (she talks at length about how she hopes her three-year-old daughter will be a lesbian, and thus avoid men completely).
NM also did a great job keeping us isolated from the opposite sex. Our dad, included. He traveled a lot, but even when he was home, NM acted like any bond we had with him/time we spent with him was an affront to her. NM forced G-sis and me into really feminine activities--like ballet--where there were hardly any heterosexual men or boys.
The combination--being isolated from the world of men and, simultaneously, absorbing NM's anti-man messages--had a serious impact on me. For years, I felt like people with the "Y" chromosome were space aliens, members of a completely different species.
On the one hand, I was boy-CRRAZY. I wanted them to save me--to cancel out all my family horrors, give me the love and affection I'd never had--but at the same time I didn't trust them enough to really open up to them emotionally. DH taught me true emotional intimacy.
Sorry to drone on. It's just interesting stuff. Recently found this article about NPD and gender identity:
http://www.narth.com/docs/1996papers/schoenwolf.html Not really a fan of all the penis-envy stuff, but the part about "bemoaning the female role" fits my NM like a glove.
Anyway, early on in my relationship with DH--realizing that I had no idea what a two-way relationship looked like (NM and co-N D were hardly role models)--I decided that I was going to just going to begin by emulating the most intimate relationship I'd ever had: the relationship with my therapist. Which is not to say, I was going to try to "save," "diagnose" him or visa versa, only that I was going to get to know him by asking him the kinds of things that T had once asked me. You know, the meat and potatoes stuff like what his early childhood memories were, what he liked most about the way he grew up, who first broke his heart, etc. Sounds really remedial, but to me, the kinds of conversations that followed were a revelation. He shared, I shared. Before, I'd always felt like I had to play a part with a man, like, read from a certain script, find out what he wanted from me and then conform to it.
It also helped that I'd been working with T, thinking about what kind of relationship I wanted. Really honing in on what qualities I wanted to have in a partner, what my "deal breakers" were, etc. T really thought the Law of Attraction applied to dating.
Hope this helps...
hope anyone who's looking for a partner meets his/her heart's desire, Kay x
