A couple of years ago, I spent time with University of North Carolina women’s soccer coach Anson Dorrance, who has won 20 NCAA titles and who also coached the national team in its early days, from 1986 to 1994. The cerebral Dorrance owes much of his success to identifying, understanding, and coaching to differences between men and women. “Women,” he told me then, “have the toxic combination of having incredibly high standards for each other and being amazingly sensitive at the same time.”This is a female tendency every man needs to understand. To put what Dorrance is saying more simply, women do not hold themselves to the same high standards they expect of others. This is very hard for men to understand, who usually have low standards or hold themselves to a high standard they may or may not expect others to share.
This is how a woman who tells a dozen white lies to her husband without blinking will go ballistic if she catches him telling her one. Or a woman who lives in a pigsty will roll her eyes and sniff at the dust on another woman's bookshelf in an otherwise impeccable apartment. And a girl who has been happily riding the carousel all through college will not hesitate to call another less experienced girl a slut. Women's solipsism permits them to hold two different and simultaneous standards, one for her and one for everyone else, without any cognitive dissonance.
How to deal with it? First, it won't do any good to proactively point out the existence of the two standards or the differences between them. Logic seldom defeats cognitive dissonance, whether it is produced by solipsism or something else. The best thing to do is to simply ignore her standards and continue to abide by your own. If she presses your failure to abide by her standards, then point out that you're under absolutely no obligation to do so, as you ar responsible to your own standard, not hers. Only if she continues to press the point should you observe that it is a little strange she should attempt to apply a standard to you that she does not first apply to herself.
