I wrote for Cosmo in the late 1990s, and now that nearly 30 years (gasp! I was a veritable kid!) have elapsed, it's time to share them with a digital community.
How will they be read by young women who have been formed, over the last 15 years, by the very visual platforms of Instagram and Tiktok, for whom Facebook probably resembles a retirement community?
The piece below was commissioned by Cosmopolitan and was among the first I wrote for them. One of Cosmo-Philippines' directives was to infuse the articles with local color, which included strategic use of Tagalog expressions and quotes. Today, I disagree with this approach, preferring to use Tagalog (or any other language) only when an English translation is impossible.
***
Is he Mr. Right, Mr. Wrong, or Mr. Puwede Na for Now?
Lakambini Sitoy
Cosmopolitan-Philippines (publication details to follow)
To Leah and her freshman law classmates, Mike was perfect. He was tall, carried a briefcase to school every morning, drove his own car, lived in ritzy Dasmarinas Village. He looked as great in jeans as in a button-down shirt and a tie. Even better, he went to Mass before exams and, with the kind of grades he pulled, was destined for the Dean’s List.
The first week of school Leah set her sights on Mike. It wasn’t long before the entire class learned of her program for social improvement, a program that had nothing to do with studying hard and passing the bar. Mike was one of the first to find out but, being a true and experienced Manila gentleman, played along with her game.
Prettty soon Leah ran into a few of Mike’s flaws. For instance, he was an avid gossip and had a tendency to put down his inferiors. This Leah found cute. She herself had no patience with people who were stupid and ignorant, and besides shewas of good stock, nobody could put her down.
And thus it came as a surprise to Leah, near the end of their senior year, when she discovered that she was pregnant by a Mike who had no intention of marrying her, who denied the baby was his, and who immediately took up with a smarter and prettier undergraduate, as if to prove a point.
***
Leah, like most of us, was in search of Mr. Right. She thought she’d found him in Mike, who had all the traits that society values in men. Trying her best to find a partner with all the correct trimmings, she failed -- or refused -- to go beneath the shining achiever surface and relate with Mike, the person. She turned him instead into Prince Charming; Mike, resentful of this kind of reductionism, obligingly turned himself into a frog.
Women on the look out for the perfect man and the perfect relationship need not be discouraged by Leah’s story. For there can be a “Mr. Right” for each woman.
But he most likely won’t be Prince Charming.
“It would be easier to define who Mr. Right is if one keeps in mind that Mr. Right is a human being like the rest of us: failures, flab and all,” says Rachelle Layda, a counsellor for abused women who is completing her Master’s degree in Psychology at the University of the Philippines. “Once a woman defines the idea of Mr. Right in more or less this way, approaching and dealing with men (in and out of relationships) will be less disappointing and more realistic.”
Most women are careful and selective when they enter into a relationship with a man, although they may not be as snobbish as Leah. They have also been burnt enough along the road to adulthood to know that good and lasting relationships do not just happen to you. For one, they must be worked on. Furthermore, they must be with the right kind of person.
The first few months (or even years) of a relationship are necessarily a time for assessment. No matter how wonderful he may seem during the courtship and honeymoon stages, it would do a woman good to assign her lover a temporary sort of status until she gets to know him better. Conversely she need not send him away just because he has lots of pimples or picks his ears in public.
“Every man has character flaws. What one has to do is to see which of these flaws matter and which ones don’t, and these differ for each woman,” Layda says. “For instance, smoking might be a critical flaw for one woman, a minor flaw for another, and not a flaw at all for a third. To your mind, if a man has more critical flaws (e.g. philandering, substance abuse) than minor flaws (e.g. poor table manners) then he is not Mr. Right for you.”
Layda thinks even one critical flaw disqualifies a man as a potential Mr. Right, because if this one flaw would negatively influence the way the relationship develops---and if the inevitable personal changes that arise from a relationship are likewise adverse---then the relationship might not be worth pursuing.
But if a man has some minor flaws, she continues, he could be a potential Mr. Right, especially if he doesn’t have a critical flaw.
“It all depends on how many minor flaws you can accept and tolerate. And these are two different things,” Layda says, adding, “Of course, if a man is mostly or all minor flaws, he may not be Mr. Right.”
The idea here is that flaws do not cancel each other. More importantly, a man’s redeeming characteristics do not cancel out his flaws.
Chemistry and work
Relationships are a dynamic. They are a product of chemistry and yet require a lot of work; and the proportion of these two varies at different points in time. Take the case of Cristina, who got married a few months ago, to a man who was part of her college barkada at first, and then became her lover when they transfered to Manila. Although they slept together for six years, living together for the last two, both were hesitant about absolute commitment. To Cristina, he was more of “Mr. Puwede Na for Now” at the beginning of the relationship, a warm body she could cuddle up to and release her sexual energy on. She didn’t like his unreliability and the way she had to compete with his male Manila barkada. And she wished he was making as much money as she was.
“Tony started earning points when his friends told me how much change they had observed in him since we started going together,” Cristina says. “His attitude toward relationships changed. He was less flighty, not as footloose as before.”
During a six month cooling-off period they’d agreed on, Tony got another woman pregnant. It was a taboo topic between him and Cristina, but one day Tony brought up the issue, and eventually was able to explain to her his obligations to the child.
“I felt he was urging me to accept the child and the situation, and if I did not matter to him, he would not have gone to the trouble,” Cristina says.
Tony is an ordinary man, a far cry from the dazzling Mike, and yet to Cristina he was Mr. Right. Although their relationship had taken several hard blows, they were able to repair its fabric by confronting their most serious problems.
So how can a woman tell if a relationship is one that can be improved? How does she know whether to stick around to repair the damage, or whether to walk away?
“A relationship is reparable when both partners are willing to change specific aspects of the relationship,” says Layda. “By this I mean his behavior, their communication style, their commitment status, etcetera. This also means that her partner likewise recognizes that there is a problem that needs to be dealt with and that he is willing to do his part to deal with it.”
He’ll do for the moment
Layda opines, however, that a relationship is not reparable if the partner doesn’t recognize that there is a problem, or if he does, refuses to do his part in working the problem out, or believes that it will fix itself.
This was the case with 30-year-old Elena, whose professor husband of five years has two unforgivable personality quirks: he is chronically tardy, and he is a slob. These two, seemingly minor flaws have grown to monstrous proportions over the years. Because it is Joel’s task to drive Elena to work every morning from their home in the suburbs, she is always late, too, a factor which her boss made clear to her when she was passed up for a promotion. A public relations officer for a small hotel, she tries to moonlight by writing for lifestyle magazines, but can never complete a project on time because she is constantly losing her materials amid banks of his students’ papers.
Yet Joel maintains that it is her fault. Attempts to talk things out end in loud arguments. He blames her for not keeping the house neat; however, when she tries to clean up he accuses her of “hiding” important papers. He claims that if she would only get up early enough, he wouldn’t have to wait so long for breakfast, which he must have before getting dressed. It is a routine he has followed since he was a boy.
Despite the fact that they are legally married, Elena regards her husband as “Mr. Puwede Na for Now.” She knows that if she exerted more effort, she might get him to face the problem and work out a compromise. But this would be unfairly shouldering the burden of accountability for the relationship. Instead, she’s thinking of moving some of her stuff into her sister’s apartment in Manila, close to where she works. She’ll sleep over three nights a week.
Elena loves Joel enough to stay married to him, but knows she must distance herself from him a little and focus on herself and her work. Perhaps on his own he’ll learn to clean up his life. More importantly, she refuses to delude herself by thinking of him as the Mr. Right she must stick with through thick and thin. Instead, she wants to believe that her options are still open, that nothing is really permanent. She refuses to see herself as a trapped animal. This would only make her bitter, and prejudice her chances of a happy relationship, with him or with someone else.
Other women, especially those without legal commitment, would find it easier to walk out on a man like Joel. Sometimes that’s the less painful solution.
But there are many women who prefer to stay in a relationship that’s less than perfect, even when there’s little chance of that relationship improving. They love their partners, but are aware of circumstances that would make a permanent union impossible. Either or both partners may be married. Either or both of them may be interested in building a career first, or perhaps working abroad. One partner may be at an emotional or perhaps financial low point, and his or her needs may be answered by the other.
The point here is that both parties have no illusions about the future. They may have invested a good deal of emotion in each other, have actually been sexually intimate, may even have been pressured into marriage by their respective families. In a good “Puwede Na for Now” situation, both partners must be willing to break up when it’s time.
But it’s never that easy. Most Filipinos (women and men) put a premium on marriage. It’s the way we’re socialized. We anticipate the day when we can bring a future partner home to our parents; it’s as much a rite of passage as menstruation or circumcision, or loss of virginity. Thus Filipinos of either sex may decide a relationship is temporary and gamely enter into it, only to a) fall in love deeper than they expected, or b) realize that they’d been hoping all along the relationship would take a more serious turn. The point is to be clear about what you want and to talk it over with your partner.
Mr. Wrong
So much has been written about wife beaters, philandering husbands, liars and other unsavory types that most women already know whom to avoid. Although stories about abusive partners generally crop up after marriage or after the relationship is cemented with an emotional bond, the symptoms as early as the “honeymoon” stage, if not the courtship period. A man’s excessive jealousy and obsession with a woman’s past or her other friends may point to a violent personality months before he even lays a hand on her. Dory Hollander, PhD., in her book 101 Lies Men Tell Women (available in National Bookstore branches) asserts that men may avoid telling the truth, even about trivial things like what bus he took to get to the mall, to prevent genuine intimacy from developing between himself and a woman. Other lies may be used to cover up areas in which he feels he is inadequate. He may be into a relationship with another woman---or be hiding something more sinister, like a drug habit or a criminal record.
What a woman must surmount is the tendency to go into denial when faced with the evidence. Others make excuses for their man, saying there’s not enough proof for them to draw a conclusion about, say, a man’s violence or his philandering. Some women would prefer to sit tight and wait for the man to reveal his agenda. Even when the relationship has gone irrevocably wrong, others persevere, believing that suffering is a test of love.
Hollander believes that intuition is a powerful thing and a woman should act on it if she senses that something fishy’s going on. The power to take action, to save herself, is in her hands. She shouldn’t sit around bemoaning her fate and waiting for someone else to rescue her.
There are men, however, who are not wholly obnoxious but are simply the wrong sort for a particular woman, thanks to differences in temperament, interests or values. Experience is the only tool for determining when a man is right for you. Combine this with constant assessment of yourself and your priorities, and an acceptance of the reality that you will get hurt from time to time. If you’re careful, though, you’ll survive the search for Mr. Right with minimal scars and loads of wisdom. This is life, after all.
SIDEBAR:
Warning signs for dating violence
Physical Controls
• Hitting, grabbing, kicking, choking, pushing
• Breaking furniture or punching walls
• Physical intimidation
Emotional/ Verbal Controls
• Criticism, name calling, swearing, mocking, put downs, ridicule, accusations, blame
• Interrupting, changing topics, not listening, outshouting
• Excessive jealousy and possessiveness
• Threatening suicide
Sexual Controls
• Sexual coercion
• Accusations of “sleeping around”
• Threats of violence towards her or her friends if she refuses to interact sexually with her partner
• Coerced sexual contact
Information on dating violence is available at these websites: http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/3623 and http://www.multnomah.lib.or.us/lib/outer/rbytes/feb97/page4.html
Who is Mr. Right?
(from Who is Mr. Right, by Susan H. Brent, available at National Bookstore)
• Someone with whom you can always be yourself.
• He never embarasses you.
• He would never hit you.
• He appreciates the things you do for him.
• He listens to you even though he knows the things you’re going to say.
• He treats you as equal.
• He rarely becomes angry at other people.
• He respects your opinion.
• He is responsible for paying his bills.
• He never puts other people down.
• He feels good about himself.
• He loves your mind.
• He’s physically attracted to you.
• He has or had a good relationship with his mother.
• He has a steady job and his employer respects him.
• He is not secretive.
• He keeps promises.
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