The Basic Female

For many women who grow up without a father in the home, the idea of the perfect man starts taking shape in their early teens. Movies, television, books, and traits they admire in people around them become the blueprint. The image is not based on one real man, but on a patchwork of qualities, charm, confidence, looks, status, humor, all stitched together into one idealized figure.

Over time, she fine tunes this fantasy. She adds traits, sharpens details, and upgrades the picture until her version of Prince Charming feels real in her mind. This man is no longer just a vague daydream, he becomes her destiny, the one who is supposed to find her.

But she does not go looking for him. She convinces herself that searching would ruin the “meant to be” moment. Instead, she waits. When men approach her, she rejects most of them, sometimes even men she finds attractive. She tells herself she is testing them. She wants to see persistence, as if enduring rejection is proof of worthiness.

This fantasy is built over years, shaped by flashes of influence, a smile from an actor, the ambition of a fictional hero, the voice of a singer. She collects what she likes, discards what she does not, and keeps refining the standard. Eventually, she starts judging real men against this impossible model and refuses to settle for anything less.

When she dates men who fall short of the fantasy, she treats them as placeholders. They are not “the one,” they are stopgaps, temporary providers of emotional comfort, financial help, or convenience. She calls it “survival mode,” but in truth, the fantasy is untouched and waiting in the background.

This mismatch poisons the relationship. She grows cold, critical, and emotionally withdrawn. She complains to friends but leaves her partner confused about why her affection has dried up. Beneath it is resentment, resentment toward him for not being her dream, resentment toward herself for compromising, and resentment toward the fact that he believes in the fake version of her she has been acting out.

Her affection becomes strategy, not love. She plays nice when it serves her, but it is calculated. When she meets men who treat her well, she mistrusts them, calling them “too nice.” This is projection, she assumes they are pretending because she has been pretending.

If someone appears who seems closer to the fantasy, she shifts. The act with her current man crumbles. She becomes distant and harsh. This is not a sudden change, it is the unmasking of how little she was invested from the start. Her energy and attention move toward the new possibility.

She expects total commitment from a man, but rarely gives the same. She waits until she feels secure that he is fully invested, then she relaxes her loyalty and begins scanning for upgrades. Her attachment is conditional, based on being chosen, not on choosing him in return.

When she says a man has “potential,” she does not mean career or intellect. She means potential to be molded into the man she has invented in her mind. She will influence, manipulate, and test to try and shape him into that role.

If the roles are reversed, and a man says she has potential, she takes offense. She hears it as proof that she is not already perfect. It rattles her self image.

The older she gets, the more the gap between reality and fantasy widens. By her forties or fifties, the fantasy has been so polished and refined that no real man can compete with it. At that point, she is chasing a ghost she created.

It is the same as a young man working entry level jobs while training for a career in law, each job is a stepping stone. Except in her case, the “career” is a man who may not even exist outside her imagination. And every real relationship in her life was nothing more than another stepping stone toward a man who only lives in her head.