If she's amazing, she won't be difficult

"Camping is nature's way of promoting the motel business." - Dave Barry

***

A paragraph I've seen some girls quote (seemingly approvingly), and is very popular online (turning up about 266,000 Google results as of this post):

"If she's amazing, she won't be easy. If she's easy, she won't be amazing. If she's worth it, you wont give up. If you give up, you're not worthy. ... Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for." - Bob Marley (attr)

I find the provenance suspect (ergo the "attr"), but be that as it may, the sentiment can be taken on its own terms.

In other words,

"If a lady says 'no', she means 'maybe'.
If a lady says 'maybe', she means 'yes'.
If a lady says 'yes', then she's no lady."

I did a search of public Facebook profiles to see if there was any gender divide in support for this quote, and taking cases where the gender of the profile/page owner was discernible, I tabled the following:

14 girls
6 guys

(strangely, a lot of people cited this as an 'inspirational' quote - perhaps everyone loves playing games)

So we can see that there is a clear gender difference in the endorsement of this sentiment, though frankly it is not as much as I'd expected.

Naturally, there is empirical non-anecdotal support for this:


"Reiss reported that 87% of the females, as opposed to 58% of the males, had come to accept sexual behavior that initially made them feel guilty. Of these, far more more females than males cited the relationship with the opposite-sex partner as the key factor in bringing about this change...

With regard to sex, the discrepancy between women's attitudes and behavior has been noted by several authors. Commenting on their study of Black high school girls, Roebuck and McGee (1977) said that "of interest are incongruities in expressed attitudes and behavior" (p. 104). Social class correlated with sexual attitudes, for example, but not with behavior. Antonovsky, Shoham, Kavenocki, Modan, and Lancet (1978) devoted special study to the inconsistency between attitudes and behavior in their study of Israeli adolescent girls, in which they found that a third of the nonvirgins endorsed as important the value of a female remaining a virgin until she married. These researchers found that such apparent self-disapproval was partly maintained by making external attributions for their past sexual experiences--yet the girls continued to engage in sex even when they disapproved of their doing so. In considering the gap between attitudes and behavior, Antonovsky et al. pointed out that "overt behavior is much more influenced by situational factors than are attitudes" (p. 270)...

The attitude-behavior gap was noted by Croake and James (1973). Their research involved multiple surveys of college students of both genders. Comparing their findings regarding sexual attitudes with concurrent findings from other work on coital experience, they noted "a much higher percentage [of women] experiencing sexual intercourse than those in the same age group who approve of such behavior" (p. 96) as evidence of inconsistency among females...

The singles bar sample studied by Herold and Mewhinney (1993) also showed inconsistency between women's attitudes and behaviors regarding casual sex itself, which was defined as having erotic contact beyond hugging and kissing with someone the respondent had just met that same day. Only 28% of the women said they anticipated sometimes having sex with someone they had just met, but the majority (59%) had done it. The high rate of having had sex with a new acquaintance was especially remarkable in view of the findings that the women reported high rates of guilt over such activities (72%) and low rates (2%) of saying they consistently enjoyed them. The authors pointed out that this inconsistency was peculiar to women, although they had not predicted it and had no explanation: "The apparent contradiction between the negative attitudes expressed by many of the women regarding casual sex and the fact that most of them had engaged in casual sex provides more questions than answers" (p. 41)"

--- Gender Differences in Erotic Plasticity: The Female Sex Drive as Socially Flexible and Responsive / Baumeister, R.F


Though the research is on sex, I think it is safe to draw similar conclusions about relationships (and am also unable to find research on the latter).

In other words: What woman say they want, what women think they want and what women really want aren't always the same (this is a complimentary, not necessary a competing explanation/aphorism).

The paper quoted also has fun bits on female desire-attitude inconsistency with regard to sexual orientation and BDSM (previously quoted on this blog)


Possibly related posts:
When a Lady says No, she means...
When a Lady says No...
If a Lady says No...
Un diplomate, un militaire et une jolie femme