"All The Reasons Why" - deconstructing a feminist C&W song

My first real exposure to Country & Western music (as opposed to just plain Country, which includes C&W along with other genres such as bluegrass and its predecessor, old-time music) was as a teenager when a rock station that I listened to changed their format to C&W.

I was in Dad's tool shed doing my science experiments when the DJ said, "Well Aaaaah haaaaw!" and played Tammy Wynette singing D-I-V-O-R-C-E.  As a brash kid who'd never had any experience in relationships, let alone ones that had gone bad, I thought that was hokeiest, most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard..

Fast forward a couple of decades, when I was married with two kids and the marriage was falling apart.  I was waiting in line at the counter of an auto parts house when the C&W radio station they were using for store music played the Gatlin Brothers' Broken Lady:

She vowed every morning that what God put together
No one else in the world could pull apart -
But the walls came tumbling to the ground
And her world came crashing down around her heart

Now she's a broken lady
Waiting to be mended...

And it hit me, right there, standing in front of that parts counter.  They were singing about what I was going through.

Then I thought back to the Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman song that Tammy Wynette had made famous decades earlier.  All of a sudden, it wasn't hokey any more.  She was singing about Real Feelings that Real People go through.

And I started listening to C&W.

I remember a construction site I was working at, during those years, where one of the carpenters was playing C&W on his personal stereo (what we used to call a "Boom Box") all day long.  Finally, one of the electricians had had enough and just blew up.  "I remember when I was going through that phase.  Couldn't stand rock n' roll any more, and just had to have my country."

"So what phase are you going through now?" I asked him.

"I ain't goin' through no fuckin' phase."

Well, I'm out of my "Country phase" now myself, having moved on to Metal.  I still listen to the old classics of C&W though, and still love the genre as it existed in the Eighties.  I don't care much for the new stuff.

So I've said all that to say this:  Highway 101.  A song named All the Reasons Why.

Paulette Carlson is Highway 101.  She started the band, hired the musicians, and wrote some of the songs.  It's her band.  And she communicates a female perspective on life, relationships, and bar etiquette that is, in my opinion, instructive.

I like almost all of their songs.  This post is about the one exception:  an emotionally blind screed written by Carlson and another female songwriter about a woman dumping her man for no discernible reason at all:  All The Reasons Why.  Some excerpts:


All the reasons why won’t make you understand
I’m trying to explain but I’m not sure I can...


You ask what you've done wrong, and if there's someone new
What has changed my heart and what else can you do
Oh darling can’t you see, it’s not so cut and dry
And who knows where love goes and all the reasons why...


If I could explain it I would, take away the hurt if I could

What a cold, cold song.  And so representative of how women look at what they call "love."  I'm trying to explain... it's not so cut and dry... who knows where love goes... If I could explain it I would...

But she can't explain it.  Because it's not rational:  it's all about her feelings:  he doesn't make her wet anymore.  She doesn't feel the tingles any more.  And her feelings - mostly wetness and tingles - are the only thing she cares about.

The numbers vary with the telling, but supposedly somewhere between two-thirds and three-fourths of the divorces in the United States are initiated by the woman¹.  I find this credible.  Yes, there are cruel men out there who mistreat their wives and girlfriends and deserve to be alone.  I might have even met one or two of them.

But I have met many -- many -- who were unceremoniously dumped by their wife, girlfriend, life partner, whatever you want to call it, with no explanation whatsoever.  I vividly remember one poor neighbor who had come home from work to find all of the stuff gone from his apartment -- hers and a great deal of his -- and coping with the loss with a bottle.  I walked home that night with a heavy heart, thinking of his pain.  And thinking that he was probably dealing with the initial shock in the best way possible.

I've known tons of men with the same story.  And it's always:  no reason given.  I'm trying to explain but I'm not sure I can.  Who knows where love goes?

Because when "love" is based on nothing but feelings, on tingles and wetness, it doesn't go anywhere.  It just goes POOF! and evaporates.  Men view love differently, very differently.

Most of us men take wedding vows seriously.  When we vow "to have and to hold, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part," most of us mean it.  When she gets older, puts on weight, and unsightly wrinkles & bulges appear, we stay with her, continue to support her, honor and cherish her.

When women say those words, most of them mean, "Until I find a higher branch I can swing up to."

I once dated a woman whose first husband had been a doctor.  I got the opportunity to meet him and even party with him -- she was on good terms with all of her exes except one -- and he was a cool guy.  I asked her, "Why did you leave him?"

"Because I thought I could do better," came the surprisingly frank reply.

I'll bet she told him the same things the songwriters said:  Who knows where love goes?  I'm not sure I can explain...  Left unsaid:  because there aren't any reasons why.  I just want to swing to a higher branch.

I thought I could do better.  We have a word for that:  hypergamy.  Also called branch-swinging.  Look it up.  I won't say that all women are like that, but... well, it's in the mammalian part of our DNA and they can't help it; you might as well try to get your dog not to bark.  You can't overcome fifty or sixty million years of evolution with a mere ten thousand years of culture.

But you can get partway there.  And we used to be partway there.  Ten thousand years of culture had brought us stable (for the most part) marriages and family structures.  Many of the lower classes were unable to keep their commitments, but most people did.  Wealth was created, and passed down to heirs, who married others from stable families and leveraged the inherited wealth to create more.

In the past eighty years or so, there has been a systematic effort to dismantle all that to pave the way for a world under Collectivist rule.  Incentives that hindered branch-swinging have been swept away, and other, perverse, incentives have been created:  there is a reason why half of all marriages fail, and ⅔ to ¾ of those that do, are initiated by the woman.

Who knows where love goes?

I have saved the worst for last:  a line in the song's chorus.

I don’t think I can go through them again
I was hoping we’d end up friends

One of the most disgusting things about the female perspective on relationships is the idea that you can, for no good reason or any reason at all, dump a man who loves you, take away from him everything you built together, spit on the way he cherished you, rip his heart out and stomp all over it in front of his friends and family, deny him day-to-day contact with his children and even in many cases turn them against him, take away the bulk of the fruit of his labor at the point of a gun using the "child support" authorities --

and expect him to remain FRIENDS?

Women have no idea what love even means to a man.  But I've already written about that.

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¹I've not found an authoritative source for that; if anyone finds one please let me know.