Photo supplied by Emma Thomas to the Huffington Post

Freud wanted to know what women want. Here’s what I want:

I want to know what’s wrong with women.

Example: Emma Thomas, writing for Huffpost Personal. Thomas’s Huffpost bio says she’s a “British writer living in Bangkok” who is “training to compete in Muay Thai and powerlifting.” Muay Thai looks like a Thai version of mixed martial arts. She refers her HuffPost readers to her blog, Under the Ropes. And, extrapolating from one of her blog entries there, Thomas is currently around 30 years old.

So here goes her HuffPost Personal piece, about her ex-boyfriend, dated Feb. 28:

Through gaslighting, he taught me to do everything for him while expecting nothing in return. I worked several jobs simultaneously, paying all the bills while he refused to work. Instead, he spent his days at the gym pursuing an unlikely sporting career and living off my income.

What a prize.

Since he was constantly broke, it seemed absurd for me to ever ask anything of him. This didn’t just apply to material expressions of love. It extended to all other kinds, too. I learned to live off breadcrumbs of affection, holding out for him to eventually show me that I meant something to him. I was shocked when he made the effort to cook dinner for me once or twice a year (with groceries I’d paid for).

He was also fun to have around on holidays:

Grand or even discreet gestures on anniversaries were completely out of the question. So, we just didn’t acknowledge them.

The same went for birthdays and Valentine’s Days. He brushed them off, telling me that I didn’t need or care about those things. Not wanting to make a fuss, I pretended that he was right. If I ever said otherwise, he told me I was “crazy.” And then: This was the same response he gave whenever I questioned him about his fidelity, although it would eventually emerge that he’d been cheating on me with multiple partners from the start. More: Whenever I broke down and called him out for neglecting me, he flipped the script, manipulating me into feeling sorry for him and believing that I was too demanding. Yet every time I thought I’d had enough, he convinced me to stay. Now for the surprise: After five years, I kicked him out of my apartment and my life. Five years??? The guy spent five years sponging off this lady–and what a deal he had! Free rent, free food, and free passes at whatever gal-pals of Thomas happened to sashay through the gym. What a life, guy! Way to go! Here’s some arithmetic: Thomas says she broke off with the guy on March 3, 2018 (she’s about to celebrate her “singleversary,” she says). She would have been around age 29. So she spent–no, the word is “wasted”–all her years from age 24 through age 29 devoting 100 percent of her amorous time and attention to…well, you’ve read about him in her own words. I’m not getting into the peak-fertility problem. Or the peak-attractiveness problem. I’m just looking at the WTF problem. Now, I’m happy to report that Thomas is feeling better: A year of self-love has changed me for the better, seeing me evolve into a happier and healthier version of myself. I didn’t know what it was like to love yourself, know your worth or feel “good enough” until I made myself a priority for the first time in my life. In days of yore young women spent their twenties looking for husbands. In fact, they started to worry quite a bit if too many years of their twenties passed without their having found…a guy who would at least take them out to dinner now and then if not put a ring on it. And their mothers or aunts or grandmas warned them that if you wanted a husband, it was a big mistake to shack up with any man who wasn’t serious about marrying you because you’d be cutting yourself off from access to men who were. But now, we have…female freedom. And the above is what we get. I want to know what’s wrong with women. Update: Thanks for the link, Instapundit! Posted by Charlotte Allen