Where is the love?

Sometimes I wonder how humanity survived the eighties and the nineties. Not because of nuclear war or novel diseases or alien invasion or even Madonna. Rather, because men reached an apogee of confusion with women. 

A small sampling of pop songs of the era:

• Michael Penn: "No Myth" 
• Stone Temple Pilots: "Sour Girl"
• Marshall Crenshaw: "Mary Jean"
• Mark Oliver Everett (A Man Called E): "Looking Out the Window with a Blue Hat On"
• Deep Blue Something: "Breakfast at Tiffany's"

All these songs show a man in confusion about a woman, unable to understand what she wants, except she doesn't seem to want him. I'm sure you can add many more to this list, some by the same artists. 

The more I thought about it, the more it appeared to be a running theme. These are not just breakup songs; those have been around forever. They aren't even angry songs; there are plenty of those. These are songs where the male is in love, but baffled about the disaster befalling him.

Traditionally popular love songs fell into the categories of Desire, Devotion, or Desolation: I want you, I love you, I lost you. The songs I'm thinking of are a subset of the last. Torch songs can be found anywhere, but usually the torch bearer knows what's happened: she fell for someone new, she had enough of my garbage, she decided to trade up, whatever. But beginning in the eighties, and especially in the coffee-shop nineties, men were getting utterly gobsmacked by these women. She's leaving and I have no idea why this is happening.

I think there are some reasons these kinds of cris de coeur arose when they did. For one thing, after women's lib (as it was called in the seventies), men started to wonder what women actually wanted from them. Kind and sensitive? Witty and adventurous? Gentle and loving? Or was the old strong and silent still what they liked the most? Confused men trying to be what their women wanted made for cases where no one could behave like themselves, so the guys couldn't grasp why nothing ever clicked and everything just fell apart one day. 

Another possibility is that couples moved much faster into intimacy than they had in the past, giving the illusion of solidity without the actuality of it. Not surprising that one person in the relationship might be much more committed than the other, thinking that, having made it to home plate, the couple had achieved something solid. 

Traditionally the subsequent broken heart in such situations would be the basis of female torch songs, but by the eighties we heard it from the boys, who had a sense they had screwed up but more of a fear that they were screwed up.  

Anyway, that's my theory of this subset of the breakup song -- the What Did She Want? song -- that arose in the eighties. I know there are more than I listed above, and maybe examples that preceded the era mentioned. I'd be happy to hear your additions to or even rebuttals to this theory. It won't break my heart.