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The typical Delicate Flower case goes something like this: your colleague never completes her projects on time but inevitably gets an extension because she sighs gently in a chair's office about the pressures of being the new member of the department, team, project, or committee (or sighs about the pressures of being a senior member of the team--but that since that's less conventionally pretty, it works less well).
You, on the other hand, have often stayed in the office until dawn to complete your work but you get it in on time and have never missed a deadline. In order to do this, you promise the baby-sitter your new car if she'll stay until you get home. Your colleague, in contrast, can't make her deadline because she's attending a fabulous screening. Are you congratulated for being competent? No. Is she penalized for being incompetent?
No.
If anything, she gets more attention and more support for her inability to do things well than you get credit for being competent and dependable.
Like the princess who couldn't sleep because she felt the tiny pea under all those mattresses, the helpless darling is more often regarded sympathetically as a dainty creature who needs all the help she can get just to survive in this cruel world. She makes others--especially men, but women too--feel necessary. When you complain about her, you're seen as insensitive and bullying, a workhorse of a woman who remains untouched by finer sensibilities.
You'll lose the DF's contest because she sets the rules.
My all-time favorite line is this one: "I can't leave her. She'd fall apart without me. You, darling, will get over this quickly. You're a strong and brave woman and you'll be fine." This line is the real killer--or maybe it's just that I want to kill the folks who use it. (Not that I'm bitter....)
So should we all just learn to flutter our eyelashes and sink into cultivated, manipulative passiivity?
No way. For once the answer usually offered, as a palliative is true: while independence is occasionally complicating and often difficult, dependence is authentically and permanently crippling. Don't give in to whining. Those who seem to get away with something are paying a price higher, in the long run, than the world will be content to bear. Word will get out: The boss will need a job done on deadline and all the excuses in the world won't help it get done sooner.
The lover will eventually tire of a woman who is no more self-animated or independent than a hand puppet. If not, then they deserve each other. As the old Yiddish saying goes, "At least God didn't ruin two households."
The woman who is secure in her abilities and strengths ultimately wins-- but it takes time. Cultivated incompetence is effective only in the short term. If you can't sleep with the pea under all those mattresses, you better not count on being rested--or rescued.
Better to climb down carefully and find a better bed, one feathered with your own accomplishments, intelligence, and ability.
