BORN TO LOVE
I often tell men they were born to belong and bred for break up.
Our natural state is to love others as decreed by nature herself.
It is to move towards people who resemble us and assume belonging, looking to the eyes for reassurance, ensuring the reciprocity underpinning our interdependence is intact.
I say the only person in life upon whom you may reliably count on for unconditional love with any confidence is you. If you were not loved adequately as a child and now find yourself as an adult still yearning for love, you’ve got a problem.
Don’t worry, it’s a common issue, you are not alone in feeling this way or being in this situation. The danger is that you allow yourself to be bred for breakup.
You could also say you were born to love and be loved.
Notice I didn’t say born to be loved and love. There’s a difference. If you say the words “born to be loved and love” that way out loud, you might notice how weird it sounds.
The order, to love and be loved, is a clear demarcation, a line between boyhood and masculine maturity
Yet, the way forward for your life is not backwards. It’s into the future as a powerful man. It’s to fulfill your masculine destiny, not to revel in what could have been.
In any case, men do not carry the same burden as women. You will often see me write men don’t need love at all. I think is true. The key word is need. We needed love as boys undoubtedly.
Every child needs to bask in the glory of his mother’s love for as long as possible. As men we cannot need love, or we revert to being boys. That’s how I see it.
Like it or not women are nature’s caregiving delegates. They have wombs and out of nature’s chaos they create life itself. Men, on the other hand, are nature’s expendable hunter warriors.
One man can impregnate a thousand women (think Genghis Khan and a few others); one woman maxes out at producing around a dozen kids… if it doesn’t kill her.
Despite having a self-interested brain like anyone else, women use their empathy, compassion, smarts and bodies to nurture and grow those around them. You think that doesn’t take a toll on them, especially as selfish human beings like the rest of us?
It does in ways you can’t comprehend.
Her secret fear is that she will be taken advantage of… or worse, taken for granted, especially by the adults around her… despite her sacrifice. Martyrdom to her equals slavery.
Nature realizes this is an impossible situation so it provides her with a powerful male hunter warrior who can stand by her as she creates life for the benefit of mankind. Part of his role is to defend, deliver, discern, discuss and/or delay, and decide while she is preoccupied.
Part of these Ds of masculine decorum of action include that he rescues her from her insanity to protect them both when she overthinks. Lest you think anything untoward of that last sentence let me clarify that this is just another form of reassurance.
He does this because caregiving takes her so far away from her own self-preservation that she may lose her way. Men take pride in producing more than they consume and so he delivers on behalf of them both, their children, and tribe.
He acts to preserve her essence lest she lose who she really is. He never forgets she can carry a sword and bow or run all night and howl at the moon alongside him.
…
Carl Jung wrote about the process of individuation. This is how we come to unify our past with our present, where the individual self develops from an undifferentiated unconscious.
For our purposes we could compare it to integration, the quest to reconcile various parts into a meaningful whole.
It’s where it all comes together and part of your journey is finding and accepting what Jung called your anima, the feminine side of your psyche. Jung did not see this aspect of your psyche as an aggregate of mother and father, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, or educators though they remain influences.
Jung considered the anima (and the masculine animus for women) part of the collective unconscious.
Typically, the male’s sensitivity is lower or repressed, he said, so he regarded the anima an important independent aspect of the self.
We often mention the masculine as characterized by order and feminine energy as chaos. Jung said the anima is a man’s source of creativity.
To that end a man realizes that he must reverse the flow. He doesn’t require love as he has the anima in him already. If only, he realizes and accepts it.
He no longer needs or expects love but rather, absent the caregiver’s burden, he realizes he possesses all the love he needs. While the women around him expend their love on people, he holds his in reserve for everyone’s benefit.
He dials out his love and power to those next to him, first making a difference there and allowing this energy to ripple out from his center and beyond as a path to meaning and freedom.
He earns respect by deeds or takes it with limits. He earns loyalty by winning hearts and minds, realizing that people are loyal only to those whom they respect.
Thereby, in doing this and fulfilling his mandate the expendable hunter warrior male makes himself indispensable.
He’s often truly loved for this… though he is unconcerned.
Questions? Comments?
Love & Power, True & Free,
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