This is not a happy post. Or at least it's not starting as one. It could metamorphose as some of these do, but I'm not starting from a point of positivity or encouragement. Sorry. But this is your chance to look elsewhere if that's what you seek.
Over the last week I've heard from some of the people I hold most dear. Women, to be specific. These are individuals I love but am not involved with. If you've read any of the older entries here or know me in real life it will not come as a surprise that this is the case or that I'm about to ramble on the subject.
I love women. I always have. Many if not most of the bigger decisions in my life have come about in one way or another because of women. That's really only started changing (some) in the last ten or twelve years. Is that good? Does it mean anything? I have no idea.
As a boy I was taught to respect women and in fact was raised to be chivalrous. But I grew up when the world, when society, was changing. I mean, it always is but this was a time of interesting change. As these were my formative years a lot would not become clear until much later in life, but I was brought up to put women on pedestals when women were smashing them.
Now I know and accept that men and women are different. On a purely biological level we have fundamental disparity. But we're taken through childhood largely separately and even when we're integrated at school there is an 'us and them' mentality. Maybe this has changed some since I was little. I hope so. Girls and women together are not the same as boys and men together. I don't think either is particularly good, but I think there are things that we don't understand about one another in very broad strokes.
I think the male as canine/female as feline analogy works pretty well on some levels. Men are linear. We're task oriented. We're kind of about one thing at a time. Our focus is generally upon what's before us. When we're hungry, we eat. When we're tired, we sleep. Pretty uncluttered. Women are a bit more convoluted. The number of things at play in the feminine psyche at any given moment would scare the hell out of men. It does scare the hell out of men. On a purely chemical level, what a woman deals with day in and day out is unreal. Some men are able to grasp this intellectually, but the reality of it is completely beyond us. Men want to simplify, to create a direct path. Women usually find this boring.
Once again, I'll point out that this all comes from my experience. My observations and yours may differ wildly. I'm not trying to draw conclusions or to make any kind of statement under the pretense that I'm expert at anything. I'm not.
Like a lot of men my age, women were to be treasured and protected. Their sensitivity, empathy and self-sacrificing nature was precious. Women represented the finer things where we men were more crude and unformed. It is because of women that so much of our art exists.
However...
Women want to be treasured and protected occasionally. That sensitivity, empathy and self-sacrifice are usually conditional or situational. Representing the finer things can mean looking down on what's crude and unformed.
But women will always be magic. Unknowable. Deeply flawed but without them men like me would never know what it is to be in love. And we are flawed and limited in so many ways, too.
I don't know. I used to joke that I knew what women want: everything, but they don't know in what order. These days I don't joke much. I don't invite women into my life. A romantic who was raised to open doors and walk between a woman and traffic doesn't really have a place in the 21st century. I've been lied to, left without explanation and attacked for no reason too many times to open my heart. I still love and I do it deeply but until or unless a woman unlike any I've known in half a century saunters into my life looking for an itinerant musician with no ambition for material wealth or fame, I'm done with romances. Which sucks because there is nothing like being in love. I write that as someone who has never fallen out of love and has only been with women who don't want to be in love.
Again, I don't know. I don't know a lot of things. I don't know why I believed everything I did or why I still want to believe the things women tell me. I don't know why I can't or won't grow up. I don't know why it's easy to spend days caressing a woman but it destroys me to see the same woman happy with someone else. I don't know why I've never been enough for anyone but I suspect that goes back to the idiotic things I've believed for most of my life.
Most women in my life have at one point or another said, "Love isn't enough." But for someone like me it is. Maybe because I've never known stability and I can be happy without a lot. Of course I understand that a woman wants what I can't give. But then why do they seek me out even when I point out this fact? Why do they come back to me years later to tell me that no one loved them like I did?
I don't get it. I just don't. We all want sex, love, acceptance, affection and those things that reassure us we're good or worthwhile. Is it really so hard to simply be straight with one another about what we want and what we don't? Really?
Want to know the real rub here? I still love romance. I write about it, relish it in books and movies and a part of me that I just can't seem to kill still dreams of it. When women say those things they do, my fucking heart still skips. So maybe I'm just crazy. Maybe we all are.
Okay. That's enough.
